Chapter 1: The Empty Mirror

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   Naomi had made her escape to the restroom on the excuse of “retouching her lipstick”, a typical enough excuse for her date to swallow without question. Trying and failing to find a conversation topic that didn’t make her yawn or throw him into a confused silence, she had finally pulled out the ladies’ room card as a last-ditch solution. Tom was his name (as generic as it could get for a white male in his mid-twenties); he had simply nodded, understanding perhaps the womanly need to desperately touch up her makeup or fix her hair, particularly in the middle of a date as successful as theirs. In his eyes, clearly, everything was going well—not splendidly, no side-splitting laughter or heart-warming childhood stories, but well. The spring rolls had been small, but crispy. Their papaya salad had arrived on time, with just enough dressing for a light toss, but not an overwhelming drench. Their waiter was friendly but not overbearing. It was all Tom could ask for, on what was likely his fourth or fifth blind set-up. In his standards, yes, this was a date as mundane and successful as any. 

   The women’s room door was heavy and janky beneath Naomi’s push; it required an extra pulse of strength from her upper arms, which were fortunately toned and firm from her latest workouts at the gym. Inside, the lights were dim, and the air smelled like a sickly herb-y diffuser. There was a row of three cubicles, all grey. The concrete wall behind the single ivory sink was grey, too. A quintessential public restroom at a moderately-priced, average-rated Vietnamese restaurant on Harvey Street. A “casual Southeast Asian dining experience”, Yelp had promised. Three stars out of five. It had lived up to its expectations, which in Naomi’s case, hadn’t been much.

   Naomi sighed. Average, average, average. That was the only word that punched her brain throughout the entire evening. Another less polite description would be boring. Naomi was not used to boring dates. She was not used to being set up on blind dates, period. Just like her escape to the restroom, the set-up was a last-resort, undoubtedly unsavory but inevitably necessary solution—or so her friend Jamie had said when she kindly nudged Naomi to try out an evening at Han Hoy with Tom the twenty-something brand marketer. It had been a mistake to say yes, Naomi knew. In the past hour that they spent together, she had learned that Tom had been an econ major in college. Tom liked the color navy blue. Tom ate tuna sandwiches for lunch. All of this she learned not from his direct words, but the subtle snippets of dialogue she managed to fork out of him between bites of his salad, or even the observations she made while having nothing to do but watch him eat his salad. If there was one more boring detail about Tom that she had missed, no problem, Tom would fill her in with his exceptional ability to speak through silence. There was no other way of describing it. Tom said nothing, and yet told her everything she needed to know. No more discussion would be needed with Tom the econ major. She could already see where this date would end. 

   But still, Naomi had agreed to come, and she had steamed her black silk Nanette Lapore dress from the wrinkles it had collected in the back of her closet, exchanged her plain studs for pearl earrings, and put on stockings under her heels. She had arrived at the restaurant on Harvey Street at exactly seven twenty-nine, painfully overdressed, and suffered the consequences of her own overestimation inside the cramped and stuffy room, filled to the brim with mostly Asian families, potted tropical plants, the smell of pho broth steaming over bowls hailed by small women shouting in Vietnamese to the small, visible kitchen. Almost no one chose a Vietnamese restaurant for a first date venue, and here were the reasons why. There were numerous acceptable dining options for a date, all in this same neighborhood, that would have at least somewhat preserved her dignity (and her dress). Italian. Sushi. Steak. Even Thai food, for crying out loud. Had Naomi had any better prospects, she wouldn’t be in here, now, in a dingy public restroom, letting her pho get cold. 

   It was when Naomi leaned over the sink to turn the faucet that she saw it for the first time. At first, she blinked, as if her eyes needed to adjust to an abrupt change in brightness. But the restroom was just as dimly lit as it had been a moment before she lifted her head. No, it wasn’t the lighting that made her squint with confusion. It was the mirror—or rather, the empty frame above the sink where the mirror should have been. 

   She stared at the spot for a moment. It gave her the strangest feeling. There was a clear outline of a square where a mirror would naturally hang. The bathroom was small and rather grim, but it was by no means unkempt or revoltingly run-down. There was no indication or reason for a mirror not to be in the spot reserved for it. And yet the white tiled frame held nothing. It was a bare canvas, as grey as the cement wall behind it.

   The unexpectedness and the initial abnormality of the sight unsettled her. She wasn’t sure why, she couldn’t pinpoint it, but something about it felt wrong and unnatural. It was like she had drawn the curtains of a changing room stall, and seen the naked preparation of something (or someone) that had not been ready to be shared with the world. Everything about it rubbed the opposite direction of Naomi’s principles: a mirror had not been put up, and yet the restroom had been opened to the public anyways. It had ignored the requirements of a proper facility, and begun operating in incompletion. It had broken the rules, and Naomi’s rigid procedural standards could not take it in. It was unbearable. It was suffocating. It was simply wrong. 

   Her problem with the mirror (or lack of) wasn’t just with its principles. It was also with its futility. The empty space served no purpose. She could do none of the things she had been set on distracting herself with in the restroom: fixing her hair, reapplying her lipstick, her powder—anything that would have stalled time for a good five, ten minutes. All that was out the window (metaphorically, as a physical one was lacking, among other things). It was as if this mirror, or this restroom, or even the owner of this restaurant had plotted against her in some cruel prank to keep her glued to her date. It was, to Naomi, a personal offense. An injustice.

   But often, looking at something twice or three times more tends to wear off the initial disturbance of a first glance. Humans, after all, are very good at adjusting what they see to what they would like to see. Naomi looked at the mirror-less spot, then again, then another time, and each time her head leaned a little bit more to the right. Her eyes narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again. Finally, she shook her head, blinked, and came to a conclusion: a mirror that should have been there was not, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was a fact that she would have to accept. Just like the inevitable demise of her night with Tom. 

   She was about to turn back, to return to her table (she hadn’t even opened touched her lipstick, but Tom would hardly notice) when something caught her eye. It couldn’t be anything reflected back—there was no mirror, that was the only thing she had established. And still, in that flat, dull grey space, there was a glint. A tiny but unmistakable glimmer of something that drew Naomi back. She looked at it again. It had disappeared. No, there it was again. Yes, for certain this time, it was definitely there.

   Naomi’s index finger first touched the grey cement; it was cold and hard against her soft flesh. She leaned her head closer. The tip of her dark curl, a single piece in the front that had escaped her otherwise impeccable messy low bun, grazed one of the white tiles outlining the empty square. The rest of Naomi’s fingers followed after. Soon, all five tips were flat against the cement surface.

   As soon as her hand made contact with the mirror-less spot, the shimmer was gone. Like a speck of dust caught in her eye, or an imagined substance in the ether that appears after you blink or adjust from darkness to bright, glaring light. 

   Naomi shook her head for what was probably the second or third time. It took that many shakes, it seemed, to get rid of all the nonsense from her head. She swung open the door and left. She couldn’t even apply her lipstick. The bathroom didn’t have a stupid mirror. 

   “That was fast,” Tom said, neither cheerfully nor indifferently, but somewhere awkward in the middle. 

   “Yep,” Naomi said, avoiding eye contact. “Not all of us take five hours in the restroom.” 

   Tom stared at her. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

   Naomi raised a brow. She didn’t think she had said anything too incomprehensible. “I said,” she said with a hint of impatience, “Not all girls are bathroom hoarders.” 

   But Tom continued to blink impassively. He looked at Naomi for a long, still moment. So long, Naomi was almost tempted to flee to the bathroom once more.       “Are you speaking in Vietnamese?” 

   “Huh?” Naomi said. “What are you talking about? Can you not hear me? I’m speaking English. This is English, in case you didn’t know.” She knew she sounded rude, but she no longer cared; she was slowly losing more and more patience with Tom. 

   “I’m sorry, I don't have a clue what you’re saying,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Please switch back to English. I didn’t even know you were fluent in Vietnamese. Which is fascinating, but I’m afraid I can’t understand a bit of it.” 

   “What the hell is wrong with you?” Naomi said, nearly shouting. A few heads from nearby tables turned their way. “Does this sound like Vietnamese to you?” 

   A server, a tiny Vietnamese woman in her forties, heard her this time. She came marching up to their table and began barking at Naomi in rapid, loud Vietnamese.       Naomi didn’t need to know the language to see that the lady was annoyed, probably angry. And she clearly expected Naomi to understand every word of her speech. 

   Naomi stared at her, blank-faced. But the server didn’t give her a chance to respond. She turned on her heels and briskly walked away. She was already whisking away another tray of dirty bowls and cups from the table behind them.  

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   Inside the empty grey-walled, dingy women’s restroom of a mid-ranged Vietnamese restaurant, another Naomi stood behind the empty frame of where a small square mirror should have hung. 

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   That Naomi smiled.

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