Open Me Read Online Free PDF

back in its place. Though Mem’s mother takes care to dust it, the bag does fade a bit over the years. The fur by the bottom turns brown and the black handles lose their shine. For twelve years the bag is still and silent but is the loudest thing in the house.
    Mem does not want to know what might be inside. When she learns the word
hoary
she pictures the suitcase, though she never touches it. It is not a large bag but to Mem it is monstrous, it stays both on the floor and in Mem’s mind, next to the vision of an empty chair, an empty bed, doors permanently closed, all of the things she and her kind are taught to fear. Not the death of their mothers, but the disappearance.
    “You are too beautiful for words,” her mother says, smiling as she stirs the oatmeal, though she has explained to Mem several times that while being pretty will always help her make money, crying prettily will not.
Professional crying should be like natural crying, ugly and hard to look at, a play of facial contortions that the crier cannot see, including the awkward posture and pose. Clients should find it unbearable to watch yet impossible to turn away, while the Wailer should find it equally as unbearable to be watched. This is the moment you must strive for. It will make you cry harder
.
    Around Mem’s mother’s neck is the locket full of salt from Mem’s first baby tears. It’s Mem’s grandmother’s mezuzah, dented from where aneighborhood dog bit it decades ago. Mem’s mother knows it’s bad luck to wear your children’s tears, it’s something she would never allow a client to do. But Mem’s mother does it anyway. “I love you so much,” she says to Mem. “And after today, the rest of the world will love you, too.”
    She sends Mem out to the front yard to rinse apples, to keep her out of the kitchen. In the morning light the apples are beautiful, a perfect hard redness, and the lawn is dotted with the careless bursts of dandelions mutating into wishes. When Mem finds the hose behind the shrubs and turns it on, the water is hot from lying in its tubing for so long. It spurts out a thick arc that catches the low sun, splashing watery beads across the apples’ waxed peels.
    Mem lets her eyes unfocus and rest on the soft lawn-wishes and is just deciding which one she will pick to blow when she looks up and sees, gliding down the street, a group of girls from a different court in her development.
    But these are not just girls. These are beautiful girls, luscious girls, blond cakes iced from head to toe in glimmery frostings. Mem looks at them and thinks:
puff pastry, lily, foam, milk, moondust, silver, snow
. The tall girl is the shimmeriest, lips painted the color of the inside of an oyster shell, eyelids swirled in mother-of-pearl. Her cheeks are shiny soap bubbles. Even her spun-sugar hair is snowfeathered, puffed into swans wings and silvered at the tips. Her false lips wink and gleam like the rainbow in an oil slick.
    The girls are wearing dancer costumes, pink leg-warmers and white jazz shoes, T-shirts artfully torn at the top to reveal glossy shoulders, golden skin spangled with sunlight. Pink and purple ribbons braided into barrettes with small purple beads dangle between stiff meringue peaks of hair. For months Mem has watched these girls sit on the sod-and-curb islands that bulge from the end of each court, carefully plaiting the sherbet-colored ribbons and beads onto plain silver barrettes. Some of them wear roller skates with wide pink laces. The smallest one carries a radio that is almost as big as she is. The iron-on kitten on her T-shirt has chipped and cracked from being washed too much, but it, too, twinkles in the sunlight.As they pass the last island before Mem’s house, the tall girl spits a neon-pink wad of gum onto the street.
    Even though Mem has never been to school, she knows about these kinds of girls. They always travel in groups of three or four, gliding seamlessly by her house like a parade of confections