the fruits of fate

Louise stood in the quiet pale green of the half-lit hall in her apartment, the afternoon sunlight filtering weakly through the plate glass of the casement window. Zelda had remarked on her last visit that her windows are "flithy," but Louise didn't see the point of cleaning them. She quite liked to see the grunge, imperfect frames of the outside world.

At this time of day, if she stood very still... and if Marly, her Russian blue kitten wasn't wrestling with some string somewhere... she could hear the faint hum of the Prospect Expressway which divided her neighborhood from Park Slope. To say you lived "on the other side of the expressway" was like saying you lived "on the other side of the tracks." Brooklyn was dangerous, but her small neighborhood, hugged on two sides by the cemetery, was insular somehow, made up mostly of Polish and Italian immigrants, who took quiet strolls arm in arm after dark and let their children run free in the streets.

She felt safe here, standing in the narrow hall, staring at the photograph of her great grandmother - her mother's mother - which hung next to a small gilded-edge mirror. The only decoration on a long wall, they appeared awkward and alone, but keeping each other company. She remembered when she hung them just after she moved in two and a half years ago, the fresh paint smelling of new beginnings. The pained frustration at hanging them so they were straight, and the subsequent giving up, so that they hung on the wall slightly askew.

The mirror was a poor excuse for a mirror. She had picked it up from a cardboard box left outside a stately mansion on Garfield Place... some rich family's refuse. Most of the things in her apartment were acquired this way, on the street or in flea markets, an amalgam of the fruits of fate. The cast-iron skillet, the kitchen table, the Danish desk chair, were all like the mirror: half-functioning, half-pretty, their glory days a distant past. The chair was worn in the seat, and the table was wobbly, but they were dear to her and she liked the idea of giving them a second, third, or fourth chance at life, treating them as if new.

The mirror on the wall had lost some of its reflectivity. The coating had pulled away from the back like paint, having documented each passing year with another centimeter, so that now only the center surface remained. It was enough, though, that she could see her brown eyes eyes, strong nose, and small lips, barely lit by the waning sun. Standing, still, she glanced back at her great-grandmother's portrait. Suddenly, Louise saw the same brown eyes, strong nose, and small lips, and she realized she was probably now the same age as her great grandmother when the photo was taken: twenty-nine.

She had known this photo since her life's memory began, when it sat on her mothers dresser, until she went to college and asked to take it with her. As a child, she had always been captivated by the beautiful dress, old-fashioned hairdo, and the knowledge that, three years after the photo was taken, in 1922, she would be stricken with a fast-moving and vicious leukemia. Most captivating was her gaze: haunting, yet peaceful, as if she somehow knew what would befall her. It was the same look she saw reflected in her grandmother's eyes when she stood staring out at the bluegrass of her Kentucky lawn, and it was the look she saw in her own mother's eyes when she was lost in thought on a long car trip.

Louise turned her head to look in the mirror once more, staring, into nothing, and for that minute, in the half-light, the portraits of two distant generations of women hung on the wall, side by side, slightly askew, mirror images of each other.