Chapter 13 - The Mirror and the Scale
By Saturday afternoon, my hands were raw. We had spent four unbroken hours clearing the neglected plot in the backyard, pulling thick ropes of crabgrass and unearthing rusted paint cans that had been buried under years of rotting leaves.
My knees were stained with black dirt, my hair was tied back in a messy knot with a piece of twine, and my lower back ached with a dull, grinding fire I had never experienced in my entire life.
It was the best I had felt in ten years.
Inside the house, the small bathroom off the hallway was the only room with a functional mirror. It was an old medicine cabinet with tarnished beveled edges, hanging crookedly over a stained porcelain pedestal sink.
I went inside to wash the grime from my face, turning the brass handles until the cold water sputtered and coughed through the pipes. I splashed the icy water over my cheeks, scrubbing away the dust of Lansing loam, and looked up at my reflection.
The hollow, painted perfection was gone. There was no bronzer, no expensive contouring, no porcelain veneer of a trophy wife desperate to maintain her standing in the Bloomfield Hills country club circuit. My nose was sunburned across the bridge. A smear of black dirt marked my cheekbone like war paint. But beneath the mess, my eyes looked alive. They didn't have that glassy, dead look of someone starving on cabbage water and dry gin to fit into a size two gown.
I heard heavy footsteps in the hall, followed by a sudden, jarring thud.
I stepped out of the bathroom. Aaron was standing in the doorway of the master bedroom, staring down at an object on the bare floorboards.
It was an antique bathroom scale—a heavy, mechanical contraption with an iron dial that he must have uncovered from the bottom of an unpacked crate from his father's house.
Aaron stood frozen before it.
He was wearing an old gray t-shirt, soaked with sweat between his shoulder blades. The fabric clung to his back, to the heavy curve of his waist, to the broadness that had made me whisper cruel, cutting jokes to my sister across linen tablecloths.
*“He looks like an unmade bed,”* I had said once, laughing into a flute of champagne while Aaron stood five feet away, pretending he was absorbed in a financial quarterly report. *“I have to hire a trainer just so he doesn’t embarrass me at the gala.”*
The memory struck me with the force of a physical blow. The shame rose in my throat, bitter and acidic.
Aaron stared at the numbers on the round glass dial. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscles jumped under his beard. His hands hovered at his sides, fingers trembling slightly. The man who had faced down Julian Vance without blinking was terrified of a rusted spring inside a metal box.
"Aaron," I said softly, stepping into the hall.
He didn't turn around. His voice was thick, muffled by the weight of a decade of humiliation. "Do you know what Marcus said to me in the elevator the morning of the banquet?"
Marcus had been the Chief Executive Officer.
"No," I whispered.
"He pressed the button for the thirty-fourth floor, looked at my stomach, and said, 'You're carrying too much ballast for a director, Aaron. It looks undisciplined. Clients think if a man can't control his own appetite, he can't manage their risk portfolios. Get a tailored suit that hides it, or I'll give the promotion to Julian.'"
Aaron turned his head slowly, looking at me with eyes that were ancient with pain.
"I didn't eat lunch for three weeks, Claire. I drank black coffee until my stomach bled. And when I put on that gray suit that night, the one that cost three thousand dollars, the buttons were pulling so hard I couldn't draw a full breath. I felt like a pig wrapped in silk."
A tear tracked through the dirt on my cheek. "Aaron, stop..."
"And then I walked into that ballroom," he continued, his voice dropping to a fragile whisper that gutted me completely. "I saw you laughing at the corner table with Julian and Sarah. I walked up behind you to hand you your wrap, and I heard you say, *'If he eats another canapé, the buttons are going to take someone’s eye out.'*"
The silence in the narrow hallway was deafening. Even the radiator stopped its hissing.
"I wanted to die, Claire," he whispered. "I stood on that stage with the microphone in my hand, and every pair of eyes in that room was looking at my belly. Not at the twelve million dollars I had made the firm. Not at the fact that I hadn't taken a vacation in four years. Just at the fact that I had let myself become ugly."
I walked across the floorboards. I didn't stop until my toes touched his work boots.
I reached out, took his large, calloused right hand, and placed it directly over my own waist. My ribs were visible under my dirty t-shirt, the legacy of a woman who had starved herself of calories and love in equal measure.
"I was hollow, Aaron," I wept, looking straight into his eyes. "I made fun of your weight because I had nothing inside me. I had an empty soul, an empty marriage, and an empty life, and making you small was the only way I could feel tall. It was cowardice. It was poison."
I looked down at the scale on the floor.
Without breaking eye contact with him, I drew back my heavy leather boot and kicked the rusted scale. It skidded across the oak floorboards and slammed into the opposite wall with a loud, metallic clatter, the glass dial cracking down the middle.
"We don't weigh our lives anymore," I said, my voice fiercely steady through my tears. "We don't weigh our worth on their scales. You built this life with your sweat, Aaron. You saved your father. You gave me another chance when I deserved to be thrown out into the snow. That’s who you are."
Aaron looked at the broken scale against the baseboard, then back down at me.
A deep shudder ran through his massive chest. He reached out with both arms, pulling me against him with a sudden, crushing strength that pressed all the air from my lungs. I buried my face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of cedar, sweat, and rich, black earth.
May you like
He didn't say anything. But as he held me against the bare walls of that drafty house, I felt hot, wet tears falling into my hair, washing away the last traces of the party where we had lost everything, and clearing the ground for what we were about to build.
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