The Girl in the Glass by Susan Meissner

Author:Susan Meissner [Meissner, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307730435
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

My mother loved Carnival. In the gallery of my mind, in one of the images I have of her, she is dressed in Carnival regalia, as beautiful as a fairy princess—all glitter and diamonds and feathers. She is showing me her dress in this memory, and I am asking her if I can come with her to the theater where she has staged a play. She is bending down to place an errant, downy feather on my head. Then she kisses me and says, “When you are older, Nora.” And I ask her if I can have a dress just like that one, and she says, “You can have this one. I’ll save it for you.”

I never saw the dress again. I looked. I asked. But by the time I asked about it, several years had passed since I had last seen it. No one knew which dress it was. She had many beautiful dresses, and they’d been given away or sold. I only wanted that one because she twirled in that dress when I asked her to. She hummed a little tune, and it made me laugh.

She also loved music. There is a painting of her holding a piece of sheet music that looks very much like the portrait of her in her wedding dress. But there is no little dog in this one. It soothes me to know she loved music and that she staged concerts and plays at her villa and the palace, even though she did not play for me. Music is the language of the soul. Music captures our prayers and hopes and joys—and yes, our sorrows—and gives them voice, just as the paintings and the statues give them dimension.

Nurse told me my mother was fond of games too.

Her face was sad when she said this, as if she wished to warn me that some games are too dangerous to be played. I understand now that unlike music and art, games do not give voice and dimension to our dreams and desires. Games exist to make sport of them, for our entertainment. Games produce victors.

And wherever there is a winner, there is by necessity, the one who lost.

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