Art Pact 18 - Mirrors
To say that during the period between my fourth and twenty-fifth birthdays I was vain would have been wrong, but perhaps understandable if you looked at the evidence. I could not pass a mirror without a thorough examination of the silvery surface, and someone watching through my bedroom window (there was such a person, I later discovered) would have seen the child me sitting in front of her own mirror (a bare thing, silvered glass in a boring steel surround, fixed to the wall with two screws) for hours on end, staring as if rapt at her own face.
When I was in school a mirrored surface could distract me from my lessons with ease, and during the few disastrous times at which I went shopping with friends the mirrors in clothes-shop dressing rooms and the little reflectors behind rings in jewellery stores would draw me to a direct stop - amusing to my friends to begin with, although after I had held them up for the fifth time they began to tire of it and ultimately (on my third trip with these two girls whose names I barely remember - Jackie? Alice?) I was abandoned in a shoe shop. I wandered around the circumference of the shop for hours, staring into the little mirrors that lined the back of each shelf of shoes so that you could see them from all angles. When the shop was about to close I was thrown out, and I spent the rest of the evening eating pizza slices and garlic bread in a restaurant on the lowest floor of the mall. I didn't particularly like the food there, but they had a ceiling to floor mirror along the rear wall that had been put in to make the place seem bigger than it was. I got a table next to it and examined it for hours.
I did not have close friends, so the shallow outward expression of my obsession was not obvious for what it actually was - an all-consuming obsession. My foster-parents were the only people I might have expected to understand, of course, but although they were both kind and thoughtful, they allowed themselves to become wrapped up too easily in the simpler problems of my two siblings (their real child, my brother Daniel, and their other foster-child, my sister Rachel). They might sometimes have suspected something, but there was never any mention of it to me. The only clue I have is that when Rachel joined the same high school as me and began to pick up the rumours about her sister's vanity, my foster-father stepped in once or twice to stop her teasing me about it. They did that whenever we teased each other, of course, but there was something more final about the way he did it, a timbre in his voice or some expression on his face perhaps that I was unable to see. Whatever it was, it was more effective than normal because Rachel never again teased me about my reputation for egotism.
The truth that the others could not see (except the one person I mentioned earlier) was that it was never about me. I was compelled to study every mirror by a mania, a desperate search. It was the background of the reflected image I searched, not my own face. I was looking for someone, someone who I knew did not exist in the solid world but who I knew that I would recognise instantly the moment I saw her. Any mirror could have housed my real mother, so I made sure not to miss any opportunity. I would sweep the shards of wing-mirrors out of the street into canvas bags, carrying them into the garage to examine secretly. I sneaked into the boy's washrooms at the end of the school day and hid in the cubicles until everyone else had left so that I could examine the mirrors there at my leisure. When I went to my dentist I would persuade him to allow me to examine the tools he would be using - impatiently sitting through his demonstrations of drills and polishing brushes so that I could tinker with the little examination mirror on its plastic stick. When I began to work I worked in a department store (on the customer service desk), and at every possible opportunity I would take breaks and travel up to the home and furniture floor to examine the slowly changing assortment of mirrors we sold.
I would like to say that it was exactly twenty-one years to the day between my father telling me that I would find my mother in the mirror and my revelation, but it was actually a week after my birthday that I finally (by accident) looked at the one thing in the mirror that everyone else did. There she was, staring back at me. A woman in her mid-twenties, with brown eyes and a light dash of freckles across her nose. It seemed as though I might have seen the face before, very briefly.
When I was in school a mirrored surface could distract me from my lessons with ease, and during the few disastrous times at which I went shopping with friends the mirrors in clothes-shop dressing rooms and the little reflectors behind rings in jewellery stores would draw me to a direct stop - amusing to my friends to begin with, although after I had held them up for the fifth time they began to tire of it and ultimately (on my third trip with these two girls whose names I barely remember - Jackie? Alice?) I was abandoned in a shoe shop. I wandered around the circumference of the shop for hours, staring into the little mirrors that lined the back of each shelf of shoes so that you could see them from all angles. When the shop was about to close I was thrown out, and I spent the rest of the evening eating pizza slices and garlic bread in a restaurant on the lowest floor of the mall. I didn't particularly like the food there, but they had a ceiling to floor mirror along the rear wall that had been put in to make the place seem bigger than it was. I got a table next to it and examined it for hours.
I did not have close friends, so the shallow outward expression of my obsession was not obvious for what it actually was - an all-consuming obsession. My foster-parents were the only people I might have expected to understand, of course, but although they were both kind and thoughtful, they allowed themselves to become wrapped up too easily in the simpler problems of my two siblings (their real child, my brother Daniel, and their other foster-child, my sister Rachel). They might sometimes have suspected something, but there was never any mention of it to me. The only clue I have is that when Rachel joined the same high school as me and began to pick up the rumours about her sister's vanity, my foster-father stepped in once or twice to stop her teasing me about it. They did that whenever we teased each other, of course, but there was something more final about the way he did it, a timbre in his voice or some expression on his face perhaps that I was unable to see. Whatever it was, it was more effective than normal because Rachel never again teased me about my reputation for egotism.
The truth that the others could not see (except the one person I mentioned earlier) was that it was never about me. I was compelled to study every mirror by a mania, a desperate search. It was the background of the reflected image I searched, not my own face. I was looking for someone, someone who I knew did not exist in the solid world but who I knew that I would recognise instantly the moment I saw her. Any mirror could have housed my real mother, so I made sure not to miss any opportunity. I would sweep the shards of wing-mirrors out of the street into canvas bags, carrying them into the garage to examine secretly. I sneaked into the boy's washrooms at the end of the school day and hid in the cubicles until everyone else had left so that I could examine the mirrors there at my leisure. When I went to my dentist I would persuade him to allow me to examine the tools he would be using - impatiently sitting through his demonstrations of drills and polishing brushes so that I could tinker with the little examination mirror on its plastic stick. When I began to work I worked in a department store (on the customer service desk), and at every possible opportunity I would take breaks and travel up to the home and furniture floor to examine the slowly changing assortment of mirrors we sold.
I would like to say that it was exactly twenty-one years to the day between my father telling me that I would find my mother in the mirror and my revelation, but it was actually a week after my birthday that I finally (by accident) looked at the one thing in the mirror that everyone else did. There she was, staring back at me. A woman in her mid-twenties, with brown eyes and a light dash of freckles across her nose. It seemed as though I might have seen the face before, very briefly.
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