Open Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

dry.
    While she works, Mem’s mother watches the widows with a surgeon’s eye. She twists at her handkerchief with not-yet-old hands. She wonders, often, which unseen part of her own self will be the first to wither, then fail. This is why, every night, Mem’s mother pats cream onto the swollen crescents under her green eyes and onto the bridge of her Roman nose and peers at herself in the bathroom mirror as if she has already become someone she does not know, as if the person she does know has been lost or left behind.
    But when she opens the medicine cabinet mirror half-way so that it slants against the mirror on the wall and then slides her head between the two mirrors and looks, she sees an endless tunnel of reflections curving out toward an unknown space. A million reflections of reflections of reflections of the person Mem’s mother is about to leave behind. Years later,when her daughter asks her to explain the word
infinity
, this is what she will show her.
    The bathroom door opens, releasing a flurry of steam and a honeysuckle smell. Through the wet fog Mem can see her mother wrapped in two towels, one on her head, one around her torso. She is slick and soft and gleams like a goddess. She wipes the steam away from the mirrors with the flat of her hand as Mem scrambles to sit on top of the toilet lid with its blue carpet cover. Mem’s favorite thing to do is to watch her mother stare at herself in a special face-painting mirror that is round and framed with glowing white bulbs the size of ping-pong balls. The mirror is so powerful you can see the pale down on Mem’s mother’s cheeks as she concentrates on her reflection, staring at it as if she is searching for something. The mirror has a built-in drawer filled with wondrous and exotic treasures. She finger-paints her face with colorful goo kept in vials and tubes, or buttery puddles of pudding in pots, using paintbrushes, combs, crayons, and sponges. She pats the top of a bottle onto a fresh white wedge and paints new skin on top of her old skin, covering the faint splatter-shaped birthmark on her forehead. She pulls her brow hairs out with one tool and then draws them back in with another, traces pretend lips on top of her real lips and fills them in with deep red.
    Mem thinks that her mother is already the prettiest woman in the world but the pastes and flower-colors make her even more beautiful.
There
, says the satisfied look on the new face of Mem’s mother.
That’s who I’ve been looking for all along
.
    Mem longs to use her mother’s magic paints and glosses, so that she, too, can start as herself, look into the mirror, and end up as someone-else. Sometimes her mother will tap a dot of lipstick onto each of Mem’s cheeks and rub it in, but Mem understands that the rest is forbidden, something she will one day be skilled enough to handle. These are things brought in from the outside world of the unprofessionals. They are mysterious, magic, something the regular little girls in her suburban development probably already know how to use. Someday she will master them, too.
    Downstairs, on her way into the kitchen, Mem sees a large, square stuffed animal by the front door, leaning against the imitation wrought-iron banister, on top of the scrubbed but still stained linoleum floor. But as Mem comes closer to the animal, she sees the black plastic handles attached and knows it is not an animal at all. It is her mother’s packed suitcase, patterned in hairy green-and-red flannel.
    If you can’t do it, I will have to leave you behind
.
    “Come in the kitchen, baby,” her mother calls. Mem walks into the kitchen, and there is her mother’s smile, there is the smoky smell of her hair, there are all of her flushed open pores, and Mem’s insides flush in response, urgent, abundant, and too big for her small body to restrain. From that day on, Mem’s mother’s suitcase remains by the door. It is moved aside each week to clean underneath, but then it goes