Hall of Mirrors

The space above my father’s glass shop was a hall of mirrors. Framed and unframed pieces of every size were propped along the walls facing each other, repeating images rendering the room gigantic. When I stood before them, I saw a dizzying number of images of me, one behind the other, fading into the distance, the so-called infinity effect. Most captivating to me were the gold-framed antique ones waiting to be refinished, which was called re-silvering because reapplying silver nitrate on the back of the glass is what endows glass with reflective quality. In these old mirrors, I saw blotchy, imperfect echoes of myself, and in dim light it appeared to me as though shadows of other figures stood behind me. My shadow ghosts did not look benevolent.

In these old mirrors, age determined the amount of damage. When I stood before those so old that they’d lost most of their reflective silver, I could see little clear detail even in my own face. Like the darkened mirrors, age has done damage to my memory of some details of long-ago events that were to shatter my worldview, but the essence of what happened is etched clearly in my mind.

***

Even if no friends were around to play kick the can or hide-and-seek, or if the weather was bad and I tired of wandering the house or coloring on the back porch, I had a catalog of other fun activities. One arrived in the form of a large cardboard box that my mother emptied of its dozens of toilet paper rolls and tossed on the porch. I hauled it back into the living room, turned it upside down, propped it open on one side with books or a shoebox, and played games underneath it. Then I turned it open-side-up, crawled into it, and lurched merrily around on the floor, which kept me so busy Mom let it stay there for months afterwards as my plaything.

But this was a fine, sunny morning, and I was impatient to begin a round of outside fun. I liked to explore the bank behind the lilac trees and tool shed where my father tossed glass remnants from his work creating stained-glass church windows in his shop. I looked for pretty pieces of ruby or aureate gold I could hold up to the sun and gaze through, or the rare find of stained glass “jewels,” the small, round, faceted pieces that usually appeared in my father’s window designs at the intersection of four square or rectangular pieces. I once showed my father one I had found, and he offered me a penny for each one I returned to him, as they could be reused and would have been thrown out in error. I had in mind finding enough jewels to buy myself a tasty treat from the neighborhood store our house.

I must have been just six when my mother chose a day when the house was empty except for me and my sister, Lucinda. Four years younger than I, she was playing happily in the bedroom we shared. My father was out on a work trip installing his windows and my brothers Fred and Bobby were at school. After breakfast, I was preparing to skip out the door when Mom called me into her bedroom, picked me up in her arms, and set me down gently on her bed. The pink-and-blue flowers on her white chenille bedspread always intrigued me; my own chenille bedspread had plain white flowers. With my index finger, I began to trace the outlines of the pastel flowers as she sat beside me.

 “Margaret,” she began, taking me by my arms and turning me to face her, “I want to talk to you. Sweetheart, is someone touching you where they shouldn’t? You can tell me.” 

Her worried face observed me closely for signs of recognition or relief, but on my countenance, she found neither. I shook my head, “No, Mama.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but thinking the matter closed, I made to slide off the side of the bed and run outside. Mom took hold of my arms to keep me there on the bed facing her.

This was long before the development of methods to interview children who may have been sexually abused, and she had no background in that kind of work anyway. She had only her own personal experience, and it’s unlikely anyone had asked her such a question when she was my age, though she wished they had. Would she have known how to answer? Thinking back as a grown woman, she probably thought she would, and so believing, she asked me.

The perplexed look on my face must have shown her she was not getting through to me that she was trying to help me. She continued to probe, framing the same question in different ways, trying to communicate to me that I had been violated and that she was my advocate.

“I won’t be upset with you, Margaret,” she asserted, her rising voice belying her words. “I know someone has been touching you somewhere they shouldn’t. Just tell me who it is.”

I already said no. Why was my answer not right? What should I say? I sat squirming, uncomfortable with the shapeless dimensions of the situation, its dark edges revealing no sure path into a resolution for the problem. Mom seemed impatient, and I longed to tell her what she wanted to hear, if only I knew what it was. I wriggled out of her grasp and lay back on the bed, turning over the puzzle in my mind. Finding no answer in the space my child’s short attention span allotted to it, I drifted into a daydream, her voice fading into the background.

Then quite suddenly, a pillow was on my face, pressing down, covering my nose, my mouth, my eyes. I could not breathe. My small legs flailed helplessly as I tried to throw off the soft but relentless obstruction. Her irritation must have sparked into a blaze of exasperation. Was she trying to shock me into seeing the seriousness of the situation? Or did she suddenly conclude that a little girl’s life was being ruined, and she was powerless to stop it? Perhaps she felt it was better to end that life now before it turned out warped and ugly? Or did her actions begin as one motive and become another? In those airless, sightless seconds as she held down the pillow and listened to my muffled cries, she had time to make, unmake, remake a decision.

Who can say why she did it? We never spoke of the episode, though I never forgot it. By the time I was old enough to collect words and thoughts to form a question, it had become fused together with the hundreds of her other strange and inexplicable acts into the image I had of her as an unpredictable, irrational person whose ire you must take care not to arouse.

Just as suddenly as it came, the pillow was gone, and I struggled to sit up. The panicked look on my face and rising tears told her that she had to take a new approach.

“Tell me who touched you,” she cajoled, “and I’ll give you a nickel to buy a pie.”

Now this was a carnality I was familiar with—a pre-packaged, handheld pie from the neighborhood store near our house was one of my favorite treats.

“Can I have the whole thing for myself?” I sobbed, a little joy coming back into my shattered life. “Can I have apple?”

I could almost taste the mushy fruit and cardboard crust of that manufactured pastry.

“Yes, yes, Just tell me! Was it your father?”

I pictured Dad’s shocked face and the quick rage that would surely follow. I shook my head.

“Your brother Fred, then? Was it him?”

Sobbing and terrified, I agreed it was, indeed, the innocent and unsuspecting Fred. I could deal with his anger; my mother had some control over what he might do to me. I nodded through my tears. The look on her face signaled that I had, at last, supplied the required answer.

“And where did he touch you?” She seemed relieved that the truth had come to light.

Yet another question I could not answer! As I cast about desperately for what might satisfy her, she pointed to my female private area. “Was it on your teenie?”

Again, I agreed, thankful that I had not only landed on a response that would end this captivity and torment by this new and frightening version of my mother but would also allow me to have a wonderful, promised treat. I got the nickel and skipped off to the neighborhood store to buy the pie and finally begin my day. I lingered on the road home for as long as possible.

Fred came home to a screaming torrent of accusation and rebuke usually reserved for my father. His vehement denials that he had not and would never think of doing such a thing to me or anyone may have convinced her only that she had accused the wrong male family member. Later when she had left the house to go to my father’s shop next door, my brother confronted me.

Fred towered over me. His whole body, usually so slack and relaxed, was taut with anger. “Why did you tell her such a lie?” he hissed. “What were you thinking?”

I was caught between two volatile forces. He would never hit me or even scream at me because Mom would hear, but I didn’t relish living with his anger either. I burst into tears and explained as best I could in my child’s language that I had been forced into this knowingly false charge. He seemed to understand and stalked off. I never mentioned the pie.

***

Vivid nightmares began to visit my sleep, one repeating often. I perch at the edge of the maroon overstuffed sofa in our living room, my small legs dangling, and I look down idly at a marble ashtray on a metal stand beside me. As I watch with an inarticulate terror that only a small child’s mind can conjure, the ashtray’s marble patterns begin to move around, stirring into misty plumes that rise out of the tray. I see that the plumes threaten to become shadowy creatures like those behind me in the mirror hall, and terrified out of my mind, I fall from the sofa and try to rise and flee. But my feet do not obey my command, and I stumble and fall. With the shadowy ghosts about to overtake me, I wake shrieking and crying for my mother, my comforter, and the cause of my terrors. Other nights, I dreamed of sailing over the green hills past the Potomac River, only to plummet suddenly and wake as if I had fallen from the firmament.

Sometimes lying half-awake at night, everything in my room appeared far away. I would call out to my mother to come in and reassure me that I would not fade away into the background and be unable to reach out and touch anything solid again. The possibility that she could have caused any of my night alarms would never have occurred to her.

***

When I began first grade at Cresaptown School later the same year, I found a place that restored coherence in my chaotic mind. I loved everything about school, and school seemed to love me back. Everything ran along predictably, and each day, each month, offered the same agreeable sequence. My teachers’ comments glowed with praise, and Mom seemed pleased, so I was relieved. Who wanted to rouse the dark wrath I had seen in her?

Later that year, I ambled home through the woods after the last bell in a gathering dusk to find both my parents and sister gone and Fred my designated babysitter.

Fred’s voice was shaking, his face drawn. “Cindy somehow climbed inside that empty cardboard-box of yours.” I envisioned her wobbling around the living room floor in it as she had seen me do so often.

“The box fell over, and her head caught the sharp corner of the piano.”

“H-how bad is it? Will she be okay?” I also began to shake.

“I don’t know. Mom and Dad took her to Memorial Hospital in Cumberland. We’ll have to wait until they get back.”

I roamed the house unable to think of much else besides my sister. Sometimes I stood sentinel at the back door at the driveway to catch sight of the truck, waiting for word on whether she was alive or dead. She was too young to be much of a playmate, but she was a cheerful presence in our home and, unlike me, always seemed happy and smiling.

They were still not back by the time Fred made me go to bed. When I woke in the morning, Mom assured me Lucinda would be fine. “She’ll need rest and quiet for a couple days. She’s sleeping now.”

Before making me get dressed for school, Mom allowed me to look in at Lucinda as she slept in our parents’ room, and I glimpsed a white-bandaged head.

Now a new nightmare, more frightening than walking shadows or falling from the sky haunted my sleep and drifted into my waking hours. I dreamed my mother had killed my sister and cut her up. Somehow, she put her back together, but I could see the red lines in her skull where Mom had reassembled her like a jigsaw puzzle. I woke up wailing but dared not tell anyone the exact shape of my anxiety, saying only that I dreamed Lucinda was hurt again.

My nightmare gave narrative to my unconscious fears. Fred and I examined the position of the piano and its sharp corners and deemed it plausible that an accident had happened just as Mom described. But my terror was born of not knowing, of being certain of nothing, a fear that became a shadow I would never outrun.