I’m age appropriate in your mirror. What I tell my wife, who looks back at me in the same mirror, only slightly different than same--watching me from this specific angle, inches from my own. She sees what the mirror does and it’s fine, there’s gray in his beard and gray about his temples and wrinkles around his eyes and across his forehead. He’s made her promise no needle will ever be welcome near her face, injecting botox or other such things: he want signs of age as much as he wants the woman aging. This doesn’t make him virtuous or any better than he is, this man I happen to give to the mirror; he simply can’t stand the eeriness of kissing a deadened face. She’s a lively one, always has been, it would make no sense, would contradict her natural excess of energy, injecting botulism subcutaneously into her forehead or cheeks. She’s worried about her lips mostly. Thin as they are, they’ll only thin down more until there’s nothing left but a cut line holding back a skeletal yield of teeth. She has great teeth. The world loves her smile. Sure I’m being ironic, I want a reaction, this woman in the mirror, switch her dread to irritation or an eye roll. Aging’s unfair to women, she has said hundreds of hundreds of times before, but she’s aged into the saying and it feels not at all rhetorical to live it.
Our reflections make a good pair, the lighting’s awful. Astringent and fierce, amplifying every wrinkle and early warning liver spot. Give us ten, twenty years and our reflections won’t even miss a beat turning away. She’ll not pause to notice me, he’ll hardly scan her generous parts in dumb admiration.
The sink's running and we’re standing shoulder to shoulder brushing our teeth. The couple before us follow suit, imitating to mock or learn how to accomplish this one, small, workaday goal: the teeth they don’t have but that we do, to run bristles over them in such a fashion, to brush them. Teeth age much as faces yet it’s possible to whiten them, every dentist would be happy to take good money and do so. The teeth outlast the face and no cosmetic bacteria can keep skin paralyzed long enough it won’t eventually slide off its cranium. No need to tell my wife any of this. She’s a worrier, wired for disquiet. For now she’s worried about early onset invisibility, her mortal portion of beauty leaving her never to return. The mirror doesn’t flatter. But it doesn’t have a history either. I know her, I’ve lived with her, by degrees throughout the days and weeks and months I've held her when she's under some feeling that's beyond me.
There they go, the eyes, rolling. It’s different for you, she says. There’s evolutionary cruelty at play. Of course you’ll stay because you love me but that doesn’t mean your body wants to. We could talk this way all evening then through the evening while we sleep. Maybe it’s the mirrors, I could tell her. They don’t give back to us what we make certain to give each other. They’re indifferent, calculating, selfish. They’re gods without any understanding of affection. The worst would be if we woke one morning on the other side looking out, back at ourselves. Mimicking the two we are, shoulder to shoulder, one joking to distract and console the other. The other wanting to still the usual gradual harsh course of a life. She’s afraid it means even if she has someone she’ll be unsure. His reassurances hurt, that very reason. Why would he try to convince if really he was working to convince himself, so when time comes and she’s old he might be all the more convincing? Tonight, he says the next evening in the bathroom, let’s try something different. Turn around, he says, turning himself. She turns and there they stand facing the shower curtain, ignorant of whatever the backs of their heads might look like in a mirror. Brush teeth, pull back curtain, into the shower spit. Brush, spit. Finished, pull curtain closed, reach in and turn the hot and the cold. A shower for no one, sudsy saliva breaking up and rolling live rivulets down the drain. We'll have left by then, buried once again hip by hip in bed. The couple in the mirror stand and watch, wonder where we went. One day soon we'll hold them.
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