Authors: SUNSHINE O'DONNELL
In the morning, Mem is too tired to change from her pajamas into her day clothes. Her mother is not home, so it doesn’t matter anyway. She doesn’t have to work until later in the afternoon. In the four months since Raziel’s death, Mem has developed the dishonorable bad habit of not being able to stop crying. During burials, she has a hard time fighting it off until the right moment, and then as she works she forgets that anyone else is there, that she is there. Sometimes she can’t keep up with it. It floods up and boils over, the froth running down the sides of Mem in seething tributaries. The drips are bitter and eat away at the rest of her, leaving runners and burns and invisible bruises. When the tears come they don’t need to be coaxed into being anymore. Bitter fingers are already whispering through her head all day long like the half-memory of a very old nightmare. Now when the tears come she cannot rein them. They rattle the inside of her head and buck from her eyes, sloppy, delinquent, and not at all professional.
But at least she can still work. Now she saves her money in an old shoe box, instead of handing it over to her mother. Soon she should have enough to leave, although she has no idea where she will go.
At home, the crying is different. It comes cloaked, it stalks her, seething beneath the cloth like a bad molar. It is full of pinholes and miniature petulant mouths, an opus of cavities and ulcers. She hears its chronic shuffle in the hallway, tired and cold and missing her. She can’t help herself. Now she wants it. Now she is addicted to it, the taste of salt, the swollen lips, the loss of her own self as it comes gasping into puddles of saltwarm and opened mouths watering. The escape from the attack of one pain into the chrysalis of another. The splintering.
Come
, she whispers through the keyhole.
Come
, she murmurs through the cracks in the wall. It sheds its bastard fur in the hallway, mouthlike pores dilating for the nipple. There is honeysuckle at the door. There are bowls of meat at the door. There are strings playing and bread baking at the door.
She sits in the corner and crouches to the floor and calls again and calls.
Come
, she croons.
Come
, she says.
Come
, she calls.
And it does.
Mem is so hungry. Her body feels as if it is eating itself alive from the inside out. There is plenty of food in the house but Mem can’t be bothered to prepare it. She opens the refrigerator door, sees the carton of milk, and knows that making herself a bowl of cereal will require a gargantuan effort. Just imagining this laborious and many-stepped process is exhausting. It will be easier to not eat at all.
Mem also suspects there is a good chance that she will start crying while she is eating. She knows from experience that crying while eating is an almost impossible thing to do. The two activities are at extreme cross-purposes, one focusing on something going inside and the other on something coming out, and the risk of this happening today is too great because
the weeping doesn’t go away anymore, not even while she goes to the bathroom or tries to eat.
Mem returns to her room and curls up in bed, knowing that unlike most anywhere else in the house, under the sheets is a safe place to be. She locks her body together like a jaw but finds she can’t sleep this time. She sits up and the corner of her contour sheet pops off and creeps down the plastic mattress cover. Mem looks at it and gets out of bed, pulling a sweater on over her pajamas, which are beginning to smell sweetish, the smell of Mem asleep.
Filthy. Smelly. Lazy
.
The voice inside Mem slurs as she tries to wash her face, slowly rolling the bar of soap between her heavy hands. It whispers from behind the shower curtain, from inside the closet, from under the dust-ruffles. The voice is full of bile and pus. It is not Mirabelle. It doesn’t sound like Mem. It sounds like Mem’s mother, the mouth of Mem’s mother, trapped inside of Mem.
“Shut up,” Mem says, weakly.
But it will not shut up. It prowls around inside of her, softening and sickening and split, oozing like old tomatoes while she tries to tie her shoelaces. Outside the front window she sees that the snow is melting, rushing into the sewers by the islands, dragging cigarette butts and potato-chip bags and plastic six-pack rings into the gutter grates. Little rocks suckle at the dirty water line. Pebbles caught under the rivulets reflect and spread, mysterious pried-open oysters rippling and beautiful.
It feels like someone else, someone much larger, has borrowed Mem’s body and now she has to put it back on again, bone for bone. She is so tired she just wants to lie down in the turd-brown handfuls of cold mud and get colder and wetter and melt away, too. Mem is so tired she can’t even breathe, can’t remember how to make her lungs work. She just wants to go home but she doesn’t even know what that means anymore, she is already home.
She hates that she is so upset for no reason. She is not a refugee in an occupied country, forced to walk days to the nearest border. She is not a
three-hundred-pound woman who was electrocuted by her father. She was never “Trapped!” in a cabin during an avalanche, forced to cut off her own frostbitten toes in order to survive. She didn’t have to walk in a death march. No one ever pushed her head into the toilet, flushing three times.
She remembers a show she saw on Aunt Raziel’s TV, a science program about how the sound of snow falling is deafening to fish. When a snowflake lands in water, microscopic air bubbles trapped in its crystals squeak as they pop. The squeaking is as loud to the fish as a jackhammer would be for a human. All day when it snows, as people happily romp, the poor fish are bombarded with blaring squeals and screeches.
This is how Mem feels. No matter where she goes, no matter how quiet it seems to the rest of the world, inside her head it is deafening. She is bombarded by the noise of her own thoughts.
Earlier that morning, before Mem’s mother left to go food shopping, she had made breakfast. She didn’t really cook anything, she just poured milk into an open miniature box of brown cereal covered in sugar, the kind that Mem was never allowed to eat before her mother stopped working. Her mother didn’t open a box for herself. She busied herself with tidying up the kitchen and hummed, a crisp white apron smoothed over her most expensive doole. She has taken to wearing her blacks day and night.
Mem understands. For a Wailer, the color black is not death, not black as blood or even black-and-blue-bruise-on-the-body black. It is not an absence of color. Black is loud, all of the colors playing at once and obliterating themselves out, an orchestra of sound so loud that nothing can be heard.
In Mem’s house, instead of noise, there is a quiet that fills up all the empty space in the rooms, spreading the way smoke spreads, and shooing the ghosts away like flies. Watching her mother, Mem learns that loving someone means that you will inevitably grieve for them, that love is an engraved invitation for grief. But for grief there is no language, which makes no sense to Mem, since grief, like love, never really goes away. Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens—love, grief, hate, shame—
never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen. And when that something else happens—another death, another love, another shameful episode—the scabs drop off and there are the original wounds, septic and drippy as ever.
Of course, it gets worse when there are more wounds, or when the original wound goes deeper, when it becomes a
puncture wound
. Mem imagines herself full of puncture wounds, deep as her whole self, starting at the skin where the welts blossom like flowering mold on the surface of bread. People usually just scrape mold off the top and eat the bread anyway, but Mem knows from the science shows she has watched that mold has invisible roots, flourishing their translucent threads through the body of the bread, unsuspected and unseen.
Mem knows you can get used to anything. Even the welts. Even the taste of see-through mold. Even the color black.
The color black is being alone. The color black is the fear of being alone, the cold flat fact that you will be alone for all of your life, even when you are around other people. Mem looks up at the black melting trees that line the street, gnarled fingers clutching at nothing. One tree has managed to split its whole upper self in two, growing into a semicircle of branches around power lines that run straight through the center. Both halves are fused together at the trunk, the part of the tree that grew as one thing before it was tall as the wires, then cleaved as if the wires were poisonous, as if the high voltage might kill it. As if it is just safer to disconnect.
What a shame to waste those tears, crying them for free
, the ancestors would say to Mem, if they could see her then.
But Mem, sobbing, knows better.
Someone is always paying for tears.
But why would a mother allow this to happen?
Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t know any better. Maybe it was all she knew.
I have had a little while to think about this and what I’ve come to see is that this part of a Wailer’s story is an old tale which can be found in its many versions across the world but always with the same players: a daughter, her mother, a wolf. In all of its incantations, the story still begs the question
why would a mother allow this to happen?
The quick answer is that the mother didn’t know. But no matter how stupid, no well-meaning mother tarts her daughter up in bright red fabric and a basket of bait and then sends her off into the woods. No matter how stupid, any mother who knows enough to warn her daughter about the wolf knows what end awaits if the girl is sent off alone. The mother’s warning is clearly false; she knows what’s going to happen, in fact she’s known all along. It happened to her, too. It’s a village tradition that must be endured.
So why doesn’t the mother just tell her the truth? Forget the red dress and edible lures, explain the situation and send her out. “It’s your duty, don’t be afraid. We all have to do it. It will be over before you know.” It wouldn’t work. The daughter would be scared; she would refuse to go. It’s better like this, a set-up that cannot fail, a sweet and ignorant daughter who blunders into a situation she doesn’t even realize should be frightening. Perhaps this way she won’t figure out what’s going on. Perhaps she might enjoy it.
But for a moment let’s consider that the daughter isn’t daft. Let’s say she already knows, she’s heard the stories. Being a girl, the daughter has
already had to practice at being slower than she is, pretending things are okay when they’re not. She doesn’t mind it, because all she wants is to make her mother happy. If this means she must feign ignorance about the wolf—even behaving as if she were truly excited about the trip into the woods—then she will do it.
Like the daughter, we want to believe that in response to this show of loyalty the mother will be sad and regretful, not really wanting to send her daughter out but knowing she must. But this is not likely. Most probably she will be the kind of mother who’s been so traumatized by her own experience with the wolf that she suffers nervous disorders and accidentally packs her daughter’s basket with senseless things: a tin of meat without an opener, soap ends, a comb. The daughter is used to this and therefore lives in a constant state of mild exasperation. She will be equally aggravated once she’s in the grandmother’s house, going through the ridiculous motions of pretending that a wolf in bad drag is her grandmother. She will roll her eyes and tap her feet, sighing, arms crossed, waiting by the bed. Sometimes, if he’s tired, the wolf lets this kind go, which is fine with the girl. Her mother won’t know the difference anyway.
It seems the wolf prefers something more yielding, a daughter sent off by a mother who’s pleased, as some fathers are pleased when their sons are sent off to war. This type of mother has incredible posture, she’s steel-skinned and keenly conscious of all the ways in which the daughter will soon disappoint. The girl hasn’t realized this yet and is therefore still trying, in every way, to please. The day of the trip into the woods, the mother wakes to find the daughter already dressed in her best riding cloak, having already baked the bread for the basket. The mother shakes her head. “Why would you wear your best cloak into the woods?” she asks. “It will get filthy and I’ll be stuck washing it. Why haven’t you let the bread cool? Your braids are a mess. You forgot the milk. There are ashes all over the floor. For the life of me I cannot comprehend why you will not stand up straight.”
Like this mother, there are many mothers in the village who are grossly underrepresented in the story: lethargic or sad mothers who are too beleaguered to pack the basket, drunk mothers who sloppily cry and hug their daughters too hard and too long as they leave, widower fathers painfully aware of their own inadequacies as they crookedly plait the braids, mothers who are hardly ever home because of drink, drugs, love, lust, or business, their daughters waiting on the front porch, holding their baskets and chanting
she hasn’t forgotten
. The daughter who has been left for good never gets to go into the woods, she’s too busy caring for her incessantly hungry or dirty siblings. As she ages she’ll develop elaborate fantasies about the wolf she never met, she’ll dream of him while she washes the pissy linens for the millionth time, she will resent her young sisters as they go into the woods. She will never want children of her own.
But now I’ve skipped the point, which is this: No matter what sort of mother she has, once the red-hooded girl has entered the woods she will slow her pace and then stop. She will look down at the cobbled path and close her eyes, she will wish what every such girl from the dawn of history who has stood in this spot has wished: for her mother to run into the woods, weeping or laughing or calling,
I’m sorry
. For her mother to sweep her up into her arms. For her mother to stop this and just take her home.
Eventually, standing stock-still in the middle of the woods, the girl will realize that this is never going to happen. Hinging on this moment is a psychological destiny, a split second of unseen response that will determine whether this girl will grow to be strong or weak, sad or angry, afraid to leave the house or wired with a yearning for escape. Unlike her grandmother’s house, which has two windows and a door, this is a moment from which there is no escape. The girl must see this, then she must carry on. She must pick up her foot and make it march over the mushrooms and moss. She must move steadily in the direction of her grandmother’s house. She must go on, she must go without stopping, she must do this knowing full well that her grandmother is dead, the wolf is waiting, her mother is not coming to save her.