Volk - Shocked

Audrey Elaine Morgen Volk.

Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli.

E verything is mirrors. The legs of the vanity, the vanity itself, the pullout stool. The drawers, drawer pulls, the ivy planters on both ends. The three adjustable face-mirrors that recess behind beveled mirror frames.

Audrey wears her green velvet robe. It grazes her green carpet and matches her green drapes. A broad lace collar frames her face. When she perches on the stool we are almost the same height. I stand behind her to the left. That way I can watch from every angle. I can see her reflection in all three face-mirrors and see the real her too, her flesh-and-blood profile closest to me. I can see four different views of my mother simultaneously. Sometimes, when she adjusts the mirrors, I can see thousands of her, each face nesting a slightly smaller face. The lace vee of her robe gets tiny, tinier, smaller than a stamp, until it vanishes.

Is there a word for that? I ask.

Phantasmagoria, darling, my mother says.

The mirrored drawers store her tools. The left drawer holds hair-grooming aids: a tortoiseshell comb, her rat tail, a brush, clips, bobby pins, hairpins, brown rubber curlers, perforated aluminum ones. In the middle drawer, she keeps her creams, tonics and astringents. (Soap is the enemy. She does not wash her face. Water touches it only when she swims.) A blue and white box of Kleenex, the cellophane tube of Co-ets (quilted disposable cotton pads), her tweezers, cuticle scissors and emery boards that are made, she has told me, out of crushed garnets, her birthstone. The right-hand drawer (she is right-handed) organizes makeup andseparated from everything else, in its own compartment, her eyelash curler.

Everybody tells me my mother is beautiful. The butcher tells me. The dentist, the doormen, my teachers, cab drivers gaping at her in the rearview mirror as they worry the wheel. Friends from school, friends from camp, camp counselors, the hostess at Schraffts. The cashier at Rappaports and the pharmacist at Whelans, where we get Vicks VapoRub for growing pains. At Indian Walk, the salesman measures my feet for Mary Janes and says, You have a very beautiful mother, little girl. Do you know that? When a man tips his hat on Broadway and says, Mrs. Volk! How lovely to see you!, my mother says, Patty, this is Mr. Lazar, a customer of your fathers. We shake hands. How do you do, Mr. Lazar? I say, or Nice to meet you, Mr. Lazar, and Mr. Lazar pinches my cheek. Did anybody ever tell you, he says, you have one gorgeous mother? Thursday nights, when four generations of family gather at my grandmothers for dinner, the relatives tell my mother, You look so beautiful tonight, darling. Then they violate Audreys Pronoun Rule: It is rude to discuss someone who is present using the third person. Never call someone within hearing distance he or she. Refer to that person by name. Yet they use she. They speak about my mother as if she werent there. Right in front of her they say, Isnt she beautiful? Did you ever in your life?

But this face in the mirror right now, people who think my mother is beautiful dont know this face. I know what my mother looks like without makeup. I know her real face. I know how beautiful she really is.

She spreads two bobby pins with her teeth and pins her hair back. She dips three fingers in a large jar of Ponds, then creams her face in a circular motion. She plucks four Kleenexes:

FRRRIIIIP!

FRRRIIIIP!

FRRRIIIIP!

FRRRIIIIP!

and tissues off the Ponds. Here she sometimes pauses, meets my eyes in the mirror and says, Never let a man see you with cold cream on your face. She disposes of remaining shininess using tonic shaken onto a Co-et. Her face is bare, the smooth sleeping face I kiss before leaving for school. Her poreless skin, stretched tight in flat planes, no matter what time of year it is, looks tan.

She dabs on moisturizer and smoothes it in. From the right-hand drawer, she extracts a white plastic box of Max Factor pancake makeup. Its contents are the color of a Band-Aid and smell like an attic. Sometimes she calls pancake her base. Sometimes its my foundation. She unscrews the lid and rubs a moist sponge into the color. She makes five smears with the sponge: center of the forehead, both cheeks, tip of nose, chin. Then she begins the work of evening it out, concentrating to make sure the color reaches her hairline and under her chin, and that part of the nose dab is used to lighten the inside corners of her eyes. She is satisfied when her face is all one color, including her lips. This is the moment she stops looking like my mother. This is when her face is reduced to two eyes and two nostrils. It is as flat as the rink at Rockefeller Center. This is when I swear: