The summer I turned twelve my hair was chopped off. It was my mother’s idea. The Cut and Curl had a special: Seven dollars for a Pixie.
“Wash and wear,” my mother said.
My mother was the kind of person who kept an umbrella under the front seat of her car, a mini-sewing kit in her purse, and a twenty in her shoe for an emergency. She never let the gas in her tank go below half full lest the sediment foul up the engine nor did she toss out chicken parts that she could boil into soup. She carried a black purse in winter and a basket weave for spring and summer. More than that was unnecessary. As she saw it, the world was in service to her and, in return, the least she could do was be practical.
This may have been a good thing to some but I found it practical and boring. It was hard to appreciate my mother and there were more than a few things I held against her besides my haircut. One was the large lamp in our living room. The lamp became a grudge, which followed me like a period follows a sentence.
Now the lamp may have been a practical purchase, I would never know. But unlike everything else about my mom, it was fussy. Shaped like a winners’ cup in faux white marble, it offered smiling, satisfied cherubs of white and gold gazing benignly, heavy-lidded from its rim. Draped lazily, their dimpled chubby thighs and dainty feet pointed upwards to provide an illusion of floating. Gold-leaf ivy twined around the base, through the handles of the cup and up to its shade which was big and round like a drum. It too was splashed with gold and bold strokes of white to resemble puffy clouds: Heaven, no doubt.
I didn’t know how I knew it was ugly. I just did. It came upon me suddenly as though I turned twelve and realized I had taste and my mother didn’t.
A lamp should be simple. Straightforward. A lamp as lamp. Not some pretense of a fountain sculpture from some palazzo in Italy.
I used the lamp to keep us separate. It highlighted and clarified our differences and topped a list that, one by one, I gathered as proof of just how opposite we were: From cake mixes (instead of scratch) to liver and onions for dinner, I scorned my mother’s choices.
That summer the lamp was at the heart of my concerns. It sat bold and gaudy in the center of the large front bay window of our house for all to see. When the days light dimmed, my mother would walk barefoot across the carpet to turn it on. The cherubs, warmed in the soft glow of a pink bulb, looked happy, acknowledged, peacefully sated.
I worried. What would Tommy Desmond, the eight grader with a crush on me, think if he saw that lamp? How would Mrs. Lituchy, my homeroom teacher, react when she came to dinner? Or Francy Pine, my cool new friend from Los Angeles?
To have anyone I wished to impress associate this lamp with me was as awful as having them discover I stuffed my bra with socks.
The summer of my pixie cut, two of our neighbors came by one afternoon as I lay flopped out on the back deck, reading Gone With the Wind for the third time. They lived on the street and our families were friendly. Their husbands were airline pilots: one flew a domestic route, the other international. When they weren’t flying they were drinking. They rarely shook hands in greeting—just passed each other a tumbler of scotch and clinked. My older brother said once, “Even when they’re not flying, they are.”
This day Babe Bartlett and Mimsi Reese had already loosened up around Babe’s pool with several laps and more than a few martinis. They huddled, tan in tennis shorts, on either side of the lamp.
