The Mirror Stage
by Alyssa Quinn
During her pregnancy, Inez reads Lacan. She reads it at home, in an armchair by the window. Rain spits against the glass and the apartment blues with shadow. Lacan says, The mirror supplies an imaginary wholeness to the experience of the fragmentary real. In the window, her reflection stares back at her—bleached, distorted, now here, now gone.
Inez cannot understand the obstetrician’s urge to say Your baby is the size of a grapefruit. The need to make it more real by lumping it into a litany of objects—mustard seed, cotton ball, lightbulb—strikes her as perverted, though she cannot say quite why.
The OB spreads gel across her stomach. Inez watches. The other woman has slender fingers, short fingernails, cracked skin at her knuckles. Her hands glide across the taut belly, too brief, too brisk. Then they’re gone.
At sunset, the curtains leak with light. The baby is the size of a winter melon. Inez sits in the armchair in her apartment, drinking ginger tea and reading. The paper tag at the end of the tea bag drips liquid in her lap. The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego, the Ego being the result of identifying with one’s own specular image. Specular. The word itself feels dusky, haunting.
Last December, she let herself be fucked in front of the full-length mirror tacked to the back of her bedroom door—a cheap foggy thing with a plastic gold frame left by the previous tenants. Her body folded into a right angle, palms against the glass, and she watched herself. Inez, Inez, Inez, Inez. She heard her name said over and over, until it loosed itself into syllables, became so much empty sound. She wished he would stop saying it.
The baby is a pumpkin. The size. The baby is the size of a pumpkin.
A nurse hangs a pouch of electrolytes and slides a needle into her arm. They always say Now is the time to look away, but Inez never does. She watches from the corner of her eye (she’s afraid they will think she is strange) to see the moment when the needle breaks the tight snug skin. It always seems impossible.
She dilates. The pumpkin-baby has a good heartbeat, the nurses tell her.
“Do you want to watch? We can hold up a mirror.”
“No, thank you,” says Inez.
The baby comes out into the shock of oxygen. Inez watches very carefully as they cut the umbilical, prick the pink pink heel.
Inez gets the hammer, which she keeps under the kitchen sink. She has just come home with the baby—it is sleeping in a drawer lined with blankets.
The mirror on the back of the bedroom door is attached with four old nails. Always a strange pleasure to extract a nail, to slowly pull pull pull—then pop. She does one after the other and the mirror falls to the floor with a thin rattle. She carries it—and the hallway mirror, which she lifted from its hook when she first walked in—out to the dumpster behind the building. A loud metal clang, a splintering of glass.
The bathroom mirror is harder, as it’s attached to the wall. She tries to hang a sheet over it, but there’s not enough of a ledge to attach it. So she grabs a roll of packing tape and her recycling bin full of old newspapers and she covers the glass. The end result is strangely beautiful, she thinks. A patchwork of Tribunes and Dailies. A perfect opacity.
She closes the blinds on the windows, drapes a blanket over the little glossy TV. Every slick surface, hidden.
On the phone with her mother.
“You’re telling me you still don’t have a name?” her mother asks.
“Not yet.”
“What about the birth certificate?”
“They just put ‘Baby Girl’ or ‘Baby Boy.’ They give you up to a year to pick a name.”
“You’re telling me I have to call my grandchild ‘the baby’ for a whole year?”
“Names are weird,” says Inez.
“Oh, Inez,” says her mother.
The baby lies on the living room floor. Inez watches it, trying to imagine being undifferentiated from carpet fibers, from air and light and sound. She has thrown out the stainless steel tea kettle and the wind chime with the little silver moons. She has thrown out the sunglasses with the blue sheen.
She picks the baby up. She loves to hold it, knowing it cannot tell her body from its own. She does not speak to it; words can never get outside of ideas about you and I. Lacan says, Man is an animal at the mercy of language. She remembers her folded body, their perpendicular spines, her own eyes watching.
Impossible to know the night of conception, back when they were fucking once, twice daily, back when they were that insatiable. Maybe it was in front of the mirror—maybe not. It was his idea. He wanted to see her whole body splayed, wanted the white beauty of it in the dark. Or so she thought then. Now, she imagines he wanted not her body but his own, made better, more real, comprehensible for once. They both watched themselves, really. They both became painfully aware of their existence, all the attending loneliness and desire.
The doorknobs are too polished. The little window on the oven door, the bathtub faucet. She finds half a can of white paint in the storage closet on the balcony, and paints over them all.
Going out with the baby is difficult. Reflections wedge themselves in unlikely places; light and water and metal conspire to throw faces back at their owners. So she has her groceries delivered and stays inside. Her mother says she is coming to visit, and Inez tells her traveling with the baby is such a hassle—could she take a taxi from the airport? Would she? Thank you—it is, after all, such a hassle.
The visit, predictably, is bad. Inez, what is going on with the bathroom mirror? Her mother worries she’s gone crazy. Tells her to get out of the house for a while, and so Inez does. She gets on a bus and rides it in circles around the city. The bus smells like a wet mitten. Around her, people are insulated behind hats and coats, silhouetted against the florescence. Inez traces the dark outlines of their bodies with her eyes. When a woman sits next to her, they are careful not to touch.
When she gets home, her mother has scraped the paint from the doorknobs and the oven and the faucets. She has peeled the newspapers off the mirror. Inez’s face pops from every surface—strange, bright eyes that hold her gaze, haunt her.
Her mother stays the rest of the week. When she goes, she says “I don’t understand all that stuff about the mirrors. But the baby will be okay.”
Now they are alone again. Inez and the baby. The baby and Inez. The baby lies naked on the bed, wiggling its little legs. Inez has filled a bath with water she tested on the inside of her wrist. She wonders if this is an accurate gauge, an equivalent delicacy—her wrist-skin for the baby’s soft body. She can’t ever really know.
She picks the baby up, carries it to the bathroom. They stand together in front of the mirror. The baby doesn’t notice. It slides its eyes indiscriminately over everything: mirror, mother, ceiling, bathtub, light. According to Lacan, it will be a few more months before it recognizes its own reflected face, before it sees itself and understands where its body begins, where it ends. It will be a few more months before it looks at her—Inez—and realizes she is something else. It will be a few months, but it will happen.
Inez holds the baby closer, closer, as close as she can get.
ALYSSA QUINN got her MFA from Western Washington in 2016, where she worked as the Assistant Managing Editor of Bellingham Review, and she is now a creative writing PhD student at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Pinch, Indiana Review, Juked, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Dante’s Cartography, is forthcoming from The Cupboard Pamphlet fall of 2019.