Free Open Me by SUNSHINE O'DONNELL Page B

or funny or nice. Mem tries to feel something else but she can’t. There is nothing else. There is only this. Small body crooked down, white ghost wrapped in black, warped spine contracting, pores flared, nostrils streaming. Mouth in the shape of pain.
    This is the shape pain makes.
    This is the prologue to heaving and screaming.
    This is a picture of Mem weeping.
    In her mind Mem hears Aunt Ayin reciting,
The desire of the weeping body is not to stand but to sit, not to sit but to lie, not to lie but to curl and contract, puckering like a sour mouth. The weeping body wants to recoil, withdraw
,
retreat. Don’t do any of these things. Remember Adrastia, jailed in Rome in the 6 th century B.C. for breaking Solon’s law by crying in public. Remember how she refused to stop and wept so lavishly behind her bars that even the guards threw coins at her feet
.
    Mem tries to straighten her body, to breathe normally again and let it all sink back down. She knows she is supposed to do it quickly, like her mother, in one brisk flick, the kind you use to check the undersides of leaves or the bottoms of bricks where beetles grow. The widow has covered her own mouth with her hand as she stares at Mem, and Mem is instantly overcome with embarrassment, as if she were standing here naked in front of all these people.
    One of the mourners stands off to the side, waiting. He is an older man with white hair and a white mustache, wearing a tweed suit. A thin man with fat hands. Mem takes one look at him and knows he is the kind she’s been warned about. There is usually at least one at every job, her mother explained, an older man who cranes his neck so he can watch the Wailers drip and snot, the smeared mascara, the opened mouths. The kind of man who makes
psst psst
noises at women and says rude things in languages that they do not understand. When Mem’s mother was a teenager she had one man who followed her from job to job. Finally she called the police to complain. The policeman who answered the phone listened to Mem’s mother explain and then interrupted. “Come on, lady, what do you expect?” he had asked. “I mean, look at what you do for a living, for Chrissakes.”
    Eventually, the man stopped showing up. But Mem’s mother still keeps a watchful eye upon her audiences, looking for voyeuristic old men who are all too fascinated with what is going on behind them. Too often, she has noted, the most ardent observers are men of the cloth, straining over their hymn books during pauses to behold the moaning, the submission, the rare dripping of womanly fluids. A few times Mem’s mother has caught the eye of some salivating minister and wagged her tongue at him, mid-sob.
    The letchy-looking man in tweed walks over to Mem, smiling broadly. He claps his meaty hands.
    “Bravo,” he says. “What a wonderful job you did! Talented and lovely, too, what a combination!”
    Mem is embarrassed but she smiles, a small smile. When the man walks closer Mem sees that his skin is mottled with pocks and scars, the inside of his lopsided nostrils lined with a hard yellow crust. His eyes are moist, but not from crying.
    “How much for you to cry for just me?” he asks, his rheumy eyes pink, cigar-shaped fingers stuttering over the wallet swelling out of his breast pocket.
Tap, tap, tap
.
    “I’m not allowed,” Mem says softly. “I’m sorry.”
    She smiles politely again. She doesn’t want to offend him. She tries to fix her eyes on something else, the trash lining the street by the cemetery like unwanted food pushed to the side of a plate, the man’s loose shirt button dangling like a teddy bear’s floppy eye. The man looks disappointed, but not defeated. He nods his head, tapping his wallet. “Okay, lovely,” he says. “I understand.” He takes Mem’s hand and kisses the top of it and walks away.
    After he is gone Mem can still feel his spit on her hand. She rubs it against the back of her doole. His fingers felt just the way they