One Brick at a Time

“The girl in the mirror looked like someone who had been asked to leave.” Her mother used to say: “you don’t walk into a conversation with a face that shows what happened before it.” The red top goes on the floor; beige wool, a white blouse buttoned to the second button from the top, pearls “the kind nobody notices,” hair pulled back smooth. “That wasn’t showing off, it was information. A representative of the Ashford family.” Four minutes to the dean’s office, six hellos — “and every glance laid one more brick back into her.”

When the self is built as status, it gets repaired from the outside: with clothes, with a surname, with the way people look at you. It works — Priscilla walks into the office composed — but this kind of repair has a blind spot: it never touches what actually broke. The scene rhymes with Jacob’s kitchen, where Simon discovered that he “had his own habits”: there, an identity was being assembled out of a first choice of one’s own; here, out of other people’s recognition. One grows from the inside; the other holds only as long as the world keeps nodding. In an hour the world will nod, as it always does. It won’t make things any easier.