Mirrors

Flo asked me today, “Doris, why do you always smile when you look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Do I?” I replied. My “do” was in the deepest voice I could muster without gender reassignment and seemed all the deeper set against the crystal shatteringly high “I” that followed. It was a theatrical response but it left Flo, sans doute, that she had my full attention.

“Always. You smile when you look in the mirror.”

“Flo, you are infuriating,” I said. “All you did there was to rearrange the words, saying the same thing and leaving me none the wiser.”

“Alright,” conceded Flo, realising she’d short-changed me. “Just try it. Look into the mirror.”

Intrigued, and a little hesitant, I approached the mirror hanging over the fireplace. It was just as Flo had said (twice). As soon as I caught sight of myself in the mirror, my face transformed, from a dour, life-beaten husk of a physiog into exactly the same thing but with a grotesque, Sterident smile.  And, try as hard as I might, I couldn’t stop smiling.

“See!” declared Flo, with punch-the-air triumphalism.

My cheeks were beginning to ache. Still the mirror held me under its spell.

“It’s okay,” laughed Flo. “Everyone does it.”

“Really?” I said, through gritted teeth. I looked like a cartoon cat with a broad, fixed grin, just before its teeth drop out, one by one.

“It’s because it makes you look younger,” she continued. “That’s why people smile when they look at themselves in the mirror. I do it too.”

I began to wonder if I had ever really seen myself at all. Many years ago a street artist attempted my cariacature. It was rubbish and looked nothing like me; and I told him so. “Consider a career change,” I told him. “Motorway maintenance is undemanding,” I said, meaning to be helpful but he took against me. I digress. Now I’m wondering if the reason I didn’t recognise the face in the picture, was because it wasn’t smiling. What if, right this minute, a former street artist is digging a trench on the hard shoulder of the A42, all because of me?

“Do you do it? Smile I mean?”

“Of course I do. Look.”

Flo stepped alongside me and faced into the mirror, and she smiled.

And there we stood. Two idiotic friends, smiling at themselves like simpletons. Not looking youthful exactly but both afraid of consequences if they stopped.