Read Online Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields - Free Book Online Page A

the summer months. Otherwise, they are not very different from other couples nearing the end of middle age—he being sixty, she fifty-eight, their children grown up and married and living hundreds of miles away.
    In September they will have been married thirty-five years, and they’re already planning a week in New York to celebrate this milestone, five nights at the Algonquin (for sentimental reasons) and a few off-Broadway shows, already booked. They stay away from the big musicals as a rule, preferring, for want of a better word, serious drama. Nothing experimental, no drugged angst or scalding discourse, but plays that coolly examine the psychological positioning of men and women in our century. This torn, perplexing century. Men and women who resemble themselves.
    They would be disinclined to discuss between them how they’ve arrived at these harmonious choices in the matter of play-going, how they are both a little proud, in fact, of their taste for serious drama, proud in the biblical pride sense. Just as they’re a little proud of their mirrorless summer house on the shores of Big Circle Lake.
    Their political views tend to fall in the middle of the spectrum. Financially, you might describe them as medium well off, certainly not wealthy. He has retired, one week ago as a matter of fact, from his own management consulting firm, and she is, has always been, a housewife and active community volunteer. These days she wears a large stylish head of stiffened hair, and he, with no visible regret, is going neatly bald at the forehead and crown.
    Walking away from their cottage on Big Circle Lake, you would have a hard time describing its contents or atmosphere: faded colors and pleasing shapes that beg you to stay, to make yourself comfortable. These inviting surfaces slip from remembrance the minute you turn your back. But you would very probably bear in mind their single act of forfeiture: there are no mirrors.
    Check the medicine cabinet in the little fir-paneled bathroom: nothing. Check the back of the broom cupboard door in the kitchen or the spot above the dresser in their large skylighted bedroom or the wall over the log-burning fireplace in what they choose to call “the lounge.” Even if you were to abuse the rules of privacy and look into her (the wife’s) big canvas handbag you would find nothing compromising. You would likely come across a compact of face powder, Elizabeth Arden, but the little round mirror lining most women’s compacts has been removed. You can just make out the curved crust of glue that once held a mirror in place.
    Check even the saucepans hanging over the kitchen stove. Their bottoms are discolored copper, scratched aluminum. No chance for a reflective glimpse there. The stove itself is dull textured, ancient.
    This mirrorlessness of theirs is deliberate, that much is clear.
    From June to August they choose to forget who they are, or at least what they look like, electing an annual season of non-reflectiveness in the same way other people put away their clocks for the summer or their computers or door keys or microwave ovens.
    “But how can you possibly shave?” people ask the husband, knowing he is meticulous about such things.
    He moves a hand to his chin. At sixty, still slender, he remains a handsome man. “By feel,” he says. He demonstrates, moving the forefinger of his left hand half an inch ahead of the path of an imaginary razor. “Just try it. Shut your eyes and you’ll see you can manage a decent shave without the slightest difficulty. Maybe not a perfect shave, but good enough for out at the lake.”
    His wife, who never was slender, who has fretted for the better part of her life about her lack of slenderness—raged and grieved, gained and lost—has now at fifty-eight given up the battle. She looks forward to her mirrorless summers, she says. She likes to tell her friends—and she and her husband are a fortunate couple with a large circle of friends—that she can