What the Mirror Tells You by Gail Louise Siegel
You lie in bed under the quilt from your son and his wife, and stare at the ceiling. It’s impossible to sleep while your roommate groans. You think the same thoughts every night. That it’s hard to believe what the mirror tells you. The wrinkles and spots. The thin, limp, gray hair. You can’t reach your feet — or if you can, your hands shake too badly to clip a hangnail. That woman frowning back at you is a stranger, an alien.
Trapped in this awful body, they park you at a table with a seat-mate who seems to dust his pasta with dandruff instead of parmesan. After every meal, dessert is the same watery bowl of tepid aged plums, and Greta Johnson from Room 207 in the Memory Wing plays the same nocturne in the lounge over and over again until you want to flip the heavy black keyboard cover onto her hands and crush them.
It will do no good, not even if you break her fingers, because you are haunted by her scales and trills in the bath and in your dreams. So you nod at her and smile weakly at her balding cap of white frizz. You picture Greta Johnson on an amphitheater stage, an old lady glowing under a spotlight, wearing a tuxedo and fuzzy pink slippers. But what kind of person is in there, really? A concert pianist, a jazz club crooner, a retired music teacher?
Every day you mean to ask her, and every day you forget.
Artist’s Statement
I am primarily a fiction writer, but often explore personal challenges – my late husband’s kidney failure, my late mother’s decline -- in both fiction and nonfiction. And sometimes, when the topic has been especially haunting, I’ve written about it over and over again. “What the Mirror Tells You” is a fictional piece which falls in that category. The absurd and tragic permutations of dementia, and the toll it takes on its victims and their loved ones, are particularly cruel. I’ve flogged them again and again in my writing. Sadly, however often I rage against it on paper, I cannot blunt its sting.
Gail Louise Siegel’s fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in dozens of journals including Brevity, Ascent, Post Road, Salamander, StoryQuarterly, Wigleaf and New World Writing. She has an MFA from Bennington College and lives just outside of Chicago.