I call my mother Hannah because she told me to. When I was about seven, she said it was time to stop being a baby and start using her proper name.
“Otherwise,” she said, turning to enjoy her reflection from behind, “the older you get, the more you’ll age me.”
She is a beauty. You’d have to give her that. Tall and dark and glossy, like some kind of racehorse, with legs and curves that people feel the need to stare at in the street. We are not one bit alike.
I am plain-looking, skinny and flat-chested and small, and it suits me. I live in thrift-shop jeans and secondhand sweaters because they come in under budget and under the radar and they’re just easy. I cut my hair short like a boy for the same reason. I’ve banked myself plenty of time and money by never minding too much what I look like. I think my day is about four hours longer than Hannah’s without all the grooming in it. It’s really quite liberating, not giving a shit. What am I missing out on exactly – make-up, brand anxiety and crippling self-doubt about shoes? Big deal. Poor me. If I was in charge, mirrors would be for making sure there’s nothing stuck in your teeth or sticking out of your nose or tucked into your trousers, nothing more. I’m not likely to start staring into one and wishing I was different.
I used to wonder if that’s why Thurston chose me, because I was unremarkable, because I’d be useful to him that way. Every hustler needs an invisible friend. He laughed at me when I asked him.
We were making him a mask out of old, broken sunglasses, sticking the smashed lenses on to a plain latex face, so that when people looked at him, all they would see was repetitions of themselves.
“I like you, Iris,” he said, holding it up in front of his face, pulling the strap to the back of his head, “because you are you.”
I was fourteen. I’d known him on and off for two years and he was the only thing I had worth knowing. It was the nicest thing he could have said to me. My smile just about exploded, reflected at hundreds of angles by his mirrored mosaic of a face.
Hannah and Lowell think I am determined to be ugly. They think my attitude is aimed at them, out of spite. It’s beyond them that somebody would go a whole day without looking in the mirror. They wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without a layer of light-reflecting foundation and an accessory with a three-figure price tag. Looking good is the actual bedrock of their moral code. Presentation is ethics to them, which is why they bought me the dress. Hannah threw it down on my bed like a gauntlet, this loud patterned thing with a belt. I avoided it, walked around it like you would a patch of vomit in the street. I took a shower, pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went downstairs for breakfast.
It was Saturday, the weekend after Hannah called Ernest and agreed to bring me (I think) for a price. Since then, you could see they’d been shopping. Lowell was pacing the kitchen in a stiff pale suit that made him look like a rectangle, like a man in a cardboard box. Hannah had on a mink silk top and a skirt so tight I wasn’t sure she could move. I think she had to cross her legs the whole time to fit into it. They looked like they’d just stepped out of a shop window. I wondered how many hours the two of them had spent fantasising about the scene at Ernest’s deathbed and the muted, elegant, expensive clothing they could suddenly afford to wear. I wanted to put a match to the hem of her skirt and set it alight, drop a hot coal down the neck of his jacket and watch it swallow up the fabric like a black hole.
“Morning,” I said.
Hannah leaned against the kitchen counter, nursing a cigarette for breakfast. My mother often smokes instead of eating. She’d sell you a diet book about it if someone would let her. Her blown smoke bloomed in the bands of sunlit air that striped the kitchen, vanishing in its shadows, expanding to fill the room.
“Kiddo,” Lowell said, like every morning, in his faked transatlantic drawl. “Nice of you to show up.”
“Where’s the dress?” Hannah asked, and I poured myself some cornflakes before I told her it was still in the wrapper.
“Aren’t you going to wear it?”
“Nope. You should definitely take it back.”
Hannah pointed at me with her smoking hand and an inch of ash fell soundlessly on to the soft suede toe of her brand-new shoe.
“Well you can’t go like that.”
“Why not?” I looked down at myself. “I’m always like this.”
“Lowell,” she said, still pointing. “Talk to her.”
Lowell’s jacket was too starched and too big, like the cardboard box was trying to swallow him whole.
“It’s a great dress,” he said, “really on-trend,” as if his opinion mattered, like that would swing it. He talked like one of the girls at my old high school. I thought he’d fit right in there, simpering over labels in the hallways, bitching in the lunch queue about boys.
“So you wear it,” I told him with my mouth full. “Help yourself.”
“Just once,” Hannah said through gritted teeth.
“Just once what?” I asked her, but I knew the answer. She wanted me to slot seamlessly into the picture-perfect lifestyle she had filling the space in her head, to stop being difficult and strange, to dress up and shut up and play along. We stared at each other. She looked away first. I always win that game.
Lowell had already given up and gone back to his magazine. There were lots of people in it he’d stood quite close to over the years. Things were happening. Men more successful than him were starting to lose their hair.
“Let her wear what she likes, Hannah,” he said. “A dying man is going to have other things on his mind.”
My mother put her hands together in prayer at the word ‘dying’ and looked up past the burst radiator stains on the ceiling.
“God knows,” she said, “we could all do with a bit of good luck right now.”
I asked her where she thought God filed that kind of prayer, the please-harm-others-for-my-benefit kind, and she ignored me. “In a box marked DAMNED probably,” I said, “in a whole archive called Be Careful What You Wish For.”
“What do you care?” she asked me. “You’re an atheist, aren’t you? You don’t believe in God.”
“Humanist,” I said. “There’s a world of difference.”
Hannah lit a new cigarette off the old one so she was holding two. She said, all deadpan, like it was the last thing in the world she was really thinking, “You must explain it to me sometime.”
Thurston made a God box once. It was like a mailbox, with a slot, and he wrote on it PRAYERS ANSWERED. You were supposed to write your prayer and post it. That was the idea. He left it for four days on the corner of Westwood and La Conte, near the University. When he went back there was some trash in it, a couple of crushed cans, a banana peel and half a bagel. There was some angry stuff about blasphemers and the wrath of the Lord. And
