CHANDELIER

on external versus internal coherence, OR, "puttin' lipstick on a pig"

It started with an old table lamp.

I think I was trying to manage the mysteriously agonizing emotional stakes of taking my children to kung fu class. I may never understand why that whole experience, of all things (great teachers, nice place, etc.), ranked right up there with “helping hold my son down so a medical team of three can put nine stitches in his butt” for level of parenting difficulty. However, I do know what fixed the ragged psychic wounds in at least two out of three of us every time we left class, and that was either french fries or going to the antique store. On really bad days, both.

At the antique store, my then five-year-olds were usually instructed that if they found something very cheap they could get it. One day, my daughter selected a Christmas bauble for $1.99 and my son found a table lamp with a green glass shade and dangling crystal fringe, tagged at $297. We did not get the lamp. Ergo, we have been hearing about it for five months. But in his rather mysterious little brain bucket, just as “infinity” is very clearly pronounced “humidity,” so too “green table lamp with dangly things” is pronounced “chandelier.”

We hear about chandeliers wherever there are light fixtures. Enter a building, especially any building with a hanging fixture, and we hear an electrified shout from the perpetually straggling peanut gallery with shoes on the wrong feet and pants installed backwards: look at that chandelier! he shouts, into the quiet poise of the library or the steady traffic of Bass Pro Shop, which then begins to run him over while he gapes.

All lamp fixtures of any grandeur or interest whatsoever are cause for celebration, and actual chandeliers trigger total stupefaction, followed by a hustle so tenacious I’m tired before it even starts. —Mom. —Yes buddy. —We need a chandelier. —Not really, not in the space we have. —With crystals. —Crystals don’t really go with our house. —Sure they do, they’re so beautiful. —Well they’re very expensive. —I have a box of quarters we can use! It’s under my pillow! —When you’re older you can have a job and earn enough money to buy whichever chandelier you want for your own room. —OK, so when I’m seven? How long until I’m seven?

This conversation goes on for quite a bit longer, and it happens roughly every other day. It happens at school as well, apparently. When I attended my kids’ kindergarten field trip to the Children’s Garden, their teacher took the opportunity, beside the bed of purple basil, to whisper to me that the classroom Kind Deeds jar was almost full of puffballs, which means the class is about to get a treat, and when my son noticed her noticing this state of affairs, he approached her and said, “oh good. I really like chandeliers.”

When we finally got the kids to watch Beauty and the Beast (as opposed to endless YouTube fragments, which, however useful they may be in learning about herpetology or the foraging of greens or the refurbishment of Indonesian tractors, generally do not carry a patient thread of narrative), my son was so primed to see the amazing chandelier we had promised him that he was prematurely gobsmacked by the far inferior alehouse chandelier earlier in the film, so we were afforded the pleasure of informing the child that yes, that thing was nice, but the one that was coming in the ballroom scene was going to be EVEN BETTER. And so we tracked and processed the potentialities and values of the movie through its lighting fixtures, throwing in the word “sconce” now and then to buy ourselves some variation and a bit more accuracy.

Last night, we were still riding a week-long wave of unusually frenetic and difficult to manage behavior— explosive physicality, unbelievably noisy and insistent fixation on a few favorite things that are almost automatic nos from the parents (candy, watching hamsters in mazes on YouTube), interrupted sleep patterns, refusal to eat enough to keep the blood sugar regular. All of these things seem to come with one of two realities— either an illness reveals itself with a fever a few days in, or the kid finally suddenly gains a significant new behavioral skill, and the discomfiture magically subsides. Last night, nothing illuminating had yet emerged, but the behavioral pattern was persisting and intensifying, so the parents were especially beleaguered.

We’d tried all the things (redirection, engaged play, joking around, involving him in food prep, stern warnings, yelling, ignoring it entirely, physically separating him from his sister, learning new things, logic, absurdity, getting him to run around a lot, etc.) Nothing was taking the edge off. He was just getting more insistent and explosive.

Enter Captain Dad, who has a knack for sneak-attack depressurizations. “Hey! We really need a chandelier!” he announced from the kitchen, after five months of telling this kid, in every way possible, that we are definitely not getting a damn chandelier. (We did need a new light fixture for the landing of our stairway, where a busted Scandinavian wooden specimen from the 80s has been dangling like an extravagantly loose tooth for years.)

Whatever Cuisinart-mixer motion my son was performing on his sister’s head with his feet (while standing on his own head on the couch— a favorite pastime) suddenly ceased. He went still for a moment like a pointer dog in indicative freeze. He was definitely, definitely listening.

We got ready (several snacks crammed in my purse for continued & failed fueling attempts; raincoats, socks and shoes— things that take 450% as long as one can even really imagine them possibly taking) and were finally all buckled to go to the lighting store. The arguments about the listening menu for the car ride began. Why does so-and-so get to pick first?— My song isn’t as long so I get to hear it twice.— Daddy, did youuuuuu put your choice on repeeeeat? (They don’t miss a beat when it comes to such illegal activities as parents trying to care for themselves.)

My husband managed to make it through the doors of the almost entirely glass-and-crystal lighting store first, with its heretofore quiet dignity all a-twinkle. Do you have insurance? he called to the woman behind the counter, whom he has become familiar with. Do you have a LOT of insurance? She quickly nodded—because there are two of them, he said, as my children burst through the door, having left their own car doors open in the rain

No running / quiet bodies / gentle touch / get out from under the table / don’t rip the pages of the catalogs / keep your clothing ON please … we went through the lines of our most earnest verbal efforts, sending our hopes for good-enough citizenship into the freshening breeze of the children’s brains like tiny, helpless dandelion floofs.

Within about six seconds my son had found and fixated on THE chandelier, which, out of hundreds of wood and metal and glass sculptures— to his credit— was actually almost the least expensive one there, despite the fact that it was entirely crystal.

We began the exhausted, gentle easing-off, the slow assist, the accrual of casual, respectfully deemphasizing utterances to help my son slide back down the mountain of his intensity of desire. It’s very beautiful, amazing, yes, good find! It’s not going to fit in our house though— a little too fancy, buddy. More like for the Beauty and the Beast castle. (In our home, there is a totally busted lath-and-plaster wall and a mysteriously absent window frame behind the spot where the new fixture was to go, as well as a decomposing staircase from the 1930s with evidence from several criminal applications of paint beneath it, and the chandelier this kid had chosen was comprised of six glittering tiers of intricately faceted, double-hung crystals.)

Try these wooden ones over here— super cool, we offered, mumbling lamely… and then something strange happened. I think we began to hear our own inadvertent idiocy, the great dumbing-down of our human vitality by the heavy plod of a practicality we didn’t… actually… espouse.

Here we were, alive on this tiny blue dot in the wonder of galactic space, for a few blinks or whatever, and we were for some mysterious reason proposing, with infinite dullness, to a kid with a passion for chandeliers in his heart so intense that it could power a small village for a year, that we should adhere to an arbitrary and barely relevant aesthetic, one we happened to inherit from some people we’ve never met and never will meet, who happened to own the house before us. People, moreover, who made the decision to put built-in cabinetry on top of shag carpet. That’s who we’re leaving important decisions to, about the delivery of light into our lives?

My husband and I caught the dawning wave of realization at the same time. I could see what I was beginning to feel spread across his face and soften and brighten it. He grinned at me and I started laughing. Let’s just do it, he mouthed. I nodded quickly. We tried not to laugh too overtly as we broke the news to the kids. Let’s just get it, huh? Let’s do it! It’s so pretty, you’re right! Why not? It’s on sale! It’s actually the cheapest one for some reason!

While the disbelieving, invisible smoke of five months of unmet need, of desperate and profoundly tenacious trying, went up around my son’s head, he leapt up from the floor (no, I don’t know what he was doing there) and grabbed his sister in a rush of triumph and joy. She seemed moved by his excitement, and joined him, because she is a deeply generous and delightfully game soul.

Then, there was the requisite unfolding of mumbled, retroactive understanding between the nominal adults: “I mean, it’s not like it matters, right?” / “who cares? The house is a total heap, so why not?” / “It’s not like we have a coherent aesthetic anyway, not like we’ll ever be able to achieve one” / “OMG, the wall behind it— completely busted— this is going to be hilarious” / “We’ll always have a conversation piece when people come over for dinner…”

Getting the chandelier down and packing it up for transport with the saleswoman’s help was a lengthy process, but it was nothing compared to what we would face when we got home.

As far as what we faced on the at-home end of things, imagine, if you will, holding a ten-pound weight by a slippery cord with no knot in it, crystal teardrops falling and crashing down several wood stairs from twelve feet up while you balance on a ladder, which itself is planted on some not-quite-square stairs, and arch your back deeply so you can see into the mouse-decorated cavern of the ceiling to undo the previous owners’ ministrations with electrical tape and misguided prayer. This was my husband’s job, attended to from below by a wife who works hard to be as quick as possible with the Phillips-head versus the flat-head, and does pretty well, but doesn’t always dodge falling crystals quickly enough.

So now we have a crystal chandelier in an otherwise utterly Dickensian stairwell. I’m coming to believe, quite rapidly, that whatever coherence we might have achieved aesthetically in our home one day by doggedly pursuing the “right” kinds of fixtures and furniture for the “style” (ha) of the build is absolute garbage next to… well, pleasure, I guess.

We all stared at the thing intermittently throughout the evening. My husband went outside to look at it from out there. I had a photo shoot with it as dusk came on. The children kept running up and down the stairs, craning and weaving precariously to try and comprehend this sore thumb of grandeur in the belly of our mouse-nest house. “Like putting lipstick on a pig,” my husband said, but the music of it was pleased, entertained. I thought, well, I think this pig really likes it.

To be honest, I quite like the recalibrations the crystal chandelier is affecting in our collective neural circuitry— my husband has been looking up Victorian wallpaper on his phone, the kids think they live in a castle, I’m reminded of the crow that I am, in loving sparkly things quite hopelessly, and we’re all kind of looking around at each other, a little breathlessly, with mysterious half-smiles, as if to say, what else might be possible?