Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [67]
The bathroom was ordinary enough. Damp towels were mounded on the racks and a clutter of shaving things and men’s cosmetics covered the various porcelain ledges and surfaces. But the mirror over the basin had been broken. There were only a few jagged pieces of glass left sticking around the edges of the wooden frame. She tried peering into one of them but it wasn’t large enough to be of much use.
When she went back into the room he was doing the pillowcase. He seemed more relaxed: he was ironing with a long easy sweeping motion instead of the exact staccato strokes he had been using on the blouse. He looked up at her as she came in.
“I suppose you’re wondering what happened to the mirror,” he said.
“Well …”
“I smashed it. Last week. With the frying pan.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I got tired of being afraid I’d walk in there some morning and wouldn’t be able to see my own reflection in it. So I went and grabbed the frying pan out of the kitchen and gave it a whack. They both got very upset,” he said meditatively, “particularly Trevor, he was cooking an omelette at the time and I guess I sort of ruined it. Got it all full of broken glass. But I don’t really see why it should disturb them, it was a perfectly understandable symbolic narcissistic gesture, and it wasn’t a good mirror anyway. But they’ve been jittery ever since. Especially Trevor, subconsciously he thinks he’s my mother; it’s rather hard on him. It doesn’t bother me that much, I’m used to it, I’ve been running away from understudy mothers ever since I can remember, there’s a whole herd of them behind me trying to catch up and rescue me, god knows what from, and give me warmth and comfort and nourishment and make me quit smoking, that’s what you get for being an orphan. And they’re quoting things at me: Trevor quotes T. S. Eliot these days and Fish quotes the Oxford English Dictionary.”
“How do you shave then?” Marian asked. She could not quite imagine life without a mirror in the bathroom. She speculated, while she spoke, about whether he even shaved at all. She had never examined him for bristles.
“What?”
“I mean with no mirror.”
“Oh,” he said, grinning, “I’ve got my own private mirror. One I can trust, I know what’s in it. It’s just public ones that I don’t like.” He seemed to lose interest in the subject, and ironed in silence for a minute. “What grisly things,” he said at last; he was doing one of the guest towels. “I can’t stand things with flowers embroidered on them.”
“I know. We never use them.”
He folded the towel, then looked up at her gloomily. “I suppose you believed all that.”
“Well … all what?” she answered cautiously.
“About why I broke the mirror and my reflection and so on. Really I broke it because I felt like breaking something. That’s the trouble with people, they always believe me. It’s too much of an encouragement, I can never resist the temptation. And those brilliant insights about Trevor, how do I know whether they’re true? Maybe the real truth is that I want to think that he wants to think he’s my mother. Actually I’m not an orphan anyway, I do have some parents, back there somewhere. Can you believe that?”
“Should I?” She couldn’t tell whether or not he was being serious; his expression revealed nothing. Perhaps this was another labyrinth of words, and if she said the wrong thing, took the wrong turning, she would suddenly find herself face to face with something she could not cope with.
“If you like. But the real truth is, of course” – he waved the iron