Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst

watching me with interest. I focus on each small task completely, letting it occupy all of my mind. Now you heat the oil in the pan.
    Now you plunge your hands into the cold meat and squeeze it between your fingers.
    By seven a.m., the house is filled with the warm scent of it. For the first time in months, it smells like someone lives here. I eat a big plateful, and when I’m done, I feed Lorelei three meatballs, one after another, from my fork. The way she takes them in her teeth is surprisingly delicate. I crawl back into bed and fall into a welcome, dreamless sleep.

17
    After our honeymoon, Lexy and I returned home to her little house, the house with the apple tree in the backyard, and settled in with a fresh sense of adventure. It was September, one of Lexy’s busiest times, workwise - something
    about the changing colors, the new chill in the air, the glimpse of Halloween looming on the horizon, makes
    people think about magic and masquerade in a way they rarely do in the warmer months.
    I loved to watch her work. She made her masks through a lamination process of layering torn bits of paper into a clay mold and brushing them with glue. She had experimented with other methods - there’s a commercially produced paper pulp mixture you can buy, and she had also tried a method of pureeing paper and wallpaper paste in a
    blender - but this was her favorite. Sometimes she left the masks to dry outside in the sun or the wind; more often she used an electric fan. After they were dry, she painted them with acrylic paints and finished them with a coat of varnish.
    She sold her masks at craft fairs and Renaissance fairs and over the Internet, and she also did occasional work for local theater companies; I remember in particular a wonderful donkey head she made for a production of
    A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She had about a hundred
    designs, and she was always coming up with new
    ones. She got a lot of special orders. We’re not far from Washington, so there were always requests for political figures, especially in election years, but she also fulfilled a few more unusual requests: a giant pepperoni pizza for a restaurant trade show, a bashed and bloody cow’s head for an animal rights protest. I never knew what strange new creature I might find in my home when I returned at the end of the day.
     
    One day, maybe a month into our marriage, Lexy greeted me at the door wearing a mask of my own face. The likeness was quite good; she had a particular talent for the details that make up a human face. ‘Hi,’ she said in a gruff voice.
    ‘I’m Paul.’
    I laughed. ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s amazing. And I see you were kind enough to leave off the lines around my eyes.’
    She swatted me with something she held in her hand, a second mask. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, in the same deep Paul voice. ‘I have an extremely youthful face.’
    ‘What’s that one?’ I asked, pointing to the mask in
    her hand.
    She held it up. It was her own beautiful face. ‘Here,’
    she said, handing me the Lexy mask. ‘I’ll be you and you be me.’
    I covered my face with hers. ‘My name is Lexy,’ I said.
    ‘My husband is a wonderful, wonderful man.’
    ‘Hi, Lexy,’ she said. ‘You are one hot mama.’
    ‘I don’t talk like that,’ I said.
    ‘Well, maybe you should.’ She took me by the hand and led me into the living room. We sat down on the couch.
    ‘So,’ she said. ‘Tell me about yourself.’
    ‘Well,’ I said in my best Lexy voice, which wasn’t
    very convincing. ‘As you’ve already noticed, I am one hot mama.’
    She laughed. ‘See?’ she said. ‘It just rolls off the tongue.’
    ‘I’m also a very talented artist, and I’m smart, and I’m funny, and…’ I looked around the living room for inspiration. ‘And it looks like I even cleaned the house today, which was super-nice of me and above the call of duty. I hope I’m not turning into a housewife.’
    ‘You know, it’s funny you should say