Rouge(2)

When you told Mother this once, she’d laughed hysterically. She’d thrown her head back and laughed until she’d cried. And then you cried too, you couldn’t help it. So it was true. You were definitely part ogre, just as you’d feared. Stop it, she said, and then she slapped you. Right across the face. Tears instantly stung your eyes. Listen to me, she hissed. Listen. And the world grew very still while she assured you with the softest voice that of course your father was not an ogre, of course not. He was a lovely man, god rest his soul. Handsome, even, many women thought so. He was just from a place where there happened to be more sun, that was all. And people in that place were darker and they were hairier. So you were darker and you were hairier. You were lovely. You were lucky, she’d said, putting her white hands on your shoulders. Shaking them a little. Lucky, do you hear me? She wished she had your skin and your hair, absolutely. Definitely. And then she petted you like a dog. Smiled at you in the three-way glass. And you knew then that she was lying. She didn’t wish that. Not at all.

Now you looked at her in the mirror until she looked away. Took a drag of her cigarette. Went back to brushing her hair with your gold toy brush.

“Anyway,” Mother said. “The beautiful maiden. She had this mirror. And the mirror talked to her.”

Yes, yes. This was your favorite part of the story. That the maiden talked to a mirror. That she had a friend in the glass who told her things. You were such a lonely little girl, weren’t you? Whispering to grass. Befriending sticks. Dreaming yourself into movies and books. Every screen, every page, like a door to another world, remember?

“What did it tell her?” you asked like you didn’t know. Like Mother hadn’t already told you this part a thousand times.

“That she was beautiful,” Mother said as if it was obvious. “The most beautiful in all the land.”

You nodded. An ache opened up inside you. Deep, deep. For what? Some other life, some other self, some other body. In a land far away. In a castle by the sea.

“But then one day,” Mother said, and her tone shifted. “One day, the mirror didn’t say that.” She was staring at her three selves in the glass when she said this.

“It didn’t?”

“No.”

And in the mirror, you saw a shimmer. A sparkling something that wasn’t there before.

“Mother?” you whispered, your eyes on the shimmer.

Not just a shimmer now, a shape. A darkly glimmering shape hovering in the mirror behind Mother’s reflection. Mother shook her head at the mirror. She took another drag of her cigarette. She was staring at the shape too. Like she wasn’t at all surprised to see it there.

“It said something else,” Mother whispered, her eyes on the shape. What sort of shape? Something or someone?

Someone.

A figure. Staring at Mother. You could feel it staring though it had no eyes you could see. Just a silhouette, remember?

“What did it say?”

“Something terrible,” Mother said, staring at the figure who stared back. “Something inevitable. Something true.”

Like what? Like what?

Mother shook her head again and again. She looked in the mirror like she was about to cry. The figure was looking at Mother sorrowfully. Fake sorrowfully, you felt, you didn’t know why. And that’s when it looked up. Lifted its eyes from Mother to you. Yes, it had eyes, though you couldn’t see them. You could feel them on you. A coldness. It stared at you and smiled. You knew it was smiling, though it had no mouth you could see either. Just a man-shaped shadow. Just that shimmering silhouette.

You should’ve been afraid. You really should’ve been. Definitely. But you weren’t, were you? When you felt his eyes on you, all of you was suddenly lit up. Like the glow-in-the dark stars on your bedroom ceiling. Like your grandmother’s chandelier. You were smiling now.

“And then what happened, Mother?” Your eyes were staring right into his eyes, you could sort of see them now. He had eyes that saw your soul, you knew this. It was a he, you knew that, too, didn’t you?

Mother wasn’t looking at the figure anymore. She was looking at you.

“Mother?” you pressed, feeling the figure’s eyes on you. “What happened?”

But Mother just smiled darkly in the glass.

“And then all hell broke loose.”





Part I





1


2016

La Jolla, California

After the funeral. I’m hiding in Mother’s bathroom watching a skincare video about necks. Cheap black dress that chafes. Illicit cigarette. Sitting on the toilet amid her decorative baskets, her red jellyfish soaps, her black towel sets. Smoke comes tumbling out of my mouth in amorphous gray clouds. I blow it out the window where the palm trees still sway and the alien sun still shines and the sky is a blue that hurts my eyes. There’s a Kleenex box made entirely of jagged seashells at my back—probably she never once filled it with Kleenex. There’s her mirror over the sink, a crack running right down the middle of the glass. Whenever I look at myself in that mirror, I look broken. Cleaved. There’s the perfume she wore every day of her life on the marble counter, the Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick in its gold-and-black case. A little cluster of red jars and vials on a silver tray. For the face, dear. For the face, I can hear Mother saying to me. Need all the help we can get, am I right? Cynical smile of the beautiful who know they’re on the downhill slope.