Free Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields Page B

this beautiful place for the summer. Time to travel now. Old friends. A long marriage. A bank of traditions. He imagines his son and daughter must amuse their separate friends with accounts of their parents’ voluntary forswearing of mirrors, and that in these accounts he and his wife are depicted as harmless eccentrics who have perhaps stumbled on some useful verity which has served to steady them in their lives.
    He longs sometimes to tell them that what they see is not the whole of it. Living without mirrors is cumbersome and inconvenient, if the truth were known, and, moreover, he has developed a distaste in recent years for acts of abnegation, finding something theatrical and childish about cultivated denial, something stubbornly willful and self-cherishing.
    He would also like to tell them that other people’s lives are seldom as settled as they appear. That every hour contains at least a moment of bewilderment or worse. That a whim randomly adopted grows forlorn with time, and that people who have lived together for thirty-five years still apprehend each other as strangers.
    Though only last night—or was it the night before—he woke suddenly at three in the morning and found his wife had turned on her light and was reading. He lay quiet, watching her for what seemed like several minutes: a woman no longer young, intent on her book, lifting a hand every moment or two to turn over a page, her profile washed out by the high-intensity lamp, her shoulders and body blunted by shadow. Who was this person?
    And then she had turned and glanced his way. Their eyes held, caught on the thread of a shared joke: the two of them at this moment had become each other, at home behind the screen of each other’s face. It was several seconds before he was able to look away.

THE HARP
    The harp was falling through the air, only I didn’t know it was a harp. It was only this blocky chunk of matter, vaguely triangular, this thing, silhouetted against the city sky, held there for a split second like a stencil’s hard-edged blank, more of an absence than a real object of heft and substance. It threw off a single glint of gold as it spun downward, I remembered that afterward.
    Everyone stopped and stared, which is surprising in a city this size, and especially at that hour, the end of the workday, and people hurrying home or stopping to do a little last-minute Christmas shopping. Yesterday’s fall of snow was fast turning to urban slush. I remember thinking how oddly comforting the cold slush felt against the side of my face and along the exposed part of my leg, a sort of anesthetic of sensory diversion. My own father, when seized by shoulder cramps last spring, had favored ice packs over a hot water bottle, and this was one more thing he and my mother quarreled about. That long list made up their life together. Leisure, food, work, housing, the sentient pleasures, the hour of bedtime, tea versus hot chocolate, heat versus cold; they agree on nothing.
    Someone near me let out a shriek, there were scuffling sounds as I went down hard on the pavement, and then a sudden closed silence as people in their overcoats crowded around me. I blinked and saw a man stoop and put his gloved hand on my bare leg. My pantyhose; what had happened to my pantyhose?—a brand new pair put on earlier in the day. “You’re going to be fine,” he said, and someone else pronounced the word “harp,” that puzzling little word leaping out of a strand of other, less audible words.
    It seems—yes, it was true—I had been struck on my left leg by the wood post of a large concert harp falling from an overhead window, and this smashed instrument lay next to me now in the soft gray slush, two inert bodies side by side. It and me. Fallen sisters. A streetlight shone overhead. I flung out a hand and, with more reflex than intention, struck violently against the harp’s strings, and was rewarded by a musical growl, very low in tone and with the merest suggestion