Our Living Room

I had not bought the glue. I had not fixed the accident. Over a month ago, shuffling the sheet music, I heard the glass break. My mother’s green swan crashed on the hardwood floor of our living room. The swan was no regular swan. It was a final gift to my mother, a treasure from her own mother, now claimed by cancer.
This living room had always been a cold, empty place for me, except at Christmas. It adjoined the kitchen, and wafts of nutmeg and cinnamon floated in. The spotlight on our silver tree changed it from blue to green to yellow to red. We all loved that tree. The living room had transformed to a place of anticipation. What sat inside all those packages? This was the year my sisters and I did not use our Christmas money to buy each other gifts. Instead, we bought all sorts of gifts for our parents, true gifts of sacrifice. The destruction of the swan was the destruction of that memory. No more happy memory of this room for me, replaced by the sound of crashing glass. Dread joined the cold of my empty heart.
The room was sparsely decorated, now sparse less one thing. Mother did not notice the missing swan for a day, then a week, a month. My secret was safe. My anxiety eased. Still each day I faced my guilt at practice time. The broken swan lay in the bottom of my closet, broken, wrapped in a towel. I was careful not to look down each morning and afternoon. No one would ever know. If I didn’t see, it hadn’t happened. Anyhow, I would soon glue it. Glass glue, that’s all I needed.
The living room piano bench was a place of humiliation for me. My sister Lynn’s long fingers and analytic mind surpassed me shortly after we began our lessons. I never caught up with her. She was the math person. She understood how those half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes, with their sickening little dots and lines. She was so perfect - I could not memorize the music. My fingers would not stretch an octave. Now my mind would not stretch either. My mind shrunk to the level of my deed.
Practicing my scales, I glanced up to see my dad standing in the doorway, the neck of my mother’s green glass swan in one hand, the base in the other, and the question in his face.
“You hid this in your closet?”
“I was going to glue it back together,” I cried.
“But, you didn’t,” an accusing face replaced the questioning one.
“No sir, I didn’t.” I hung my head.
The viridian shards mocked me. I had been found out. My secret sin of omission was revealed. I had disliked the room before. Now I hated it.
“You will be the one to explain to your mother.”
Then he left. I was alone in the living room with my fear and dread, the severest form of punishment: the consequence of admitting to my lie. I closed my eyes to the empty space where the swan had been. What would Mother say? What would she do? Would I need to tell her in this cold-hearted living room, the place where the swan had died? My grandmother’s gift was gone, too shattered to ever be whole, never to swim on the piano again.
Mother came home from work. I met her at the car and asked her to come to the piano with me to the living room. “Are you going to play a song for me?” “No ma’am.” I pointed to the empty space on the piano. “I broke your swan about a month ago and did not tell you.” Her eyes moved to the empty spot, and her body turned away. Her footsteps headed to her room, and I heard the door close. My mother had rarely talked about her past. I knew nothing about the swan, what it had meant to Grandmother Ellen, how Mother had acquired it, how long it had been in the family. Their life was meager. As a child, my mother had often been hungry. Her mother sometimes went as far away as Ohio to work, a victim of a blackball at the local bleachery. She was a widow with four children and two parents to support. I knew I would hear Mother cry if I listened at the door. She never mentioned the swan again. I did not either. She had to face her grief and longing a second time. I had to live with my deed.