The Broken Lamp
The night he broke the lamp, I’d been sighing as loudly as I could and jerking my legs around trying to wake him up. If he woke up, I might not say anything because it might just be enough to have him feel uncomfortable, on-edge, unsure of why I was waking him up. Because what I wanted to say was It’s Your Fault, You Need To Fix This. When he woke up, he just said, I’m awake, like he knew what I was trying to do. I said: We might as well give up dreaming about sipping margaritas in Jamaica or buying our first house because it’s never going to happen for us. There are times when you make critical choices, like the time you quit as manager at the A&P and it took you three months to find a job, or the time I spent five thousand dollars on a degree in marketing and then never even finished; we made the wrong choices. We’re wasting our time, this planning, this asking people for favors. Everyone else made the right choices, and we didn’t because we’re stupid. Everyone else has it easy, and we don’t because we were meant to struggle. We might as well burn the wish list. That’s when he broke the lamp.
Our lamp had a compact fluorescent light bulb in it. We bought it because we thought of ourselves as environmentally-aware, not because we wanted to save money. Our motivations weren’t entirely pure, though. Buying things like special light bulbs and recycled toilet paper made us feel like we were problem-solving, making us feel better about our current situation, which was that we didn’t know how not to be poor. But this light bulb was one of only two because we didn’t have enough money to buy them all at once. Nothing in our apartment had ever been thrown against the wall before, and I thought the lamp made an impressive crash. There was even a cruel black smear marking the site of impact. The shards were not as sliver-thin as the old light bulb would have been. The compact fluorescent light bulb had an opaque coating unlike the old, regular light bulbs, so when I swept it up it just looked like I was sweeping up broken shells.
The first time I realized I could garner sympathy through hardship was when I was five. I made up an elaborate lie that got me into trouble. I’d made up lies before, but this was the one that left a little scar. I blame it on the movie Annie and the show Little House on the Prairie. I didn’t know much, but I knew that hardship warranted a lot of attention.
I was on my way to the bus stop, and I saw, partially covered by dust from the dirt path, half of a pear-shaped piece of glass with a metal base. It was automatic, the way I started hopping on one foot. I hopped all the way across the street with the glass in my pocket. My fellow school bus passengers had been watching my approach, so by the time I got there, their faces were concerned. When one of them asked me why I was hopping around, I said because I had a piece of glass in my foot. On the bus, someone asked me why I didn’t have crutches. I said because my family was too poor. Then a girl named April said her brother’s old crutches were in her basement, and I could probably borrow them.
When I got to school, I told my teachers the same thing. All day things were handed to me—the lined paper, the box of crayons. I didn’t even have to ask. When it was time for music, I got to leave five minutes before everyone else and hold Ms. White’s hand. I was drunk with power.
The first thing I heard when I got home was my mother saying my first, middle, and last name. She’d been on the phone. One of my schoolmate’s parents wanted to know if I’d like to borrow her son’s old crutches. My mom said she was beyond angry. The next day, I was told, I’d have to tell the class I’d lied and apologize. I don’t know if I felt like crying, but I know that I didn’t.
I knew why he broke the lamp. From the age of three until the time when I moved out of the house, my mother said that I was impossible. Even though I wanted to blame him, I could have just as easily said, I love you. We’ll work through this together. My being impossible was a choice, which meant that I didn’t mind the outcome. I guess it meant I didn’t care how far I pushed him.
I felt sorry for him. His long body was bent in half like a straw and he was using his fingertips to get the smallest pieces of glass, the ones that even the broom couldn’t get. He said: We can’t have you stepping on any of this. A hospital bill is the last thing we need. He said it casually although I detected a slight quaver in his voice. I thought maybe his face looked the same way my mother’s had all of those years ago: heartbroken. He wouldn’t ask, but maybe what most stung, the way it had for my mother, was that I really seemed to believe that I wouldn’t be taken care of. I didn’t slip my arms around him. I didn’t apologize. I just climbed back into bed. He didn’t have the right to ask why, why, why. Because he wasn’t my parent, and I wasn’t lying.
