Mirror, Mirror by Mary McGlasson

     One of my mother’s favorite phrases during the first two years after my father left was, “This isn’t as bad as it gets.”

     This had become her over-arching life philosophy, a catch-all mantra that held either a kind of Dickensian reassurance or a Nostradamus-vague warning that something much worse was yet to come. Either way, it was applicable in just about any situation, and my mother, in her grimly assessing way, rarely missed a chance to use it.

     Stomping around the living room because your sister ruined all the lipsticks in the Revlon makeup kit you got last Christmas? “Save up your money and buy more, then. You think this is as bad as it gets? Jesus Christ.”

     Rolling your eyes at a third night of tuna casserole? “You don’t like leftovers? Then eat what I make when I make it. Believe me, this isn’t as bad as it gets.”

     Crying because the new landlords won’t allow pets? “Hell’s bells, quit with the tears. The cat’s going to be just fine living at the pound. Sorry to tell you, little girl, but this isn’t as bad as it gets.”

     Always, always, it was delivered with the type of cut-the-shit cynicism that twisted her thin mouth and made it something ugly. Her eyes would go flat, like the eyes of a Vietnam vet when asked about a certain incident in the jungle, and then my mother would intimate, with just seven words, that she had already survived the worst life could offer. Everything else was just details.

     Some afternoons after we got off the bus but before she got home from the factory, I would get Abby engrossed in the adventures of Scooby Doo and the gang so I could sneak alone into Mom’s bedroom and try on clothes from the back of the closet: sturdy triangular skirts, filmy blouses with ruffles, the grey dress she wore to funerals and weddings alike. Wobbling in scarred but serviceable white pumps, I tried to capture her in a various pantomime performances, strutting before the mirror, pausing to hold my hair up in various styles and to try on different facial expressions to see which worked best. In my mother’s clothes, already too short for my rapidly growing arms and legs, however, my acting only worked when I wrenched my face into a defensive scowl. Even dressed up, even only looking at herself in the mirror, my mother would be expecting the world to come at her with daggers drawn, just as a matter of principle.

     But she hadn’t always been like this. My teenage brain, overactive and fickle, didn’t retain any clear memories of times when she had laughed or even smiled with true joy as motivation—but they had been there, somewhere. There had been laughs and smiles in our lives, before. In her life, before.

     This idea hovered, a faint but persistent buzz, in the back of my head. And so, on days when there wasn’t time for a fashion show or Abby was too hyper to be hypnotized by the television screen, I would let Abby sit with me on the sagging couch while I leafed through Mom’s old high-school yearbooks, pausing to examine, for long minutes, the black-and-white senior picture of a bouffant-headed, smooth-faced girl with a sly, pretty smile. Her head canted to the left and her confident gaze was aimed somewhere outside the boundaries of the picture, where the words “We’ve come a long way, baby!” was printed in cheap-looking typeface as her graduating quote.

     Despite the fact that they both smoked Virginia Slims, these were two fully different creatures, the girl from the Class of ’72 and the woman I knew. There was some similarity about the eyes, the curve of the cheekbone, but they seemed to share nothing more than DNA. I spent quite a lot of time looking for the Class of ’72 in my mother. I examined her face from across the dinner table or the car’s front seat, scrutinized her movements from my spot on the living-room floor when she talked on the kitchen phone—she demanded that much privacy despite the duration or purpose of the conversation. She spoke low, so it was difficult to eavesdrop, but there were two kinds of calls: the terse ones for which she stood almost at attention and the kind that kept her pacing like a tigress on a leash as she twisted the slack of the curled cord around the fingers of her free hand.

     I learned a lot of useless details during these observations. She wrote with her right hand but smoked with her left. She unfolded towels and newspapers alike with the same impatient snap. She put sugar but not cream in her coffee. She took long showers with the bathroom door locked. I also found out that her own powers of observation were not inconsiderable the day she informed me that I was to stop staring at her all the time, or she would give me something to stare at.

     My observations may not have rendered anything useful, but one idea remained, regardless: in the Campbell family’s 1988 yearbook, my mother would be represented by a garish color photo of an exhausted, pony-tailed woman staring flat-mouthed into the camera from under a fringe of lifeless brown bangs, the phrase “This isn’t as bad as it gets” emblazoned underneath her name like an epitaph.

     On the opposite page, above my father’s name, a blank gray square would proclaim, “Picture not available.”

***

     Only once during those “as bad as it gets” years—once ever, really, because I tend to retain the lessons I learn—did I ever throw those words back at her.

     It was the sweltering summer we lived out of town, the summer of the white Ford station wagon my mother purchased for $200 in a moment of pure no-other-vehicle-in-sight desperation. During that hottest part of that miserable year, it seemed like the station wagon broke down two or three times a week, always at a different point in the ten miles between our place—a decrepit, many-times-rented country house with a thousand leaks that always smelled of wood smoke and bacon grease—and Overton.

     This was also the summer that I got accepted into what was called the Renaissance Program at Overton Valley College, something I’d never heard of until my teacher mentioned it to me during the school year. It was for gifted students, or so Mrs. Mitchell told my mother at my final eighth-grade parent-teacher conference, and she thought I might enjoy the playwriting class.

     Gifted. I liked the sound of it then, but in the years to follow I would come to depend on that word as a personal definition. It made me feel important, special. Mrs. Mitchell’s pronouncement was the first time I had heard it in connection with myself, and once I latched onto the sound and the feel of it, my fate was decided: I had to be in that class. It didn’t matter that the only play I’d read that I could remember was “The Enormous Onion” in second grade, in which I played the turnip.

     So, I told my mother that I wanted to be in the playwriting class. And she, although visibly irritated at the idea of driving me into Overton every Saturday afternoon of the summer, agreed with a sigh and a rare, brief smile. “I knew all that reading had to be good in some way,” she said, some approval leaking out around the words.

      It happened on the fourth Saturday of what my mother called my “gifted class.”

     During that month of Saturdays, I’d found a new religion, and my combined priest and god was Mr. Harris, who had a Master’s degree in literature and a true and abiding love for the scripted scene. He wasn’t young or good-looking—his hair stuck out a bit around the bald patch spreading from back to front on top, and he had a tendency to sweat through the armpits of his short-sleeved button-down shirts when he got really excited about an idea—but his enthusiasm and genuine interest in helping us learn to love plays was a revelation. He read aloud to us, citing names like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller before holding up his hand and stating, “We begin …”

     And when he read the dialogue they’d written about people way older than us who’d lived in a time we couldn’t visualize, he became the characters. Some of my classmates might snicker at the occasional bad word or reference to sex, but I watched in rapt silence and later asked to borrow his playbooks, some of which he said were “too grown-up” for me. After much begging, he allowed me to take home The Crucible, which was about Puritans, he said, so my parents wouldn’t think it too racy. I didn’t know what “racy” meant, but I secretly hoped the play would end up that way. Near as I could tell, it wasn’t, but I liked the courtroom stuff in the third act and the way John Proctor died rather than ruin his family by confessing.

     Mr. Harris wanted the class to write a one-act play together before the end of the summer, only four weeks away, so the last two classes had been brainstorming sessions. We’d gone a full two weeks without a breakdown in the old white station wagon, and in the meantime I’d found heretofore unknown creative power in writing scene after scene for our class’s character, Yolanda, in the black-and-white composition book Mom had bought me from the college bookstore on the first day of class.

     As the official character decided upon by the other kids in the class, Yolanda was frustratingly vague. My classmates had dealt up what I considered to be a fairly boring 15-year-old girl who babysat and didn’t like school; the only interesting thing about her was her name, which I had suggested.

     Mr. Harris said that conflict is the heart of drama, so we had to give Yolanda some problems: “Make her interesting!” he told us. In my notebook, I tried different things—parental abuse, a traumatizing dog attack, leukemia—and then decided to keep them all in the story, just in case one wasn’t enough.

     Things quickly escalated beyond the one act Mr. Harris had suggested when I gave Yolanda a little sister, Francine, only to kill Francine off fairly early in the tale. Yolanda’s sweet but troubled boyfriend, who was extremely handsome and about to graduate high school, ran over Francine accidentally while high on marijuana and then, in the days that followed, refused to allow Yolanda to forgive him even as her vengeful family fell apart. They were planning a horrible fate for the boyfriend, who didn’t have a name yet because nothing felt quite right. I’d tried Tristan, but kept forgetting it, and then Jake, after which I kept slipping and calling him Tristan. After that, he was simply “the boyfriend” until something else better came along; I was tired of constantly crossing things out. 

     Yolanda’s father, also currently unnamed, was a geometry teacher and a loving but weak and doomed alcoholic, while her mother came to life as a vicious stay-at-home bulimic who wore too much red lipstick and didn’t even cry at her younger daughter’s funeral in Act IV. Her name was Veronica, which sounded appropriately evil and bitchy to me; I didn’t read Archie comics, but I paid attention to what I’d seen depicted on the covers propped up on the supermarket shelves.

     All this was working into some interesting dramatic territory, but I was working on adding some jokes to lighten the tone (“Comic relief,” Mr. Harris told us, “is crucial to sell the audience on the tragedy”) in between the funeral and a weepy phone conversation between Yolanda and her long-lost older brother, a famous actor living in Los Angeles who was on the verge of adopting her, likely in Act VII, to save her from the very parents he’d escaped years before. 

     I was writing dialogue for the funeral director—who was young and nervous and had a significant stutter—that morning as we drove down the highway, Abby in the front seat with Mom and me sprawled out in the back, trying to keep the pen steady against the paper and the paper from fluttering in the breeze from the open windows.

     When that ominous, telltale rattle struck, still several miles from town, the engine sputtered like the character on the page and the car began to slow. I raised my head up and out of Yolanda’s world as, with a muttered “God damn it,” and several frantic stomps on the accelerator, Mom pulled the now-coasting car over to the side of the highway.

     When the car finally stopped, she slammed it into Park, I pulled myself into a sitting position, wincing as my legs clung to the hot vinyl in protest, and we all sat there for a moment in full, weighted silence. After a few seconds had passed, I watched Mom lean her head forward onto the steering wheel. I still couldn’t see her face.

     Abby craned her head around to look back at me, eyes wide, and I shook my head once. Then we both waited for a reaction from Mom, whose limp ponytail was hanging sideways down across her eyes.

     Finally, tired of waiting in the broiling heat of the motionless car, I said, “Mom, try the ignition. Maybe it’ll start back up.”

     I saw the sigh more than I heard it, and then she lifted her head back up to snarl, “It’s not going to start back up,” in my general direction, but even as she said it her hand went to the keys and twisted them forward. What followed was no sound, no fire, no nothing. It amazes me now to think that, every time, we actually thought that it might.

     ”Damn it,” Mom said, thumping one palm on the top of the steering wheel. After a moment, she opened the car door and got out, and Abby and I followed suit. There were no cars whizzing by on the highway that Saturday morning, no potential saviors to give a ride to a stranded mother and her two daughters, as so many had before.

     That morning, there was nothing but the three of us, me holding my composition book and pen in one hand and wiping sweat off my legs with the other, Abby finger-combing the snarled tail of a battered Cherries Jubilee My Little Pony, and Mom standing with her hands on her hips while she regarded the car in pained disgust.

     I thought of the scenes I’d written that week. Mr. Harris did the brainstorming sessions at the beginning of class; we only had a half-hour of idea time before an hour of writing. So far, my classmates hadn’t heard all that much about my version of Yolanda, but I was loaded with dramatic details this time. At the thought that he might start without me (“Latecomers may not enter until intermission”), without all the stuff I’d written between now and then to help guide the story, mild panic set in.

     Even though I knew I shouldn’t, because it wouldn’t help me in any real way, I whined, “I’m going to be late,” and followed up with a recriminatory, “And I’m going to get in trouble from Mr. Harris, too.” This was a lie; Mr. Harris never punished anyone for anything, much less being late for class.

     Mom pressed her lips together, and I could almost hear the teeth grinding. She took a step away and cast a resigned glance at everything else but me: the road, the car, the fields.

     Finally, she said, “I’m going to walk back to that house we passed, just over there.” She motioned in that direction. The house was one of those two-story white farmhouses that dotted the highway every few miles or so; I could just make out its pink roof over the tree line, rising up from the pure green like pictures I’d seen of castles in England or Scotland.

     I was still contemplating the house, wondering if Yolanda could live somewhere like that, when Mom told me to stay with the car and “watch your sister,” a directive I loathed on every level. Nothing was happening at the car to make it even remotely interesting on a dramatic level: the station wagon wasn’t a ticking time bomb, Abby wasn’t in danger of dying due to hypothermia. The only way the scene would be any good at all would be for a serial killer to scent our unmistakably helpless odor and come after us. This idea seemed brilliant and wonderful until I realized that if such a thing really happened, I would likely die a horrible death unless I could get away or outsmart the killer. This made the game less fun. And a serial killer, unlike the other stuff, could potentially happen. Things like that were on the news all the time.

      So I decided to make a stand, newest scenario fresh in mind. “What if someone comes by and stops and he’s a serial killer, or a rapist?” The rapist bit was an ad lib, pure inspiration.

      Exaggerated patience staining her tone, Mom said, “There are no serial killers around here.” She stepped around Abby and me, moving toward the car. “If anyone stops, it’ll be someone like that old couple who helped us the last time. I think you’ll be fine.”

     I frowned at her back. “You don’t know that. Just because they haven’t caught any serial killers doesn’t mean they aren’t here.”

     She tossed me a quick, irritated glance as she leaned through the open car door to collect her purse. “Then stay in the car and lock the doors.”

     “You can’t just leave us in the car like a couple of dogs. It’s too hot! Abby will suffocate!” Not that I cared much, but it felt like a good appeal—a line of dialogue appropriate to a caring older sister. Even so, Abby didn’t even wrench her eyes away from her grungy toy pony to help sell it, the dork.

     “Then roll down the windows,” Mom said, straightening up.

     “Then what’s the point of locking the—”

     “Fine, then!” She slammed the car door closed, ripping a scream from the rusted hinges and cutting off my final, victorious point. Her mouth angry and flat, her eyes glaring slits in the sun, Mom slung her purse across her body like the sash of a sad beauty queen. “We’ll all go! You, me, and Abby! We’ll all walk to the house together and leave the car here for someone to steal. Happy?”

     I barely kept myself from pointing out that anyone trying to steal the car would need a tow truck, because another bit of dialogue had popped into my brain. The thrill of her reaction was making me reckless; I could suddenly see myself as the main character, center stage—even though I’d never actually seen a stage, I could imagine it. The spotlight was on me now, and I had a killer line to deliver.

     “Happy? Me?” I pretended to think about it, adrenaline coursing through my veins, then shrugged. “Not really.” Her features began forming an angry scowl, but before she could speak, I tossed my hair out of my eyes and asked, “Is this it, Mom?”

     In that moment, I swear her nostrils flared like a bull scenting the challenge in the air. She took one step closer to me, but I held my ground, secure in the four feet of grass-strewn gravel separating us and the spotlight that was still waiting. When Mom answered my challenge, every word was a separate, bitten-off warning: “Is. This. What.”

     I smiled as bitchily as I knew how. “Is this as bad as it gets?”

     For the span of a full second, she only stared at me, and I thought, I did it. I really did it. Dizzy from triumph, my eyes devoured the stillness of my mother’s face, sparing only brief recognition for Abby’s open-mouthed, round-eyed gaze tinged with fear and respect coming in from the side. I think we all knew it was in me, just waiting to come out, but I doubt any of us thought I’d ever actually say it.

     The moment of silence only seemed to last forever—it was cut off when Mom, like someone making a deliberate decision, crossed the few feet that separated us and delivered a slap that rocketed like an explosion across my cheek and jaw and knocked me backward a full step. It burned like hard, stinging fire and flooded my eyes with water.

     Her face white and her eyes hard, she stared me down as I clutched my cheek, shocked pain singing in my head. “No,” she said, distant and cold. “It isn’t.”

     With painful dignity, I bent down to pick up my notebook and pen where they had fallen to the gravel and then glared at her though eyes filled with hot tears that were already beginning to streak down my face. Summoning all my anger and frustration, everything about her that made me miserable, I put it into the only words that would come to me just then: “I hate you.” It was a trembling and overly dramatic pronouncement—Mr. Harris might have called it over-the-top—but in that moment, it was true.

      Instead of responding to me, my mother only shook her head, a humorless smile twisting her lips, and then turned on her heel to march off down the road.

     I wiped at my eyes, first with my fingers and then with the shoulder of my T-shirt, wincing when it scraped across my left cheek. It occurred to me to walk to town, or to walk home. Anything but following her.

     “Are we going with Mom?” Abby asked. She clutched her pony with one arm and picked at an elbow scab with her free hand, and we both watched Mom get farther away with every second.

     After a few bewildered, fulminating seconds of weighing what weren’t really options at all, I began walking, too, leaving Abby to trail in my wake.

     She ran to catch up. “I don’t want to walk,” she whined, trying unsuccessfully to grab my free hand, still damp with tears, in her sweaty brown paw.

     Still sparking with rage against everything in the entire world, I shook her off and hissed, “Don’t be stupid.”

     “I’m not stupid,” Abby muttered from where she fell into step behind me.

     It was a long, silent trip. The heat was the kind that made beads of sweat burst from the skin of your neck and back almost instantly, matting up the hair at the scalp with salt and damp. And the whole time, I kept my eyes on the roof of the house and worked on imagining the people there—kindly farm people who would never slap their kid even in the heat of pure rage, no matter how smart-alecky they were.

     Once I had them in my head, a slightly plump but active older couple, she with a sensible housedress and he with a cap from a seed company, I imagined what they would think when we got there: the frustrated mother and two frightened, obviously abused girls. They would witness my red cheek, identify the guilt that would no doubt be lurking in my mother’s eyes by then even as she asked to use their phone.

     Instead of the tow truck, they would call the police and report my mother for abuse, maybe even refusing to let Abby and I leave with her. They would keep us at the pink-roofed house for a week or so, feeding us good, solid farm food instead of Hamburger Helper without the hamburger, until DCFS would step in to say they’d found us a home, but the couple only wanted a younger child; I’d have to stay in a halfway house for juvenile delinquents in some town I’d never been to until they could find a home.

     In the wake of my impassioned protests against being separated from my sister—“We’re the only family we’ve got!”—the farm couple, who were probably named Martin and Ruth, would decide that they loved us too much to let us go away to be separated and lost in the system. There would be a four-person family hug, the kind that only usually happens on TV. My heart swelled just thinking about it. This was better and more satisfying even than Yolanda’s triumphant move to L.A., which I hadn’t written yet.

     But it wouldn’t be that easy, would it? There would be conflict. Mr. Harris said there had to be conflict to create a story. Mom, I realized, watching her cross the lawn to the house that was now in full view and getting closer, wouldn’t want to let us go, even though she hated being a mother.

     Stumbling along the side of the road, I nearly teared up again, head stuffed with conflicting emotions over this grand and heart-wrenching family drama. Of course, it would all go to court. Martin and Ruth wouldn’t give up. I envisioned my mother in the courtroom, begging me to forgive her, and me refusing with just a shake of my head and a world of pity and scorn in my eyes. Triumph surged; I thought of a line from The Crucible that I’d liked, when the guy said he would “fall like an ocean on that court.” I wondered if I could use something like that when talking to the judge, or if that would be plagiarism.

     My brain was still singing with the happy ending of what could be when we got to the house and stood on the front porch, quiet, behind Mom as she knocked on the door.

     I held my breath and waited for my moment, only momentarily surprised by the stout blonde woman who opened the screen door and wiped her hands on a dishrag as my mother gave the I’m-so-sorry-but-our-car-broke-down speech and asked to use their phone. The woman was wearing jeans and looked to be only a few years older than Mom; I doubted that her name was Ruth.

     The woman’s eyes drifted behind Mom and slid over Abby and me—I’d taken Abby’s unresisting and still sweaty hand in mine in a last-minute burst of inspiration. I smiled timidly, the left side of my face tilted prominently. Her eyes lingered a moment, and I thought, yes.

     Then the woman turned her attention back to Mom, with no sign of recognition of our plight. “Sure, you can come on in,” she said, leaning out a bit to push the door open farther.

     My moment was slipping away, so I decided to act, throwing all caution to the wind. “What about us?” I asked Mom, taking care to let my voice tremble. “Are you just going to leave us out here, like you wanted to at the car before you hit me?”

     Mom’s mouth dropped open only slightly. Seemingly speechless, she looked at our benefactor and then back at me, and mixed with the anger in her eyes was a kind of helpless, disbelieving pain that, if I’d let it, would have jolted me clear down to the bone, would have shaken some guilt out of me in a way no physical means could have. As a mother now, decades later, alone like she was then, I recognize that pain for what it was: the kind that only your own children can deliver, wielding against you a profound, ruthless, innate power to inflict wounds so deep that you cannot afford to let anyone see them bleed. 

     Now, I see this. I see that moment so clearly that the memory of my mother’s face as it was just then might superimpose itself over that other yearbook photo—the caption the same, but its meaning canted in my direction no matter how I try to look at it, like a compass needle swinging to north again and again.

     Now, I see this. It is as clear and unavoidable as my face in the mirror. But then I was still locked in the role of abused-but-noble daughter, so all-in on the gamble that the moment washed past me where I stood on that porch. I was thirteen and determined to get a reaction—to inflict that wound, to make her bleed.

    I held Abby’s hand tighter and sent a pleading glance to the blonde woman, who watched me carefully for a few seconds, dishrag dangling from the hand she’d propped on one hip. 

     This is it, I thought, almost lightheaded.

     But when the blonde looked back to my mother, there was no recrimination on her face, no righteous, protective rage. She kicked up one side of her mouth almost like a smile, and gave my mother the kind of look that I’d seen from people my age who found out they’d had the same strict-as-hell teacher in elementary school.

     And when she spoke, it wasn’t to me. “If your girls want to, they can sit in the swing set in front of the house ‘til you’re ready to head back. There’s shade there.”

     “Thank you,” Mom said, exhaling audibly. Holding on to the handle of the screen door, she swiveled her head back. “You heard her. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, looking straight at me where I stood stock-still, awash in thwarted hopes and the beginnings of an awful humiliation.

     When I finally nodded, not trusting my vocal cords to hold steady, my mother smiled a little, too. This was not the distorted, bitter curve I so often saw, and neither was it a vilified, satisfied smile—this was grim, knowing, and sure, like she understood what I was feeling and wanted me to go on feeling it for awhile.

     “This isn’t it, either,” she informed me. “But you’re getting there.”

     With that, she stepped into the house. The screen door banged shut behind her. 

     Like the door shutting was a starting pistol, Abby sprinted over to claim the swing set, which had a faded, peeling pink paint job and a liberal sprinkling of rust. All earlier drama either forgiven or forgotten, she wrestled herself into one of the cracked, plastic-bottomed swings, singing, “Come and push me!”

     She was already beginning to pump her legs and propel herself up into the air by the time I made my way across the yard, my throat clogged with heat and unshed tears. Someone was mowing hay in a nearby field, and the breeze was heavy with the smell. The chains of the swing, gritty with age, creaked in protest as Abby jerked them backward and forward.

     “Push me!” she demanded again. I wordlessly reached out an arm, planting my hand on her back and following through the upward-arcing trajectory, her T-shirt warm and moistly solid beneath my palm and fingers. When Abby came careening back, hair flying forward around her face, I did it again, and she squealed, a delighted crack of childish noise in the otherwise quiet yard.

     Some of the pressure in my chest began to ease. After a moment, I stepped behind the swing set, letting my notebook and pen drop to the grass. I held both arms out now, palms ready, waiting, for her to swing back into my hands once more.

Mary McGlasson holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and is currently the lead English instructor at Frontier Community College in Fairfield, Illinois. Her work has previously appeared in Booth: A Journal. She lives in Olney, Illinois, with her daughter, Selena.