Free Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields Page A

“Oh.”
    At that moment the mother remembered something she had almost forgotten. In the old days, when a woman bought a new purse, or a pocketbook as they were called then, it came packed hard with gray tissue paper. And in the midst of all the paper wadding there was always a little unframed rectangle of mirror. These were crude, roughly made mirrors, and she wasn’t sure that people actually used them. They were like charms, good-luck charms. Or like compasses; you could look in them and take your bearings. Locate yourself in the world.
     
     
    We use the expression “look into a mirror,” as though it were an open medium, like water—which the first mirrors undoubtedly were. Think of Narcissus. He started it all. And yet it is women who are usually associated with mirrors: Mermaids rising up from the salty waves with a comb and a mirror in hand. Cleopatra on her barge. Women and vanity went hand in hand.
    In his late forties he fell in love with another woman. Was she younger than his wife? Yes, of course she was younger. She was more beautiful too, though with a kind of beauty that had to be checked and affirmed almost continually. Eventually it wore him out.
    He felt he had only narrowly escaped. He had broken free, and by a mixture of stealth and good fortune had kept his wife from knowing. Arriving that summer at the house on Big Circle Lake, he turned the key rather creakily in the door. His wife danced through ahead of him and did a sort of triple turn on the kitchen floor, a dip-shuffle-dip, her arms extended, her fingers clicking imaginary castanets. She always felt lighter at the lake, her body looser. This lightness, this proof of innocence, doubled his guilt. A wave of darkness had rolled in between what he used to be and what he’d become, and he longed to put his head down on the smooth pine surface of the kitchen table and confess everything.
    Already his wife was unpacking a box of groceries, humming as she put things away. Oblivious.
    There was one comfort, he told himself: for two months there would be no mirrors to look into. His shame had made him unrecognizable anyway.
    He spent the summer building a cedar deck, which he knew was the sort of thing other men have done in such circumstances.
     
     
    She had always found it curious that mirrors, which seemed magical in their properties, in their ability to multiply images and augment light, were composed of only two primary materials: a plane of glass pressed up against a plane of silver. Wasn’t there something more required? Was this really all there was to it?
    The simplicity of glass. The preciousness of silver. Only these two elements were needed for the miracle of reflection to take place. When a mirror was broken, the glass could be replaced. When a mirror grew old, it had only to be resilvered. There was no end to a mirror. It could go on and on. It could go on forever.
    Perhaps her life was not as complicated as she thought. Her concerns, her nightmares, her regrets, her suspicions—perhaps everything would eventually be repaired, healed, obliterated. Probably her husband was right: she made too much of things.
     
     
    “You remind me of someone,” she said the first time they met. He knew she meant that he reminded her of herself. Some twinned current flowed between them. This was years and years ago.
    But her words came back to him recently when his children and their families were visiting at Big Circle Lake.
    The marriages of his son and daughter are still young, still careful, often on the edge of hurt feelings or quarrels, though he feels fairly certain they will work their way eventually toward a more even footing, whatever that means.
    He’s heard it said all his life that the young pity the old, that this pity is a fact of human nature. But he can’t help observing how both his grown children regard him with envy. They almost sigh it out—“You’ve got everything.”
    Well, it’s so. His mortgage is paid. There’s