Dressing Up for the Carnival

by Carol Shields

  Walking away from their cottage on Big Circle Lake, you would have a hard time describing its contents or atmosphere: faded colors and pleasing shapes that beg you to stay, to make yourself comfortable. These inviting surfaces slip from remembrance the minute you turn your back. But you would very probably bear in mind their single act of forfeiture: there are no mirrors.

  Check the medicine cabinet in the little fir-paneled bathroom: nothing. Check the back of the broom cupboard door in the kitchen or the spot above the dresser in their large skylighted bedroom or the wall over the log-burning fireplace in what they choose to call “the lounge.” Even if you were to abuse the rules of privacy and look into her (the wife’s) big canvas handbag you would find nothing compromising. You would likely come across a compact of face powder, Elizabeth Arden, but the little round mirror lining most women’s compacts has been removed. You can just make out the curved crust of glue that once held a mirror in place.

  Check even the saucepans hanging over the kitchen stove. Their bottoms are discolored copper, scratched aluminum. No chance for a reflective glimpse there. The stove itself is dull textured, ancient.

  This mirrorlessness of theirs is deliberate, that much is clear.

  From June to August they choose to forget who they are, or at least what they look like, electing an annual season of non-reflectiveness in the same way other people put away their clocks for the summer or their computers or door keys or microwave ovens.

  “But how can you possibly shave?” people ask the husband, knowing he is meticulous about such things.

  He moves a hand to his chin. At sixty, still slender, he remains a handsome man. “By feel,” he says. He demonstrates, moving the forefinger of his left hand half an inch ahead of the path of an imaginary razor. “Just try it. Shut your eyes and you’ll see you can manage a decent shave without the slightest difficulty. Maybe not a perfect shave, but good enough for out at the lake.”

  His wife, who never was slender, who has fretted for the better part of her life about her lack of slenderness—raged and grieved, gained and lost—has now at fifty-eight given up the battle. She looks forward to her mirrorless summers, she says. She likes to tell her friends—and she and her husband are a fortunate couple with a large circle of friends—that she can climb into her swimsuit and walk through the length of the cottage—the three original rooms, the new south-facing wing—without having to look even once at the double and triple pinches of flesh that have accumulated in those corners where her shoulders and breasts flow together. “Oh, I suppose I could look down and see what I’m like,” she says, rolling her eyes, “but I’m not obliged to take in the whole panorama every single day.”

  She does her hair in the morning in much the same way her husband shaves: by feel, brushing it out, patting it into shape, fixing it with pins. She’s been putting on earrings for forty years, and certainly doesn’t require a mirror for that. As for lipstick, she makes do with a quick crayoning back and forth across her mouth, a haphazard double slash of color. Afterward she returns the lipstick smartly to its case, then runs a practiced finger around her upper and lower lips, which she stretches wide so that the shaping of pale raspberry fits perfectly the face she knows by heart.

  He’s watched her perform this small act a thousand times, so often that his own mouth sometimes wants to stretch in response.

  They were newly married and still childless when they bought the cottage, paying far too much, then discovering almost immediately the foundations were half-rotted, and carpenter ants—or something—lived in the pine rafters. Mice had made a meal of the electric wires; ants thronged the mildewed cupboards. Officially the place had been sold to them furnished, but the previous owners had taken the best of what there was, leaving only a sagging couch, a table that sat unevenly on the torn linoleum, two battered chairs, a bed with a damp mattress, and an oak dresser with a stuck drawer. The dresser was the old-fashioned kind with its own mirror frame attached, two curving prongs rising gracefully like a pair of arms, but the mirror it had once embraced was missing.

  You would think the larceny of the original owners would have embittered the two of them. Or that the smell of mold and rot and accumulated dirt would have filled them with discouragement, but it didn’t. They set to work. For three weeks they worked from morning to dusk.

  First he repaired the old pump so they might at least have water. He was not in those years adept with his hands, and the task took several days. During that period he washed himself in the lake, not taking the time for a swim, but stopping only to splash his face and body with cold water. She noticed there was a three-cornered smudge of dirt high on his forehead that he missed. It remained there for several days, making him appear to her boyish and vulnerable. She didn’t have the heart to mention it to him. In fact, she felt a small ping of sorrow when she looked up at him one evening and found it washed away. Even though she was not in those days an impulsive woman, she had stretched herself forward and kissed the place where the smudge had been.

  Curiously, he remembers her spontaneous kiss, remembers she had washed her hair in the lake a few minutes earlier, and had wrapped a towel around her head like a turban. She was not a vain woman. In fact, she had always mourned too much the failures of her body, and so he knew she had no idea of how seductive she looked at that moment with the added inch of toweling and her face bared like a smooth shell.

  At night they fell exhausted into the old bed and slept as though weights were attached to their arms and legs. Their completed tasks, mending and painting, airing and polishing, brought them a brimming level of satisfaction that would have been foolish to try to explain to anyone else. They stepped carefully across their washed floorboards, opened and shut their windows and seemed to be listening at night to the underhum of the sloping, leaking roof. That first summer they scarcely saw a soul. The northern shore of Big Circle Lake was a wilderness in those days. There were no visitors, few interruptions. Two or three times they went to town for groceries. Once they attended a local auction and bought a pine bed, a small table, and a few other oddments. Both of them remember they looked carefully for a mirror, but none was to their liking. It was then they decided to do without.

  Each day they spent at the cottage became a plotted line, the same coffee mugs (hers, his), the comically inadequate paring knife and the comments that accrued around it. Familiar dust, a pet spider swaying over their bed, the sky lifting and falling and spreading out like a mesh of silver on the lake. Meals. Sleep. A surprising amount of silence.

  They thought they’d known each other before they married. He’d reported dutifully, as young men were encouraged to do in those days, his youthful experiences and pleasures, and she, blocked with doubt, had listed off hers. The truth had been darkened out. Now it erupted, came to the surface. He felt a longing to turn to her and say: “This is what I’ve dreamed of all my life, being this tired, this used up, and having someone like you, exactly like you, waking up at my side.”

  At the end of that first married summer they celebrated with dinner at a restaurant at the far end of the lake, the sort of jerry-built knotty-pine family establishment that opens in May for the summer visitors and closes on Labor Day. The waitresses were students hired for the season, young girls wearing fresh white peasant blouses and gathered skirts and thonged sandals on their feet. These girls, holding their trays sideways, maneuvered through the warren of tiny rooms. They brought chilled tomato juice, set a basket of bread on the table, put mixed salad out in wooden bowls, then swung back into the kitchen for plates of chicken and vegetables. Their rhythmic ease, burnished to perfection now that summer was near its end, was infectious, and the food, which was really no better than such food can be, became a meal each of them would remember with pleasure.

  He ate hungrily. She cut more slowly into her roast chicken, then looked up, straight into what she at first thought was a window. In fact, it was a mirror that had been mounted on the wall, put there no doubt to make the cramp
ed space seem larger. She saw a woman prettier than she remembered, a graceful woman, deeply tanned, her eyes lively, the shoulders moving sensually under her cotton blouse. A moment ago she had felt a pinprick of envy for the lithe careless bodies of the young waitresses. Now she was confronted by this stranger. She opened her mouth as if to say: who on earth?

  She’d heard of people who moved to foreign countries and forgot their own language, the simplest words lost: door, tree, sky. But to forget your own face? She smiled; her face smiled back; the delay of recognition felt like treasure. She put down her knife and fork and lifted her wrists forward in a salute.

  Her husband turned then and looked into the mirror. He too seemed surprised. “Hello,” he said fondly. “Hello, us.”

  Their children were six and eight the year they put the addition on the cottage. Workmen came every morning, and the sound of their power tools shattered the accustomed summertime peace. She found herself living all day for the moment they would be gone, the sudden late-afternoon stillness and the delicious green smell of cut lumber rising around them. The children drifted through the half-completed partitions like ghosts, claiming their own territory. For two nights, while the new roof was being put on, they slept with their beds facing straight up to the stars.

  That was the year her daughter came running into the kitchen in a new swimsuit, asking where the mirror was. Her tone was excited but baffled, and she put her hands over her mouth as though she knew she had blundered somehow just presenting this question.

  “We don’t have a mirror at the cottage,” her mother explained.

  “Oh,” the child replied. Just “Oh.”

  At that moment the mother remembered something she had almost forgotten. In the old days, when a woman bought a new purse, or a pocketbook as they were called then, it came packed hard with gray tissue paper. And in the midst of all the paper wadding there was always a little unframed rectangle of mirror. These were crude, roughly made mirrors, and she wasn’t sure that people actually used them. They were like charms, good-luck charms. Or like compasses; you could look in them and take your bearings. Locate yourself in the world.

  We use the expression “look into a mirror,” as though it were an open medium, like water—which the first mirrors undoubtedly were. Think of Narcissus. He started it all. And yet it is women who are usually associated with mirrors: Mermaids rising up from the salty waves with a comb and a mirror in hand. Cleopatra on her barge. Women and vanity went hand in hand.

  In his late forties he fell in love with another woman. Was she younger than his wife? Yes, of course she was younger. She was more beautiful too, though with a kind of beauty that had to be checked and affirmed almost continually. Eventually it wore him out.

  He felt he had only narrowly escaped. He had broken free, and by a mixture of stealth and good fortune had kept his wife from knowing. Arriving that summer at the house on Big Circle Lake, he turned the key rather creakily in the door. His wife danced through ahead of him and did a sort of triple turn on the kitchen floor, a dip-shuffle-dip, her arms extended, her fingers clicking imaginary castanets. She always felt lighter at the lake, her body looser. This lightness, this proof of innocence, doubled his guilt. A wave of darkness had rolled in between what he used to be and what he’d become, and he longed to put his head down on the smooth pine surface of the kitchen table and confess everything.

  Already his wife was unpacking a box of groceries, humming as she put things away. Oblivious.

  There was one comfort, he told himself: for two months there would be no mirrors to look into. His shame had made him unrecognizable anyway.

  He spent the summer building a cedar deck, which he knew was the sort of thing other men have done in such circumstances.

  She had always found it curious that mirrors, which seemed magical in their properties, in their ability to multiply images and augment light, were composed of only two primary materials: a plane of glass pressed up against a plane of silver. Wasn’t there something more required? Was this really all there was to it?

  The simplicity of glass. The preciousness of silver. Only these two elements were needed for the miracle of reflection to take place. When a mirror was broken, the glass could be replaced. When a mirror grew old, it had only to be resilvered. There was no end to a mirror. It could go on and on. It could go on forever.

  Perhaps her life was not as complicated as she thought. Her concerns, her nightmares, her regrets, her suspicions—perhaps everything would eventually be repaired, healed, obliterated. Probably her husband was right: she made too much of things.

  “You remind me of someone,” she said the first time they met. He knew she meant that he reminded her of herself. Some twinned current flowed between them. This was years and years ago.

  But her words came back to him recently when his children and their families were visiting at Big Circle Lake.

  The marriages of his son and daughter are still young, still careful, often on the edge of hurt feelings or quarrels, though he feels fairly certain they will work their way eventually toward a more even footing, whatever that means.

  He’s heard it said all his life that the young pity the old, that this pity is a fact of human nature. But he can’t help observing how both his grown children regard him with envy. They almost sigh it out—“You’ve got everything.”

  Well, it’s so. His mortgage is paid. There’s this beautiful place for the summer. Time to travel now. Old friends. A long marriage. A bank of traditions. He imagines his son and daughter must amuse their separate friends with accounts of their parents’ voluntary forswearing of mirrors, and that in these accounts he and his wife are depicted as harmless eccentrics who have perhaps stumbled on some useful verity which has served to steady them in their lives.

  He longs sometimes to tell them that what they see is not the whole of it. Living without mirrors is cumbersome and inconvenient, if the truth were known, and, moreover, he has developed a distaste in recent years for acts of abnegation, finding something theatrical and childish about cultivated denial, something stubbornly willful and self-cherishing.

  He would also like to tell them that other people’s lives are seldom as settled as they appear. That every hour contains at least a moment of bewilderment or worse. That a whim randomly adopted grows forlorn with time, and that people who have lived together for thirty-five years still apprehend each other as strangers.

  Though only last night—or was it the night before—he woke suddenly at three in the morning and found his wife had turned on her light and was reading. He lay quiet, watching her for what seemed like several minutes: a woman no longer young, intent on her book, lifting a hand every moment or two to turn over a page, her profile washed out by the high-intensity lamp, her shoulders and body blunted by shadow. Who was this person?

  And then she had turned and glanced his way. Their eyes held, caught on the thread of a shared joke: the two of them at this moment had become each other, at home behind the screen of each other’s face. It was several seconds before he was able to look away.

  THE HARP

  The harp was falling through the air, only I didn’t know it was a harp. It was only this blocky chunk of matter, vaguely triangular, this thing, silhouetted against the city sky, held there for a split second like a stencil’s hard-edged blank, more of an absence than a real object of heft and substance. It threw off a single glint of gold as it spun downward, I remembered that afterward.

  Everyone stopped and stared, which is surprising in a city this size, and especially at that hour, the end of the workday, and people hurrying home or stopping to do a little last-minute Christmas shopping. Yesterday’s fall of snow was fast turning to urban slush. I remember thinking how oddly comforting the cold slush felt against the side of my face and along the exposed part of my leg, a sort of anesthetic of sensory diversion. My own father, when seized by shoulder cramps last spring, had favored ice packs over a hot water bottle, and this was one more thing he and my moth
er quarreled about. That long list made up their life together. Leisure, food, work, housing, the sentient pleasures, the hour of bedtime, tea versus hot chocolate, heat versus cold; they agree on nothing.

  Someone near me let out a shriek, there were scuffling sounds as I went down hard on the pavement, and then a sudden closed silence as people in their overcoats crowded around me. I blinked and saw a man stoop and put his gloved hand on my bare leg. My pantyhose; what had happened to my pantyhose?—a brand new pair put on earlier in the day. “You’re going to be fine,” he said, and someone else pronounced the word “harp,” that puzzling little word leaping out of a strand of other, less audible words.

  It seems—yes, it was true—I had been struck on my left leg by the wood post of a large concert harp falling from an overhead window, and this smashed instrument lay next to me now in the soft gray slush, two inert bodies side by side. It and me. Fallen sisters. A streetlight shone overhead. I flung out a hand and, with more reflex than intention, struck violently against the harp’s strings, and was rewarded by a musical growl, very low in tone and with the merest suggestion of vibrato. The crowd around me applauded. What could they have been thinking? That I, wounded on the street, ambushed, had decided to perform an impromptu concert? “There, there,” one of them said, “the ambulance is coming.”

  Explanations followed, although there are no explanations that quite cover this kind of random accident. There had been a Christmas party on the second floor of the Blair Building, a gathering of accountants and their spouses standing about drinking spiced wine and eating little hot rolled-up tidbits of bacon and cheese, and one of the more bibulous guests had stumbled against the harpist—it was said by someone that he had been flirting openly with her—and knocked the instrument against the window, which immediately shattered.