Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

You would have more time to fix everything.

The Christmas gathering was still in full swing in the living room, a cluster of uncles discussing the recent election over libations, a circle of cousins inspecting old photograph albums, two or three toddlers playing with crumpled gift wrapping in the shadow of the imposing tree, when she excused herself and slipped away. The noise of the party receded quickly, became a jolly hum diffused in the succession of high-ceilinged rooms. As she crossed a sudden strip of silence, she was conscious of the blunt clatter of her heels (bought used, just for the occasion, at her neighborhood thrift shop) against the hardwood floors.

In the foyer, at the foot of the staircase, stood the second, smaller tree. When they had pulled up the driveway the night before, it had shone through the glass-paneled front door like a many-splintered, Cubist image of Christmas, each diamond-shaped pane bearing a burst of white light within a nest of dark green fir, all dusted with the snow of glass frosting. “Your parents have a glass front door?” she had cried.

Paul had laughed, but she had been too astonished to join in his laughter.

She had not known that houses like this really existed.

The foyer was deserted now save for a little boy in a plum-colored velvet suit, the son of one of Paul’s many cousins, whom she had not yet learned to distinguish. His head tilted back, he stood staring up at the tree. She was about to slip past with a vague smile when the boy turned to her.

“Our tree has lollipops on it, you can pull them off and eat them,” he said. “This tree is all grown up. Can you keep a secret? I have to whisper.”

She nodded and crouched before him. Children made her nervous. He poked at a lower branch where a pinkish angel circled slowly, its brittle wings sparkling with illusory sugar, then breathed in her ear: “Angels taste dusty.”

“Oh, but these angels are not for eating,” she said. “Every night, when everyone in the house goes to sleep, they leave their trees and fly to the bedrooms of little boys and girls to wish them sweet dreams and sing beautiful songs and—”

“You talk funny,” said the boy. “I’m hungry. I want my mom.”

She watched him waddle off, when a creak sounded above her, and, glancing up, she saw Paul on the landing, leaning over the curve of the staircase. Feeling embarrassed, as if caught in a small lie, she rose and went up to meet him. He pulled her into a bear hug, and for one instant they tottered a bit precariously at the top of the steps.

“Everyone loves you,” he sang into her hair.

Extricating herself, she inspected him in some surprise. He stood towering above her, chuckling and swaying, his shirttails untucked, his auburn hair plastered over his moistened forehead, his eyes glazed with elation that was ever so slightly unfocused. He looked very young, a bit blurry at the edges, perhaps, but just as wholesome as ever.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” she said. “You’re tipsy!”

“I’m celebrating,” he said. “You are so beautiful tonight. You should always wear diamonds. Everyone loves you. Uncle Curtis said you look like a porcelain doll.”

His inebriation had an unmistakable quality of relief to it, of exhaling after the stiffness of tense expectation. She knew, of course, that his family had been nervous about meeting her, but it had not occurred to her until now that he had been nervous as well. Her smile wavered, as she struggled to ignore a minute pinprick of disappointment.

The grandfather clock began to chime in the polished depths of the house. When the faint jingle of crystals in the chandelier overhead died in the wake of the tenth boom, she said, “I think I’ll turn in, I’m tired. I thanked your parents already. Everyone has been so kind. Come kiss me good night later if you think it’s all right.”

Paul was staying in his childhood room; she had been given the guest suite.

Once behind the closed door, she kicked off her shoes, sank down on the velvet vanity bench, and looked at the blue and silver room poised in the vanity’s mirror. The mirror room was flawless. The glossy silk duvet had not a wrinkle on it; the light blue curtains fell to the dark blue of the rug in beautifully sculpted curves; elegant flocks of lamps, vases, and clocks lined up in stately symmetry on antique tables and nightstands. It took her only one moment of contemplating the perfection to realize that things were not as she had left them. Seized by a childish suspicion, she turned around and stared at the room itself. As one would expect, the original was no different from its reflection, and therefore the silent dark-skinned woman with a feather duster whom she had encountered gliding on slippered feet in the upstairs hallway must have remade the bed she herself had made, rather haphazardly, that morning, as well as pulled the curtains closed and removed the chaos of lipsticks, tissues, and clothes she had strewn on dressers and flung among pillows while getting ready for the party some hours before.

She faced the mirror again.

The girl in the mirror, she saw, looked somehow different too, made subtly foreign by the sparkling of dainty teardrops in her ears and a brighter flash on her finger. She lowered her eyes. On the vanity’s surface, a half-dozen elaborately framed black-and-white photographs of unsmiling brides with wasplike waists stood sentry around an engraved toiletry set much like one she had once admired in the window of a fancy antique shop, with a price tag that had made her laugh. Picking up the heavy brush, she tried to read the initials but could decipher only the first, M, the other two letters choked past the point of recognition by the virulent proliferation of Victorian scrolls. She ran the brush through the tangle of her hair, once, twice, then set it back down; objects here were clearly not meant to stray too far from their allotted places. Next to the toiletry set, a round silver tray bore a precise arrangement of perfume bottles, some severely geometrical, others plump, still others twisted in flirtatious spirals, all crowded by their saffron, topaz, honey doubles in the mirror. She chose one at random, dabbed a bit in the hollow of her neck, and looked up.

“Charmed,” she said, aloud, to the mirror girl.

The mirror girl smiled back most graciously. She looked perfectly at home in her perfect Cinderella bedroom, if one paid no heed to the somewhat wild, startled look in her Scythian eyes and the pair of scuffed black pumps with soiled insoles, sprawled with all the indecency of peasant abandon in the middle of the lovely blue carpet.

The scent was sweet with vanilla, and a trifle stale—an older woman’s smell. She took a cotton ball from a gilded crystal bowl and started rubbing at her neck, thinking of a poem she could write—each verse an enigmatic vignette reflected in the same mirror, a massive Renaissance mirror that would start out in some palace in Florence or Siena five centuries before and end up in an American suburb in the present day and age—when there sounded a delicate tap on the door.

“Come in,” she called out, leaping to shove her unseemly shoes to the wall.

“I hope I’m not disturbing,” Paul’s mother said, flowing across the threshold in her queenly, straight-backed manner. “Paul told me you were going to sleep soon.”

“Thank you again, Mrs. Caldwell, the party was delightful.”

“Please.” It sounded like a sentence of its own on Mrs. Caldwell’s lips. “Call me Emma. I wanted to give you this.” Carefully she lowered a large white box onto the bed and lifted the lid. “It was my mother’s, and then mine. It’s been in storage, but I had it cleaned just before you came up. It’s only a thought, you don’t have to use it if you don’t like it, perhaps you’d rather choose your own, or maybe you have something in your family already—”