Black Mirror

by Nancy Werlin

  My father had put on some instrumental jazz. The music pulsed and strummed. I pretended to eat, and noticed after a while that my father was only pretending too. Head bowed, he was carefully ripping a slice of bread into smaller and smaller bits. Finally he placed a bite-size chunk in his mouth and proceeded to chew as if his jaw were made of glass. His Adam’s apple bobbled when he finally swallowed. He drank the tiniest sip of water.

  He stole a glance at me and, seeing that I was watching him, shot his gaze down again quickly. I stared at the thinning hair on top of his head. His scalp was shiny beneath the strands.

  He was fifty years old. He lived with his mother. He wrote books nobody wanted to publish. His wife had left; his son had died; his daughter had nothing to say to him, or he to her.

  Sadness for him—for us—welled up within me. I thought of his books. He was an interesting man, my father. He was a smart man. So, why? Why?

  I didn’t know.

  We listened to the jazz. And then I found myself saying quietly: “Dad? Can I ask your opinion about something?”

  He looked up, seeming relieved that I’d spoken, but also wary. “Yes?”

  I had spent hours turning the afternoon at the food pantry over in my mind, not understanding anything beyond the indisputable fact that I felt itchy, troubled. I’d wondered briefly about talking to Ms. Wiles, but we had already had this conversation, she and I.

  “It’s about Patrick Leyden,” I said to my father.

  He nodded. “The Internet guy.”

  “Yes. You know he’s active at Pettengill and with the Unity charity group that Daniel was part of? He was even here at the house …” I paused. When we sat shivah for Daniel.

  My father nodded. “Yes.”

  I rushed on. “I just wondered—I know you don’t really know him, but you follow technology trends, and new companies, and science stuff. And Daniel—” I stumbled over the name. “Daniel talked about him, and you did meet him and everything. And well, I just wondered what you think of him. What your opinion is.”

  “My opinion,” said my father.

  “Yes.” And then impulsively I added: “Ms. Wiles—that’s my art teacher, you know—says he’s a dickhead.” Childishly, I had wanted to say that word in front of my father, but he didn’t blink. I went on. “But she also says that he does a lot of good in the world, and that matters more.”

  There was a short silence. My father was looking at me through his glasses thoughtfully. He looked almost professorial, and when he spoke, his voice was strong. Interested. He said, “And what do you think of Patrick Leyden, Frances?”

  I found I was squirming. “Well, Daniel really adored him. Thought he was kind of a God. But I think …”

  “He’s a dickhead?” said my father. To my astonishment a smile had formed on his lips.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know. Maybe that’s necessary in order to be a success in business. That kind of thing.”

  “So they say,” said my father dryly. We looked at each other. I found I was smiling a little as well.

  “‘The rich are different from you and me,”’ quoted my father. “F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Hemingway then replied, ‘Yes. They have more money.”’ He shrugged. “I don’t know, Frances. Do you want to have an abstract discussion about wealth and corruption? We could do that—I’m happy to—but I’ll tell you up front that my opinion probably has more than a tinge of sour grapes to it. As you might expect, given my general level of success in life.” He ducked his head again suddenly, but then looked up and met my eyes straight on.

  Discomfort washed over me. My father’s frankness was difficult to hear.

  He went on: “The fact is, one tries not to want what one doesn’t have. One tends to think it’s valueless.”

  Not exactly, I thought. Lots of people want and value only what they don’t have. Then: Daniel, I thought, with sudden recognition. Daniel.

  My father was studying his hands. His shoulders were braced. I had a simultaneous urge to end the conversation immediately—to flee—and to continue. I shifted in my chair. And then my father said slowly, “I had this conversation with your brother once.”

  “What?” I leaned forward. “You mean you talked to Daniel about …”

  “Patrick Leyden. Yes. Oh, he didn’t ask my opinion. I just—offered it.” My father’s lips twisted. “I was glad about the scholarships for you two, but when your brother started in—Patrick Leyden this, Patrick Leyden that—I took him aside.”

  I was fascinated. “What did you say?”

  “That a man like Leyden never does anything that doesn’t benefit himself in some way. And that Dan—your brother should keep that in mind.”

  “And what did Daniel say?” I asked.

  “He told me,” said my father, “that he would remember.” He blinked at me ruefully. “He was quite polite, actually. He even said thank you. I wasn’t sure it was my son for a minute there.”

  “When was this?”

  “Your first year at Pettengill,” said my father promptly. “Second semester.”

  “Huh,” I said. It had been then that Daniel intensified his involvement with Unity.

  “Frances?” said my father.

  “What?”

  “Um. Are you in danger of getting a crush on Patrick Leyden, like your brother?”

  “No!” A vision of Leyden’s earlobes invaded my brain, immediately overlaid with another, of James’s smile. “Absolutely not!”

  “Good,” said my father. He fiddled with his spoon. “Then take his scholarship and run, Frances. Don’t look this particular gift horse in the mouth until after graduation. That’s my advice.”

  We slipped back into our accustomed silence. It felt a little easier between us. And when I stood up to go and my father asked, as he always did, if he could drive me back to school, for once I said yes. And then, before getting out of the car, I added, “Thanks, Dad.”

  He replied diffidently, “Sure.”

  We didn’t kiss or hug. We hadn’t done those things since I was nine. But I felt his eyes follow me, through the window of his old car, as I walked without looking back to the door of my dorm.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was only nine o’clock. Walking through the dorm on my way to my room, I could feel the taut quiet that defined end-of-weekend study panic at Pettengill. Aline Subramanya had put a big sign on her door: i am in china during the yüan dynasty. on pain of bloody torture and death, do not disturb. It was typical of Aline to have put the umlaut in Yüan. I shook my head, but also felt a pang of envy. China, centuries ago—that sounded pretty good right now. And I could almost imagine that if you did open Aline’s door, you’d find yourself stepping into a mysterious, long-ago world.

  Who knew, in fact, what was behind any of the doors in the dorm? What if the doors were portals, of the kind my father might write about in a science fiction novel? What if each of them took you into a place defined only by the occupant’s mind?

  What would my father put in his world? The oracle? Death? What would George de Witt, or Pammy Rosenfeld, or Tonia Mack from art class? I tried to imagine Saskia’s world, and winced. And, of course, the world I wanted—no, longed—to know about belonged to—

  James Droussian.

  In that moment I understood that the thought of James had been with me all day. He had been a swift, silent current running beneath everything that happened, behind everything I did and said and heard. All day, yes, and last night too, beneath my sleep and my dreams. James, James, James. Wondering where he was, and what he was doing, and what he was thinking—and if his thoughts could possibly be of me.

  Reaching my room, going inside with the usual relief—my world—I felt my whole being flood with the secret, guilty joy of letting myself think of him. Even though somewhere in me, mixed in with my quickened pulse, I knew it was quite hopeless, because—

  I grabbed my elbows, suddenly overwhelmed by the memory of how James had looked at me in the cafeteria aft
er I threw my plate and had the hysterical laughing fit. After he’d slapped me. In his expression, in his eyes … I recognized now what I’d seen there, and there was no sense pretending it wasn’t what it was.

  Pity.

  I sat down on the edge of my bed.

  Some time passed; I don’t know how long. Eventually I looked vaguely around my room. I looked at the mourning-draped mirror, and for some reason my gaze stayed there.

  I knew I’d put it up to remind me of Daniel’s death; to remind me of my failure to be a good sister; to remind me of how much I hadn’t known. But somehow those reasons seemed murky to me now.

  Jews put black over mirrors during times of mourning so they wouldn’t think about themselves. But I never did look in mirrors anyway, because I disliked myself. No, wait. I disliked my appearance.

  I felt so confused. So much around me, and in me, seemed to have changed—and all in the past several days. Yet none of it made any sense to me. It seemed as if there were all kind of things that I almost knew—that I should know, but didn’t. And if I could know them, could drag them into consciousness and understand them, all would be well.

  Or maybe not. Daniel would still be dead.

  Attention leads to immortality. Carelessness leads to death.

  I curled myself into a knot on my bed and tried to think of nothing at all.

  Later I heaved myself up, determined to stop feeling sorry for myself—and study, dammit. Ms. Wiles would approve of that. And there was certainly plenty to do. I even had a list. Somewhere.

  I found the list. Research for a paper on, yes, something to do with China. Figure out how to program an applet into a web page. Learn the molecular structure of gases. And read that novel Beloved, about which an essay was due next week.

  I couldn’t imagine attempting to do any of the active studying, so I opened the novel. I read the first page, and then the second. On the third I realized I couldn’t recall a word. I closed the book. I got up and paced the small confines of my room. James—no. No.

  I hated Sunday nights. They always felt melancholy. I got up and turned off the overhead light, leaving on only the bedside lamp on top of the nightstand. The nightstand. There was a little weed left in Mr. Monkey, I knew. Enough for a cigarette or two. I sat on my bed and took out Mr. Monkey. I held his little plastic body in my hands and looked at his silly expression.

  That itchy feeling I had had earlier came back. It whispered that I still wasn’t paying enough attention.

  I tore off Mr. Monkey’s head and hurled it across the room. Unlike the plate the other day, Mr. Monkey’s head bounced against the wall. It rolled back again, landing nearly at my feet.

  Okay, I wasn’t getting something, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn’t the Buddha. I couldn’t have a vision. Unless, maybe, it was drug-induced.

  Yeah, right. Like the other night, when I’d dreamed of Daniel as the Buddha. One stupid question. That had been helpful. Sure.

  I reached for Mr. Monkey’s head and fitted him back together. Then I put him away. I did not smoke the remaining marijuana.

  I looked at the bedside clock. Too late to call Ms. Wiles and describe what I’d overheard at the pantry this afternoon. Too late to ask her opinion. And besides, Ms. Wiles … Another itchy thought flitted through my mind and then was gone.

  The room was dim. The black-draped mirror was only a shadow on the wall now. I rose and went to it. I stood in front of it. With one fingertip I traced a fold in the fabric.

  I thought of Snow White’s stepmother and her truth-telling mirror. The stepmother had asked only about beauty—and it wasn’t that I blamed her. I understood her yearning and I wondered, in fact, if that stepmother had been an unattractive young woman before she blossomed into her queenly self.

  What if a mirror really did have the power to show you what was beneath the surface? What if it were like Picasso?

  What if it showed you your soul?

  My hand reached out. I removed the black silk. I stared into the dim, unfamiliar reflection. Vaguely I could see the line of my brow. The bulk of my hair. My face only, not my body. That was safer. Mirror, mirror, on the wall …

  No. I turned away.

  Then I turned back.

  I looked, not straight at my face, but at its components. First I skimmed my gaze over my hair. Its thick texture was one of the things that told people I couldn’t be wholly Asian. But how had I managed not to notice that it had gotten so long? That it stood out around my head with a frizzy life of its own? It was pretty hair, I thought, unable to repress a spurt of vanity. Even if it didn’t fit with my Asian features, even if it wasn’t straight and silky. Maybe if I brushed it more often … I couldn’t help it; I reached up tentatively and tried holding it up, in a bun kind of thing. It looked fine that way.

  And it made my cheekbones stick out. I looked at those cheekbones, noting their sharpness. When had my face stopped being chubby? Where had those slight hollows in the cheeks come from? And my skin was smooth, dark. Like Sayoko’s.

  Then, turning my head, I saw that the ear—my ear—was slightly pointed, delicate. Bizarre! My hair had always covered my ears. I examined the other one. Yes, they were a pair of alien ears; I had never looked at them before. And my eyebrows! Straight dark lines that angled a bit upward toward my temples, matching the ears somehow.

  But then I examined my nose and grimaced. Like my hair, my nose announced that I wasn’t all of one piece. My nose had a high bridge. In fact, I knew that nose! It was Bubbe’s, right in the middle of my face, sneering in familiar haughty disapproval.

  My gaze traveled down quickly to my mouth. A second ago it had almost smiled, but now it had returned to the expression that I suspected was its normal state. It was drawn-in, tight, careful. Bitter? I tried to make it smile again, but it wasn’t having any of that.

  Round chin. Boring, but okay.

  Lastly, finally, I looked at—but not into—my eyes. Of course: dark-lashed, dark hued. Tilted slightly to match the brows. Ordinary Asian eyes, I thought. Not large; not small. Fine. And, like the mouth, like all of it: unfamiliar.

  There. I had taken inventory. I possessed all the usual features, located in all the usual places. Some I liked; some I didn’t. I took a deep breath. It was time to step back and look at the whole face. To see … me. Frances.

  Frances the mongrel. Frances the dwarf.

  I straightened my shoulders. I had a wild thought that maybe this would be like the final page of a fairy tale, and I would discover that I had become beautiful. Duckling into swan. As beautiful in my way as Saskia was in hers.

  I poked out my undistinguished chin, raised my imperious nose, drew in my brows, and then I looked. I really looked at the girl in the mirror.

  She looked straight back at me.

  She was not beautiful. She was not even pretty. But she—that girl with her combination features and suspicious mouth—was interesting-looking. She was someone that I, the artist, would have looked at twice. Would have wondered about.

  The truly shocking thing was that I felt no kinship with her. I honestly felt no connection with her whatsoever.

  Simultaneously, I and the girl in the mirror both put one hand up and touched a cheek.

  Then, tentatively, I put both my hands on my body. Lightly, slowly—very differently from the mindless, efficient way I scrubbed with a washcloth when showering—I ran my hands from my shoulders to my knees. Breasts, rib cage, waist. Hips, butt, thighs. Even to my artist’s hands, nothing felt…disproportionate. Not anymore. Although of course, to be certain, I’d have to look. This mirror was small, but perhaps if I stood on a chair … tried to see what was really there … what I really did look like …

  I turned away sharply from the mirror. I discovered that I was sitting on the edge of my bed. And for a second it was as if I’d transported back seven years and was sitting once more on the toilet lid in Bubbe’s upstairs bathroom. Not daring to take off my clothes and look at my precocious nine-
year-old body. Not daring—even now, at sixteen—to look at the poor freaky kid.

  You are not going to be a dainty Japanese woman.

  I got up again. I put the black silk back over the mirror. I didn’t look in at her—at me—at her—while I did it. And the second that the mirror was decently covered again, I felt better.

  CHAPTER 24

  The next few days were so ordinary that it seemed almost as if I’d dropped into a time warp and mysteriously returned to Pettengill in the days before Daniel died. But the ordinariness now felt false, mask-like.

  I still had that feeling, the one that had grown on me so slowly, so inexorably. The feeling of waiting. The feeling that something just out of the periphery of my comprehension was badly wrong, and that I knew, somewhere in me, what it was.

  There was a new sensation too. This one was extremely strange after all the years of being invisible. It was the feeling of being watched.

  I knew I wasn’t making it up. I caught people at it. My teachers, of course; I supposed that was only natural after my little tantrum in the cafeteria. Maybe it was also natural that the other kids would give me sidelong, half-wary, half-fascinated glances as well. Will she, won’t she, crack up? Saskia shot me occasional fierce, frowning looks across the room in history. And Ms. Wiles—she was worried, I knew.

  I felt guilty about Ms. Wiles. On Monday, when she’d approached me with questions about how I was and what I’d thought of the Unity food pantry, I’d found myself brushing her off. I wasn’t even sure why. “I’m fine,” I’d said. “Yeah, it was okay at the food pantry. I have another shift on Thursday. But I have to go now, okay?”

  She’d put a hand on my arm. “All right, Frances. Would you like to come over for tea this afternoon?”

  “I can’t,” I’d said, even though I could have. I’d watched Ms. Wiles’s mouth drop open. I had never before refused one of her invitations to tea. I opened my own mouth to retract my refusal, but found myself saying, instead: “Bye. See you later.”

  No, I wasn’t making up the eyes that followed me, judged me, wondered about me. But meanwhile, the one person whose eyes on me I would have welcomed—James—was nowhere to be found. I looked fruitlessly for him everywhere I went. At the same time, however, the bare possibility that I might see James added light and color and texture to the world. There was potential every time I turned my head. I felt irradiated by it.