Mirror, Mirror

by Judy Baer

  “Why do you want a man who doesn’t want you?” I didn’t mean to be harsh, but Maggie has to get over the idea that if she were prettier, better dressed or more obliging, Randy might have stayed.

  “You just don’t get it. You are always the dumper, not the dumpee!” She flounced into her room and slammed the door.

  Pete and I stared at each other. Dumper and dumpee? Now what?

  Typical Americans that we are, we turned on the television and watched a couple shop for a new home and a frenetic designer try to remake someone’s home in twelve hours. Finally, when our eyes were beginning to glaze over, Pete mumbled, “I’ve got Rollerblades in my car.”

  “You’re tired of HGTV?”

  “These people are too happy. They’re getting on my nerves.”

  “Then let’s make the boys smile instead.”

  The boys—Dash and Flash—were downright delirious as Pete and I let them race us down the street and around the walking trails in the park. We must look a sight when we do it—intense, loping dogs pulling their terrified old-enough-to-know-better owners on Rollerblades—a recipe for disaster if there ever was one.

  We’ve wiped out a time or two, Dash and I. And once Flash dragged Pete through a break in the sidewalk that left him sprawled on the ground with so much skin scraped off his cheek and arm that he ended up in the E.R. But we still do it. It’s our mild way of living on the edge.

  Pete tipped his head toward Maggie’s door before he headed home. “Are you two going to be okay?”

  “Of course. Maggie and I are practically sisters. She trusts me to tell her the truth even when she doesn’t want to hear it. That’s part of our deal.”

  “I’m glad she has the health-club job coming up soon. That will distract her. She’s really excited about it.”

  “Are you shooting it?”

  “I am. I haven’t heard anything about it lately so I assume everything is on schedule.”

  I felt the pressure lift in my chest. “Good. She needs a distraction.”

  “And someone fawning over her,” Pete added grimly.

  “She acts like she’s only half a person without a man. When will that girl wake up and smell the coffee?”

  Not until tomorrow morning apparently, when the coffeepot’s automatic brewer engages, for when I went to pray with Maggie, I found her sound asleep on her bed. I covered her with a downy comforter, then went to my room to do some serious praying on my own.

  “What’s this?” Maggie waved a piece of paper under my nose when I walked into the kitchen the next morning. Her hair was sleep-mussed and sometime in the night she had awakened and changed into a pair of boxer shorts and an oversized T-shirt.

  On a napkin I had doodled the word Chrysalis with a downward smiley face.

  “Just scribbling. It’s nothing.”

  Frank had called yesterday with dual purposes. The first was to convince me that I’d be passing up a great thing if I didn’t take this job with his company. The second was to invite me out to dinner to help me change my mind.

  That’s like being invited out by a cannibal for “a little bite to eat.” He’d pressured me just enough to make me uneasy. Fortunately I was already busy.

  “Just a job I turned down.”

  Her head snapped up sharply. “Oh?”

  “Hostess for a reality show, makeovers with a twist.” I summed it up as succinctly as I could.

  She nodded absently. “Hostess, huh? Is the pay good?”

  She studied herself in the reflection from the toaster, a replica of the kind that had been in my mother’s kitchen when I was growing up. “I suppose I’d better get to Pete’s and find out what he knows about our shoot.” She put her hand on her stomach. “I’m getting fluttery just thinking about it. I am so grateful to have this job to take my mind off things.

  “I’m sorry about last night.” Her eyes welled with tears. “You told me the truth and I took it badly. I should be grateful. You are one of the few people in the world I can count on for unvarnished honesty and you’re right. I don’t want a man who doesn’t want me.”

  She hugged me before heading for her room. “I’d better get ready. Pete’s probably waiting for me.”

  After she’d gone, I lingered at the table so long that Dash lay down across my feet and fell asleep.

  Lord, I don’t know what it’s going to take, but please help Maggie start depending on You for her worth and value.

  My thoughts whirled with all that had been going on in the past few days.

  And give me what I need to be the best tutor and friend I can to little Ben Harmon. What a bright light he is. And help his father, Jack. Ease his pain, as well. Only You know what’s supposed to happen next, but I ask that I be in the center of Your will, no matter what it is. Amen.

  Because I had a few hours to waste, I indulged myself in my secret pleasure, shopping.

  Not for myself, of course. I’m a clotheshorse who doesn’t care that much for clothes. I love to shop for babies.

  I find that little pink dresses with ruffles, soft, cottony blankets and blue-and-white sweatshirts with tiny embroidered baseballs and bats are irresistible. Baby soap is my favorite scent and it’s my other passion to find unique diaper pins and soft washcloths. I buy them by the shopping cartful with only one reservation. They have to be on sale. Cheap. Because I want to buy in quantity. Obscene quantities, actually.

  I am a baby-clothes freak and the layette ladies at church love me for it.

  This passion started for me as a child not satisfied with the bits of money I put into the offering plate on Sunday. I asked my mother if there was anything a little kid could do to help out at church. I didn’t know how to quilt or cook and was too young to have a job and donate money.

  My mother, wise woman that she is, came up with the idea of contributing to the layettes the church ladies were making for new mothers. First she brought home bolts of soft flannel fabric and taught me how to cut blanket-and diaper-sized pieces and zigzag the edges. After I had made stacks of both, she took me to the dollar store and gave me orders to buy as much baby soap and as many diaper pins as I could with the money. Soon I added my own babysitting wages to the pot. By the time I was in high school, I had all my friends shopping with me and our church was sending layettes not to just one missionary hospital but several. In college I was called “The Baby Lady” which took some explaining to the uninitiated—especially guys who wanted to date me.

  I still indulge myself in my vision—that every new mother have something new for her baby no matter what her standing in life or country of origin. Pete says I’m changing the world, one mama and baby at a time. There are worse hobbies, I guess.

  Anyway, by the time I hit a sale on flannel at the local discount store, stocked up on tiny T-shirts and sleepers at seventy percent off and bought odds and ends of baby yarn to knit a couple sweaters, I was feeling better about everything. So good, in fact, that I stopped at Starbucks for an infusion of caffeine and a chance to read the newspaper uninterrupted.

  I’d been home only five minutes when my cell phone rang.

  Pete’s strangled voice whispered across the line.

  “Get over here, Quinn. Now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Pete doesn’t panic. Pete frets, stews, mulls, ponders, fusses and fumes, but he doesn’t panic. Not even when Flash ate a canister of film from Pete’s largest-paying-ever shoot. Fortunately, everything, as Pete put it, “came out just fine.”

  I grabbed my purse and headed for the door. “Dash, come. Ride.”

  He went from comatose to alert in a nanosecond. Ride is one of Dash’s favorite words, right up there with eat and walk. He does fetch, heel and stay without enthusiasm. Roll over insults him, but he does it out of deference to me. He views me as the pleasant but rather unenlightened member of his pack. I am not alpha dog. I may be omega dog in Dash’s eyes.

  Dash hopped into the front seat and waited for me to buckle his doggy seat belt. I was on the ro
ad within five minutes of Pete’s call.

  Pete’s studio is in the area of 50th Street and France Avenue and it took me only a few minutes to get to Images. As I walked from the parking ramp I ignored all the small, tempting shops including a brand-new chocolateria that had just opened in the storefront next to his, although I did take several deep breaths as I went by. Maggie’s Triumph was parallel parked in front of the studio. Pete currently has his black-and-white photography on display in the reception area of the studio. Six-foot-high pictures of body parts—a foot and ankle in a Manolo Blahnik, a wrist draped in charm bracelets and a closed eye lined with kohl and fringed with impossibly long lashes—greeted me. I liked it better when Pete was in his “baby stage” and the walls were lined with cherubic babies wearing nothing but a smile.

  Everyone, including Flash and Dash, loves having Pete take their picture. They like it because he keeps them alert and attentive with doggy treats. I have more portraits of Dash in the house than I do of my family. Of course, Dash is the only one actually willing to sit still long enough to make it happen.

  The reception area of the studio was empty except for Flash who, upon seeing Dash, wagged from the tip of his tail to the top of his head. I left them to perform their doggy hellos and headed for the break room.

  All was quiet. Maggie was seated at Pete’s small retro laminate-topped table holding a mug of coffee in both hands. She stared trancelike out the back window onto the alley at a large Dumpster ready to be emptied.

  Pete made pointing motions toward Maggie and a dramatic slitting motion across his neck.

  She wants to kill herself? I mouthed.

  Pete wagged his head in the negative. Then he began miming himself at a photo shoot, taking pictures.

  “She wants to kill you?”

  “Of course not!” he blurted aloud. Maggie never even flinched. She simply continued to grip her mug and stare out the window.

  “Mags, Quinn is here. We’ll go into the studio and I’ll tell her what’s coming down. We’ll be right back.”

  Maggie never acknowledged his words.

  “What on earth…”

  “I thought you’d never get here,” Pete blurted. “I don’t know what to do. The general manager from the fitness club’s corporate office called me to say that there’d been a ‘change in plans.’ They took another look at the direction of their advertising and decided to move away from images of people in their ads. They’ve developed a new logo and plan to use photos of their facilities in their advertising.”

  My stomach fluttered uneasily.

  “Now they want me to go to their gyms and do photo shoots of the buildings and a series on the machines. I asked what would happen to the model they’d hired.”

  The flutter became a jackhammer in my gut.

  “The general manager said, as casually as can be, that she’d been ‘cut loose.’ They’d sent her a registered letter notifying her that she wouldn’t be needed.”

  “Maggie…”

  “I didn’t know if I should tell her.” Pete shifted restlessly, hands in his pockets, anxiety writen all over his face. “Then I imagined her getting the letter and decided to try to soften the blow.” He nodded toward the break room. “A big help that was. Look at her.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Pretty much what I just told you. I didn’t say she would be ‘cut loose’ as they so crassly put it, but Maggie is good at reading between the lines.” Pete looked so miserable that my heart went out to him. “She usually reads too much into things but this time, she was right on the money.”

  “What did she say?”

  “‘I’m being replaced by a row of elliptical trainers and rowing machines?’” Pete spread his hands helplessly. “What could I say to that?”

  “You could have said ‘yes.’”

  Maggie stood in the doorway of the break room. Neither Pete nor I knew how long she’d been there or how much she had heard.

  She moved gracefully, like a wraith, across the hardwood floor to us. “It wasn’t your fault. You were trying to protect me.”

  “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, especially not yours. In our business these things happen….”

  Maggie shook her head emphatically. “I don’t believe that.”

  “The company had no business hiring people for a concept they weren’t totally committed to,” I blustered, feeling both furious and frustrated.

  “Don’t you see? I’m the one who failed them. If I’d been right—thinner, more attractive, the exact person they wanted on their billboards—they would have been loyal to me.”

  “Maggie,” Pete said impatiently, “corporations change their minds all the time about how they want to be perceived. It’s not about a single person and it’s certainly not about you. It was a company decision.”

  “Why didn’t they just try me first?” she murmured, more to herself than to us. “I could have been anything they wanted—hip, buff, come-hither. I’d make myself into exactly what they wanted.”

  “Make yourself into whatever they wanted?” Pete echoed incredulously. “Why would you do that?”

  “To get the job, of course.”

  She looked so fragile and lost as she said it that tears came to my eyes.

  “Oh, Maggie, I know…”

  “You can’t know what it’s like, Quinn. Everyone wants to hire you!”

  Pete took up my case. “People who want dark-haired models with exotic features don’t call Quinn. She’s Scandinavian as fish balls in white gravy, lefse and King Harald! No matter what she did, she couldn’t—wouldn’t—look like you.”

  “You can talk all you want, but I don’t believe it. If I were different I know I would have kept this job.”

  “Do you remodel your house every time your mood changes? Do you paint your car to match your nail polish? Come on, Maggie, get real! You can’t change who you are for others. Be who you are and let the right ones come to you!”

  We might as well have been talking to one of Pete’s backdrops. Maggie ignored everything we said.

  She didn’t speak when she arrived at home. Nor did she murmur a word when she took the official-looking letter from the fitness club out of the mailbox. She threw it into the garbage, walked into her room, closed the door firmly and locked it.

  The finality of her movements told me that, no matter how much I wanted to talk about this, the matter was not up for discussion.

  Knowing Maggie was locked in her bedroom grieving made it impossible for me to focus on lesson plans. Ready for a distraction, I was more than a little relieved when my doorbell rang.

  The last people I expected to see were Jack and Ben Harmon framed in the doorway. Jack looked embarrassed and uncomfortable, but Ben was obviously elated to be here.

  “I told him it wasn’t appropriate to drop in on you.” Jack’s tone was apologetic.

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind,” Ben said, beaming at me like a halogen flashlight. Just because you are my teacher doesn’t mean you can’t be my friend, too. Right?”

  “He wouldn’t listen….”

  “Dad said this was a ‘business arrangement,’ but I’m not a business and you’re not an arrangement,” Ben insisted. “Besides, you are the only one I want to go to the Science Museum with me. They’ve got this really cool show on now. Did you know that Pluto isn’t a planet, anymore? And they have moon rocks and meteorites. My friend Nathan says you know a lot about outer space. Do you really think the dinosaurs died because…” Ben paused to take a breath. “Want to come?”

  “She isn’t going to be interested, Ben.” Jack put a comforting hand on his son’s shoulder as if to brace him for a disappointment.

  I looked at the closed door that separated Maggie and me. She would probably sleep a long time. A person simply can’t cry as hard and long as she had without becoming exhausted.

  “You can’t just drop in on people and assume they have time for you, Ben,” Jack continued.

  “Sometimes you
can.”

  Jack’s head jerked up as if he hadn’t heard me correctly.

  “You will?” Ben squealed. “You’ll come?”

  I bent to look Ben straight in the baby blues. “Your Dad is right. Call ahead and make plans next time, but today I would like to get out of the house. I was planning to go to that exhibit, anyway, so there’s no time like the present.”

  Ben screwed his head around to look triumphantly at his dad. “See? I told you she’d go.”

  Jack’s face cleared and his dark eyes lit in his tanned face. It made him look impossibly young and handsome. “And I thought I knew how the world worked.”

  “Let me write a note to my roommate so she knows where I’ve gone when she wakes up. I’ll take my car and follow you to St. Paul.”

  “That wrecks all the fun!” Ben protested. He turned again to his befuddled father. “We’ll bring her home whenever she wants, won’t we, Dad?”

  Jack gave up the battle. “Sure. Why not?”

  “You don’t have to…”

  Then Jack’s face creased into a smile and I saw where Ben got all that irresistible charm. “But we want to. Please?”

  I wrote Maggie a note, grabbed a sweater and followed them to Jack’s van. It looked like a home away from home, with a DVD player, movies, games and books scattered about the backseat, as well as a gym bag, tennis racquet and golf shoes. There was a twelve-pack of soda and a bag of tortilla chips piled on top of undelivered dry cleaning. Yes, indeed, the Harmon vehicle was definitely a man’s domain.

  But far be it from me to say I don’t like a little testosterone in the mix. Ben and I sat in the backseat discussing black holes, dinosaurs, volcanoes and the merits of really goopy mud while Jack sat in front and drove. It must have looked like a cozy family scene to passers-by when we emptied out of the van.

  Looks can be deceiving.

  Ben was so impatient that he bounced and spun on his tiptoes and made impatient noises until we were ready to go inside.

  To see the familiar through new eyes, join a small boy with an inquiring mind in a museum.