The bathroom lighting I rearranged my whole life around
For four years she brushed her teeth in the dark and kept two light bulbs wrapped in a dish towel. Then the landlord replaced her bathroom fixture while she was at work.
This is a composite story. Names and personal details are invented and combined from real experiences people in this community have shared.
Personal experiences are individual and aren’t medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your own health.
The maintenance man had left a note on the toilet tank: Replaced vanity light, old one had a short. Much brighter now. He had drawn a small sun.
Jo Kessler read it at 9:40 at night, still in her kitchen clogs, flour dried into the creases of her knuckles, and flipped the switch.
The new fixture was a long white bar of LED, the kind of light they use to inspect diamonds. Her whole face arrived in the mirror at once. The pitted scars along both cheekbones, left over from a war with acne she had technically won at nineteen. The brown marks it had left behind like tide lines. The texture on her chin that looked, in that light, like pie dough before the egg wash.
She turned it off. She stood in the dark for a full minute. Then she went to the kitchen, tore a sheet of parchment off the roll, and taped it over the light.
Four years in the half-dark
The old fixture had three bulbs. Jo had unscrewed two of them the week she moved in and wrapped them in a dish towel under the sink, like spare teeth. One weak, warm bulb was left, on the left side. If she stood a little to the right of the faucet, her face fell into a soft brown shadow, and she could put on mascara in it and believe she looked like everyone else.
She was thirty-one and a pastry cook at a hotel restaurant downtown. Her shift started at four in the morning, which had turned out to be the perfect cover for a life arranged around not seeing herself in good light. She brushed her teeth in the dark. She showered with the door open to the hall light and was out before the steam cleared off the mirror. At work she had hung a clean apron on the hook that happened to be in front of the little mirror by the walk-in, and nobody had ever moved it.
She knew every light in her life by its cruelty. The staff restroom at the hotel: flickering fluorescent, a crime scene. Her mother's bathroom: a makeup mirror with a magnifying side that Jo turned to face the wall every Thanksgiving. The visor mirror in her car, which she had not flipped open in six years.
Her girlfriend, Mae, fixed bicycles for a living and had the calm of someone who spends all day with small parts. Mae called the bathroom "the séance room." Early on she'd offered, gently, to put the bulbs back. After a while she just started keeping a flashlight on the back of the toilet, and that was love, too.
Parchment
The parchment stayed up for three weeks. It made the new light soft and yellow and a little grim, like a lamp in a tent. Jo told herself it was fine. Parchment could handle an oven. It could handle a light fixture.
What undid it was a croissant.
The kitchen had a new cook that month, a nineteen-year-old named Dev who was terrified of the laminated dough. He kept pulling trays out and staring at the tops, trying to guess from the color whether the inside had worked. On his fourth tray Jo picked one up, tore it open with her thumbs, and held the torn side up to the light so he could see the honeycomb.
"Stop guessing from the outside," she told him. "Cut it open. Look at it. It's just information. It can't hurt you."
She heard it about an hour later, driving home in the gray part of the afternoon, and she had to pull into a gas station and sit there with her hands on the wheel.
Looking at it
She made the appointment the next morning, before she could talk herself out of it. She had seen a dermatologist once, at nineteen, and had come away with the idea that the scars were simply the price of having survived. The new one was a quiet woman with very steady hands who switched on an exam lamp brighter than the maintenance man's bar and looked at Jo's face for a long time, without any hurry, as if it were a croissant.
She explained that the scars and the brown marks were two separate problems, on two separate clocks. The marks would fade faster, especially if Jo stopped letting the sun darken them. The scars were slower, a matter of months and a series of visits, and she was careful to say better, not gone.
So Jo did the work, which was mostly boring. Sunscreen every morning, even at 3:30 a.m., because the drive home was in full sun. Her hands off her chin, which she hadn't realized she picked at while she proofed dough. Bed at eight-thirty, with Mae recording the shows they used to watch together. And a lot of reading, late, about what else people did, most of which she decided against, and a little of which she didn't.
Mae sent her a story about a pharmacist who took the same photo every Sunday by the same window. The next Sunday Jo peeled the parchment off the light, stood in front of the mirror at the same time as the week before, and took one of her own. It was the first photo of her face she had taken on purpose since college.
For a long time the Sunday photos looked the same. Then, around the fourth month, she lined up the first and the newest, and the brown marks had faded to the color of weak tea, and the texture on her chin had softened in a way she had to lean in to see. The scars were still there. They were quieter. She looked like a person who worked early and slept enough, which was now true.
3:40 a.m.
On a Tuesday in February, Jo walked into the bathroom in the dark, the way she had every morning for four years, and without thinking about it she reached out and flipped the switch.
The long white light came on. She blinked at it. Then she brushed her teeth looking at her own face, the whole two minutes, the way people do.
There was a smudge of flour in her left eyebrow from the day before. She could see it perfectly. She wiped it off with her thumb and went to work.