Verified by 
I haven't looked into a mirror in four days.
That is, except the castanet-sized one in which I apply makeup every morning. Besides that, I almost never look.
Yes, this is possible. But no, I am neither blind nor a guru nor a saint who shuns worldly attachments nor an animist who believes that my mirror image is another me.
My gym has mirrored walls. My fellow members watch themselves work out, bright tattoos rippling like cartoons. But if I keep my eyes down, I see only drains and carpet and machines whose buffed steel bars blur everything.
I walk daily for miles, past countless car windows and storefronts and other reflective surfaces without a glance. Call it a skill I've learned. Call it a sickness. Passing something shiny, I avert my eyes. Most people can't resist and stand transfixed, sleeking their hair behind their ears. Not I. Just as recovered alcoholics look away from martini-shaped neon signs, I look away from polished surfaces. Sliding doors. Spoons.
Okay, I look when I must, such as at the hair salon or when dressing for weddings. Rare.
My closet door always stands open so that the long mirror on its front faces the wall. Our bathroom had a mirror once but, detached during repairs, it was not replaced. My husband barely notices. Not because he avoids his own reflection, as I do mine, but because he says appearance doesn't matter if you're happy. He also says I am beautiful, which I do not dispute because he hates being disputed and because, who knows, it might be true. Probably not, but at least theoretically. At least compared to other women fifty-plus who dye their hair but have never had plastic surgery. At least compared to women fifty-plus who are prostitutes and meth addicts on reality TV.
I do not know for certain. I have never known and I might never know. Not that it matters anymore. Not that it ever should. But long ago, before it did, I was a child with bangs and small, regular features that could turn out either way. I watched my mother scowling into mirrors. Puffing out her cheeks, arching her neck to make a double chin, she punched herself in the stomach and hissed Fat ugly pig.
You would not find her fat or ugly, nor a pig. She was plump when young. Passersby in Central Park oinked at her. Or so she said, and why would she lie? But all her life, she had high cheekbones and a fine straight nose and such a flair for modish makeup, clothes and heavy silver jewelry as to have been magazine-ready if cover girls had been fat in the 1940s. Which they weren't, and that's the point.
She was 33 when colitis made her howl with pain while passing blood-streaked undigested hanks of everything she ate. In eighteen months it halved her weight. Cortisone worked, but by then she had learned not to eat. She eked out each day for the next fifty years on peppermints and instant coffee. Which is how I grew up watching a thin person telling her reflection it was fat. And watching a reasonably pretty person telling her reflection it was monstrous.
Stalin knew about suggestibility. Say anything enough and it becomes true, or as good as true. Say "fat" and "ugly" about a face, any face. Yours. Say it to yourself. Your spouse. Your child to whom you also say that everything you say, and only everything you say, is true. Say it day after day like liturgy and lo: Your jowls stretch, shudder and sag. The skin spanning your neck and chin becomes a swag. Keep chanting Fatuglypig and your eyebrows vanish. Whisper it with teeth gone cockroach-dark. Repeat Fatuglypig until your witnesses - only your closest kin - enter your world in which all but movie-star looks are gross and every mirror is a magnifying glass. Your witnesses - whom you love most - will never trust their eyes now. Fatuglypig is the curse that binds them. Say it. Proclaim it so that truth always evades them and they must forever ask: Is she, am I, are we ugly and fat or are we not?
And this is how I learned that being fat means having failed. That being fat means being ugly. That being ugly means having lost your right to live. God created your looks, picking features just as you do when playing with Mister Potato Head. Making you fat and/or ugly is how He proves He hates you. If He loved you, He would have given you longer eyelashes. A nicer neck.
I always knew that some people were born appalling or deformed, and others got that way through war, illness and injury. I saw lepers, veterans, the napalmed and those kids at school with giant birthmarks. Their misfortune only made me more keenly aware of what I thought was mine.
And this is how I learned that girls stare into mirrors constantly, which as a girl I must. But I must do it more than other girls because I also learned that our family gains weight around the face. Other families do not. They gain weight in their waists or thighs, which can be camouflaged. But just our luck: A face is always on display. This (and only this) is why I wished I was a veiled woman forced to show only her eyes, or that I lived in some land of the blind whose citizens knew me solely by touch. Surely, I thought, their fingers would find me acceptable.
I grew up glaring into mirrors and vaulting through doorways to confront them as if they might yield different results when caught off-guard. But no. Always those same small features that could go either way: nutmeg freckles, chocolate eyes that matched my hair, so regular as to look manufactured. Inspecting that perfectly oval face with its tiny teeth and harmless button nose, I called my almost-olive skin yellow, sallow and khaki as I arched my neck to make a double chin.
Watching me, Mom sighed in consolation I'm sorry sorry sorry, this is my fault, not meaning me cursing my looks but the looks themselves. When at twelve I sprouted traces of a mustache, she traced my lip with her finger and intoned This is my legacy.
Well, yes.
At twenty, I quit eating for a few years, which I spent staring at mirrors while gauging my facial width with tape measures. At thirty, my new husband made me eat.
And this is how I learned that looking into mirrors feels like the end of the world.
Somewhere past 45 I reached a point at which I thought I looked OK. This was a shock. I said You got what you wanted. Now stop. When I quit looking into mirrors I was neither fat nor thin and neither young nor old and neither fabulous nor hideous. Smart gamblers know exactly when to fold their cards and walk away. Recovered alcoholics walk past bars. I walk past glass.
I know more or less how I look. My small regular features have survived my loathing like blithe little rocks. I have eaten and exercised the same for eighteen years, so any slight change in my facial weight, those mobile micrograms, I need not see. Not now. If I look worse and worse, I need not know. After a life spent trolling all flaws like a cruel town crier, I owe myself this abstention. Call it denial. Call me weak. Call me a prisoner.
Maybe someday I will be over this. Maybe someday I will be normal like you and gaze at myself and shrug. My beef with God is not that He gave me this face but that He gave Mom hers. They say He knows all, yet could He not love her enough to make her look like a movie star?
