Heart Soul And Art
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The girl in the mirror looked a little like her mother. The eyes were wrong, of course. They had that same peculiar way they’d had since she was small and he had begun to be old. The other thing about the girl in the mirror was that she knew it wasn’t really her.
She did not have the same bone structure, the same shape of the cheek, or the same look of things. It was only because she had been so long at it that she could tell herself that it was her reflection that looked so much like her mother’s.
But she did not know how to do the same for her father. He had always seemed so old when she was young, and now he was even older. He had never said anything to her about it, but she knew that he was getting tired of being alive.
He was not quite as steady on his feet as he used to be. He had trouble with his voice sometimes. Sometimes he got confused about what he was doing. Sometimes he forgot where he was, or who he was. There were times when she thought he had forgotten her.
Then there would come a time when he would talk about her, or bring her up, and he would smile at her as if she were still very young, and he would say: “You’re just like your mother.”
And then she would laugh. It was easy to laugh, because the girl in the mirror was so young and pretty, and the woman in the mirror was so old and ugly. She did not need to put any effort into looking good. Her hair was the same color as her mother’s.
Her skin was smooth and pale, and her face was beautiful. She was slender and tall, and graceful. She was so thin that it was hard to believe she had ever been fat. She was so tall that it was hard to believe she had ever been short.
And she was so graceful that it was hard to believe she had ever been clumsy. And her face was so beautiful that it was hard to believe it had ever been ugly. It was like looking at a picture of her mother, but she had been there too. She had been there, and she had smiled, and she had laughed. She had been there, and she had held her daughter in her arms.
But that was before. Now she was dead, and the girl in the mirror was all alone. And the man who had been her father was dying. He had a thing in his chest that was going to kill him. If he lived, it would be a long time before he got better.
But he was dying now, and the girl in the mirror had to get out of the house. She was going to go out and look for someone else. She was going to find some other man, and she was going to have children with him.
She was going to live her life over again, and this time she was going to make herself happy. She was going to have everything her mother had, and more. She was going to have all the things her mother had had and more. She was going to have the house and the car and the money.
She was going to have the boy and the girl and the baby, and she was going to have them all very soon. She was going to be happy. She was going to be beautiful. She was going to be happy.
She was going to have everything her mother had, and more. She was going to have the house and the car and the money. She was going to have the boy and the girl and the baby, and she was going to have them all very soon. She was going to be happy. She was going to be beautiful. She was going to be happy.
“It’s all right,” said the woman in the mirror. “You’re not really here. You can’t hurt me.”
The girl in the mirror did not say anything. She did not need to. The woman in the mirror knew that. She had been there too, and she had seen what had happened. She had been there when he had died. She had seen how he had died.
She had seen him lying on the floor, and she had felt the pain of his death. That was why she was afraid, and why she wanted to run away. And she had heard what he had called her when he was angry: “You stupid bitch!”
“I am sorry, but I have to go now,” she said.
She took the knife from its hiding place under the bed and walked toward the door, and then she left the house. She went down the street where her mother and father had once lived. It was a big street full of tall houses, and it ran past parks where people were playing ball.
She went through one park after another, passing through each gate without stopping, until the last park was behind her, and then she turned off onto an alleyway. She looked back and saw a few men sitting around in front of their doors.
They were smoking cigarettes, and they were talking. A couple of them had their heads together; a third man was staring straight ahead. Some of them were laughing quietly. One man was crying softly, and a fourth one stood up and wiped tears from his eyes.
The girl in the mirror went up the alley, following her mother’s footsteps, until she came to another street. This time, she was not sure which way to turn. So instead she went up and down the streets until she found two young men walking side by side, talking with some other boys.
She followed them until they stopped outside a store that sold books and records. Then the girl in the mirror waited outside for a while, and the two men went inside.
When they came out, one of them was wearing a red sweater, and the other wore blue jeans and a white shirt. The man in the blue sweater looked familiar. He was about the age her mother had been when she died if she hadn’t been older or younger.
The man in the red sweater was much taller than her mother had been. He didn’t look like anyone she knew, and yet she remembered that he had been her father’s friend. She was certain of it. She watched the men walk down the alleyway together.
After they crossed a road, he walked ahead of her mother’s father, and after a few steps, he turned around. He smiled at her, and she nodded. Her mother’s father did not smile back; he just walked on ahead of her, and so she hurried after them, trying to catch up.
They walked into an open space near a big building, and he pointed at a fountain with a statue of a horse in it. The girl in the mirror knew he was saying something about it. But as she listened, she could only hear half of what he was saying.
The part she heard seemed like nonsense. She couldn’t understand it at all. She wasn’t listening properly, because the thing that frightened her most was that she did not know what they were talking about, even though she had listened very carefully.
When he spoke to her, her head was not really listening, it was only pretending to listen. It was doing something else. She was watching him, and she was thinking about something else.
So she did not hear anything he said to her, and she did not really see the fountain either, although she thought it was very pretty. All she saw was her mother’s father looking down at her and smiling kindly.
As far as she was concerned, it was a lovely day, and she was having a good time. And that was a great relief because the man who had made her feel bad—the real thing that scared her—was gone, and now she was free again to think about everything else that was important: her own happiness and beauty and love and the things that would happen later that night.
She could do anything she wanted now, and she could be anything she wanted to be. She could even leave the city and go somewhere very different.
The girl in the mirror watched them cross a bridge. He put his arm around her shoulders. She held on tightly and leaned against him. He told her that he loved her, and kissed her cheek. “And you are going to make me very happy,” he said. “I am very glad to meet you.”
He was talking to someone else now. She did not really see who it was, but the words meant nothing to her. She was still too busy being glad to be there herself to listen properly. So she pretended to listen. She looked at him, and she looked at his shoes.
They were new and very clean, and shiny and bright. She wondered how they looked so nice when he was wearing the same old things as before. She liked those black shoes, but the man was always changing his clothes. Maybe that was why he looked so strange.
“I don’t care what anybody says,” he said. “I’ll never change my mind about that.”
Then she saw someone else, and she forgot about her mother’s father. The girl in the mirror watched a tall thin woman with short hair walking toward the bridge. She seemed to have just come from somewhere else—a very dark place.
There was something on her face that reminded her of a person she had seen once, many years ago. It was a long time since she had seen that face. The woman walked up to the man in the red sweater. “You can’t go home with her,” she said quietly. “She is crazy. She has been dead all these years.”
The man in the red sweater looked startled and angry. He grabbed the woman by the wrist. “Who are you?” he asked, but then he let go of her hand. The girl in the mirror saw that he was trembling.
He looked very frightened, and she knew something awful must have happened to make him behave like this. She tried to remember who he was, but it wasn’t hard. He had always been there, every day, and her mother was always with him, and she was never alone except for the brief times when people came and took her away from him.
She remembered that he used to say, “Don’t worry”—but now that sounded like another lie. She had learned long ago to watch out for the ones he told. But now the worst thing of all had happened. Her mother was dead, and he was crying.
When she reached out and touched him with her fingers, the shaking stopped immediately. He was safe now, and she could stop worrying about him. She turned her attention fully back to the stranger in front of her.
The woman was very tall, with a powerful build and wide shoulders, and strong arms. Even though she seemed so different from him, the girl in the mirror could sense that there was some connection between them—even though she could not see it exactly yet.
In fact, the whole woman seemed vaguely familiar, as if they had both been somewhere before together. But that did not matter right now. She had other things she needed to talk to this lady about. She smiled, and her face showed her teeth—white and straight and very white.
She did not wear braces; her teeth were perfect. She wore her hair pulled back into two little ponytails, which showed off her ears. That was another reason why she looked so funny. The ears were quite large, and they stuck up high over the side of her head, and behind each one was a tiny black button—like the kind of buttons the soldiers used on their uniforms.
She had no idea how to explain this to anyone. The girl in the mirror felt that she should know what to say, but she could not think clearly because she was so confused. She wanted to tell the woman everything she wanted to say.
This woman would understand, she thought. She was sure that the lady would agree with her. She was afraid—for him, for herself—that she might have forgotten something important that was waiting to happen, and that if she didn’t say the right words then nothing else would ever work out, and she would fail, and that would be terrible.
The girl in the mirror stood perfectly still and listened hard while the tall thin woman talked. She had a loud voice and her lips moved quickly as she spoke. Sometimes, after she had finished speaking, the woman paused to take a deep breath, and then kept on talking again without any sign of embarrassment or awkwardness at the way she was doing it.
“I will stay with him,” she said, “and I won’t let nobody else take you away from me either.” After she had spoken, she went on looking at him, smiling and nodding to herself. “That’s a good boy,” she said softly. “You’ve got the makings of a nice man there if you listen to your mama and do what she says.”
After this, the girl in the mirror began to feel that everything was going to be fine. The tall woman had done the trick somehow, but she did not know how. She wondered if he could hear the sounds, even though they weren’t coming through the speaker, and the sound seemed very strange to her because she could not recognize anything in it, and it made her dizzy.
The girl in the mirror felt like vomiting, but when she opened her mouth to do this, a great big smile appeared instead—the best one that she had ever produced. Then she heard the voices of the other children, and they were saying that he had done something bad, that he was a bad man, and that he had hurt them.
“Shut up!” the man in the red sweater shouted. “Nobody likes you! You’re all liars. I’m the only real one here. Nobody listens to you.” The woman put her hands on her hips and gave him an angry look. “He’ll come back to you soon enough,” she said firmly. “Now get yourself cleaned up. There’s a lot of work to do.”
The man looked down at his clothes. His knees were filthy.
When he picked up a handkerchief to wipe himself dry with, its corners ripped open. It was all she could do to stop herself from laughing when he dropped the pieces onto the floor and bent down to pick them up, but her laughter ended abruptly, and she found herself staring into the face of the woman beside her who had turned slowly round to look at her, a strange expression on her face.
She was very surprised by the look, but she did not understand it. “Who are you?” the woman asked. Her eyes widened suddenly, and for a moment the girl in the mirror saw her turn pale. “Are you really—” she started to say. “Is this really you? Did I meet you once?”
At first, the girl in the mirror couldn’t speak. The shock was too much. She had never been confronted with someone she had thought dead before, and now this woman’s face had returned in full. She could see her hair and her eyes.
She did not remember this woman, but the girl in the mirror recognized her from a photograph she had seen once, and from other things that people had told her. But this was a surprise—she had expected the woman to appear looking exactly like her picture—so when she finally managed to speak, her voice trembled. “You…you…” she stammered. “How is it you live? How?”
The woman nodded calmly, but she kept on looking at the girl with the same expression. “I don’t know how long I’ve been away,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s my life and nobody else’s. Don’t you worry about me?”
“But where has everybody gone? Where did we go wrong?” the girl in the mirror demanded, and she felt a sudden fear that if she didn’t hurry and say the words right away, then she might forget them. “How have we come to do it? Why can’t you explain why we lost all those years?”
The woman shrugged. The gesture reminded the girl in the mirror of another woman who had worn a similar expression, and who had also tried to shrug, although she had used no arms of her own, and only one finger, and it had taken her several tries before she succeeded. “I can tell you nothing more than what you already know,” she said. “I’m just a visitor, as you are.”
The girl in the mirror felt tears welling up in her eyes. Something inside her was hurting badly, and she had no idea why. “Why can’t you help us?” she cried. “Don’t you remember anything? Tell us about our parents or somebody. Someone has to know. Somebody knows!”
The woman took the girl’s hand. “Listen to me,” she said gently. “It doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from. What matters is where you’re going now.” She turned away from her. “I’m sorry. We should be friends, but I must go.” And after a pause, she added: “Remember, there’s still time. You don’t need to do any fighting. It won’t bring them back again.”
The girl in the mirror stared at the woman’s back for some moments longer. After a while, she pulled her hand away and turned around to look at her, hoping to find that she would be smiling, but when she caught sight of her face she understood that the woman was truly gone.
The End