Summary
The story opens on the narrator's first day at her new job; she's working on the cleaning staff at a hospital for the summer. She's eighteen, just graduated from high school, and is saving money over the summer holiday so that she can buy a ticket to London. She's not sure whether she plans to return to Australia; she has her sights set on an exciting life elsewhere. She starts the job with an eagerness and efficiency she quickly learns to tone down. On her first day, her supervisor, Marie, is displeased to find that she's completed her assigned tasks with plenty of time to spare. The narrator seeks Marie out and finds her lounging in a utility closet reading the morning paper. As a punishment for her efficiency, Marie sends her to empty and scrub out the ash receptacles in front of the hospital.
The narrator then describes her lunch break, which takes place amidst the catering staff "stirring gigantic tureens of custard and tomato soup" (36). There she meets one of her co-workers, Dot, who sells jewelry, makeup, and cleaning supplies from a catalog. Dot gives the narrator tips on subjects like which brand of toilet paper is the best value. After lunch, the narrator begins cleaning patients' rooms. An elderly patient, Mr. Moreton, calls her back into the room after she finishes cleaning. He asks her if she would take some of the cash from his bedside table and buy him a pack of cigarettes. The narrator apologetically declines, having already been warned that he would ask her to do this by the Matron of the ward. Mr. Moreton suffers from emphysema and likely has a matter of months left to live.
When the narrator clocks in early in the morning, Mr. Moreton is already awake, ready to make pleasant small-talk and persist in his request for a cigarette and help pushing his wheelchair out onto the veranda. The narrator sticks to the same line, that she has to follow the Matron's orders, and Moreton never gets frustrated with her or expresses his disappointment as blame. One morning, a nurse stops her outside of Moreton's room and tells her that it's best not to fraternize with the patients. Though the reprimand is brief and gentle, it humiliates the narrator.
The narrator cleans the elective surgery ward, where she sees girls her age recovering from nose jobs. They're all in pain, bruises across their faces, and many express regret over having the surgery. The elective ward is considerably nicer than the other wards she cleans, and the narrator reflects on how soon, when the whole hospital turns private, the entire place will look like the elective ward, with sleek, white fixtures and the newest technology.
The same morning she's reprimanded, Dot tries to sell the narrator some merchandise from her catalog. Marie walks into the break room and asks the narrator to operate the floor polisher. The narrator feels obligated to buy something from the catalog, because she knows that Dot's husband, Len, doesn't believe Dot is capable of succeeding at the mail-order sales business. Dot is trying to sell enough before Christmas to be eligible for the holiday bonus. The narrator manages to delay by going down to the surgical corridor to polish the floors. There, she's taught to use the polisher by Noeleen, and the two of them have a laugh as the narrator is bucked around for the machine.
Afterward, the narrator has to scrub the scuff marks off the floor with steel wool. She takes solace in the fact that she only has to endure the work for six more weeks, and then she can go to London. While she's scrubbing, she sees the nurse who asked her to the staff Christmas party. The other cleaning staffmembers are much more interested in the intrigue of her and the nurse's possible romance; the narrator finds him to be quite kind and pleasant, but she isn't even sure whether she'll attend the party. Her mind is on the future, on leaving the continent with a clean slate.
The next morning, Mr. Moreton talks to the narrator while she cleans his room. He tells her that his doctor has just informed him only has a few weeks left to live. His daughter is planning to visit with her kids soon. She tells him if she could, she would give him a cigarette, but she's only a seasonal employee and they would definitely fire her for it. Moreton asks her what she's saving up for, and she tells him she's trying to go overseas. As they talk, Marie bursts into the room and tells the narrator to come with her. Marie is cold and furious, because the Matron sought her out specifically to ask the narrator to stop fraternizing with Mr. Moreton. As punishment, Marie sends the narrator down to clean the tubs in an unused wing that's marked for demolition the following week.
The week before Christmas, Dot is still a couple of hundred dollars in sales away from meeting her quota. The other cleaning staff have taken to calling the narrator "the scholar" after Dot finds her reading a novel at the bus stop (47). Dot once again thrusts an order form in front of the narrator, and while she truly doesn't want or need anything Dot is selling, she orders two shifts' salary worth of jewelry to make Dot eligible for the Christmas bonus. The narrator looks forward to seeing Len's reaction when Dot tells him she succeeded. "I think Len will be chastened," she says, "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" (48). The narrator revels in this sweet moment between Dot and Len: "She and Len glance at each other again and grin, and I’ve got my money’s worth, after all" (49).
The next time the narrator cleans Mr. Moreton's room, he asks if she got into trouble for talking to him. She downplays the situation. She's ashamed of herself for talking to Mr. Moreton in hushed tones because she's afraid to be caught again. He tells her that his daughter and grandchildren are going to be visiting the next day. He sounds glum about it, and she asks whether that is a good thing or not. He says he's happy to see her, but that she wouldn't be coming if he weren't dying soon.
The narrator arrives to the hospital an hour early the next morning and goes straight to Mr. Moreton's room. He's surprised to see her. She asks if he'd like a bath before his family arrives, and he gives a resounding yes. She takes him down to the unused wing where she immaculately scrubbed out the tub and runs him a hot bath. He stretches out and luxuriates in the tub—it's a huge tub, and he hasn't had a proper bath since he was admitted to the hospital. Then, the narrator presents him with her real gift: a cigarette and a trip outside. She wheels him back to his room and helps him dress, and then she takes him out a back door and props the door open. The narrator observes, "he’s like a different man with a cigarette in his hand. He gazes affectionately at the rosebushes and beyond them, off to the distant hills visible between the hospital’s east and south wings" (54).
As Mr. Moreton enjoys his cigarette, they hear the propped door click shut. The sound of the door closing confirms to the narrator her fate. She was already concerned she might be fired if they were caught, but now, with the time nearing 7 a.m., it will be nearly impossible to wheel Mr. Moreton back to his room undetected. He finishes his cigarette and they begin looking for alternate entrances, but all doors are locked from the outside. Finally, she accepts that they'll have to go in through the front. They enter through the front of the hospital and pass through the scrutinizing glances of staff freshly clocked in for the morning shift. As they continue down the hallway, Mr. Moreton begins humming "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," and the story concludes in a moment of reckless joy, the narrator and Mr. Moreton laughing like kids as they make their way back to his ward.
Analysis
"Laminex and Mirrors" is a story about a young woman on the precipice of adulthood, struggling between her overwhelming desire to leave her small town for London, and her inability to treat her summer job as simply a means to an end. While Kennedy's stories rarely concretely refer to a specific locale, the pieces in Like a House on Fire evoke a specific type of rural and suburban narrative characterized by a longing for something different. In "Laminex and Mirrors," this quality is achieved through the narrator's strong drive to leave her town behind for London. The entire circumstance of the story hinges on this desire, because the narrator's sole reason for working at the hospital is to save up for her one-way ticket out.
It's clear from the way that the narrator engages with her co-workers at the hospital, in addition to the way Mr. Moreton emphasizes that she doesn't seem like "the kind of girl looking for a lifetime career cleaning tables," (44) that she's seeking a cultural change. When she starts her job at the hospital, she sees the lives around her as being small and content, and she's very much not content with her circumstances; Kennedy's deft rendering of the first-person perspective allows the reader to watch as the narrator's perspective changes. For example, when she's first given the nickname "the scholar" by her co-worker Dot, after Dot spots her reading a novel for pleasure at the bus stop, she's annoyed and "impatient to be in a world ... where reading a novel in public isn’t a cause for comment" (47-48). This comment has an air of superiority and isolation. She feels stranded in an anti-intellectual place where people are more interested in the contents of catalogs than the contents of novels. She identifies the whole "world" of these respective places, her home town versus London, by applying Dot's perspective to her home town, and her own perspective to London.
But over the course of the story, the narrator's perspective is challenged; she witnesses and participates in moments of joy and tenderness, life-affirming moments by which she sees her co-workers differently and, regarding her relationship with Mr. Moreton, ultimately force her to reevaluate her priorities when it comes to this hospital job. For instance, when she buys two shifts' worth of jewelry from Dot's catalog in order to help Dot reach her holiday bonus threshold once and for all, she does so to spite Dot's husband, who she, the narrator, views as patronizing and lacking faith in his wife. The narrator describes how the situation unfolds to her surprise:
I wait around to see the look on Len’s face when she tells him. His expression, I think to myself, will be worth it. 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. ... She and Len glance at each other again and grin, and I’ve got my money’s worth, after all. (48-49)
Over the course of the job, her allegiance switches from her need to leave Australia to her need to do everything in her limited power to provide Mr. Moreton with a meaningful experience as he approaches death. As with the titular story of the collection, "Like a House on Fire," along with, to varying degrees, "Flexion," "Tender," and "Five-Dollar Family," "Laminex and Mirrors" is deeply concerned with questions of agency and power. Kennedy asks, What power does Mr. Moreton have left, lying in his hospital bed? Here is a grown man denied cigarettes and a proper bath, even after he's told he only has weeks left to live. He asks everyone who orbits around his hospital bed to smuggle him a cigarette, and the only power he has left is his generous ear and his humanity. He tells the narrator, after sharing his prognosis, "I’d kill for a smoke ... Seriously. It’s not as if they can hurt me now" (45).
The narrator's friendly relationship with Mr. Moreton butts up against the bureaucratic protocols of the hospital. She's reprimanded multiple times for "fraternizing" (38, 39, 45, 53), but in the end, it's her relationship with Mr. Moreton that gives the job its primary meaning. One of the quintessential "meaningless" tasks of the story, when Marie forces the narrator to scrub the tub in the "menzies" ward that is going to be demolished the following week, acquires meaning because it allows the narrator to later wheel Mr. Moreton down to that abandoned ward and draw a hot bath for him in the huge, now-spotless tub. The story ends in a blazing scene of joy and abandon, the narrator wheeling Mr. Moreton through the main entrance of the hospital, having just taken a hot bath and enjoyed a cigarette, knowing she'll be fired, but knowing it was worth it to furnish this dying man, who's been a friend to her, a few simple pleasures denied to him due to his lack of agency as a hospital patient.
