Compact Image of the Soul

I felt her rummaging through the purse and tried to pull the condom package over to hide me. But it was so dented and weary from years of disuse in the dregs of her purse that it was like lifting a dead weight. The fingers pressed closer and I gave up the fight. She pulled me out of the purse.

“Here we go again,” I thought, opening to the pressure of her fingertips.

I cast a jaded glance around. Another night club bathroom: walls papered in advertisements and obscenities, cigarette butts and reeking puddles on the floor, and, most offensive of all, lighting so dim I couldn’t reflect more than hazy images.

Although, considering my current client, I shouldn’t complain.

Deb had never been what anyone might consider a beauty. That was, until she met David, the plastic surgeon. Since that fateful night, Deb had undergone one surgery after another until even her own best friends no longer recognized the girl they’d once known. Known and loved, as a matter of fact. Deb had been sweet and clever, once upon a time. No one had ever told her that she was beautiful, though, never told her that she was perfect the way God made her, never told her that outward beauty is fleeting. You know, all that sappy stuff dads are supposed to say at Father-Daughter dances and moms are supposed to say on the occasion of the First Period. Instead, Deb had believed the commercials, the shows, the magazines, the billboards, which all told her, in words or images, how worthless she was if she didn’t qualify for a centerfold.

Deb had discarded her sweetness and cleverness in favor of pouty lips, poreless skin, perky derierre, and palatial breasts.

I had been with her through it all, too. I watched her transformation.

Unfortunately for Deb, I’m not the kind of mirror to flatter where flattery isn’t warranted. In fact, I can’t show her her own physical perfection at all. I can only show the rotting, decaying flesh of her soul. Not a comforting reflection, I assure you. Why she ever opens me at all, I don’t know. But she takes me with her everywhere.

Something about Deb this night brought my attention back to her. She was holding onto me tightly, almost desperately.

She extended my hinge and peered into my eyes, one for ordinary image, one for magnification. She nearly always avoided the magnification eye. This night, she made a point of holding it close to her face, as though she was forcing herself to see her own ugliness.

She stifled a sob and swiped the back of her hand across her eyes, smearing her mascara and knocking her false eyelashes askew. Blinking to keep the eyelashes out of her eyes, she reached up and tore them off, throwing them petulantly into the trashcan.

“I want to go back,” she whispered, peering at my reflections again. “I can't do this anymore.”

Deb grabbed a paper towel and scrubbed at her ruby-colored lips. The color came off in bright blots, like blood. Some color remained in lurid streaks on the skin around her lips, though. The lips themselves looked raw and vulnerable.

She crumpled the paper towel in her hand and peered at me again.

“I never thought it would feel like this. I feel trapped. Like I can’t get free of this body.” She looked down at herself: black top cut low, black trousers skin-tight to show off Dr. David’s handiwork.

“It’s not even my body anymore.”

Deb looked up at me and I saw tears in her eyes. I had not seen her tears in more years than I could recall. The hard look of false self-assurance had left those eyes, and even if it was only for this moment, it was beautiful.

“They want my body, but they don't want me. That's why I turn them all down. I can't go home with them. They don’t even see me.”

Deb leaned her head back against the wall for a moment, dragging in a breath. She lowered her gaze to the bathroom mirror which reflected only the outward layer of the woman. Typical.

Deb smiled wryly at her false reflection and murmured,

“I don’t even see me.”

She looked back into my eyes.

“Except here. I always see myself clearly here.”

Deb stopped short, so startled she nearly dropped me.

I glowed with the first glimmer of real beauty I had reflected in a long, long time.