Have you ever seen those tiny mirrors that fit in your pocket, the ones that remind you to smile and that you’re beautiful every time you look at them? The ones that show you not smiling even though they insist everything in the world is amazing and you’re amazing? Stupid, bullshit mirrors. I’m always reminded that it’s not the actual mirror telling me that, but it’s ink on plastic put there by some factory worker, undoubtedly not smiling while mass producing them.
Could you imagine a mirror that actually had a consciousness to tell you that? What a good friend that would be, just a mirror that only had the capacity to tell you to smile and that you were beautiful. Ignore the fact that it can’t say anything else, that it couldn’t actually tell you that you were ugly and that the blemish on your face is horrendous and the bags under your eyes make you extremely unattractive.
Just smile.
More.
You can’t imagine? I couldn’t either until my girlfriend brought one of those mirrors home. I remember that day I was sitting on the couch and she strolled in after her first day at her new job. She swung the front door open, holding one of these mirrors in her hand. It was still folded closed, but the smile on her face was already there - one of those big, toothy grins that makes you wonder why exactly someone looks so happy at that moment.
I’m sorry, I’m not usually such a downer, I promise. But retrospectively it’s hard to inject happiness and cheer into a story with this overarching trauma. I’ll do my best though.
I jumped up ecstatically, throwing my hands up in the air as if prompting for the largest hug in all of history. “How was your first day?” I exclaimed, wrapping her up in my arms and lifting her up. She swung her arms around the back of my neck, mirror in hand.
“It was amazing!” she said as I put her back down. She opened the mirror to show me the new gift she got from work. Smile, you’ve got this! was written across the top of the two square inch mirror.
“They’re such a kooky company, look at this fun mirror they gave all of us.”
I reached out to get a closer look at the mirror, but she pulled it back to look into it herself. “It’s so fun having a little mirror to motivate you. It’s like you’re motivating yourself!” She seemed to get stuck in a trance while looking at it, her smile never receding.
“That is fun,” I said, wanting to change the subject and hear more about her day. “What else did you do today?”
“Huh?” she said, never breaking eye contact with her own reflection.
“Your job, honey,” I said, putting my hand on her arm and moving the mirror down. “Tell me about your day.”
“Oh,” she said, “my day. Sorry.” She closed her eyes and shook her head as if coming out of a daze. She put the mirror in her back pocket and continued to have a normal conversation with me, telling me about the training she went through, about the coworkers starting the same day as her, and the icebreaker where one man overshared about his fear of baked beans.
Once the mirror went into her pocket, nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. We opened a bottle of wine to celebrate her first day and cooked some mushroom risotto together, our meal we saved for every special occasion. As we went to bed I watched her place the mirror on the bedside table. She ran her fingers across it as if it were an heirloom and this was a ritual full of memories and familial love. She saw me looking, smiled, and pulled her hand away. “I love you,” she said, rolling over and pulling the cover across.
“I love you too, baby,” I said, turning out the light. As I walked to my side of the bed in the pitch black, my muscle memory my only map to my side of the bed, I tried to keep an eye on the mirror. Realistically I couldn’t see it, but I felt my eyes were drawn to its exact location. I managed to get into the covers on my side of the bed without stubbing my toe and fell asleep pretty quickly. The night went by uneventfully.
The morning, however, was a different story.
I woke up and found I was alone in bed. Not an odd occurrence in itself since she normally got up before I did. I got up and opened the door to the bathroom to relieve myself, but she was already in there getting ready. She stood in front of our big mirror on the wall, but held the tiny mirror up to her face while she put on lipstick. Bright, red lipstick. She puckered her lips a couple times to spread it around, then continued applying more.
“What kind of job did you get again?” I joked. “I’ve never seen you wear red lipstick outside of date nights and hanging out with friends on the weekend.” She shrugged, her eyes never moving away from the tiny mirror.
“Do you ever wish your smile could be bigger?” she asked me. I was about to start peeing when she asked me this, but decided I could wait a minute or two to dig into the strange morning question.
“Bigger? What do you mean?”
She put the mirror down, closed the lipstick, and finally turned to look at me. I looked at the text on that stupid mirror again, Smile, every day is a new day! written on the top. She looked me up and down as if me urinating with her in the bathroom was not a common occurrence. Before I could ask about the change in text on the mirror, she said, “Just, I don’t know. Bigger. Do you ever feel like your smile could be more?”
“Isn’t it too early for metaphors?” I asked. “If I scowl too much you can just tell me.”
She smiled then with her red lipstick complete, possibly wider than I’ve ever seen. Looking back on it, it definitely was the widest, but at the time I thought she was just exaggerating to emphasize her metaphor of me needing to smile more. I grinned back at her, showing as many teeth as I could. She then turned to walk out of the bathroom to leave me in peace. I took care of business, but by the time I left the bathroom her car was already leaving the driveway.
The bathroom counter was also clear of any tiny mirrors for me to analyze. I convinced myself the company also gave her little strips of text to put into the mirror to motivate them with whatever daily slogan felt right that day. I wrote all of it off as just new job jitters and a stupid, corporate mirror that she appreciated a little too much.
When I came home that evening from work, she was the one sitting on the couch waiting for me. She was holding the mirror in both hands, forearms resting on her thighs, smiling while looking into her reflection. Her red lipstick from earlier in the day had smeared as if she were wiping her lips for too long. She stopped smiling briefly, then squeezed the muscles in her cheeks to what looked like a painful extent in order to smile as big as she could. Tears fell from her eyes to blend with the faded lipstick on her cheeks.
“I can’t…” she said, going back and forth from smiling and crying. “I just can’t smile big enough.”
“Baby,” I said, putting my bag down and walking toward her. “You have a beautiful smile. Why do you think it needs to be bigger? It’s perfect.”
“It’s not perfect,” she said, looking up at me with a smile showing all of her teeth. “Maybe if you could smile bigger, it would motivate me to smile bigger.”
“I thought you liked my smile,” I said back, concerned she was having a mental breakdown.
“I do. I mean, I did.” she said. Her eyes moved to my teeth and my lips, presumably offended by my lack of smile. “Let me just…”
She jumped up from the couch and shoved her fingers into my mouth, taking advantage of my startled gasp to grab a hold of my bottom teeth and lower jaw. The mirror she was holding dropped to the ground and bounced, mirror side up. My arms flew up to grab her arm which was yanking down on my jaw. My chin was down to my chest at this point, and I was trying to bite down on her fingers to get her to let go. I tried pulling her hand away from my teeth while simultaneously biting down, but until I felt her letting go I didn’t want to stop doing either.
I finally bit down harder and felt the skin of her fingers puncture. She let out a little yelp as her fingers relaxed. I held onto her arms as I relaxed my jaw, then pushed her away and onto the couch once she let go.
“What the fuck!” I yelled as she sat calmly looking at her fingers on the couch. “What is going on with you and that mirror?”
As I was saying the word, she reached down to pick up the mirror and put it on the table in front of her, positioned in a way that she could see herself. “We just…if we could just smile more…” she said, slowly putting her hands in her own mouth. Her jaw slowly widened as she pulled harder and harder on her lower jaw.
“Baby, stop!” I yelled, grabbing her arms to try to pull them out. No matter how hard I pulled I couldn’t loosen her grip or force herself to bite her fingers out like I did. I pulled harder and harder, but after a few seconds I heard a loud crack and a shudder flew through my arm. One side of her jaw had completely broken, the flesh around her lip tightening as it was the only thing holding her lower jaw on that side. The other side of her lips stretched in a smile as she finally let go, her goal achieved.
Well, partially achieved.
She put her hands back in her mouth on the side that hadn’t broken yet. In a panic, instead of futilely grabbing her arms again I reached over to the mirror and threw it onto the ground. I stomped on it, slamming my heel into it and shattering the reflection as a thousand reflections of my heel came down over and over. Unsure if I too had a mental break and stomped a mirror while my girlfriend needed medical attention, I was reassured about my right decision when she screamed in horror and pain.
She never managed to break the other side of her jaw, but when I looked back at her she was in a fetal position, holding the side of her jaw and screaming. Whatever hold that mirror had on her was released, but too late. I went over to her and cradled her, apologizing and telling her everything would be okay without fully knowing it myself. The mirror stared back up at me shattered, but one thing I could make out was some broken text at the top that said Smile, like you mean it!
I called the ambulance and stayed with her the whole time to, and at, the hospital. Once she was stabilized and we were allowed to go home, I put my girlfriend to bed, her jaw sewn shut. I gave her a kiss on the forehead, then went downstairs to start preparing some of her liquid meals. On the way to the kitchen, I decided to stop at the mirror and get rid of all the pieces since I didn’t want any remnant of it left behind in our house.
When I came up to it, I realized the mirror was whole again, showing my reflection as I stared at it in disbelief. At the top, the text read –
Smile, it’s contagious!