Our Reflections

Our Reflections a Short Story by Lea Sauls aka LLB of Roland OCT 2023Twelve feet above the living room, a fan clung frozen stiff to the ceiling for the winter. The edges of all its blades were laced in dust the color of Grandma’s uptown gloves. The windows towered, and if I stared at one of them long enough, I could feel myself falling through it to the brick street below. Only the sheers, white as ice and long as bed sheets, rescued me like ropes in my terror fantasies of this vaguely familiar place. I was but a third as tall as their vertical expanse, only five years old. But if I wasn’t engaged in my dark daydream my recent memories haunted me: Sprawling red maples had shivered their branches half-naked by the time we stood among the family on raw dirt. Broken hums of weepers cracked into my chest as strangers lowered Mama’s coffin into a kind of hole I’d never seen before. For it wasn’t roundish at all but a nasty rectangle. I stood next to Grandma in my sad blue dress and my black shoes whose fantastic shine impressed me no more than the smell of mounded dirt. The coffin reminded me of Sleeping Beauty, the story Mama had read to me before she had to stay in bed for months. I couldn’t remember the picture in the book, though–I only knew it was of a glass rectangle that separated the sleeping from the rest of the world.But no matter how much I hoped, Mama wouldn’t be waking up in her white casket.Now, I took caution, never standing too close to those glass rectangles on Grandma’s walls: Like the rectangular hollow that had swallowed up Mama’s coffin they led nowhere but down.It was that warm-kettle season, when the boiling of potatoes erupted in steam that settled on the cabinet’s upright brass handles. From there it cooled into the occasional drip onto the spice jars or mail or vitamin bottles that cluttered Grandmother’s countertops. She kept a towel, folded into a block, nearby. She’d use it to wipe her ceramic tiles dry repeatedly while the pot simmered on high.Sometimes I’d stare up at her endearing, peculiarly low kitchen ceiling, basking in the safety of its nearness, imagining that if I stood on the table, I could touch it. I could stretch my fingertip to one of its many water beads, which I secretly thought of as kitchen stars. But I couldn’t get past the sting in my eyes, which glistened like the ceiling did behind its many teardrops of condensation.She always sent me to the couch moments before ladling the potato soup into a bowl, which she’d set upon my lap pillow as I sat keeping my stocking feet warm against my own knees.  My spoon was far too large for my hand, and I still didn’t much care to eat three months later. So I stared through the windows at flecks of snow that raced downward as if so bold, almost as if they might be in a war against the low places of stillness and death. I wanted Snow to win.And it appeared to win at first, if only by covering the barren ground and the tombstones as Grandma walked me through the nose-nipping air while visiting Mama week after week. There was a plush bed of snow, so clean and perfect, where Mama slept forever. Upon it were white flowers. Then one day Grandma shook the snow from the flowers and dusted the soft bed clean. Now there was a large, ugly stone there.  I touched the rim of my bowl. It was lukewarm. Grandmother sat beside me with her own bowl. “Eat, Claire.” She sat back, and I saw the snow again, barely aware of the clinking of her spoon.I thought of Mama, out there, all alone under the cold ground. It wasn’t right. She was my angel, my doctor, my savior, and my very best friend. Everything she was, was mine. The agony in my tummy felt nothing like hunger. “Oh, dear,” Grandma rose abruptly, returning with a tissue. Her face eclipsed the window, her tissue gathering the tears from my face one by one. I hadn’t realized I was crying until then.She looked as sad as I felt, which didn’t seem possible to me. She was my Christmastime granny, our birthday cake baker, our Halloween house sitter tending the candy bowl under the porch light. As far as I saw, Grandmother was our occasional acquaintance. How could she have loved my mama like I did? She set our bowls on the coffee table then next thing I knew she was rocking me in her lap, caressing my crown. She’d tried to comfort me many times this way. I could hardly tell the difference between sitting on her lap and standing up in my sandbox to retreat from the rain when Mama would call me inside. It wasn’t until I was six that I accepted her gentle, protective embrace of me or her thick, dull voice that often proclaimed, “Your mother is safe above. She’s not suffering in the dirt. You will see her again one day, when you go to heaven.”When I started going to school, the classroom overwhelmed me like Grandma’s big windows did. Like the snow, my schoolmates flurried into class with bold smiles that could have never fit on my small meek face. Grandmother went to visit my teacher one afternoon while I, the only student present, sat in the corner near the bookshelf, looking at the pages I turned. I’d peek up every few pages to see what they were nearly whispering about.“Shy,” one said. “…just last winter,” said the other. In the glare of the distance I couldn’t tell which whisper belonged to who.  Moments later Grams and I stood in front of my teacher’s metallic desk. When I realized that I was hidden up to my nose from my teacher, I became distracted with the wrinkled tuft I’d created in Grandma’s coat by gripping it a moment earlier. Then I started buttoning my coat beside her. As I stood next to Grandma’s coat pocket, looking up at her, she gave my teacher a courteous nod. “Well, you have a nice afternoon. It’s been a pleasure.”“Thank you for stopping by Ms. Dorothy. See you tomorrow, Emily.” I looked away.Through the rectangular doorway we ventured off. The hallway was empty. I heard quick steps as we strode along, and I tried to disentangle them from the slower steps to see which were mine, which were hers. “Grandma.”She’d gotten a step ahead of me so slowed her pace to let me catch up. I took her hand, but could hardly see her face, though I knew she had her eyes on the doors: I knew that anything that seemed daunting to me was the target of her swift reach, and it would not escape her grip. It seemed to take me a thousand steps, but we reached those heavy doors, and she pushed one open for me like it was a thin wall of wind against her strong palm. I looked back as the abrupt slam confirmed its weight. With her grip on the railing we descended the first of five steps. She stood still to watch me with the grace of an angel whose prescence, I imagined, commanded those steps to make my downward journey easier. She guarded me from time itself as I held her hand with both of mine. My short legs led us down the next four.When my seventh birthday came, Grandmother gave me a gift, an oval, black lacquer mirror that pivoted on a little mother-of-pearl stand. I placed it on my vanity. There we sat on the bench together. Our eyes met in the mirror. She asked, “Did you know that this is a magic mirror?”“Magic?” It sounded like a precious opal had vaporized into my shimmering breath.“Look how we can see each other without really looking into one another’s faces. This mirror will always keep us together, no matter what happens.”“Grandma?”“Yes dear?”“Why do people have to die?”Her turquoise gaze jittered a second, then she rescued her fading smile. Our eyes met again. She said, “Because we don’t want to get left behind after everyone has gone to heaven, my dear.”“But I don’t want to die.”“No, of course not. You shouldn’t. Not now. But. Someday, after you’ve been sunburned, or frostbitten perhaps a thousand times over many years, and your jaws tire of chewing pecan pie and caramels, then someone you’ve loved a long, long time takes their leave of here, you’ll be ready.”I felt my forehead tighten around a question I held back. Yet it blurted fourth like a clump of warmed rooftop snow that thumps to the ground. “Mama went to see Daddy, then? Did she love him more than me?”“Certainly not. It was easier for her that way. That’s all.” She dragged my long hair behind my shoulders. We were still talking in the mirror as she gently smoothed my sleeves. “You know–because she was ill.”“I guess.” I wondered if I wanted to die to be with my mother, and in the mirror, I saw that large window behind me. My stomach muscles tightened when I imagined its pull, which was so vague it seemed like it was trying to trick me by pretending to be weak and helpless. I resisted it, disgusted with death, which I didn’t trust one bit. With a shrill as weak and crisp as the ice over a puddle I said, “I wish people didn’t have to die.”She wiped my eyes. “Don’t cry, child. You will live a fine, long life. I didn’t tell you this to make you cry, but to show you that you’ll see your mommy again, honey.”“What will she look like in heaven?”Now there were tears in her eyes. She ran my little silver brush through my hair. “She’ll have hair like yours.” She smiled through a sniffle. Tapped the corners of her eyes dry with her thumb. Looked at me again, glowing with an inviting joy I found so elusive it mystified me, like some moving reflection on the wall on a sunny morning. “And she looked like you do now. I remember her when she was your age.”“She looked like me?” I smiled inside.“Oh, yes, she had the same eyes, even the same eyebrows.”“Then I’ll look just like her when I’m older?”“Yes. Yes, you will.”Grandma had three or four friends who’d all drop in every so often. They’d sit at the kitchen table while the coffee maker snored out loud. I’d hear them laughing and carrying on from my spot on the couch with some little book or toy. Yet, I’d peek up often to enjoy their conversation, trying to puzzle together what subject they must be fascinated with, and why.Grams would always insist her company had a second cup of coffee. I started to realize she did this so that they’d stay a while longer. What I didn’t understand was why some of them declined saying, “Oh, no more coffee for me, it’s after six.” I didn’t want them to leave, either. So, I’d ask them if they wanted to hear me sing some songs. They always slid back into their chairs, smiling at one another, as if the clock’s ticking measure would be blinded by a melody. So, the coffeemaker snored again.When I was a teenager, Grandma would surprise me with the prettiest things: Shoes with buckles on top, or rhinestones set into the heels, gemstone barrettes, even scented candles and bath salts.  Other times we’d get dressed up to go out shopping together.She’d sit in front of my mirror while I curled her longish hair–only after I insisted on giving her a younger look. Then she’d curl mine. And we’d talk to one another in the mirror. She even told me stories sometimes:“…because she was pregnant. So on the way back I looked for her. She was still standing on the onramp. I mean it was an hour and still nobody picked her up. So, I pulled over. After she got in with her big bag, she pulled out the most hideous smelling ham sandwich. I glanced over, and she was about to take a bite. I said, ‘Oh no. Sweetie, I think that’s spoiled.’ So she put it away and dug in her bag for a different one. And it smelled fine. She said, “Sorry. I can’t smell a thing with this cold. Or taste.’”“Poor woman. Where did you bring her?”“Oh, the doctor’s office. She had blisters on her feet, that bad cold, and she was due anytime.”I said, ”Poor woman. She must have been so glad you helped her out.”“I hate to see people struggle like that.” “Yeah.” I watched her carefully curl my bangs. “Didn’t Uncle Dan have a problem smelling?”“Mm hm.” She started teasing my curls just the slightest, glancing at me often as she gave me these interesting life lessons. “One night he and your Aunt Violet were visiting their neighbors. Well, he went home just for a second to light the fireplace then went back over while waiting for the house to warm up. He’d left through the living room door so he could cut straight across the street, and that must have caused a vacuum draft or something. Well, as soon as he stepped onto the neighbors’ porch half his house burst into flames.”“Oh my God, the stove? They had a gas stove?” Grams flashed a smirk in the mirror. “Well, not with the lazy pilot light. The maid had come by that day to clean. She dropped a mothball in the kitchen. And. It rolled under the stove.”I cackled, “Gosh, was it explosive?” She bent over laughing at that. Stood up. Looked at me in the mirror, “They might as well be explosive they smell so darn bad.”“Don’t they?” Our bright lipstick chuckles made us look like two porcelain dolls in a gift shop with those old fashioned puffy lilac drapes hanging to the floor over that huge window behind us. And all the lamps she’d filled my room with made it feel so warm and cheery.“That was exactly why the maid pulled the stove back to dig it out. Otherwise Aunt Violet would have complained for weeks about a hidden smell like that in her kitchen.”“So, what, did the maid break the gas line or something?”“Not quite. The line kinked when she pulled the stove out. Which caused a slow-slow leak. They could have been seriously injured, you know?”“Goodness, all over a stinking mothball.”“Yup. Stinking mothballs.” She said with a nod, still teasing my hair.“That story stink’s, Grandma. Tell me another stinkin story! How many ya got?”“Hold still.” Her commanding stare rested on the back of my head.“The cowlick?”“Shh.” She was smoothing it over. Dusted it with spray. Then she smiled at me. “Look at our curls. We look like sisters.”“You look really good with that hairstyle, Grams.” I ogled my spiraled tresses in the mirror. “Ooh, and I love mine.”She mused, “May I borrow your red shoes, sis?”I batted my eye-shadowed eyes like a dainty noblewoman. “Why, indeed. I’ll trade you for your black pearls.”She giggled. “Come on, you can wear them tonight.”“I can?” With a curt nod she said, “Wee, mademoiselle.” Took my hand, and we ran half sliding, giggling, over the wood floor all the way to the jewelry box in her room.Over the years she’d pop up in my room after sunrise, promenading about in her cozy pajamas and slippers with unbrushed hair, her maroon mug in both hands. Humming some kind of good morning sunshine song. Other times she’d catch me while I was yet freshly awakened and sitting at my vanity, rubbing my eyes in the mirror. Standing behind me she’d look into my eyes and ask if I’d slept well. When I’d mumble she’d hand me her mug and say, “Have a gulp for beauty and brains.”I always did. Sweet, with milk.Then she’d hold that cup to her chest with both hands and we’d chat about the day ahead, or who was doing what in the family, and why, and trade opinions on it. My favorite times were watching her listen to me describing the dreams I’d had the night before. She radiated with depth, squeezing-in questions with the fascination of an ancient mystic. Then she’d spill like dandelion seeds onto the wind, filling my wonder-rippled mind with every detail of her own wee-hour dreams.Once, I took notice of the ring on her hand. In the mirror she looked at her finger. “Oh. My wedding ring. Haven’t you ever noticed it before?”“Well. I never looked closely at it. Is that a marquise?”She smiled. Closed her eyes. “Mm. Ronald knew I loved marquise diamonds. He made it sound like they were too expensive but. He slipped this on my finger at our wedding. You know? All those years ago.” She looked away. “Such a shame that he drank like that. Couldn’t help himself, I suppose. He was only forty-six. It’s hard to imagine how tragic, when someone’s just carrying on through life, having a good old drunk time. Then, poof. Like one of God’s own court jesters he’s simply banished from the stage of life without warning. Sick one day. Gone a week later. Awful. Makes you hate the drink. But. You have to push on, no matter how cold your feet get on that rough stone floor of life. Push on or get dragged across.”The lilac drapes always had that mango glow on a clear, early morning, and it gave the whole room a dim, otherworldly, magenta feel, like I was on the cusp between the dreamworld and the waking one.But the glow that morning somehow made me feel more like I was in someone else’s dream with Grams, maybe in his, as if he was dreaming in heaven. In the mirror she shook her head with all abandon. It drifted side to side like a lost, underwater searchlight, her crinkled eyes turned high toward the blank wall before us. Her breath sounded like the little sigh who could. I saw how much her memory of him still haunted her. So, I didn’t bring it up again for a long, long time.When I was sixteen, she surprised me with a bottle of Roasted Sugar perfume and a book by Edgar Allen Poe when she picked me up from school. We went home to bake my favorite orange tarts. And she showed me pictures of myself as a baby, sitting in Mama’s lap. “I hardly remember her now. What was she like, Grandma?”“Your mother was a quiet child.”“Kinda like I was?”She nodded, taking her cup in her hands. She always had a way of being comfortable with anything we spoke about, and the way she cradled that warm cup in her calm hands reminded me of that. “She became feisty as a teenager. Wanted to drive. Wanted to see boys.” The laughter of an unshaken soul escaped her lips like a morning breeze. “Eventually I had to let her. Her father wasn’t happy about it, but I had to remind him that if he and I had never dated we might have never gotten married.”“What did he say?”“He said that if she must drive or date, then she must always keep a journal of it.”“A journal–why?”“So she could always remember that her youth was not so bad, he said.” She chuckled. “Sometimes she stomped through the house complaining like she was the commander in a war and we had been very irresponsible soldiers.”“How old was she then?”“Fifteen. Or sixteen.”“Mm. Well I haven’t gotten my driver’s license yet. And.” I was suddenly embarrassed to say it in light of her testimony about my mother. I pretended to add more sugar to my tea, tending the cup with a stir, twisting it on the saucer like it wasn’t quite in the center of it. “And. I don’t let guys talk to me much.”“You’re young yet. You’ll have all the time in the world to fiddle with those things. You have good grades. Excellent, really. And I doubt you’ll have any trouble attracting the right gentleman when you’re ready to.”“I don’t wanna get married until I’m thirty.”She smiled. “What an unexpected twist on your mother’s legacy.”“Why do you say that?”“Elizibeth had dreamed of having her own wedding since she was eight years old: a splendid pink pearl cake, an  impossibly intricate, heavy dress of hundreds of tiny silk roses, the princely man–with his voice like mahogany steel, she’d say. They’d ride off on a white horse with a beige mane.” She beamed like she was watching a live royal wedding at the sea-brimmed Cliffs of Moher amid a violin’s drawling resonance. “Her perfect wedding was a little more conservative, but she did get that gorgeous horse to carry her and your daddy a mile and a half to his great big, cozy lake house.”When I lifted my eyes, but not my head, Grandmother clanked at me like a pair of rings tossed aside, “Oh, now there certainly isn’t anything wrong with not constantly hoping to become a wife. Some women marry young. Some much later. And some not at all. Never feel pressured.”I nodded. I needed to hear that, because I did feel like I was supposed to be just like Mama.The kitchen cuckoo clock struck five. I sprung from my seat. “Grams! It’s Friday, I have to fix my hair. I can’t be late to the movie.”“What time was…”I’d left her chatting with my empty chair.She chased the rapping of my soles, and we sat on the bench in front of my little vanity mirror. She hurried my hair into shape with my brush, and I sprayed it in place. Then I started putting my lipstick on as she spoke. Our eyes met in that mirror as they had a thousand times before, whenever I was getting dressed up or just sulking in my room, hiding from the world in the reflective dimensions. She asked, “Did your friend ever say if she was coming?”“Yes. We’re meeting there then she’s riding back with us to sleep over afterwards.”“Oh, I wish I’d known. I haven’t cooked anything worth serving to company.”I paused. “We still have orange tarts. And anyway, she’s watching her figure, so she’ll probably just want tea and fruit.” “Oh?”Looking back on that now in that same oval mirror I realize how quickly she must have felt my friends and I grew up. And in this same mirror, for the past decade, I’ve looked back on hundreds of our conversations. Once it was about a friend. Of hers. Grams sipped her tea near the flowing drapes. I saw her chin in my mirror. As she bemoaned, I heard the weeds in her voice, the way they sound after they’re torn from the earth and carried off limp and swishing. She said, “I trusted her with that secret. How could she tell anyone? Lord knows, I’ve kept all her secrets.” Now I knew the secret, too. And I saw her chin tremble. I couldn’t look directly at Grandmother while she wept. I’d never seen her weep like this before. I saw her hand cup her mouth. Shook her head to say, “Well. I suppose you can’t trust everyone. But I have you.” She stepped closer, and our eyes met as she patted my shoulder. “To hell with them. We have each other, my dear.”I squeezed her hand, a knot in my chest. Concealing my anguish for her I smiled. “Exactly, Grandma. And anyway, it’s not such a terrible secret. I mean, you didn’t do anything wrong.”She leaned down to hug the back of my head, breaking away with a loud kiss to my crown, declaring, “You know, you’re right.” She looked like she did when she went to the doctor and discovered that the spot on her foot wasn’t cancer after all.Not long ago, I gazed back at the last time we’d spoken together in front of the oval mirror. I was just married, and I had no plans to leave my Grandmother alone in that upstairs apartment. So, we moved her in with us. Everything I’d grown up with was in her room. What was different was how she’d grown shorter over the years. Her hair fully white. Her voice a thin earthy weed of its once dignified stance. For those last six years she walked bent over her cane. Her dresses had gotten baggy on her frame, and her forehead mellow-spotted by Wisdom herself.She was content being safe at home now. She had grown, in some ways, into an elder mini me, that is the child me who preferred not to tempt anything.Now it would be me who waited for her at the top of the steps, or pushed a heavy door open for her. It would be me, almost forty, who’d buckle her in the car and pull out her seat at the table.It would be me to sit behind her while she sat closest to the mirror with her failing eyes. I’d fix her hair and listen to her deepest concerns. The last thing I said to her in the mirror was, “I still believe everything you taught me, Grams. Even the part where.” I hesitated with a dull smile. “Where you said I’d see Mama again someday.”Pale and crinkled, her face looked like the velvet of a sweet, though aged, magnolia’s petal. “But now. I know that she isn’t the only one I’ll be dying to see.” My smile trembled on my face. She had been sleeping so much lately. She’d lost too much weight. She’d lost almost all her desires. Except to be with me, to spend time talking.Her head weighed to one side, the side of grace. The side of ease and warmth. The side where treasures spill into empty, life-worn armchairs. “Do you remember all the magic things I gave you?”I smiled. After she was buried, I gazed in the mirror alone for the first time. I imagined all the magic things, miniaturized, and collaged between the strips of blue and gray in her long-lived irises.  There was the lamp, to brighten my nights after she passed away. Its cold sterling silver shade was always softened with pinholes that formed a flock of tiny, bright butterflies.  The old radio, the only one in my house that picked up her favorite music station. Its song had always been like the tiptoe of a sugarplum mouse. Her old, thick nightgown, so I could feel the restful weight of its flannel, which kept her easy-dozing through the night. Her curtains, which she gave me for security. She said, “When you hang these over the windows, you’ll always feel the safety of the veil between this life and the next. Her pearled hairclip. She wore it on some of our happiest adventures: theatre performances, my graduations, our riverboat cruises.And finally, that gift from the first birthday I had in her amber-flickering home, the prettiest magic mirror on a stand I’ve ever gasped at. It spurred our unbound chirps and nurtured our mutual loyalty and laughter.  Every time I look in it now, I vaguely hear her voice. I approximate where her cheery eyes would have been on the air behind me, and vividly remember her adoring face smiling at me in the mirror. I smell the freshly burnt match–its savory smoke set adrift when she’d light her stubborn gas burner–and the banana pudding she then stirred in the pot.  These things, these memories, were all impressed in me by a woman who was stunned by nothing in this mercurial world, a woman who tamed life with grace and compromise. That is what Grams told me harmony was made of. I’ve often turned my head up in the mirror remembering that recipe.When I ponder facets of attachment in that mirror long enough, I glimpse the unseen spectrum of the veil between the living and the knowing ones, in my mind’s eye. Its vertical pathways rest on the still or moving air, where they run as narrowly as the slots between a million mirrored pages in an underwater book. I’ve come to realize that those secret passages are there whether my magic little mirror reveals them to my eyes or not. How else could she and Mama have slipped across like silken spirits into heaven’s open arms? I know my words echo directly up those corridors whenever I talk to Grams, and to Mama, whom she absolutely loved as much as I did.Those corridors are like filaments in a telephone line reflecting my every word, simultaneously dilating to the deepest of delicately droning pipes that lead my song to beloved ones from the winded organ of the heart.Indeed, it’s been exactly as Grams said to me: no matter what has happened, even death, in my mind we can never be separated when I look into my mirror archives. And I know that if my grandfather is dreaming of my glances in that mirror he’s also dreaming of my life, and of all our deep reflections, too. I know they’re all dreaming of these together, my father included, all resting hand in hand with smiles on their contemplative souls. The End