From my kitchen table I can see that lamp. That floor lamp I finally came up with an excuse to get rid of (it really is far too puny for our oversized family room, and I had no other place to use it) and temporarily replaced with a bigger, more me kind of a lamp. Before the day went out, my son asked, with his panic barely contained, “What did you do with that lamp?”
“What lamp?” I innocently asked, without any actual innocence.
“That lamp that was in the family room? Did you get rid of it??”
I told my son that I still had it. “But see how much better this lamp is for the space?” I sweetly suggested. He was not fooled. “Can you put it back?” he pleaded. He then dropped the cement. The fixative that would tie that fuggin’ lamp to me for all time. “I love that lamp. It’s been in every home we’ve ever lived in. I remember that lamp from forever.” And then the coup de grâce: “…It’s my childhood.” Just like that, I was doomed. Doomed to keep that lamp for all time, till I die.
I understood the power of the lamp for my son. For I too had THE item, a small mass produced print, purchased at some such place like Alexander’s (in the Bronx) or Woolworth’s, of a Paris night scene by Maurille Prévost. This cheap replica, printed on swirl-embossed paper to suggest actual brushstrokes, and set in a common, 1960’s ready-to-hang frame of the sort found everywhere in tasteful or striving middle class homes across the country, was so dear to me that my eye would scan the wall for it virtually every time I was in our kitchen in Rockland County. Before that, when we lived in an apartment in the Bronx, I’d look up from my spot on the smooth-tiled foyer floor (the small sofa seemed reserved for my Dad or visiting adults) and find my familiar friend reassuringly in its place, my proof that I was in the right home. When my parents were preparing for a garage sale prior to moving from their Rockland home to a more suitable dwelling for retirement years, I quickly grabbed the print off the wall and held it close. “Were you thinking of getting rid of this? Cause I’d want it,” I whimpered. And moments later I was the happy owner of my childhood companion, which I promptly hung up in my home, to the confusion of my husband.
So I knew that lamp, that damned lamp, was not just a lamp to my son. My 18 year old son, skilled in never appearing to break cool when it served him, actually voiced a plea for this unoriginal, this unremarkable, this you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself-sorry-excuse-for-a-lamp lamp, with bond paper dyed and embossed to look like a genuine tanned-leather shade and dark-brown bronze pole complete with matching, hammered base which no lamp should ever have, ever again. He was desperate. Believe me, I knew this from recognizing that same imploring expression of poorly disguised anguish my mind’s eye recalled from my very own face. Worse, I was 35 at the time! But, I wasn’t going to let on just how well I knew. “Okay, sweetie,” I said with my inner Oscar winning actor’s most benevolent patience. “For you, I’ll switch them back.” And as I turned to go, when my face was safely “out of scene,” and out of sight, my inner actor, who is, actually, me, dropped the act and celebrated my coup in grasping the truth: “That’s his lovey.”
Of course, I’m a smug dope cause my lovey is that dumb, cheap, embossed paper print with the cook arriving for work via bicycle and with his chef’s hat on already, while he’s still straddling the bike, at an establishment simply and humbly called “Restaurant.” And I remember the love I had, have, for my lovey. The joy that filled me as though I were a child again when my mother, in the manner of a carnival barker awarding a small kid a prize that was worth absolute crap all the while making the kid feel like she was getting gold, told me “It’s yours!” And I couldn’t bring myself to ruin my son’s not-so-secret, young child’s stab of joy and relief. So I said nothing to him. Nothing to let him know I was on to him. Knew his secret. And even more importantly, nothing to let him know that that very same lamp had been a prick at my heart every single time I looked at it.
I had purchased that lamp during a New England style colonial antique furniture-browsing day with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, about 4 years into my marriage. Why I was even in that particular browsing experience was a source of mystery to me, since I despise New England colonial antiques, and deep down always did, but my apparent inability to say, “no thanks, Mom, I hate the kind of antiques you love” when she brought up the idea to go browsing for the new home in the “country” that her son and I recently acquired (and so What better place for “country furniture” right?) had something to do with it. I suppose it was tied to the very impulse that later led me to suggest out loud that I might buy the lamp. It was an obligatory outing with “the matrons.” Not that my mother-in-law or sister-in-law were particularly matronly or even were aware they were serving that function. We poor females don’t always know when we morph into a member of the matrons, those women who, among so many other stultifying suggestions and comments, imply to you that furniture shopping is something “the women” do to feather their family nests. And furthermore know how to do primly, and respectably, and for not too much cost because we want to be responsible in our spending after all. And being with the matrons, I didn’t say, couldn’t say, couldn’t admit, “I hate furniture shopping. I couldn’t give a shit about what my furniture looks like, really,” or say “Guys, I’ll shop for my furniture when I good and feel like it, and it won’t be this New England, stripped of all ornamentation or frivolity, and painted or stained only in muted shades that suitably convey puritan plainness, humility and purity shit. It’ll be something positively vulgar, like florid and overly carved Victorian pieces or something out of the 50’s version of the future,” or even “There’s really something messed up about the fact that women do this in groups, to help each other, right? Where are the men? I mean, HELLO! Don’t you realize that we are still doing the same shit our very hairy hundreds of thousands of years ago predecessors did?”
So there I was, along on this activity. For some reason, probably just because it was along our path, we walked into a furniture store that was not filled with colonial antiques or reproductions, but with newer, somewhat everyday, tasteful furnishings. Maybe, understanding what felt like my only way out, I scanned around for something, anything that I could live with. Or maybe the selection just seemed so much better than it was because it appeared after a sea of items I couldn’t ever imagine owning, that I really thought I liked what was in the store. But for whatever reason, that’s when it happened. “What do you think of this lamp for our living room?” I asked. BOOM. There it was. My surrender to the matrons. And one moment later, the fog cleared, and I understood that I had selected something that I really didn’t love or even want, but I held steady. I must have figured, better to get it over with, offer up the sacrifice, and then never have to go through this ceremonial joint furniture shopping ever again. Only I couldn’t have known then that it was the beginning of a long line of offerings that became second nature to me, and led me so far away from myself that I mourned my absence.
To be fair, neither my in-laws, nor anyone else, required my offerings. Indeed, over the years my mother-in-law developed a love affair with expressionist and folk art, which she indulged in freely by altering many of her colonial pieces with paint and decals of bursting blooms, or wildly colored finishes, and by transforming her walls into galleries for some of her own very vivid, unabashed and often quite thrilling expressions of color, form and movement. She was feeling free to be herself. Why wasn’t I? Maybe, once you suspect deep down that you have entered a life that isn’t quite working for you, you do whatever you can to disguise your true impulses and desires. Maybe you do whatever you can to prevent yourself and others from knowing the truth: you do not feel yourself. You do not feel alive.
And so I loathed that lamp. For 19 years I secretly loathed that lamp. But now, well past 50, I finally decided I could simply get rid of it. I no longer felt tied by some inexplicable, self-imposed obligation to temper everything in my style, my home, words that leave my mouth. Yet, here is my son. To him the lamp is his childhood, and he loves it. The strange thing is, that somehow rehabilitates the lamp for me. I can look at it and it no longer pulls up an unpleasant association just outside my conscious language. It is my son’s lovey, … and that is… so cute. I love that lamp! That is the lamp my son looked up at and felt reassured by! How could I ever get rid of it? What was I thinking?! And so, that lamp is now among my favorite items in the house. The house we will be listing on the market this spring, now that my husband and I have separated. I will be sure to keep that lamp in every home I live in, so that my son will know he’s in the right place, or one of two right places of course.
Back to here, from my seat at the kitchen table, I see the lamp. And shifting my eyes I see that I am also in perfect line with that print. THE print, my lovey. Suddenly the thought occurs to me, what if my mother or father had an unpleasant association with that print? What if it was an awful association? I call my mother immediately.
“You remember that little print of the cook outside the restaurant on his bicycle?”
“No.” That puts me on notice right there that I am probably on safe ground.
“The one that used to hang in our foyer at Bronx Boulevard and then in our kitchen in Rockland?”
“No, honey, I don’t remember it? Why?”
At first, my lovey not having an anguished past that my mother would instantly recall and convey to me disappoints me. It made my lovey a bit more… prosaic. The possibilities had been endless. It could have been something that my mother’s wandering and ultimately abandoning father gave her that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw out. Or it could have been an imposition by her mother-in-law, who firmly declared that it was fitting and expected to see it hanging there in the foyer every time she visited our apartment that was so much smaller and less glamorous than hers. I try to inject some drama.
“Well, you gave it to me because I remembered it so dearly from my childhood, but I was wondering if it turned out that it had actually been a source of emotion for you. You know, like, maybe Grandma Gussie gave it to you and you secretly hated it?”
My mother chuckles kindly as one does at a child with a wild imagination. “No, dear, I probably just picked it up somewhere. I would do that. I’d see something that would strike me, that I’d like, and I’d get it.”
Touché.
Well, it turns out that my lovey is really quite a layered symbol after all. Far from prosaic, it now serves not only as totem of my youth, but also the ability to allow unabashed expression of myself that I once wielded and now wield again. And on top of that, while the materials used for the print and frame were inexpensive and unimaginative at the time of manufacture, they are “vintage” now, and the content, the lovely little scene by Prévost, is quite striking. I rise to wipe layers of dust and grime from the unprotected surface, it occurring to me that the dark colors I always assumed were part of the print might actually be forty years of accumulated film. As the brighter colors burst from under the damp dusting cloth, I realize that the scene has always been a window into my mother’s tastes that I had not really ever looked through.
