The Mirror
I once imagined that a writer sits around with a martini and a typewriter, leisurely typing, as the Pulitzers and Nobel prizes roll in. What a pile of horse manure. My husband Bruce and I are writers. There had better be a damn good reason to interrupt when the other one is in the throes of working on something. It’s like looking in the mirror. What I do, he does. He’ll be at his desk, I walk in, and the hand flutters up, warning me away, followed by the sideward glance, and the glance always does it. I start thinking—today, about places I’ve lived. Some have been memorable, like an apartment where the landlady lived downstairs, her two deceased Pekingese dogs mounted and displayed in a lighted glass case. It was a bit unnerving, but now I see the love she had for them, and likely the loneliness. The place I think about most, though, isn’t that one. It was a corner apartment next to a funeral chapel, the apartment with a voice in the mirror.
I was in my second year of teaching writing and literature, and the apartment building was a few blocks from campus. Everyone who lived there was elderly, except me. I’ve always liked being around elderly people, which is good, since I’m rapidly attaining that status myself. One woman in particular became my friend. She kept me apprised of goings-on in the building. The residents had a shared joke. They liked to say they were marking time in the apartment building, waiting to move next door. Definitely gallows humor. I had little sense of the workings of a funeral home—more common parlance than chapel—when I moved in, but that quickly changed.
This last week or so, I’ve been reworking a poem I wrote about living there, so it’s Bruce who has been tip-toeing around me. Something happened at that apartment, just before I moved out, and the poem, written not long after, was an effort to understand it. The finished poem was fine—the lines worked, it captured the bare facts of what had happened, but it felt flat. Even reading it myself as the years passed, I thought, yes, and…? I’d written about something that required some years of living to do it justice.
I’ve got the years of living now, and a deeper appreciation for aging, the havoc it wreaks on the body and the mind, as well as a growing need to dig deeper in both my living and my writing. As I get older, I understand that going deep is the way to attain the heights. Like the flowers at the top of this post—their beauty grows from what’s below. There’s something I should mention, before you read the poem. The bedroom of my apartment overlooked the funeral home. The living room overlooked the front door of a church. I got lost in thought, looking out those windows.
Here’s the revised poem, in memory of the voice in the mirror:
———
The Voice in the Mirror
Some nights, I hear the voice, again.
I hear it, and I’m at my bedroom window,
the window above the funeral chapel
parking lot, that ordinary, second-story
window, like all the windows in those boxy,
carbon-copy apartments.
Everything was new—
new life, new job, new town,
yet every day, a reminder. I’d peek out
from behind the bedroom curtains,
watch discreet white hearses slip in,
and out, at the funeral chapel,
in, and out, through hidden access doors,
doors that had the curious feature
of disappearing when closed.
Semis delivering caskets pulled up.
The cargo door squealed open, revealing
piggybacked rows of caskets on sliding tracks.
The driver went about the elaborate,
tricky task of shuffling one,
or two, of his precious cargo out
and to the ground.
On evenings when there were
wakes, the lighted sign beside the street
stayed on for hours—long after
the widow in the next apartment
had triple-locked her door, worried
someone meant to rob her. Some nights,
her voice, trebled with age,
seemed to come out of my bathroom
mirror. I pictured her, there, talking
to herself, rummaging through
her medicine cabinet.
The day came when, as a talisman,
perhaps, protection from harm, she told
a friend she was scared—told her
the stiff-robed members of a cult
were holding nightly midnight meetings
at her place, drawing the living room
chairs into an unholy circle.
Her last morning, she went down
for the mail before dawn, wearing only
her slip, turned to the friends who
discovered her there, eyes
that were heartbreaking, dim pools
about to flood.
I lingered at my bathroom mirror
that night, no voice, flicked off the light,
then the lamp in the living room.
Beyond the balcony windows,
at the church across the way, the figure
of Jesus shone in neon above the walkway,
hands extended, waves of light rolling
from his fingertips, miraculously not kitsch,
Jesus walking, every night, the waters
of modernity, through frost, snow, searing sun,
through desert in the midst of plenty,
where death waits on the one hand, hope
beckons on the other, the roiling
waters of modernity.
————-
The last stanza of this poem wasn’t in the earlier version. I realized, as I sat working on the revision, that I’d lived for a year at a place of juncture. Profound loss to one side, profound hope on the other. Metaphor for life.
I don’t know what happened, in the end, to the woman on the other side of my bathroom mirror. In the first version of the poem, I’d ended with an image of trapped resistance on her face. It was the imagination of a young woman. But I’m not that woman now. I think of my mother. In the last hours of her life, I saw not fear—she was ready for her passing—but uncertainty, welling up as tears in her eyes. The memory of it told me, kept telling me, that the image I’d chosen for the woman speaking through the mirror was wrong. The beauty of writing is that you can go back, without fear. You can go back and make it right.
Recent Comments