BROOD
Licensed stock photo, edited.
This one’s our most popular model, here at The Mirrors of Kensington.
“We’re here to find a suitable mirror,” we say to the salesman (Kensington fils from his nametag). Earlier today, we’d come home from vacation, to discover that the foyer mirror had fallen. We picked up the large pieces and swept up the slivers. The largest piece showed our vacation selves: pale shorts and pastel shirts, our hair blonder from summer. We were lightening.
It’s a great model for people in your situation.
“Our situation?” we say, umbrage and fear in our voice.
How could he know? After receiving the postcard, we’d spent the month at our lake cottage. Not a letter, not a text, not a phone call, but a postcard from our only child, Julia. We’d seen her last at her graduation from Vassar this spring. The picture looked like an old lithograph of the Brooklyn Bridge. On the back, she’d written, in big, blue-marker letters: “A big decision, made! Cameron and I will be moving to Brooklyn, not Michigan. Ciao!–Julia.” She had told us that in Italy, “Ciao!” could mean “hello” and “goodbye.” Now back at home, we were surfacing from the Lethe of our lives.
You’re getting a real good price here.
“Price is not the point.”
Isn’t that obvious? We take a few steps to the left, out of the frame of the most popular mirror, leaving the salesman in it.
Now, I have this one at home, in my bedroom.
“Actually, we must replace the mirror that hung in our foyer.”
Before we’d swept it, the whole foyer was reflected in the hundred shards of the mirror, strewn over the floor. The pier table with twin Newcombe vases, the hanging portraits of the ancestors that hadn’t fallen, and the ceiling coffers. We had even seen the staircase heading up to the second den, the bedrooms (the master suite and the guest suite and Julia’s old room).
Are you tired of your present mirror? Or, did it just break?
“We’re tired of it.”
At least at the lake the questions had been fewer and simpler. What shall we eat and what shall we drink? Even better, these questions came with their answers tucked inside them. What to eat? That answer came courtesy of the Pere Marquette Inn on Lake Michigan, where they did a great take-out, if you weren’t up for cooking, which we often weren’t. What to drink? That answer arrived when the other couples arrived, couples also with gone children. The other couples wanted what we wanted.
So, it was martinis and Manhattans. In our polished silver tumblers, we could see our faces curving into distortion. Behind us, the great room was bending and retreating into a smaller room. So, we moved outside. From our decks and balconies on the cove, we had watched our children, their entire childhoods flickering, refracted in this little indent of the lake.
We are currently offering three heirloom mirrors.
Why were such mirrors for sale? we wondered. Were the families that desperate for money? Or, did they just not care to pass them down? But these were the kinds of questions we kept to ourselves, and we saw them mirrored in each other’s eyes.
In an heirloom mirror, like the one we’d lost, the mirror’s silver nitrate backing gets eaten away. It occurs minutely—even in the most expensive mirrors, ones you might see in a European castle. In place of the silver, what looks like little black blooms appear. Such blooms had populated the field of our broken mirror. With Julia grown and gone and now with Cameron, we have caught ourselves walking around the foyer, seeing how the black blossoms would appear on different parts of our bodies.
Now this one’s something different.
He almost whispered this, sounding less like a salesman. Was he in fact a guide? The mirror was indeed different, a looking-glass like no other. A series of chrome tubes arranged in a rectangle the size of a flag on a flagpole. The tubes were cross-hatched, and at each crosshatching were mirrors the size of hand-mirrors. The first mirrors in history, hand mirrors were fashioned only for royalty. And not glass, but burnished copper discs. Only kings and queens acquired them, and they were also the only ones with styled hair or pigments to put on their faces. With their faces caught in the mirror, the burnished copper discs became nimbuses, casting the king and queen as god and goddess. When the king and queen have no line of succession, though, what good is being a god and goddess? The mirror didn’t answer.
Here’s one from our premium line.
It loomed as tall as the twin mirrors facing each other in our cottage dressing room. We had found ourselves lingering there too long, holding hands, like teenagers in love, sparkling. Since the two mirrors faced each other, they cast imitations of us, so we saw image after image of ourselves. We seemed to retreat into the mirror, each image of ourselves growing smaller and fainter. Or was this simply a way of going on forever?
No? Replacing something is never easy. Please, the entrance to our regal showcase.
Like royalty beckoned by the fool, we followed the wave of his long arm and open hand. In the back of the shop, behind a purple velvet curtain, was the regal showcase. A separate room, where only the most expensive mirrors hung. The room contained a king-size bed with end tables, a recamier and a huge club chair.
I’m going to leave you two alone.
With a whisper, he pulled the curtain closed. On the two end tables were two hand mirrors, with polished silver handles. Like being back home, in the master suite, we took our positions. One lay down on the recamier, and the other took the club chair. We picked up the hand mirrors and found each other’s faces in them. All it took was a little maneuvering. Then, we stared at each other’s faces and beyond, looking in vain. It got as quiet as home was now.
Charles Israel Jr. teaches creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. He has published a poetry chapbook, Stacking Weather. His poems and stories have appeared in The Adirondack Review, The Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, Field, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nimrod International Journal, North Carolina Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Zone 3.