Before You Knew My Name (43)

I don’t own my pain the way you do. I feel as if I have borrowed it from someone else.

It is unsurprising that she shakes her head—No—when it’s time for her to speak.

From across the circle, the girl who fell through the door watches Ruby, her smile never shifting. Like Ruby, she declines to speak when it comes to her turn—‘I’m taking a break tonight, folks’—and her silence leaves Ruby feeling vaguely disappointed. This girl seems so different to the others, almost serene, despite her apparent clumsiness. From her tumble through the door to the curious calm of her smile, something about her makes Ruby feel a sudden pang at the thought of walking out of there alone.

Had she known anything about the young woman smiling at her from across the circle, Ruby would have understood that Lennie Lau could see her isolation clearly, was immediately drawn to the painful beauty loneliness can wrap around a person. And she would have seen how Lennie was already hatching a plan to unravel that loneliness, to pull at it, like Ruby had pulled at the loose thread of her cushion tonight, only harder, so that with time and care, all that pain would come undone.



Lennie has already spilled her drink, and twice knocked her fork to the floor. She doesn’t bother to ask for a replacement, just rubs the metal prongs against her ripped jeans and places the fork back on the table. She talks rapidly, gestures wildly, sending anything within elbow radius flying. The staff here smile benignly at her, bring her extra napkins, patting her on the shoulder as they pass. Ruby gets the feeling this girl is treated with affection wherever she goes.

They are at a small Italian restaurant on 3rd Avenue, a street over from the meet-up. Lennie had grabbed Ruby’s elbow after the session ended, asked her if she’d like to go for dessert, and Ruby had looked around, thinking the invitation was meant for someone else. Strangely, wondrously, it seemed to be directed at her, as if this Lennie had somehow read her mind. The desire for good company felt like the memory of her favourite food, a longing she could taste. To be with interesting people again, to follow a conversation that wasn’t just in her own head—Ruby hoped Lennie had not seen her eyes well up when she vigorously nodded yes to the invitation.

On the way to the restaurant, Lennie kept the conversation light and breezy, as if they had just walked out of a movie together, but once they sit down at their small table, she fixes her dark, intense eyes on Ruby, and the questions start.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘What made you choose New York?’

Finding her tongue fat from weeks of underuse, Ruby can’t quite form the words to answer this last question. She goes for what she hopes is a carefree shrug, a kind of Who knows! But her face flushes red, and she is grateful when the waitress interrupts her floundering to set down a glass of red wine. Give me the whole bottle and perhaps I can explain it, Ruby wants to say. Instead, she takes advantage of the break in conversation to switch the focus to Lennie.

‘Were you born here?’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Are you studying, or working?’

Her answer to this last question makes Ruby’s mouth pop open in surprise.

Lennie, a born and bred New Yorker, is an embalmer at a funeral home in Brooklyn. She specialises in reconstruction, which means she works with bodies that come to the mortuary visibly damaged. It’s her job, she tells Ruby, to repair these bodies, to bring each dead person back to how they looked before it happened.

It. Whatever tragedy reached in and stopped the heart.

Ruby feels as if she can’t breathe.

‘I’m half make-up artist, half magician, I suppose,’ Lennie continues, licking whipped cream from her fork, before waving it like a wand. ‘If I do my job well, you never notice the tricks.’

Immediately, I can see the care Lennie takes with girls like me. So much of her work has an element of brutality to it; most people would recoil from the tasks she repeats on a daily basis. Puncturing organs, clearing intestines. Packing throats with cotton wool, stitching mouths closed. Inserting eye caps, draining blood, threading wire through jaws. These are just some of her so-called tricks. Dressing the deceased, doing hair and make-up—these gentler moments come after the hard work is done, at which point Lennie is as intimate with her bodies as any person could be. Taking her time, showing her respect, she offers her artistry as the smallest of consolations, and I see how this generosity of hers glows amber from her fingertips when she works, glistens like gold across anything she touches.

Lennie stumbled into this career a few years back, after failing to get into med school.

‘Funny, right? If you won’t let me near the living, I can at least fix the dead!’

She had been working over the summer, helping at her cousin’s beauty salon, when she started talking with a client seeking treatment for her super dry, red-flaked hands.

‘This woman was complaining about how her skin was so damaged from all the chemicals she works with, saying that everything seeps in, no matter how much she tries to protect herself. Turns out she was a mortician. Until then, I’d never met a mortician. I assumed they were all creepy old guys running the family business or something. But this woman, Leila, she was young, and beautiful, and running her own show. I had a gift for doing hair and make-up, and she told me there were other ways for me to use that gift. Ways to make a difference. I mean, at first it was just curiosity. Leila told me some crazy shit about her job, and at the time, I was in the mood for crazy. But then, well, it got important. The needs of the dead, and all that.’