Broken Things

I found an empty Coke bottle at the curb and I smashed it. I smashed it to enjoy the cool, angry sound it would make. I smashed it to see the broken pieces scatter like an explosion. I had seen broken glass in the street before. Bottles that other kids had broken. Bad kids. Teenagers. I broke it to see what it would feel like to smash something.

A neighbor heard the sound of glass breaking. She came to the door in her faded, peach-colored house dress. She opened the squeaky screen door with her flabby, left arm and leaned out. I was standing at the curb motionless marveling at what I had just done. “What the hell is the matter with you?” she screeched.

My mother heard the commotion and came running down the narrow driveway, clothespins spilling out of the pouch of her navy blue apron. She saw me standing there. She saw the broken glass. Looking confused, she asked me what happened. I answered matter-of-factly, “I broke a bottle.”

“You broke a bottle? On purpose?”
I shrugged.

I hadn’t really thought much about it. The bottle was lying at the curb. I wanted to see what would happen if I broke it, so I broke it.

My mother made me stay in for the rest of the day to think about what I had done. So I did. I stayed in and thought about broken things. 

People break things all the time. They don’t do it in the middle of the street. They do it in pretty houses with smoke curling from the chimney and windows that glow yellow-orange at night making people who go by wish they lived there. Sometimes people try to fix broken things. Sometimes they just throw them in the trash with all the other used and broken things. Sometimes no one knows who broke the thing. They just know they’re the ones stuck cleaning up the mess. Sometimes a thing is broken, but it looks fine, so no one even knows it’s broken - until it falls apart. Then people act shocked. What I want to know is how they didn’t realize it was broken? You can always tell a thing is broken if you pay attention.

You can’t know what it feels like to break something until you break it. Then you realize it was fun for a few seconds, but what comes after isn’t fun at all. It isn’t fun to be caught and feel ashamed in front of your house-dress neighbor who will always remember that you were the one who broke the bottle. It isn’t fun to watch your mom in the middle of the street stooped over the broken glass with a broom and dustpan cleaning up the mess because she thinks a kid who would break a bottle on purpose can’t be trusted to do a good job cleaning it up. If anyone had asked my mom, “Would your ten-year-old daughter deliberately break a bottle in the middle of the street?” she would have looked at them as though they were crazy. “My daughter? She’s a good girl. She would never do that.” 

What people don’t get is that sometimes you do things without ever deciding to do them. You just do something that ends in something being broken without ever having thought about the fact that the thing you are about to do might end up breaking something. Sometimes the mess is hard to clean up. Sometimes it can’t be cleaned up. Sometimes things stay broken forever. That’s why people often hide broken things. They don’t realize that if you hide a broken thing, somehow more things get broken. Eventually you can’t hide all the broken things. If you throw them in the trash they become heavy, clumsy things that someone else has to lift, dump, and cart away. Even then, the broken things are still somewhere. 

Sometimes people don’t mean to break a thing. The thing breaks because it’s too fragile. The way it’s made and the way the world is you just know it’s going to end up broken no matter how hard you try to protect it. Those are the things that make you sad way before they get broken. It’s the knowing that makes you sad.

That day in the house I decided never to break anything on purpose again and if I broke something by accident, I’d fix it right away as best I could. There are just too many ways to get hurt by a broken thing.

© 2013 Rita Maniscalco. All rights reserved.