answer. She doesn’t know how she is supposed to feel. Has she not loved her mother enough? Has she been eating the oatmeal the wrong way? Is it something she said, or did, or didn’t say or do?
Her mother’s face looks suddenly sad and scared. In a little girl’s voice she says, “I don’t really believe that you love me. Do you? Do you love me?”
Mem nods earnestly, urgently, how can her mother not know this?
“Good!” says Mem’s mother brightly, smiling her normal pleased smile. “Now my beautiful girl is ready to prove she is a star. Now we can go to work.”
Mem’s mother puts the dishes in the sink. Hustle and bustle. Receipts, names, directions. Handkerchiefs. Lipstick, keys. Like everything is okay.
As they walk toward the door, Mem’s mother makes a sharp noise of delight and points at the ceiling. Dangling by the molding, just beneath a fracture in the wood, is a small brown spider, arduously weaving a single line downward.
Plumb straight.
Sparkling spun.
An old sign of money to come.
—1983 A.D., PENNSYLVANIA, UNITED STATES—
E XCERPT OF A S TATEMENT
by State Representative Anthony J. DePaul, Jr. (R-13th)
Support for a Prohibition of Professional Mourning in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
“As leaders of state, we are obliged to remember that it is our virtue which separates us from other earthly creatures, a unique and God-given ability to create value systems and to then make choices based upon those systems; in honor of this virtue, I now appeal to the integrity of my colleagues and constituents to help eradicate the immoral practice of ‘professional mourning’ from our Commonwealth…
We can no longer allow the behaviors of those who knowingly refuse to abide by the laws of this state and the principles of human decency to carry on; the adults concerned are child-abusers and scofflaws who neglect and exploit their own innocent children for profit, then rear the youth to perpetuate the cycle. I have witnessed this intolerable corruption with my own eyes and am still haunted by the image of two very young and frightened girls pinching their own arms and biting their lips to make themselves cry. They were obviously and understandably terrified…
Unfortunately, my experience was not an isolated incident. Similar reports have been made concerning burials in Norfolk, Boston, Jacksonville, Florida, and throughout southern New Jersey. This is inexcusable; every decent citizen and representative should be outraged; we must demand change; we must uphold the very principles our elected stations were designed to protect…”
4
“Is it true they make you fondle corpses?”
G oing from the air-conditioned house to the warmth outside feels good at first. The summer heat drapes itself over Mem’s cool arms as she scrambles into the backseat of her mother’s big silver car. But once in the car, Mem feels a thick and sinuous worry creep its way through her veins like embalming fluid. Mem worries about her tights falling down, about not being able to cry, about the things she might have done to make her mother so angry.
This is the graveyard
, she remembers her mother saying,
colors come and go but the one that stays is gray. The unprofessionals are already half-corpses, the putrefaction began years ago when the bones stopped growing. They can smell it on themselves in the early mornings and late at night, they try to scrub it away or cover it up. Their bathrooms are full of products made to preserve skin, hair, teeth, nails, gums, bones, like bottles and pastes of embalming fluid, and someone is making a fortune off of their slow dying
.
Inside it is hot enough to smell the cracked seat cushions oozing their tufts of yellow stuffing. She picks at the stuffing and wonders what she will do if someone at the funeral asks for her name.
Mem. Mirabelle. Mem. Mirabelle
.
Filth. Whore. Lazy. Liar
.
Mem.
Aunt Ayin said that Mem was born under the perfect sign for a
Her mother’s face looks suddenly sad and scared. In a little girl’s voice she says, “I don’t really believe that you love me. Do you? Do you love me?”
Mem nods earnestly, urgently, how can her mother not know this?
“Good!” says Mem’s mother brightly, smiling her normal pleased smile. “Now my beautiful girl is ready to prove she is a star. Now we can go to work.”
Mem’s mother puts the dishes in the sink. Hustle and bustle. Receipts, names, directions. Handkerchiefs. Lipstick, keys. Like everything is okay.
As they walk toward the door, Mem’s mother makes a sharp noise of delight and points at the ceiling. Dangling by the molding, just beneath a fracture in the wood, is a small brown spider, arduously weaving a single line downward.
Plumb straight.
Sparkling spun.
An old sign of money to come.
—1983 A.D., PENNSYLVANIA, UNITED STATES—
E XCERPT OF A S TATEMENT
by State Representative Anthony J. DePaul, Jr. (R-13th)
Support for a Prohibition of Professional Mourning in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
“As leaders of state, we are obliged to remember that it is our virtue which separates us from other earthly creatures, a unique and God-given ability to create value systems and to then make choices based upon those systems; in honor of this virtue, I now appeal to the integrity of my colleagues and constituents to help eradicate the immoral practice of ‘professional mourning’ from our Commonwealth…
We can no longer allow the behaviors of those who knowingly refuse to abide by the laws of this state and the principles of human decency to carry on; the adults concerned are child-abusers and scofflaws who neglect and exploit their own innocent children for profit, then rear the youth to perpetuate the cycle. I have witnessed this intolerable corruption with my own eyes and am still haunted by the image of two very young and frightened girls pinching their own arms and biting their lips to make themselves cry. They were obviously and understandably terrified…
Unfortunately, my experience was not an isolated incident. Similar reports have been made concerning burials in Norfolk, Boston, Jacksonville, Florida, and throughout southern New Jersey. This is inexcusable; every decent citizen and representative should be outraged; we must demand change; we must uphold the very principles our elected stations were designed to protect…”
4
“Is it true they make you fondle corpses?”
G oing from the air-conditioned house to the warmth outside feels good at first. The summer heat drapes itself over Mem’s cool arms as she scrambles into the backseat of her mother’s big silver car. But once in the car, Mem feels a thick and sinuous worry creep its way through her veins like embalming fluid. Mem worries about her tights falling down, about not being able to cry, about the things she might have done to make her mother so angry.
This is the graveyard
, she remembers her mother saying,
colors come and go but the one that stays is gray. The unprofessionals are already half-corpses, the putrefaction began years ago when the bones stopped growing. They can smell it on themselves in the early mornings and late at night, they try to scrub it away or cover it up. Their bathrooms are full of products made to preserve skin, hair, teeth, nails, gums, bones, like bottles and pastes of embalming fluid, and someone is making a fortune off of their slow dying
.
Inside it is hot enough to smell the cracked seat cushions oozing their tufts of yellow stuffing. She picks at the stuffing and wonders what she will do if someone at the funeral asks for her name.
Mem. Mirabelle. Mem. Mirabelle
.
Filth. Whore. Lazy. Liar
.
Mem.
Aunt Ayin said that Mem was born under the perfect sign for a