Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(106)

Daughters growing up, mothers growing old, that sort of thing. I don’t buy it. There was never any of that stuff between us. No, this is a story about love, not competition. Maybe if you’d pried your face away from that mirror . . . Nah. You didn’t. So that’s where this story begins.

I tried to break that thing once, did you know? I saw you go into the bathroom and I seized the moment. I threw your silver hairbrush at that mirror with all the power in my scrawny little arm. I hurled it so hard! Nothing. Not a scratch. The damned hairbrush bounced off like it’d hit rubber. Boing. Nearly came back to smack me in the eye. I thought about taking a hammer to it, but by then you’d locked up all of Dad’s tools in the shed out back, and I couldn’t find the key.

So. The story. There was this woman who couldn’t stop looking at herself in the mirror. That’s you, that is. Thought I’d better spell it out. This woman had everything a woman could ever want: a loving husband, more money in the bank than she could ever spend, more clothes in the closet than she could ever wear, a fantastic stone house ? 323 ?

? The Mirror Tells All ?

with a turret—a turret! Who has that these days? She did. She had it all, and then some. I should point out that it wasn’t like this woman had all of this stuff and then still felt unfulfilled. No, it wasn’t like that at all, not as far as anyone could tell. It was just that she couldn’t stop looking at herself in the mirror.

The first time I saw her (that’s you, got that?) staring into the mirror I thought nothing of it. I must have been seven; school had started and I’d just been let off the bus. That was a great bus, the driver was always cracking jokes and he really liked kids so it was kind of like our own mini-party twice a day. I opened the front door and the house was quiet. I remember the silence because it was so unusual. This woman used to have the radio on all the time, couldn’t get enough of it. It was nice, I liked the house full of sound. And when it wasn’t, I got a little afraid that something bad had happened.

I went up to my room to dump my backpack. God, that was a

horrible thing, all purple and gold with glitter. Guess it suited me at the time. So anyway, I put it on my bed and then crept out into the hall. Your bedroom door was open. When I first saw you in front of the mirror I was relieved. Everything was okay, I remember thinking.

You were there. It was just that for some reason you didn’t have the radio on. Well, what did I know? I was just a kid. I figured maybe there’d been nothing good playing. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where that mirror came from. I don’t think it was there the day before. Did Dad buy it for you? Did you order it out of a catalog?

Fingerhut or something? No, that stuff would have been too cheap for you.

When this happened again the next day, I was curious but still didn’t really think much of it. When I realized it was going to happen every day, that’s when I started to worry. I asked Dad about it, but he was already sick by then and he wasn’t really up to pondering the imponderables with me.

I mean honestly, what was it? Did you see a wrinkle? Did you hope to stare it away? Don’t look at me like that. I’m joking. You never had a wrinkle in your life.

? 324 ?

? Erzebet YellowBoy ?

So here’s this woman, and for some reason she’s doing this crazy thing. Every day, morning to night, face in that mirror. And there’s this kid who doesn’t understand why suddenly her mom isn’t fixing breakfast, or lunch or supper for that matter, who isn’t putting out clothes for her to wear to school, who isn’t taking her shopping for new clothes when she grows out of the old, who isn’t bitching about a messy room, who isn’t asking about homework, who doesn’t show up to parent-teacher conferences, who isn’t doing a damned thing except standing in her bedroom, in front of a piece of glass on the wall.

You’d think someone would have called Children’s Services, but they didn’t. It was like magic, the way the teachers and even the principal believed me when I said you were busy. They all knew Dad was sick, so they didn’t ask about him. He was sick, but it was you I had to make excuses for.

This kid, right, after a couple years of this, she’s kind of learned to accept that things will never go back to the way they were. She understands that she can’t invite friends over because then she’d have to explain to them what her mother is doing, and she doesn’t know what her mother is doing so how can she explain it? She realizes that the other kids’ mothers aren’t like this, so she doesn’t go visit them because she can’t stand the sight of their moms in the kitchen, or coming in from work, briefcase in hand, or calling them into the house to wash up before supper.