Mirror Images

Jessica Irish

Anna wakes up with an idea in her head, and she likes it so much it stews in her brain all day.
In microeconomics the professor says things that don’t matter to her. She sits next to a boy who could be her soul mate if only she could find a reason to say more than “hello” to him when she settles into her seat every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She writes notes in her binder and doodles a canary at the top margin of her paper. She draws a musical note close to the canary’s beak. She stares at the drawing, thinking about her new idea. It is growing on her.
She has time for lunch, heats up a cup of soup in the microwave at the student union. She buys a diet soda and a bag of pretzels from the vending machines and sits alone, surrounded by the various flurries of students trying to accomplish things. She tests her idea after finishing her lunch. She walks into the bathroom, head turned straight ahead at the stall in front of her. She closes the stall door without looking behind her. When she leaves the stall to wash her hands she watches her feet, never once looking up at her reflection. She leaves feeling vindicated.
Political science requires even more doodling. She graduates from binder paper to her skin, doodling up her right arm, drawing patterns and sparrows and more musical notes. The girl sitting next to her gives her a look when she makes it up past her elbow, but Anna doesn’t stop. She uses her notepaper to refresh her pen, keep the ink flowing. She doesn’t learn anything about Russia’s social structure in the Post-World War II era, but her arm transforms into art. When class ends she pulls her jacket on with reluctance, not wanting to cover her new ornamentation.
On the bus ride home her arm and her new idea sit like a talisman at the center of her chest. The bus is crowded, it’s to be expected; it’s 5:30 and everyone is evacuating campus for their various apartments. She shares a seat with a girl whose music is playing too loud. Anna sits on the edge of the seat, trying not to intrude on the other girl’s space, trying to make herself as small as possible. She doesn’t feel small. She regrets that there is only a sliver of space between her newly adorned right arm and the other girl’s left. It feels like her arm needs more space than she can give it.
It’s hard for Anna to breathe when she is so close to a stranger. Somehow everything seems to matter more, but she only bumps into the girl when the bus goes over a particularly wide speed bump.
At home, she considers taking a picture of her arm so that she can have her new design replicated by a tattoo artist, but the idea feels contrary to the new plan, so she leaves her camera in its case.
She considers completing her homework before starting her grand experiment, but it’s suddenly too perfect to ignore any longer.
First she goes to her closet and unhooks the full-length mirror from the back of the door. She allows herself a second’s glance at her right arm before turning the mirror so that the reflective side faces away from her, settling it firmly under her arm and carrying it outside to the dumpster, where she throws it just carefully enough to ensure that it won’t crack and bring her seven years’ bad luck.
She returns to her apartment and begins digging through her makeup bag. She finds a compact and some eye shadow that both have mirrors. She tosses them in a plastic bag. She searches her purse and finds a foldaway brush that also has a mirror in the handle. She adds it to the bag. She checks her school tote and finds a little round mirror with glitter on the back side, something her friend gave her ages ago as part of a birthday present. Into the bag it goes. She takes a last look around her room, decides she’s covered every area, and takes the bag outside and adds it to the mirror in the dumpster.
It is a warm day. The ink on Anna’s arm is starting to run. The images are blurring together.
The bathroom presents a problem. She cannot take the mirror down; it’s mounted to the wall.
“Betsy’s,” she mutters, and it’s decided. She hops in her car and drives to the local fabric store, a place she hasn’t been since her mother took her to pick out curtain fabric three years ago.
“Can I help you with something, miss?” lady at the counter asks Anna as she eyes Anna’s arm with a look that implies that she just ate something cold and slimy.
“I hope so,” Anna says. “I need a yard of black felt.”
“Felt.”
“Yeah, I think felt will be good.”
“Right behind you to the left. Aisle eight. Just bring it back up here and I’ll cut a yard for you.”
The store has mirrors along the two feet where the wall meets the ceiling. Anna catches herself glancing into them, petting down her hair to make her image more perfect. Realizing what she’s doing, she quickly turns her gaze down to the floor and pinches the fattest sparrow on her right arm.
She picks out a bolt of black felt and brings it to the measuring counter. The woman at the counter unfurls a yard’s worth and slowly cuts along the line of the yardstick. There is something about this ritual that feels holy to Anna; it reminds her of her childhood, but it’s more than that. The sound of the scissors snipping at the fabric, creating so precise a quantity, following so straight a line, something about it makes the back of Anna’s neck tingle with pleasure. Even the woman at the counter’s false cheerful demeanor doesn’t dent the enjoyment Anna feels.
“Got a new project going?” the woman asks, all glowing smile and high-voiced.
“Something like that,” Anna says.
“Don’t you just love felt? It’s so pliable.”
“I love that it’s cheap,” Anna says, her voice dead, but she feels guilty for being rude so she smiles and laughs from the front of her throat. Anna can feel her mother in her face, taking possession of the corners of Anna’s mouth, controlling the corners of her eyes. She feels old. She loves her mother’s face when it stays with her mother, but on her own skin it makes her itch.
This is something that a lack of mirrors will not fix. Anna cannot escape what she has inherited, and she knows this, but still she waits for her yard of felt.
The woman smiles at her with crocodile teeth. A gold cap shows in her back molar. “Quite the deal, yes it’s true, felt is mighty cheap,” the woman says. She folds the felt with care, her fingernails tapping on the countertop. As much as Anna dislikes the woman, she relishes the slow and deliberate way she folds the fabric and attaches the little slip of paper with the price per yard written on it.
“You have a great day,” the woman says. Anna takes the fabric from her with a smile. She carries it to the front register like she’s holding a treasured book, or the ashes of a favorite pet.

The felt drapes nicely over the bathroom mirror; it is light, which means four pushpins are enough to keep it in place. It looks like someone is in mourning, with black draping hanging over the mirror, but the felt does its job and isn’t flashy, so Anna is pleased.
She spends the rest of the day with a feeling of newness in her chest, like when she started signing her name differently or the time she dyed her hair auburn for a week. She takes a shower and the ink rolls off her arm, dying the water black as it circles down the drain. She doesn’t scrub her arm, though, so when she is dry the images from earlier in the day remain faintly impressed upon her skin.
She notices right away that the felt soaks up the condensation from her showers, that every morning it becomes a little heavy and sopping, like an old sponge, but she decides that it will be fine. She likes poking at the felt and watching water run down to the base of the sink. She stands for minutes at a time doing this, watching the water run, hypnotized by the droplets.
The moments after her shower are the first real test of her new life. Looking up from the sink as she washes her face, it takes her a second to recall why there is nothing but black space in front of her. When she gets dressed she doesn’t worry about what clothes she’ll wear, picking something simple, something boring. She puts no makeup on, but does bother with sunscreen. She rubs her face three times to be sure that there are no white streaks along her nose. She blow-dries her hair because the dampness around her skull bothers her, but she doesn’t brush out the tangles when she’s dry. She notices that her own skin is soft, not cakey with the makeup she usually wears. She runs her fingers over her face, imagining its flaws, thinking about what she can no longer cover.
She puts her hair straightener in front of her roommate’s door with a note attached: Do you want me?
When Carrie comes home two hours later, Anna is in her room. A light tap on Anna’s door is followed by “I’m coming to bother you,” and Anna prepares for her roommate’s visit.
“Are you giving me your straightener?” Carrie asks.
“If you want it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t need it anymore, I guess.”
“I thought you used it, like, every day.”
Anna shrugs. Carrie wanders over to the closet, brushing her hair with her hands, and pulls open the door and stands in front of the place where Anna’s mirror used to be. This is Anna’s first moment of triumph; whenever Carrie comes into Anna’s room to chat, she inevitably ends up speaking to her own image. Anna can’t stand it when Carrie does this, even though she has done it herself, even though she has had entire conversations over the phone while staring into her full-length, tracing the bad and the good of her jaw line, her clothing, her bangs.
“What happened to your mirror?” Carry says.
“I got rid of it.”
“Why?”
“I was sick of it, I guess.”
“You were sick of your mirror? I don’t get it.”
“I wanted to try something different.”
“You are so weird.”
“I guess.”
“You won’t be able to escape it, really.”
“I know.”
“Your arm is all decorated.” Carrie stares at Anna’s arm with a look that makes Anna wish for long sleeves. Anna runs her fingers over some of the lines she has drawn, tracing her favorite sparrow. Carrie averts her eyes to the floor. Anna pinches the sparrow and lets her arm drop.
“Yeah, I was bored in Poli Sci.”
“Oh. Can I have your full length mirror?”
“I threw it out.”
“I would have taken it.”
“You can see if it’s still in the dumpster.”
“I don’t want it from the dumpster.”
“Bummer.”
Carrie leaves Anna’s room and Anna returns to her reading.

Public bathrooms are the most challenging, and window reflections. Anna takes care to look at her feet when she passes such reflective surfaces. She sees herself twice in one day when the sun comes out and people start wearing sunglasses again. Looking into the eyes of her best friend shows her her own image. She turns hastily to her sneakers and tries to stop herself from tweaking her bangs because they look wrong in the glasses. She ends up combing her fingers through them anyway, though.
At home one evening, she hears Carrie talking in muffled tones in her own bedroom. Her voice carries through the vent above the sofa, and Anna listens.
“I don’t know, some crazy thing. I’m thinking about telling her to go talk to someone.”
During the pause in conversation, Anna feels her body tense. She runs her fingers over the lines on her arm, but keeps the television on mute.
“Well, you know, since last year… yeah, I know. But being understanding and giving her space and all that clearly isn’t working. I mean, she won’t look at herself.”
Hearing this conversation gives her the same feeling in her gut that looking into mirrors did before she trashed them. She turns the television off and goes to her room, where she turns her music up as loud as her eardrums can stand it. She’s careful to only play songs that have been around for a year or two. She steers clear of oldies that remind her of summer car trips spent with her mother.

“So do you feel beautiful now?” Carrie asks Anna a week later.
“No. I mean, I know my hair’s a mess and my complexion’s uneven.”
“You just don’t have to look at it anymore?”
“I just don’t have to keep fixing myself anymore.”
“Oh.”

After two weeks, Anna can navigate her new life. She knows which buildings are most reflective. She can drive, check the rearview mirror, and never glance into the corner that will reflect her eyes back at her. People have stopped noticing what she is doing; she is more subtle about avoiding the tall building made of windows and the freezer at work with the double paned glass.
But the felt on the mirror is fading from black to grey. If Anna skips her shower one day, the felt has time to dry out completely, and it becomes cracked and stiff. It starts to wrinkle. It reminds her of elephant skin, though she’s never seen an elephant in real life before.
Sometimes Anna misses standing in front of her bathroom vanity, primping before class. One day she considers doing her makeup and hair without a mirror, but as soon as she puts on her concealer she thinks anxiously that it probably isn’t rubbed in all the way, and that if she leaves it as it is she’ll be walking around campus with the potential for perfect skin smeared in streaks across her face. Her washcloth turns a pale peach as she scrubs her skin thoroughly, to make it as clean and unpolluted as possible. She feels naked as she settles down in class with her uncovered face, but she can rest her hand on her temple now without worrying about smudging anything. Plus she knows that it’s her own face she’s wearing, for better or worse, and she loves the control she feels because of that.
Anna’s doodling in Political Science becomes an addiction. She draws new lines to add to the existing ones, and retraces images she likes that are slowly fading away. People have started to watch her instead of taking notes, but Anna barely notices. Something about the felt tip on her skin removes her from her surroundings. She decides she will never get these images tattooed; that would mean she could no longer doodle them, and she doesn’t know what would get her through the rise of the Berlin Wall without ink on her flesh.

There is a problem.
The felt over Anna’s bathroom mirror is starting to grow something. A smell is emanating from the fabric, something bad, like a fish tank full of algae or a dead whale on the beach. It looks almost brown now. Staring at the transformed felt makes Anna’s stomach squirm the same way looking at her own image used to.
She decides to go buy something more durable, so she finds a housewares store and prepares to pay five times what she paid for the felt for a powder blue shower curtain. This, she feels certain, will be protected from growing bacteria, will be made for moisture.
She doesn’t have to go to a counter to have it measured out. There is no one to help her locate it; every once in a while a wiry-haired woman in high-waisted jeans and a red vest that has her name sewn on the front walks down the aisles. The woman’s sneakers squeak and her eyeshadow is electric blue and she doesn’t even try to speak to Anna. The shower curtain is in a plastic wrapper, folded by a machine, a piece of cardboard tucked in the center of the folds to help it keep its shape. There’s a price tag stuck on the back flap. Everything about this package repels Anna, but she needs it, so she pays $15.95 plus tax and goes home to set it up.

Unpinning the black felt is like a ceremony. She turns on her favorite old music and pours a glass of wine. She runs her palm over its crackled skin, forgiving it for its flaws. To take the fabric down she has to look; she cannot let the heavy felt fall on her toothbrush. The top left corner flops down and she sees a sliver of herself and her face looks naked, rough. The bottom left corner comes free and she sees more, winces a little in the harsh light reflected in the mirror. She quickly pulls the rest of the fabric down and folds it into a trash bag. She takes it to the dumpster and throws it in with the same care she gave to her full-length mirror.
She goes back into the bathroom with a steadying breath. She unpacks the shower curtain and folds it to fit the size of the mirror. She looks up, ready to place it over the glass, and sees herself again, her right arm a blur of black ink and hazy shapes, so different from how she had imagined it looked to others. She thought it was beautiful patterns and delicate songbirds, but there are only dark lines and retraced figures that look oddly distorted, out of place. She turns her face down to the floor, then examines her arm with her own eyes. She cannot discern which image is more accurate. Her eyes show her what they have been showing her for weeks; nothing seems distorted, nothing seems blurred. She slowly turns her eyes back to the mirror. It is not the same arm, it cannot be the same arm. She stares into the glass, pulls her arm up close to it, poking at the images and hating how they are represented to her.
She’s had enough, this is why she got rid of her mirrors, she doesn’t need them; they do nothing for her.
She pulls the shower curtain up to the mirror and reaches for a pin, but the shiny nylon fabric keeps slipping and she can’t hold it against the wall long enough to pin it to its place.