In the Mirror

         
         “I’m one hundred now.”

          Balancing with one hand on her walker, she had edged her way across the living room, braced herself on the door jamb, leaned forward, stepped into the bathroom with a sudden jerk and caught her balance before falling. 

         100? 

         How is that possible? Had she had a birthday?

         Her mind was full of fog, faint memory of faces and smiles bending down, cheering too loud, cake with candles, a balloon popped like a gunshot. She was aware of her age but hadn’t  grown accustomed to it, like the way she didn’t see the dust settling on the dining table until she put on her glasses.

          “My, my…” she said, sliding her feet one by one across the bathroom floor, making sure the slippers didn’t catch on the edge of a tile.  “There now…”

           All was well. She set her walker to her right, in front of the toilet seat, steadied her hip on the rim of the sink and reached up for the medicine cabinet. She had forgotten she was still wearing her reading glasses. 

         For a moment, her eyes cleared, and this face flashed in the mirror before her, this shriveled head of some strange old lady, a skull, really, swirling with a mass of hundreds of wrinkles around her eyes and cheeks and mouth. There were wisps of white hair rising up from her scalp, with tiny veins and arteries pulsing around her temples, and her skin stretched white like parchment over the bones of her cheeks and jaws, giving her the bones of a skeleton for a face. She lifted her hand to search for the knob to open the medicine cabinet, and the fleshy wattles, empty of fat, below her chin wavered with each movement.

           “Oh dear…” Her eyes had never been this acute. She had never really seen the lobes hanging from her neck, or the spattering of liver spots over her cheek bones and under her eyes. What could this mean? In the mirror her reading glasses showed all.

           Most of all, it showed her lips, still thin and ruby red, and when they were standing by her front door, past her curfew hour, her parents waiting up and watching from the living room, the porch light fluttering with moths, the summer night around them warm and dark, she could feel he was frightened, and she was frightened by the approaching warmth of his skin so she closed her eyes and smelled soap in his hair and the flowers of her corsage and the scent of his breath.

          “Yes!” she gasped, as she peered into the mirror, as if seeing herself for the first time in many years. “He said my lips tasted like sweet wine.”

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