Girl Before a Mirror

by Liza Palmer

  It’s the first days of spring with some shimmery snow still on the ground, and XIX is finally up and running. I grab my tea, pack up my laptop, lock up my apartment, and walk down the stairs to the office. I flick on the lights, turn on all the power strips and the kettle and the coffee maker and the copier, throw a random piece of paper into the bin, and clean a bit of dust off the conference table as I make my way back to my office. I see the light on in Sasha’s office, so I dump my workbag and purse at my desk and, still clutching my tea, head in to see what has her here so early.

  I poke my head into her office and am met with the same dark reds and browns that she had back at Holloway/Greene. Art is everywhere. Covering every inch of her space.

  “We’re meeting with that little Disney actress today or her people, probably,” Sasha says, not looking up.

  “For her clothing line,” I say, sitting in one of Sasha’s client chairs.

  “They sent me an e-mail late last night about there being more to it than that,” she says. The difference in Sasha is noticeable. She has become that woman she envisioned striding through that office. Her voice is stronger, calmer. Her shoulders are always back and she hasn’t done that thing where you say “excuse me” even though it was the other person who got in your way? Yeah, that.

  “You should have said something,” I say.

  “You’ve got that big exit meeting with Ferdie today. Plus? I’ve got it,” she says, looking up with a huge smile.

  “I know you do,” I say.

  “They’re thinking of a whole backpack line and school supplies and then that can go over to this new animated character they’re auditioning her for. So, this could be huge.” Sasha hands me the printed-out e-mail with all her notes on it.

  “You’re going in with Nick?” I ask, speaking of our new accounts hire.

  “Yeah, and I thought I’d bring Skylar. Show her the ropes,” Sasha says.

  “That sounds great,” I say.

  “I saw that Preeti sent you over the numbers on Lumineux. Holy moly, right?”

  “I know. It’s unbelievable,” I say.

  “You’re going back in to meet with them next week?”

  “Yeah and hopefully . . .” I cross my fingers.

  “I know. I mean, it sounds like that’s what they’re thinking,” Sasha says.

  “But I think we really have to stay with our mission statement and only represent the Quincy products that are targeted at women,” I say.

  “Agreed,” she says.

  “And we’re both on the same page about being wildly happy that Chuck blew his meeting at Quincy, right?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “And if we were lesser people, we’d spend hours upon hours gloating and laughing.”

  “Thankfully, we’re not lesser people,” Sasha says. I smile and Sasha can’t help but laugh as she shifts in her chair.

  “Okay, I’ve got a train to catch. Plans for the weekend?” I ask.

  “Work. Work. And more work,” she says. I smile at her and say my good-byes. I’m just about to walk out of her office when . . .

  “Does any of this ever get to you?” I ask.

  “Any of what?”

  “Nineteen. Being someone’s boss. All of this. Do you ever feel like a fraud?”

  “Every day.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “Yes! Are you kidding? Wait. You do, too?”

  “Yes!”

  “Wow, I thought you had it all figured out.”

  “I thought you had it all figured out,” I say.

  “Nope.”

  “Me either.”

  “Do you think Helen Brubaker ever feels like a fraud?”

  “No way. Not at all.” I laugh.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.”

  “Okay, the train. She awaits. Good luck with the Disney princess. Let me know how it goes,” I say, turning to leave.

  “Roger that,” she says, calling out after me. I walk out through the XIX offices, into the newly fallen snow, and I’m back on the Metroliner speeding toward Ferdie and his exit interview.

  “Anna? Come on back,” Ralph says, later that morning. He lumbers down the long hallway and into a vacant office in the back of the Recovery House. “Any plans for the weekend?”

  “Work, probably,” I say. Ralph turns around and smiles. He motions for me to come in. Ferdie is there already.

  He takes my breath away. Standing in front of me is the brother I remember from our childhood. He’s been here for six months. Six months of sharing at meetings through tears and anger. Apparently, he and Ralph got into several shouting matches and one particularly Godzilla versus Mothra shoving match that ended with Ralph tugging Ferdie in for a monster bear hug, telling him that he knew he was mad, he knew he was mad . . . it’s okay. Let it out, Ralph soothed. Let it all out. Ralph wasn’t going anywhere.

  I launch into Ferdie for a hug, and I love that I’ve gotten used to his new smell. The new smell is the old smell. He pulls me close and when we break apart he pushes up his glasses and just smiles. It’s a hesitant smile, but something else is there. Ferdie is proud of himself. And now? There’s no one around to punch that feeling out of him.

  “Anna, thank you so much for coming down here today,” Ralph says.

  “My pleasure,” I say, taking Ferdie’s hand in mine as we sit across from Ralph.

  “How’s Nineteen?” Ferdie asks.

  “It’s terrifying and amazing,” I say.

  “I know the feeling,” Ferdie says. I squeeze his hand tight. Tighter. We are quiet. I don’t know who to look at or what’s supposed to happen here today. So, I just look from Ferdie to Ralph and back at Ferdie. It’s Ferdie who continues. “I’ve decided to stay on at the Recovery House. They’ve found a place for me doing intake and I can work up to being a counselor here.”

  “That sounds amazing,” I say.

  “Okay . . . cool,” Ferdie says.

  “Were you worried?”

  “Well, you always wanted me to go back to school and all that,” he says.

  “I just wanted you to be happy,” I say.

  “Being here makes me happy,” he says.

  “When this facility evaluates someone for employment, they make sure that they’re not using Recovery House as a crutch or a place to hide. We know that there’s a big, wide world out there, and we need to have every confidence that our employees can make it there, too,” Ralph says.

  “Oh . . . right,” I say.

  “That’s the case with Ferdinand,” Ralph says.

  “I feel like I can do some good here,” Ferdie says. “I mean, who better, right?”

  “No one,” I say.

  “Ferdinand would work almost as an R.A., if you will, for the first few months and then from there—”

  “If I wanted to pursue addiction counseling, I could go back to school for that,” Ferdie says.

  “It sounds great. It just sounds great,” I say, smiling. Smiling. Smiling.

  We are quiet. I don’t know what else there is to talk about. Is this—

  “Ferdinand wanted to broach the issue of your parents,” Ralph says.

  “Oh?” My stomach drops.

  Ralph looks to Ferdie. Ferdie turns to me, taking both of my hands. I grow worried. Panicked. I have no idea what’s coming.

  “We’ve talked a lot about family in here. What it means and all that. I have you.” Ferdie stops talking. Abruptly. He looks down. A deep breath. “But Mom and Dad? As it stands right now, they’re not people I really want in my life.”

  “I totally get that.”

  “I plan on paying them back all the money. I’m forever in their debt for making this possible. But I can be indebted to them and love them from a distance. I think I thought that when I got ‘fixed,’ then all of a sudden my relationship with them would be better. But that’s not how it works. It was never about me. It was never about us.”

  “I know. I . . . want to think that. I want to know
that,” I say, trying to hide my welling tears from Ralph. He slides a box of tissues over to me. I smile and act like I’m not totally crying right now.

  “I think family can be a lot of things. And Mom and Dad always acted like they were doing us a favor in loving us—or trying to love us, anyway. That it was such a burden, but that’s not right,” Ferdie says.

  “I . . . I know,” I say. Ferdie looks down at me, squeezes my hands, and waits for me to look up into those deep brown eyes of his. So clear. So bright now. He looks so young and alive. Unafraid.

  “People have to love all of us, not just some of us,” Ferdie says. I nod. And nod. I lean in close.

  “The Batman side.”

  “Right.”

  “What if they’re right, though? And there are parts of us that are unlovable?” I ask, my voice a whisper.

  Ferdie pulls me in for a hug. And then he whispers in my ear, “They’re not right, Anna. They’re not right.” He pulls me in closer and when we separate he holds my face in his hands. “It is a privilege to love you and to be loved by you. All of you.” I nod as the tears stream down my face. Ferdie watches me. Do I get it, he wonders. I nod. I nod yes. I nod yes. He pulls me in for another hug.

  “I’ll eat you up, I love you so,” I say.

  I’m sitting in my rental car in the pouring rain. Ferdie’s words echo and pinball around my mind, this car, the world. They’re not right. There are not whole parts of me that are unlovable. Loving me, contrary to popular opinion, is not a burden. It’s not my fault that my parents couldn’t—didn’t—love me. I was a kid. What could I have done that made me so unlovable? My secret fear, my shame, was that it was never anything I did; it was just me. All of me. That at my root, in my essence, I was so inherently flawed that even my own parents couldn’t love me.

  Why did it never occur to me, until now, that it was about them?

  Because it was easier to think it was me. I could control it if it was about me. Or try to. I could get good grades, go to community college plus night classes, pull myself up by my own bootstraps, and land a fancy job in advertising, and I could squeeeeeze love out of my parents blue ribbon by blue ribbon. And if they were cold and detached, I could still work harder. There was always an answer! There was always another hill to climb! There was always another opportunity to thank my parents while standing atop another podium.

  If it was about them, there was nothing I could do. It was beyond my control. I was helpless.

  The rain falls.

  They’re not right.

  They’re not right.

  They’re.

  Not.

  Right.

  It’s time to step into the rings.

  I pick up my phone and dial.

  “Mallory Consulting.”

  “Hi, this is Anna Wyatt, is Mr. Mallory in?”

  “No, he’s not in. He’s actually speaking at a small college upstate for their parents’ weekend,” the woman says.

  “Oh, that’s right. And which small college is that?” I ask, digging a piece of paper out of my purse along with a pen. The woman tells me the small liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, and I thank her. I look at the clock on the dashboard. I input the address of the university into my phone’s map. Five hours. Over three hundred miles. I could make it tonight and be there to meet him by morning.

  I pull out of the Recovery House’s parking lot and set my course for Poughkeepsie, New York.

  And I’m stuck in the D.C. traffic. I don’t have cash for the tolls and I have to stop and get money in some gas station whose bathroom is a porta-potty by the side of the flooding highway. I pull past Manhattan as night falls and it’s another traffic jam and horns blaring and should I stop and get clothes for tomorrow or at the very least my toothbrush—no. I press on.

  I have no good music, so I’m forced to listen to the radio all the way up. Pop song after pop song. And it’s amazing. I turn up the music and, once the rain stops pouring, I roll down my window and sing along. I stop at a diner and have the world’s greasiest cheeseburger and fries, sitting by myself in a booth by the jukebox. The waitress calls me hon and she’s worried that I’m driving around after dark.

  I roll into Poughkeepsie just after nine P.M. and find the nearest hotel. Full. Parents’ weekend, they say. Sure, that makes sense. Onto the next hotel. Full. The night grinds on and I decide to stop and call around to the other local hotels. All I can find is a terrible twenty-four-hour fast food place that’s full of obnoxious college kids, so I order a soda and sit in the parking lot calling around to find that no hotel has any room.

  “This is why a plan is a good idea,” I say, locking my doors, lowering my seat down, and pulling my coat over my shoulders. I turn onto my side, mess with the headrest like it’s an actual pillow, and pull my coat up a bit more. The clock on the dash. The little blue numbers illuminated as my windows fog over. 11:34. I turn on the car and run the heater. Off again. Doze off. My eyes blink open. 12:56. I run the heater again. I flip over on my other side, pull my coat up. Doze off. 2:21. Is this the longest night ever? I flip over again and wonder why sleeping on that stupid cot all those months didn’t make this one night any better. 3:01. Oh good. Time is slowing down. Shift change as employees arrive and I decide to go inside and use the bathroom at the fast food place. I sneak back outside and try to resituate myself as I run the heater. 3:34. 3:56. I turn off the heater and flip over. 4:01. I close my eyes. Keep them closed. My contact lenses are dry and my mouth is a ball of cotton. My shoe got kicked off at some point and now it’s just hitting me in the shin every time I move. But if I try to get it, the cold of the early morning will rush in as my coat falls off my shoulders. I bend down and quickly resituate my shoe. Freezing. I bring the coat up over my shoulder again. I’m now past tired and have reached that lovely point where the exhaustion and cold is just in my bones. This was a terrible idea. I couldn’t have gotten a hotel when I was back in D.C.? Stopped in Manhattan and started this stupid trek first thing in the morning?

  Of course not. I had to be dramatic. 4:37. More people start pulling into the fast food parking lot. Then a few more. Headlights on my windshield as I feign sleep. At five thirty, I decide to give up. I start the car up and head back to the diner on the edge of town for breakfast.

  It’s in the diner bathroom that I see what evil spending the night in that fast food parking lot hath wrought. The rearview mirror had been kind. Black circles under my eyes, makeup askew and worn out. I find some Lumineux Shower Gel samplers in my workbag and use those to wash under my arms and my face. I make a mental note to pitch Preeti a Lumineux Woman-on-the-Go bag for emergencies. That’s twice in the last year I could have used it.

  My hair is doing things I’ve never seen it do before, actually sticking straight out of my head in places—which I thought was physically impossible. I use the water from the sink and try to smooth my hair down, but now I just look like a drowned rat. Do I slick it back into a ponytail and look like the lunch lady who tormented me at school, or do I try to keep it down so I look like I’ve just run through some sprinklers after breaking out of the state pen? It’s really a win-win. I decide to put it back into a ponytail. No, down. A braid? Maybe two ponytails? How about some cinnamon bun rolls on the sides of my head? That seemed to be quite effective. I dry my hair under the hand dryer in the bathroom and decide to keep it down. It’s windswept, I tell myself. When I sit back down, the waitress looks terrified. Once she leaves, I throw the whole rat’s nest into a ponytail.

  Two cups of tea and a country breakfast later and I’m parking my rental car/sleeping compartment on the edge of the picturesque college’s grounds. My silk blouse looked tasteful and amazing for yesterday’s meeting with Ralph and Ferdie. This morning? It looks like I wadded up a napkin, cut out a neck hole and some armholes, then proceeded to squeeze my body inside it. My sensible pencil skirt is wrinkled and off-center, but it’s the drool on my blazer that really brings the outfit home. I walk onto campus and see the whit
e tents set up in what appears to be one of the main common areas. Students are beginning to mill around, and it’s the coffee kiosk that has drawn the most interest at the moment.

  I find a flyer for today’s festivities and see that Lincoln is speaking this afternoon at a room just off the common area. Okay. I can see if any hotel rooms have opened up, go take a shower, fix my hair, and—

  Lincoln.

  “You know I meant messy in a metaphorical way,” he says, his black overcoat pristine and his gray cashmere scarf lilting in the crisp morning air. I smooth my drool-stained blazer over my wrinkly napkin blouse and step closer to Lincoln.

  “I eat all the movie popcorn before the trailers have finished. That TV show about the chemistry teacher that makes meth? I got through one season and then just watched the finale. I hate cats; I think they’re smug for no good reason. I had an accident in my sleeping bag when I spent the night over at Tatiana’s house when I was twelve and lied about it. I love sports being on in the background. It makes me feel not so alone. I didn’t love my ex-husband and I almost canceled the wedding, but the invitations had already gone out. I love Taylor Swift. I do. I love her. I cry during any medal ceremony. My left foot swells up when it gets hot, and I’m positive it’s because I secretly have diabetes. I bite my fingernails and have no intention of stopping. I think I’m smarter than most people and if someone doesn’t think I’m funny, I am immediately suspicious. I think you are amazing. I knew it the moment I met you. You made me believe in The One and I know how cheesy that sounds, but it’s true. It’s you. It was always you. You’re my person, too.”