When my mother died, my sister and I got together and broke all her Corelle dishware. There were more than fifty pieces in all, each with that indelible, margarine-colored halo of flowers and butterflies. Three sizes of dishes, two of bowls: the number of square meals in a day; the number of courses at a meal; the proportions of different food groups required for proper nutrition. We took turns pitching them against rocks. It took some effort—they’re famously durable—but when they broke, they exploded into slivers and dust.

She must have bought them in the early seventies, not long after they hit the market, years before they came to occupy cupboard space in some thirty-five per cent of American homes. (My parents always prided themselves on being ahead of the curve; it was a way, I suppose, of being at once ordinary and remarkable.) She lugged them along with her on every move: four houses in New Jersey, the first three rentals; south to Texas, north to Kentucky, and then again inside Kentucky. Packing them, unpacking them. Packing them. They never broke, no matter how carelessly she wrapped them. But then they were designed for just such American nomadism.

God, she hated them. Not at first, of course. But by the time she died, after half a lifetime handling them. Hated the pattern. Maybe, what with the way she hauled them everywhere, they became a symbol of what she couldn’t leave behind, why she could never start over.  It was bad enough that they were so hideously indestructible. Like vampires, they didn’t age, didn’t even get those grey scuffmarks you see on other dishware. (Only this: by the time of her death, on the backs of the largest plates, the “Corelle. By Corning. Made in USA” was mostly gone.) Like vampires, when they did break, the results were cataclysmic. Like my father, breaking. Not that I ever saw this. My mother told me. Such occasional, spectacular distintegrations became a warning: Do not break. Do not let one slip from your hands. And even if we did let them slip, as my sister and I must have at one time or another in unconscious sympathy, it was no guarantee. No: you had to make the effort. Put your shoulder into it. A tennis serve. An overhead smash.

The absence of broken dishes—aided by the miracle of Vitrelle—became a sign of marital harmony, a happy home. My mother would come to regret that she never broke one, never let one go, oops, not even standing on a rug, daydreaming a life without them. As if everything that had gone askew in her life could have been fixed, as if her life could have been put on a different axis, had she just been able to raise one plate over her head and smash that fucker to smithereens. And then who knows what might have become of her, what she might have become, what destinies might have been hers? She wasn’t cut out to be a housewife. But she was, she was, cut out to be just that.

Or perhaps the opposite is true: the Corelle plates were a reminder of what she was forced to leave behind, of her new identity, her adopted homeland. Though she had arrived here from Argentina more than a decade before she bought them, and would not become naturalized for another quarter-century, I think she became American the day she brought home those plates. Hard, white, plain, painfully durable. A utilitarian absence of identity, of which she could not admit she had grown fond. And so the Corelle became her scapegoat, the truer and truer reflection of herself she saw in those white mirrors framed by margarine flowers and butterflies, but disavowed. She would continue claiming to be a misfit, an alien, protesting too much and too loudly, while the Corelle embalmed her alive with its hard plain white durable empty stuff.

*

I’ve said that my sister and I broke all my mother’s plates, but this isn’t entirely true. I—imp that I am—I slipped one bowl into her coffin—one of the smaller ones, dessert not soup—underneath the hibiscus flower that partly obscured her folded hands. Itself half-hidden, and so innocuous, so familiar (thirty-five per cent of American homes), no one even noticed.

A day, a week, perhaps a year after the funeral, I began to dream that she’d come back to haunt me. In some of these dreams she is a clown-zombie, with pancake make-up and corn-syrup blood. Rather than trying to eat me, she breaks the bowl over my head and leaves. In others, she simply stands by my door with her sunken eyes closed, holding the bowl where her heart should be, and pointing at it with her other hand, as in an allegory. I can’t even scream; she is drawing all my attention to that bowl.

In the end, I have no choice but to exhume her corpse. On prying open the lid, I find that the bowl has been cracked in two. And I might convince myself that it was my intent to provide her with a final opportunity to break the Corelle were it not for the expression on her face—decayed lips drawn back in a snarl, raisined eyes piercingly open, the convulsed twist of her body. The claw marks on the inside of the coffin’s lid. I intended to remove the plate, to smash it, to beg forgiveness. But I can see that forgiveness is not possible.

It’s possible, whether from her proximity to the bowl in her coffin, or from having been exposed to the Corelle every day for the better part of her life, that its glassy spell has been cast over her: she herself is now impervious to decay or destruction. If I struck a fork against her, she would ring. Wash her a few thousand times, she’d hardly scuff. My mother gazes up at me with a doll-like perfection she never had in life, wearing that bowl like an ancestral amulet. Or perhaps, as though in an act of transmigration, the bowl is all that remains: frost-white glass, kitsch halo. In it, a mound of hibiscus dust.

I know what you’re thinking. I should have driven a stake through her glassy heart, and so be done with it. I should have broken the plate, watched it explode into slivers and dust, and by doing so released her soul from the pattern that held her in thrall while she lived. It would have been an act of mercy; I would only have been destroying the monster she had become, the monster I loved.

*

My father’s America is the America of Gary Cooper and John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and—wait for it—Donald Trump. Not so my mother, at least in the beginning. How could my sister and I not watch in horror as, despite her continued professed disinterest in John Wayne, my father’s America got inside her? Sometimes, staring into the hard glaze of her eyes, I would think: Where has my mother gone? Who, or what, has possessed her? And while I am aware it was partly age that brought her to comfortably inhabit the myths of her adopted country, it was a particularly American form of aging: a pre-death afterlife. Refugees in a limbo of endlessly contiguous parking lots, they lug their souls about in doubled plastic bags.

My clashes with my father had more to do with the conventions of our preferred genres than our difference in age, though the two are clearly related. His America is the Western; mine—in case it is not yet obvious—horror. As he hides behind John Wayne, I hide behind Boris Karloff. We fire rounds at each other from behind our respective icons. My bullets are silver; his are lead. For him, this country makes cowboys; for me, it makes monsters. It’s easy enough to overstate the difference. After all, Wayne is no less mythical, and no less fantastic, and no less monstrous than Karloff. A good deal less sympathetic, too. Some days, I wonder how the country might be different if a descendant of Karloff had gotten into the White House, grunting executive orders, frightening the children, demanding a bride.

Coffins, vampires, the implication that my father is a sort of mad doctor who turned my mother into a monstrous effigy of The Duke … it’s true the genre rules by which I interpret my world provoke me to caricature. But at the same time, they help me to see realities of which I would not otherwise be conscious. As though, by breaking my mother’s plates, we could return her to some pristine, pre-American Eden. As though such a place existed; as though the patterns by which my parents arranged their lives hadn’t begun to be set long before they arrived here.

Then again, my fantasized orgy of plate-smashing isn’t just about her. It’s a kind of suicide. And not just because by imagining my mother’s life without Corelle, I enable her to rewrite her destiny without me—that, by undoing the Corelle, I undo myself. It is rather that coming to terms with my mother’s monstrosity makes me painfully conscious of my own: my congealed Americanism; my durable, blank whiteness; my indelible pattern. The hated thing they have bequeathed me. How can I, who was born into this democracy of tableware, this land of spartan luxury, imagine that I could escape that, just by breaking a few plates?