Flaw Salad

Water poured from an immaculate faucet as Jodi stood frozen before her bathroom mirror. Her hands, holding toothbrush and paste, rested beside the porcelain sink as she leaned toward her reflection. She pored over every feature of an irretrievably-aging face. Time had furrowed into the corners of her eyes and around the edges of her lips. Hairs now sprung from mocking follicles in unpredictable patterns across her cheeks—a cruel game she could never win, no matter how diligent her tweezing.

She recalled a time when her lips had been full and soft, gentle deliverers of invitations and wry smiles. What she saw now were the deflated, lifeless bearers of harsh grimaces and pursed disapprovals. Lines from her cheeks crafted her face into a permanent frown. She forced the corners upward, attempting warmth and compassion, hoping to conjure something of her premarital, pre-parental self, but all she saw was fatigue.

Years of lectures and worry had eroded her cheer. She marveled at mothers whose light shone in the presence of their children. She had long watched them beaming and laughing at parks and pools and school pickups, and she felt something must be wrong with her wiring because more often than not, her children exhausted her. They had taken her light away. What was once pink and soft was now gray and hard, and by the time they were done, her selfish children would leave her brittle, breakable, bereft. Her hardness was her last vestige of strength—a strength that had once come from buoyancy and lightness but was now founded in her ability to remain, feet planted, the steadfast head of her needy family.

She longed for a partner. Her husband had proven useful for little more than the bi-monthly deposit of unremarkable earnings. He was, by all other accounts, a tremendous failure and disappointment. His growth, emotionally, had arrested in his twenties, and he was more child than man, constantly whining, lying, justifying, shirking, and sneaking. His growth, physically, had continued into corpulence, and nothing survived of the passion she had felt at the outset of their marriage, when his body had been energetic and youthful, before it morphed into a grotesque blob. Her reflection bore her disgust.

Even as her heart filled with bile, she knew his failures were equally her own. She stared at the woman who had buried her husband’s dreams in a mortgage and children and medical debt. What artistic spirit remained in him was stifled by the daily demands of their suburban life. His profession was an unhappy one, and he returned each evening to the cold, hard face she saw frowning in the mirror.

Her right hand released the toothbrush and rose to her lips. She ran fingers across them as she remembered the first time he kissed her. It was a snowy, February evening. They had been flirting for months at university, finding excuses to walk together or eat together or stay up late talking together. He had a girlfriend in another state, and she pretended that didn’t bother her. She pretended that didn’t excite her. She pretended she didn’t love the thrill of being The Other Woman. They had been growing closer and closer—too close, her roommate warned, for someone who was attached to someone else—until that February snowfall, when the flakes were larger than dimes and floating lackadaisically through streetlights’ orange glow, when he stopped in his tracks, grabbed her mittened hand, and pulled her face to his. Sixteen years later, the intensity of his lips, of her desire, still burned through her cheeks, and her eyes sparked with a momentary hint of youth before they flooded with pain.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she hunched over the still-flowing faucet, succumbing to great, heavy sobs. As she wept for all that was lost, her grief fell into the basin and joined the rush drainward.