Authors: SUNSHINE O'DONNELL
M
em was six years old when she was finally allowed to see her First Corpse. It was something she had looked forward to for a long time, although she didn’t like the sound of the word
corpse
. She loved, instead, the word
deceased
. It sounded like the first few seconds of water surging from a faucet, or the beginning of a song, although her kind didn’t know many songs, they weren’t allowed to listen to the radio or watch television. Mem was not supposed to want to have anything to do with the outside world, and she wasn’t supposed to desire things. She had been taught that the things she touched or thought she owned—like the new metal swing-set in the backyard, the bright stack of
Letter People
books
(Mr. P with a Purple Pillow, Mr. M with a Munching Mouth)
, the wall-to-wall confetti-colored carpet under her feet—would exist long after her body had liquefied, and then even those things would not survive the next flood, asteroid, or ice age. The slow burn of oxygen would chew chemicals and atoms to smaller bits and then these would also be pried apart, revealing something even smaller but just as fragmented and temporary. To the unprofessionals, tangible things seemed to promise immortality, proof, a permanent record, but even as a little girl Mem knew
that permanent
was a fairy-tale word. Like
the end
. Or
forever
.
Of course this never stopped Mem from wanting things. When she
and her cousin Sofie were very small and just starting their apprenticeships, all Mem wanted was a pink dress frothy as a whipped dessert, a grit-filled Big Wheel, a dog, a cadre of friends who wore Band-Aids like badges. Mem and Sofie sat at the tile-topped table in Mem’s mother’s kitchen, swinging their legs under the chairs as they shared a packet of butterscotch Krimpets.
Here is the first Lesson, and the first secret you must keep
. They nodded, dreaming of dogs and dresses, scraped the icing off the plastic wrappers with their teeth.
By the day she saw her First Corpse and worked her First Funeral, Mem had memorized all of the Lessons. She could recite her maternal ancestry all the way back to ancient Rome, and she knew every step of her history. Her favorite part was during their wailing glory, in England, when the kings sent black cloaks and baskets of berries before each funeral parade. The Wailers then only ate berries that bled. They needed them to make their mouths red, a glistening and conspicuous health next to the powdered pall of their dull white flesh. On the streets, at their cue, two thousand mourners would wail as they stumbled and caterwauled through the cobblestone streets. Their wigs fell off, they moaned in grief.
Emotional decadence! Voluptuous suffering! A carnival of exquisite woe!
The others stood to the side, breathless, holding their applause.
Before this was Rome and the sprigs of rosemary they’d sewn, like brides, into the tightly tucked hems of their shifts. There they howled over fresh graves and snapped their own finger joints like asparagus tips. There once were white saris and platters of salt, then togas with bloodstains and garlands of thorns. On the islands they tore through their ear lobes, knocked out their teeth, and poisoned the dogs. They chanted and carved their own scalps with shells, their unbridled and nut-brown breasts swinging with each slice.
The unprofessionals said
Savage orgies. Decrepit display. Ostentatious grief
.
As always there were flowers.
Mem loved learning her history but what she was made to learn best was that she had been born, like all of the women before her, to become a
star. She would easily have sacrificed all of the other things she thought she wanted in order to become a legend like her mother. Each day Mem watched her mother prepare for work, painting her face and buttoning her doole, the traditional black dress hand-made for mourning. Mem could not wait for the day when she too would have those long black coils of glossy hair, the deep green eyes, and breasts so big she would have to lift them up to wash underneath. While Mem’s mother and Aunt Ayin, Sofie’s mother, sat at the table and taught the girls their Lessons, Mem would look at her mother and feel her heart crack open with love. Mem’s mother was tall and broad, an unbroken surface, heavily outlined and magically back-lit by light like the paintings of saints. Her bones were strong. Her mouth was lush. She was powerful enough for herself and Mem and all the space in between. She was massive but compact, a spoonful of dead star that no one else could lift. Mem looked at her mother, the wide red lips and blue-black hair oiled into snakes, and inside of Mem’s chest thrilled a love that whirled in a small hurricane. “These are the Lessons our kind has been handing down for six thousand years,” Mem’s mother said to the girls. “You may never reveal the Lessons to the unprofessionals, no matter how much they might beg you.”
Mem cannot remember how old she was when she first realized that she was part of a
kind
. Until they were older, Mem and Sofie thought that playing Funeral was something all children did. They watched the other children who lived in Mem’s townhouse development come home from their schools and play their games, and during these games someone always died. The players argued endlessly about whose turn it was to stagger and moan, then fall and slump to the ground. But all of these pretend deaths were temporary, and none of them went so far as to be mourned. When Sofie and Mem played and argued about whose turn it was to die, they were playing legendary Wailers, and corpses who were already dead.
Mem’s favorite game was called
Open Me
. One player pretended to be their legendary great-grandmother, whose public name was Ruth, and the other pretended to be the undertaker who split open her belly and found a lifetime of treasures hidden inside.
Open me
was what the famous letter
had said, the one that Ruth left on the bed-stand for her daughters to find when she died. It was a sacrilegious request, but it was a last request nonetheless, and one particularly fitting to Ruth’s history. As a baby, Ruth had been cut out of a deceased mother who was unearthed from her casket when a servant heard moaning coming from the freshly-interred grave. The infant Ruth survived this ordeal, grew to be a beautiful woman, bore seven girls of her own, and became the most celebrated Wailer in Italy before she was forty years old.
But the peculiar theme of premature burial stayed with Ruth throughout her life. During her professional prime, premature burial had become so common that preventative handbooks were distributed all over Europe, and each year new techniques and detection-devices were created to better ascertain just how dead a body really was. It was not unusual to see caskets being dug up while services were performed across the way. As a result, hundreds of exhumed bodies were discovered to have been buried alive, most found face-down in their caskets with broken fingers, deep teeth-marks sunk into shoulders and arms, and winding sheets shredded and soaked through with fluids.
When Ruth was a young mother, a gang of Ressurectionists stole one of her clients’ corpse just hours after he was buried and sold it to local doctors for educational dissection. After the first small incision had been made in his chest, the man sat up on the table, mumbled something, and swooned. When he woke the next morning he explained that what he had been trying to say
was I am not dead
. He described how he had listened, in horror, as his family discussed burial plans, and later how he had heard his small son clapping with glee at the prospect of inheriting his horse.
Because these dark mistakes occurred frequently, Ruth was often well paid to wail twice for the same man, and she soon earned enough to bring her children to Philadelphia. She lost two girls to cholera during the boat trip, but she had deliberately given birth to many daughters in the hope that at least a few might survive to adulthood and fame.
Once in America, Ruth adored two sets of things: her beautiful wailing daughters and her silver, the first set anyone in her family had ever
earned. She lavished her girls with silk mourning gowns and polished the silver herself once a week. When Ruth suddenly died at the age of eighty-six, she was found fully dressed in her bed, holding two dozen gleaming spoons against her chest with both hands like a bridal bouquet. Next to her body she had left a note, with two words written in her well-schooled calligraphy:
Open me
.
Before the opening, the undertaker was surprised to find Ruth’s stomach unnaturally lumpy and enlarged. He carefully prodded and poked from the outside, then slit the organ open. Inside he discovered a hoard of things that Ruth had managed to swallow. The small spoons, brooches, brass keys, and bracelets were removed and boiled and then given to Mem’s grandmother, who later sold most of the cache during the Great Depression. Mem’s mother inherited one of the bracelets. It hangs above the mantel in Mem’s house, behind glass, with the clasp part tacked down, one of the few artifacts left from six thousand years of ancestry. Three of the milky white beads dangle from the bottom like loose teeth. When Mem was little she would look longingly at the bracelet, knowing that someday it would be hers. She couldn’t wait to remove it from the glass and wear it, she wouldn’t care if it broke. This is what
things
were meant for, she had learned, to be used until they fell to pieces.
“As an apprentice just starting, you must model yourself after Aurora, Roman goddess of the dawn who every day wakes to weep morning dew,” her mother explained in her deep, steady voice. “Aurora was the first Wailer, from which we all came, and she still works every day, all over the planet, waking each morning to remember her murdered son and then cry on cue. As always her veils are deepest black. And as always there are flowers.”
Mem was convinced that one day she would look up and see Aurora, working above the telephone poles and static billboard smiles outside of Mem’s suburban development, riding the dawn like a chariot while the sky yawned its new sun and crept after her with puddles of light. Aurora would shed her veils and unpin her doole, dropping layers and ribbons and plumes of gray that would hang suspended over Mem’s yellow townhouse
like the ghosts of clothes. Aurora’s tears were so fine you couldn’t catch them in a bottle, though once Mem and Sofie actually tried, standing toe-deep in new sod and pebbles, foolishly holding an empty cup open to a sky that had already passed them by.
“She is such a good Wailer she can even make the houses cry, look!” Mem’s mother said. She pointed to dewdrops dripping down the storm windows while Mem and Sofie stood on tiptoe, watching the rivulets gather and streak down the glass. The windowpanes flashed in the loud morning sun and to Mem they cried like astonished eyes.
On that day Mem’s mother was so beautiful she was like a bright light that hurt to look at.
On that day she was the youngest she would ever be.
Mem’s mother had turned to the girls and placed a strong hand on the top of each of their heads. She said, “What you are learning is the language of water. Even in this culture of toilets and forecasters and containment, nothing else on Earth can cleanse or destroy like water. Every tear we’re paid to shed still possesses this cathartic and catastrophic power, and the clients know this. For them our tears are not water but analgesic, aphrodisiac, intoxicant, poison. Crying is a three-dimensional language, a language that tells a story one can touch as well as see, a native tongue that all children know as they gasp their way out of the womb. It is a true language that survives evolution, technology, and time. It is the only language that survives translation.”
It would be a long time before Mem understood this, but she didn’t mind being confused. Her mother’s hand on her head was a blessing, a shield, it sent waves of love into Mem’s marrow. She didn’t know, then, that this love was a six-thousand-year-old tradition, too, a link from mother to daughter that could not be explained to someone who did not already understand. It was already the unspoken part of her training, this sense that without her mother, Mem would be nothing. And the knowledge that if Mem could not, would not perform well, her mother would have to leave her behind.
Next to the stack of old copies of
American Funeral Monthly
on the end
of the table, Mem’s mother had piled several of her meticulous charts, diagrams of the deceased, careful family trees of as many of her clients as she could document. At night Mem would watch her mother pour over these charts while her tea got cold, rubbing her heels together, whispering things to herself about first-born deaths, making shorthand marks next to each name. This was Mem’s mother’s only real involvement with the world of the unprofessionals, although when she was younger and did not know any better, Mem’s mother had sometimes accepted the widows’ invitations to come back to the house where the mourners were gathering. The survivors always watched to make sure that she didn’t eat too much or steal anything or strangely continue to weep while everyone else whispered and the children played out back with the dogs as though it was any other day. The adults were always curious at these gatherings; they would watch her, staring at her blacks, asking questions between bites of deviled eggs.
How did you get into such a business?
they would inquire, eyes wide.
Is there some sort of school for this? I thought it was against the law
. They would watch her as if she was from another time and place, an Old West prostitute, a New England witch. As if she might, at any moment, burn the house to the ground in grief or throw herself screaming into a ditch.
In her ancestors’ days, these actions might have been appropriate, perhaps even conservative. Mem’s mother wanted to look at the mourners’ insipid faces and say
We once ate the flesh of corpses beneath fig trees, drove nails through the heads and eyes of the dead, danced around funeral pyres, wore dooles made of the deceased’s hair. We strangled their daughters. We scratched their faces to bleeding and dripped our own blood into graves. You know who I am. I’m a star. You paid me because I’m a star
. When Wailers were still allowed to work Jewish funerals, the shiva-goers would stare at Mem’s mother as if she might suddenly drop her paper cup of lukewarm coffee and dance around the plastic-covered furniture, chanting. Instead, Mem’s mother would politely excuse herself and go back to her car. Check the receipts, take some notes. Jot a few things down on her chart. Busy herself with the business of things, the craft and trade. The profession.