Laminex and Mirrors

by

Cate Kennedy

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Themes and Colors
Joy and Drudgery Theme Icon
Wealth and Class Identity Theme Icon
Death and Dignity Theme Icon
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Joy and Drudgery Theme Icon

Cate Kennedy’s “Laminex and Mirrors” follows one summer in the life of an Australian teenager, the story’s unnamed narrator, who takes a cleaning job at a local hospital. As the narrator goes about her daily work, she believes that her youth, energy, and exciting future plans sharply contrast with the grim atmosphere created by the hospital’s strict routines and tired veteran staff. However, as the narrator learns more about her colleagues, as well as the patients whose rooms she is tasked with cleaning, she begins to understand that although hospitals seem bleak and austere, there is still joy to be found there—and that she can be the one to create it. As the story develops, the narrator ultimately decides that her role in helping others to experience joy in an environment punctuated by sickness and drudgery is more valuable to her than dreaming of a future she presumes will be happier than theirs.

When the narrator begins her work as a cleaner, she believes that her youthful enthusiasm—especially with regard to her work tasks and her relationships with others—is uncommon in the space of the hospital, and appears to think that her coworkers are less vibrant and friendly than she is. The narrator describes her fellow cleaners as “glazed and unhurried,” while she describes herself as “eager-beavering [her] way through [her] allotted duties on this holiday job.” The narrator’s language here suggests that her enthusiasm is likely related to the fact that she knows her job at the hospital is only temporary, whereas her coworkers have become tired of their daily routines over time.

As the story unfolds, the hospital matron and Marie, the head cleaner, emerge as cold and authoritarian symbols of hospital policy, further suggesting that the hospital is a joyless place. Both women vehemently disapprove of the narrator’s friendly relationship with the elderly hospital patient Mr. Moreton, which forms the emotional and symbolic center of the short story. Marie teaches the narrator that developing friendships with patients is unacceptable and punishes the narrator severely for her so-called transgression by demanding that she clean a bathroom slated for demolition—an entirely impractical task meant only to instill the narrator with the value of following the rules rigidly.

However, as the narrator spends more time at the hospital—and especially with her coworker Dot—she begins to have a change of heart. Dot sells jewelry and body care items from a catalogue to her fellow hospital staff, which the story implies is a way for Dot to make ends meet. However, Dot claims to not believe in the quality of these items, and her husband, Len, expresses doubts about her capacity as a saleswoman, thus underscoring the joylessness of her enterprise. Noticing Dot’s old purse and the careful way in which she handles change, the narrator pities her coworker, realizing that money must be tight for her. The narrator takes her opportunity to spread joy by helping Dot achieve and exceed her Christmas bonus—the narrator buys so much from Dot’s catalogue that it costs her two full days of work at the hospital. Besides delighting Dot, this act of kindness allows the narrator to witness how excited Len becomes for his wife as a result of the achievement. While this moment convinces the narrator of her own capacity to help others experience joy in the midst of less-than-ideal circumstances, it also shows her that perhaps Len and Dot’s situation wasn’t as bleak as she assumed: although both Len and Dot’s lives are characterized by the drudgery of low-wage work, the couple experience a moment of pure happiness together that highlights that their lives are also filled with love, tenderness, and delight in the little things in life. As she watches the pair celebrate, the narrator learns that she has misjudged both Dot and Len’s capacity to squeeze joy out of any circumstance.

Inspired by her experience with Dot and her husband, the narrator decides that assisting someone in need of a little happiness is more valuable to her than her trip to Europe, and thus decides to allow Mr. Moreton a morning of peace and small pleasures. Mr. Moreton, who is fighting a losing battle with lung cancer, has a gloomy life in the hospital: he feels generally stifled and uncomfortable in his hospital room, struggles to find the appetite to eat his bland hospital breakfasts, and has trouble sleeping. To remedy this, even just temporarily, the narrator sneaks Mr. Moreton out of his room and provides him with the opportunity to take a bath and smoke a cigarette outside. Though the narrator’s decision is self-sacrificial, given that she will almost certainly lose her job as a result of her actions, the joy of the escape compounds, and Mr. Moreton’s happiness spreads to the narrator as well.

Through her interactions with both Mr. Moreton and Dot, the narrator comes to see that joy can be found just about anywhere, and that she can be the one to spread such delight. As Mr. Moreton and the narrator enter the hospital, “smothering laughter,” and meet their fate, the narrator thinks about her fellow staff members going about their daily routines at the hospital. She thinks in particular about the matron, who “will be waiting for us […] in the no-man's-land of the hospital's thermostatically cool interior, its sterilised world of hard surfaces, wiped clean and blameless. Someone else's jurisdiction now.” This sterile “no-man’s-land” is clearly associated with a cold sense of obligation—“someone else’s jurisdiction”—and a lack of genuine human emotion. However, even as the matron epitomizes joylessness, it’s clear that she hasn’t won: though the narrator is moments away from losing her job and Mr. Moreton is weeks away from dying, the two are “content, just for this perfect moment, to believe we can go on humming, and that this path before us will stretch on forever.” Even in the face of impending tragedy, the narrator and Mr. Moreton can find, spread, and savor joy.

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Joy and Drudgery Quotes in Laminex and Mirrors

Below you will find the important quotes in Laminex and Mirrors related to the theme of Joy and Drudgery.
Laminex and Mirrors Quotes

“Matron's got to you, has she?”

“Sorry, but yes.”

“Dunno what's gunna kill me first,” he mutters. I give his breakfast tray an ineffectual rub. He hasn't touched his poached egg, and I can't blame him—it's sitting there like the eye of a giant squid. Mr. Moreton has an oxygen mask, but tells me he hates using it. “Feel like that thing's choking me,” he says. “Like in the war.”

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton (speaker), The Matron
Page Number: 36-37
Explanation and Analysis:

“I know you're a friendly girl,” says one of the nurses in low, embarrassed tones when she stops me in the corridor a few minutes later, “but it's best not to fraternise too much with the patients. If you're a cleaner, I mean.”

“Right,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Just do your work.”

“Sorry, I will.”

I trudge, my face burning, down towards the corridor of elective surgeries. It's OK, I tell myself. At the end of the summer holidays I will have saved enough for three months in Europe, where I will walk the streets of Paris and London, absorbing culture and life and fraternising with whoever I like.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton
Page Number: 37-38
Explanation and Analysis:

Each idle post-op girl, surrounded by hothouse flowers, watches me with the same bored, incurious gaze as I move about their rooms, spraying and wiping. I pump mist over the immaculate mirrors, catching sight of my own reflection there—my unreconstructed nose and studiously neutral face. Like these girls, I'm filling in my own allotment of time here, except that when I leave, it'll be to buy that plane ticket to London, and be gone. My hand holding the yellow cloth rises and falls, cleaning pointlessly, searching for a splash of toothpaste or cup ring mark on the laminex's spotless, glossy surface.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

His uniform's blue and mine's an ugly mauve, clearly designating our status in the hospital pecking order, but he's still asked me to the staff Christmas party. The other cleaners, when they hear this, behave as if it's a doctor-nurse romance from Mills & Boon. They speculate on what table we'll all sit on, what they'll wear, whether there'll be door prizes this year. When I say I'm not sure if I'll go, they look at me flabbergasted. “But it's free,” Dot says,” and there's a whole three-course meal!”

“That nice young man asks you to go, I reckon you go,” says Noeleen. “He's from overseas somewhere, isn't he? Play your cards right and you might get a trip OS!”

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Dot (speaker), Noeleen (speaker), Tony
Page Number: 41-42
Explanation and Analysis:

“These things happen,” he says. He surveys his empty hands bleakly. “I marched, last Anzac Day,” he adds. “Hard to believe, isn't it?” He looks morosely out through the sealed window to the courtyard garden, where the five iceberg rosebushes struggle to survive their pruning.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:

I'm remembering my directive about fraternising, but I hate standing here beside his bed, like some official. I sit down and peel off my glove, pick up his hand. It's like a bundle of twigs. That hand, I tell myself, held a rifle, tried to stop itself trembling with terror, worked all its life.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton
Page Number: 44
Explanation and Analysis:

Here's another mistake I make: I think Len will be chastened, satisfyingly disconcerted, forced to eat his words. When he hears, though, he is radiant with pride. As he congratulates his wife it strikes me for the first time that, with their odd shifts, this fifteen-minute tea-break is one of the few times the two of them see each other all day.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Dot, Len
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

“Do you know,” he says, “I haven't had a bath in I don't know how long. Used to having to sit on a plastic chair in the shower. Or stand there clutching those bloody grab rails. Haven't been like this for years.”

“Like what?” I say. My heart is jumping into the back of my throat.

“Weightless,” he says finally. “Completely weightless.”

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton (speaker)
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:

As I put away his shaver in his toilet bag I see an unopened bottle of aftershave with a sticker saying Happy Christmas, Grandad! still on the box. I raise my eyebrows enquiringly.

“Why not,” he says when he sees me holding it up. “Pass it over here!”

It's the recklessness in his voice that decides me. I help him change his pyjama top for the shirt and sweater he has hanging in his cupboard, and I hold out my hand to help him into his wheelchair again.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:

“You look very nice,” I say.

“Do I? I feel bloody great,” he says, stretching with a contented yawn, and there's a little zephyr of morning breeze that washes over us, warm and fragrant with the faint scent of blossom, and I'm about to speak again when the propped-open door slides slowly shut behind us on its hinges. There is a terrible echoing click as it closes on its own deadlock, and I recognise the sound as soon as I hear it. It is the sound of a plane door closing without me, ready to taxi down a runway and take off for London.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:

Down in the kitchen the other cleaners will be pouring their cups of tea out of the urn now, Marie remarking coolly on my absence, and Matron will be waiting for us, I am certain, at the nurses' station, in the no-man's-land of the hospital's thermostatically cool interior, its sterilised world of hard surfaces, wiped clean and blameless. Someone else's jurisdiction now.

Related Characters: Narrator (speaker), Mr. Moreton, Dot, The Matron, Marie, Noeleen
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis: