La! Blame me? It’s not my fault, is it, that madam’s got so fat—?
Shut up, you horrible, lazy, impudent girl! Leave it! Get away!
• • •
This is the beginning: my mother clinging to the bedpost, her gold curls loose and in disarray around her shoulders, Mary tugging bravely at the corset laces. She can tug no further. La! It’s not my fault, is it, that madam’s got so fat?
How unhappy it makes my mother, this remark of Mary’s. She frowns, not with anger, but with a misery so profound that it frightens the servant, who runs quickly away.
• • •
Mary, help me move the mirror out of the closet.
It is the afternoon of the same day. My father, as usual, is not home.
Really, madam? Incredulously. Mr. Argument’s big mirror? Are you certain?
• • •
It is the one gift of Thomas Argument’s that my mother has banished: a large mirror in a gilt rococo frame on a cherrywood stand—the only full-length mirror she has ever owned.
Yes, you little fool, of course I’m certain. Why would I say I wanted it if I didn’t?
Of course, madam. I’m sorry, madam.
It takes both of them, huffing and puffing mightily, to dislodge the mirror from the back of the closet where, together, they’d jammed it a year ago, wedging it between a stuffed anteater with great hooked foreclaws posed on a tree stump, and a lacquered incidental table inset with ebony, belonging to Marie-Louise Girard. Back then, a year ago, my mother couldn’t bear the sight of the mirror; now she regards it coolly, evenly, like an enemy she means to face down.
It’s very dusty, madam.
That’s all right. Now get out.
Yes, madam.
The door shuts behind Mary’s bustling and bowing skirts; my mother, left alone, stands quite still, at an oblique angle to the mirror, its unruffled silver depths outside her line of vision, which rests, instead, on the bed with its white, nubbled bedspread. Beneath the bed, like stones beneath the sea, lie her trunk and her travel cases, but she can see these no more than she can see her own reflection.
She waits a moment, during which the only sounds are the chiming of the clock, downstairs in the parlor, and, farther away, muffled, here, on the third floor, the hollow, echoing boom of the river, whose vibration carries up through the bones of the house into the soles of my mother’s feet.
Quickly, then, she begins to undress, removing, first, the petite leather boots bought for her by her Papa in Paris; then, unpinning it from the bodice, the navy blue skirt, which falls around her feet; then the bodice itself, low necked, with tight, short sleeves, is unhooked and cast aside; then the petticoats—there are four—the long one with the flounce—the short white one—the petticoat bodice, with its buttons, embroideries and frills—then the ornamental petticoat, expensively laced; then she rolls her black stockings down and off, kicking them aside; then the white cotton camisole, tightly fitted at the waist; then the corset, which she unhooks from the front before reaching around behind to loosen the laces; and then at last, the heavy white chemise, which she slips up and off over her head, her arms tangling in it for a moment before, bending forward sharply at the waist in a gesture of impatience, she casts it, too, onto the floor.
Finally naked, she steps before the mirror.
She has never seen herself this way before, the entire pink and white and gold of herself unclothed. She surveys herself critically—wincing slightly as she cups her breasts in her hands, weighing them, considering the dark flush of the aureoles, then turning slowly sideways to look at herself in silhouette. She unpins her hair, lets it fall. She is a beautiful woman; she has known this; now she sees it. She places her palm against her belly, just above the luxuriant blond bush of pubic hair. Behind her, in the mirror, she can see reflected the sea, grey blue, frothy with whitecaps, protecting all its secrets, framed in her bedroom window.