Sometimes, when you've been married for years and years, you just go with the flow on certain quarrels and idiosyncrasies. This was not one of those times.
Over the holiday season, my husband won what he called ever so proudly "a major award". When it came on the front porch, none of us had any idea what it possibly could be. Judging from its size, I thought that it likely would be a household decoration. Boy, was I correct!
Now, normally, I am not one to battle with someone else's possessions, but this was different. He had turned out to have won a plastic lamp. It was made to look like the leg of a hooker, complete with a fishnet stocking and a high heel. Let me tell you, I absolutely hated that thing. What self-respecting individual would allow such a lamp to be seen publicly?
At first, I coped by turning off the lamp (which glowed all along the inside when lit up) every evening, but this made my husband irked. He was so proud of having won it that he wanted it to be on display for the whole neighborhood to see. Worse still, Ralphie was starting to find the lamp funny. I definitely didn't want my nine-year-old son to get fascinated by a shameless display of feminine sexualization, never mind the tackiness of the object in the first place.
Mr. and Mrs. Bumpus next door owned over seven hundred and eighty-five hound dogs who always liked to harass my husband for no particular reason. I wished multiple times since he put up that lamp that those dogs would just rush into the house in a frenzy and knock over the godforsaken award. The box in which it came had said "FRAGILE", after all.
After several days of thinking, I finally decided to use the lamp's fragility to my advantage. Being both a parent and a spouse comes with many tasks: cooking, cleaning, maintaining, fixing—and, ooh, was my husband about to wish that he could do that last one! We had exactly one bottle of glue on hand, and there wasn't much. I poured what was left down the sink early in the morning, not enough to be exactly wasteful, and waited for just the right moment to take action. My husband was quite a busy man, so, no doubt, the opportunity would come soon.
...
Very late that afternoon, I was in the process of boiling red cabbage for dinner the following night. Randy was up in his room, my husband was in the basement, and Ralphie was in the kitchen with me, about to have some milk and cookies for a snack.
"Red cabbage?" Ralphie asked. He apparently had looked into the pot.
I shrugged as I had my back to him, washing my hands at the kitchen sink. "Eh. It's for tomorrow night. You love red cabbage, Ralphie."
At that moment, I heard what sounded like a dull, crashing version of a gunshot pop. I turned to look. The door to the basement was shut, and smoke from the furnace was wafting through the perimeter of the door. I could hear the sound of my husband cussing beyond it. I never approved of him doing this around our children, but right now, I saw my chance. He was obviously fighting to fix our basement furnace, which was always overheating for some reason. Every time this happened, it would take him a short while to come back into the main parts of the house.
I finished washing my hands and then grabbed my watering can in order to fill it. If nobody was in the living room, then this would look completely innocent.
I paced into the living room, watering can in hand, trying my hardest not to smile. I'm pretty sure that I did, but even so, nobody would have seen it.
I turned the corner, unseen from the kitchen table where Ralphie was enjoying his afternoon snack, and I set down my watering can next to my window plant. Then, I went straight for the bait. I grabbed that outright repulsive major award, removed the shade, and smashed the rest of the lamp against our coffee table. The lamp was plastic, but it broke surprisingly easily. Not quite satisfied with the job, I tore up parts of the fishnet stocking as well.
Immediately, I heard my husband's cussing come to a halt. The basement door swung open, and I heard him asking openly what just happened.
"What happened? What broke?" he demanded as he walked into the living room. Right then and there, he saw me cradling the sorry remains of his lamp.
"I don't know what happened; I was watering my plant, and I…broke your lamp," I told my husband, trying to sound as sincerely sorry as possible.
He walked up to me and knelt down. All of a sudden, he removed his gloves and snatched the busted lamp out of my hands. "Don't you touch that!"
I knew that my husband would be upset, but nothing could have prepared me for the outrageous accusation that he was about to hurl at me:
"You were always jealous of this lamp!"
Jealous? No way! I was beyond infuriated that such an abomination of home décor ever could have been accepted to be made! It irked me to no end that my husband thought it to be nice! No, I was any negative emotion BUT jealous!
"JEALOUS of a plastic lamp?!"
My husband nodded and interrupted me. "Jealous! Jealous because I won!"
"That's ridiculous! Jealous? Jealous of what?!" I threw up my hands momentarily.
Try as I might, at this point, I could not keep my anger from brewing. All thoughts of making this incident look like an innocent accident were brushed aside as I finally let my fury show.
I pointed at the broken lamp. "That is the ugliest lamp I have ever seen in my entire LIFE!"
My husband tightened his grip on the pieces. "Get the glue!" he stammered.
"We're OUT of glue!" It was true. I had wasted our last little bit of it for this.
He yelped, tightening his grip further. "YOU USED UP ALL THE GLUE ON PURPOSE!"
I did not answer. I had given away enough of myself already.
He set down the broken lamp and stood up, the whole time trying to come up with some nasty remark to hurl at me. Having known for years how he dealt with the furnace, I was half-expecting him to go into an explicit tirade. To my surprise, all that he managed to yell as he put on his hat and dashed out of the door was, "NOT A FINGER!" Well, at least he didn't swear within earshot of the kids.
...
My husband was back with some glue from the hardware store in about twenty minutes. He came into the front door, laughing with glee at his supposed success.
"Yes! Yes! I've got it! Hee-hee-hee!" he chuckled within earshot.
I had been reading this month's issue of Look magazine in the living room when I suddenly heard his return. I looked up. He was looking directly at the bottle of glue and grinning from ear to ear.
"What? More glue?" I asked, trying not to sound enraged.
"Yep!" He set down the bottle, took off his hat and gloves, and rubbed his hands together in excitement. "Time to salvage the old beauty!"
Beauty? BEAUTY? How dare you call that an 'old beauty'?!, I wanted to scream at him, but I didn't. Instead, I just had my eyes follow him as he walked to the pieces of the lamp, which were still resting in that sorry pile on the floor by the radio.
"Oh, honey, are you sure that that will hold?" I asked, pointing to broken major award. "That lampshade may be too heavy to support it."
"You stay out of this!" he snapped.
"I'm not the one risking gluing it back together," I pointed out.
I opted not to go back to reading the magazine. If my husband was going to fail miserably at repairing that hideous lamp, then I wanted to see the result, with my own two eyes. I moved myself over to an arm of the sofa and tried not to giggle.
My husband set all of the pieces back on the ledge table and proceeded to glue them back together, from the bottom to the top. Due to his back being towards me, I couldn't tell what his expression was, but it likely was a mixture of hope and irritation.
"Come on…stay…stay…" he urged it as each piece was let go after being reglued. I couldn't help but notice that he was talking to that lamp just as if it were a dog. Well, given the fact that he had treated this major award as the one true love of his life since it was first brought into this house, I can't say that this surprised me. Just once, I would like to attend one of these little competitions he enters and just see for myself what everyone is offering!
"There!" he said finally when the last piece besides the lampshade was in place, after about ten to fifteen minutes. Visually, that lamp was hopeless; I quite clearly could see where the glue had gone, and the fishnet stocking was horribly ripped up, some pieces clinging for dear life.
"It has to set for half an hour!" he informed me sternly, turning around. "Don't even go near it!"
"I'm not," I assured him, deadpan.
"Good!" He left the room to go do his own thing in the meantime.
I did not tell him that, even though that bottle said that the glue takes only half an hour to dry, he would need to wait a full twenty-four hours for it to harden to the point that the lamp would be usable again. Thank goodness Ralphie and Randy were upstairs somewhere, or one of them might have ratted this innocently. I remember a time last spring when Ralphie broke a wheel off of his pair of roller skates; he had to wait out the twenty-four-hour period before he could use them, or the wheel would bust again. Suffice to say, my husband was not home during that repair; otherwise, he would have remembered this detail and used it to his advantage.
Wanting desperately to see him fail at fixing the lamp but having nothing to do in the meantime, I picked up where I had left off in the Look magazine. Notably, a sneak preview in the form of photos for Shirley Temple's latest Christmas short was on this page. Maybe the release would play during the newsreel the next time we went to the movies.
...
When half an hour was finally up, I put down the magazine and scooted to the arm of the sofa again as I watched my husband reenter the living room.
He approached the sorry-looking fix and ran his hands up and down it for a moment to check that the glue was indeed dry. Certain that it was, he picked up the intact lampshade and set it as carefully as he could into place. I was trying not to giggle again.
Almost instantly, the lamp collapsed when the weight of the lampshade was put on it. My husband tensed up. Agitated, he turned towards me silently and glared. I immediately tried to make my face as straight as possible, although I probably was struggling visibly.
He looked as if he were about to yell something at me, for which I was fully prepared mentally, but he instead just sighed. He was undoubtedly defeated. He knelt down, picked up all of the pieces (including the lampshade), and left the living room, with them in hand.
He never brought up the incident during dinner; in fact, he was quieter than usual, and when he did talk, it was with a more solemn tone. He downright refused to speak to me.
The next morning, Ralphie informed me that he saw his father burying the lamp next to the garage, on the side facing the backyard. My earlier suspicion that he considered that hideous thing in the same regard as a beloved pet dog was confirmed.