Open Me by SUNSHINE O'DONNELL Read Free Book Online Page A

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    On one corner hazard lights flash. A SEPTA bus has broken down, full of hot and irritated people who will have to wait until another buscomes to save them.
    “Mommy look at all those people stuck on the bus,” says Mem.
    Mem’s mother doesn’t look. She sighs, wiping her forehead with her wrist.
    “At least we’re not those people,” she says.
    As the car pulls into the parking lot next to Hector Paul’s funeral home, Mem’s mother sighs again. She says, as if to herself, “Thank god we can always count on Hector. Thank god he’s such a tit-man. At least I still have something.”
    Mem opens her door and climbs out of the car. The tar running along the edge of the road is soft and malleable, like a huge black wad of already-chewed gum. Aunt Ayin and Sofie are waiting at the entrance of the funeral parlor, standing under an awning framed by two white pillars. In her new blacks, Sofie looks like a long-ago photograph of someone’s grandmother as a little girl, pale cheeks a just-kneaded dough. She is pallid and fidgety in an unyielding bell-shaped doole, looking smaller than usual as she stands next to her mother.
    Aunt Ayin gave birth to Sofie exactly two days and three months before Mem was born, an event which transformed her overnight into an authority on motherhood and domesticity, though Ayin never cleans her flaking, almost-unfurnished one-bedroom apartment and keeps anything of value packed in stained cardboard boxes by the front door
in case of fire or other emergencies
. Unlike Mem, Sofie came into the world weeping, twitching with the effort of having been born, small and jaundiced. She came out crying and rarely stopped, calling out her lukewarm protests with her thin legs kicking, muttering weak cries even at the breast, even in her sleep. She wouldn’t go down for more than a few moments at a time and would wake and start at the slightest creak of the floorboards.
    “Crying is food for you, it’s like medicine,” Aunt Ayin had said. “If you keep it bottled up you can get sick.”
    Secretly Mem’s mother hoped that her own child wouldn’t be so sensitive, so nervous and lactose intolerant. She remembered how easily AuntAyin had cried as a child. But Aunt Ayin didn’t mind Sofie’s crying. It meant, she said, that her daughter would become a star. She picked up the baby as often as she could, holding her close against her straining buttons and cooing at her daughter’s contorted face. She was careful not to squeeze too much, though; she remembered how as a toddler she had once hugged a kitten so hard she smothered it to death.
    “You’d better teach her how to stop,” Mem’s mother warned when Sofie was just a few days old. “You know the trouble that comes from not being able to stop.”
    “Oh,
shah
, she’s just testing out her pipes,” Aunt Ayin had said, jovially bouncing the weepy baby Sofie against her mammoth breasts.
    In front of Hector Paul’s funeral home, Aunt Ayin smiles bovinely, her wide face crimson and shiny as egg-washed plaits of challah, and Mem has to control the desperate urge that possesses her every time she looks up at her aunt, a relentless yearning to stick her fingers into Ayin’s invitingly large, round nostrils. Aunt Ayin shifts her weight, her bulges straining against the buttons of her doole. She huffs and heaves and yanks at the taut fabric of her dress and touches her damp hair, which is curly brown like Mem’s mother’s but plain and coarse instead of shiny. When Aunt Ayin was a little girl her mother insisted she wear olive oil in her hair to make it soft. When they went to visit other Wailers’ houses Ayin was not allowed to sit on any of the good furniture. Now Aunt Ayin refuses to even cook with olive oil, she says the smell makes her sick, and when she has her hair cut she keeps the leftover locks in a box so that no one can cast a hex on her.
    It’s easy to understand where Ayin’s superstitions come from: when she was just a plump