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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Breaking Night, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Willpower and Independence
Poverty
Drugs and Addiction
Family
Sex and Power
Summary
Analysis
Lisa bullies Liz when Ma and Daddy aren’t around. She pulls pranks on Liz, and tells elaborate lies about what Liz should expect in school.
Liz and Lisa don’t really get along: like many older siblings, Lisa exploits the fact that she’s older and has more authority and experience.
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In the first grade, Liz discovers that she has lice, and Lisa makes fun of her. Later, Lisa offers to help Liz. She braids Liz’s hair and tells her to put “anything red” in her hair, because this will scare away the lice. Liz finds flowers, beads, and fabric, which she rubs all over her hair. After a while, she scratches her hair and “bugs wriggled” out.
This is one of the only times in the memoir when Liz details a specific interaction between herself and her sister, Lisa. This lack would suggest that the two of them aren’t particularly close (even though many children who play tricks on their younger siblings end up becoming close with them).
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The narration now jumps to a time slightly before the lice incident, and Liz explains how, when she firs started school, she felt like an outcast, partly because of the bizarre haircut Ma gave her. Then, just after the beginning of the first grade, is when she gets lice, and that makes her feel like even more of an outcast. Liz learns that she has lice in the middle of a spelling test. During the test she scratches her hair and bugs come crawling out, disgusting the other children.
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Lisa’s lice cure, of course, turns out to be yet another one of her practical jokes—it does nothing to help Liz. Liz cries after she realizes that Lisa is tricking her.
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Liz tries hard in school, but she isn’t a good student. In part this is because she doesn’t get much sleep, and in part it’s because she barely gets any food. Once, Ma steals five dollars from Liz to buy drugs. The five dollars were a gift from Liz’s grandmother (Daddy’s mother). Liz sees Ma take her money, and screams at her to give it back. Ma ignores her. Later, weeping, Ma throws her drugs down the toilet and tells Liz, “Forgive me.”
Ma is attacked in her neighborhood several times, and once a man with a knife robs her. She struggles to find work because she’s legally blind. At one point, she gets a job as a bike courier, but has to quit after she gets into not one but two accidents. Daddy is also robbed or mugged many times. He risks his safety to go to dangerous neighborhoods to buy drugs.
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Sometimes, Ma talks to Liz while she, Ma, uses drugs. She tells Liz stories about life in Greenwich Village in the 1970s, adding details about how people have tried to have sex with her or get high with her. Liz watches her parents get high, and notices that the drugs will sometimes make them feel great. At other times, she notices that the drugs make her parents relive painful memories and become seriously depressed.
Liz hates getting up in the mornings. Lisa often yells at her to get out of bed and get ready for school. In school, Liz does well in English class: she has already taught herself to read, and she can already do Lisa’s assignments easily. But Liz doesn’t like school, and hopes that she’ll get sick and be sent home early.
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By December of first grade, Ma has begun allowing Liz to stay home from school most days. They watch TV together and eat sandwiches on the couch. After many weeks of this, the house gets a letter from the truancy officer. However, Liz is able to destroy the letter before Ma sees it.
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Ma begins spending time with a woman named Tara. They get high together, and Ma often brings Liz and Lisa to Tara’s apartment. Ma and Tara talk about cocaine, their drug of choice, over and over again. Tara tells Ma about a man named Ron who “takes care of me.” The next Sunday, Ma takes Liz and Lisa so that they can all meet Ron together. Ron turns out to be a thin man in his mid-sixties. Lisa hates him right away, even though he smiles and offers the children candy. Tara later tells Ma that Ron buys most of her drugs, and could do the same for Ma.
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Eventually, Ron starts picking up Lisa, Liz, and Ma at Tara’s apartment every Sunday. Instinctively, Liz knows not to talk about Ron while Daddy is around. Liz also notices that Ron will look “up and down Ma’s and Tara’s T-shirts.”
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One day, Ron drives Liz, Lisa, and Ma out to his house in Queens. For the rest of the day, Lisa and Liz watch TV. Then, at night, Ron wakes up Liz and Lisa and tells them that Ma has left the house. He claims that he’s supposed to give Ma’s kids a bath immediately. Liz and Lisa strip and get in the bathtub, and Ron orders them to clean their “privates” so that he can see. However, Lisa yells at Ron and tells him to get out of the room. Ron leaves.
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Five weeks later, Ma has a mental breakdown, the first in more than six years. Liz has never told anybody, but she believes that Ma’s breakdown was her, Liz’s, fault. Liz tells Ma about the incident in the bathroom, and Ma later hits Ron in the face. Furious, Ma asks Liz to tell her about “every time Ron made you feel bad.” Liz explains that there have been many times when Ron “thrust his fingers inside me.” However, when Liz tells Ma about all these times, she omits one key piece of information: she didn’t tell Ma because Ron “made things better” for the family.
Following Ma’s breakdown—caused, the doctors claim, from Ma’s failure to take her “schizophrenia medicine”—Liz and Lisa are taken to the doctor as well. There, Liz remembers a nurse saying, “You should have heard what their mother had to say about their father.” The doctors examine Liz and Lisa in the place “no one should touch.” Liz adds that this place was one “where, even if no one believed it, Daddy had never touched me.” Afterwards, Liz bleeds from between her legs, and she cries, “unable to imagine ever feeling normal again.”
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