A Christmas Story (9 page)

For an instant the air vibrated with tension. A vast magnetic charge, a static blast of human electricity, made the air sing. My kid brother stopped in mid-whimper. I took the last bite, the last bite of salami, knowing that this would be my last happy bite of salami forever.

The Old Man rushed through the dining room. He fell heavily over a footstool, sending a shower of spray and profanity toward the ceiling.

“Where is it?
WHERE IS IT!?
”

There it was, the shattered kneecap under the coffee table, the cracked, well-turned ankle under the radio; the calf—that voluptuous poem of feminine pulchritude—split open like a rotten watermelon, its entrails of insulated wire hanging out limply over the rug. That lovely lingerie shade, stove in, had rolled under the library table.

“Where’s my glue? My glue!
OH, MY LAMP!
”

My mother stood silently for a moment and then said:

“I … don’t know what happened. I was just dusting and … ah.…”

The Old Man leaped up from the floor, his towel gone, in stark nakedness. He bellowed:

“
YOU ALWAYS WERE JEALOUS OF THAT LAMP
!”

“Jealous?
Of a plastic leg?”

Her scorn ripped out like a hot knife slicing through soft oleomargarine. He faced her.

“You were jealous ’cause I
WON!
”

“That’s ridiculous. Jealous! Jealous of what? That was the ugliest lamp I ever saw!”

Now it was out, irretrievably. The Old Man turned and walked to the window. He looked out silently at the soft gathering gloom of Spring. Suddenly he turned and in a flat, iron voice:

“Get the glue.”

“We’re
out
of glue,” my mother said.

My father always was a superb user of profanity, but now he came out with just one word, a real Father word, bitter and hard.

“
DAMMIT!”

Without another word he stalked into the bedroom; slammed the door, emerged wearing a sweatshirt, pants and shoes, and his straw hat, and out he went. The door of the Oldsmobile slammed shut out in the driveway.

“K-runch. Crash!”—a tinkle of glass. He had broken the window of the one thing he loved, the car that every day he polished and honed. He slammed it in Reverse.

RRRRAAAWWWWWRRRRR!

We heard the fender drag along the side of the garage. He never paused.

RRRRAAAWWWWWRRROOOOMMMM!

And he’s gone. We are alone. Quietly my mother started picking up the pieces, something she did all her life. I am hiding under the porch swing. My kid brother is now down in the coal bin.

It seemed seconds later:

BBBRRRRRAAAAAWWWRRRRR
… eeeeeeeeeh!

Up the driveway he charged in a shower of cinders and
burning rubber. You could always tell the mood of the Old Man by the way he came up that driveway. Tonight there was no question.

A heavy thunder of feet roared up the back steps, the kitchen door slammed. He’s carrying three cans of glue. Iron glue. The kind that garage mechanics used for gaskets and for gluing back together exploded locomotives. His voice is now quiet.

“Don’t touch it.
Don’t touch that lamp!”

He spread a newspaper out over the kitchen floor and carefully, tenderly laid out the shattered fleshy remains. He is on all fours now, and the work began. Painfully, hopelessly he tried to glue together the silk-stockinged, life-size symbol of his great victory.

Time and again it looked almost successful, but then he would remove his hand carefully.…
BOING!
… the kneecap kept springing up and sailing across the kitchen. The ankle didn’t fit. The glue hardened into black lumps and the Old Man was purple with frustration. He tried to fix the leg for about two hours, stacking books on it. A Sears Roebuck catalog held the instep. The family Bible pressed down on the thigh. But it wasn’t working.

To this day I can still see my father, wearing a straw hat, swearing under his breath, walking around a shattered plastic lady’s leg, a Freudian image to make Edward Albee’s best efforts pale into insignificance.

Finally he scooped it all up. Without a word he took it out the back door and into the ashbin. He sat down quietly
at the kitchen table. My mother is now back at her lifelong station, hanging over the sink. The sink is making the Sink noise. Our sink forever made long, gurgling sighs, especially in the evening, a kind of sucking, gargling, choking retch.

Aaaagggghhhh—and then a short, hissing wheeze and silence until the next attack. Sometimes at three o’clock in the morning I’d lie in my bed and listen to the sink—Aaaaaggggghhhh.

Once in a while it would go: gaaaaagggghhhh …
PTUI!
—and up would come a wad of Mrs. Kissel’s potato peelings from next door. She, no doubt, got our coffee grounds. Life was real.

My mother is hanging over her sink, swabbing eternally with her Brillo pad. If mothers had a coat of arms in the Midwest, it would consist of crossed Plumbers’ Helpers rampant on a field of golden Brillo pads.

The Old Man is sitting at the kitchen table. It was white enamel with little chipped black marks all around the edge. They must have been made that way, delivered with those flaws. A table that smelled like dishrags and coffee grounds and kids urping. A kitchen-table smell, permanent and universal, that defied all cleaning and disinfectant—the smell of Life itself.

In dead silence my father sat and read his paper. The battle had moved into the Trench Warfare or Great Freeze stage. And continued for three full days. For three days my father spoke not. For three days my mother spoke likewise.

There was only the sink to keep us kids company. And, of course, each other, clinging together in the chilly subterranean icy air of a great battle. Occasionally I would try.

“Hey Ma, ah … you know what Flick is doing … uh.…”

Her silent back hunched over the sink. Or:

“Hey Dad, Flick says that.…”

“
WHADDAYA WANT
?”

Three long days.

Sunday was sunny and almost like a day in Midsummer. Breakfast, usually a holiday thing on Sundays, had gone by in stony silence. So had dinner. My father was sitting in the living room with the sun streaming in unobstructed through the front window, making a long, flat, golden pattern on the dusty Oriental rug. He was reading Andy Gump at the time. My mother was struggling over a frayed elbow in one of my sweaters. Suddenly he looked up and said:

“You know.…”

Here it comes! My mother straightened up and waited.

“You know, I like the room this way.”

There was a long, rich moment. These were the first words spoken in seventy-two hours.

She looked down again at her darning, and in a soft voice:

“Uh … you know, I’m sorry I broke it.”

“Well …” he grew expansive, “it was … it was really pretty jazzy.”

“No,” she answered, “I thought it was very
pretty!”

“Nah. It was too pink for this room. We should get some kind of brass lamp for that window.”

She continued her darning. He looked around for a moment, dropped the Funnies noisily to get attention, and then announced in his Now For The Big Surprise voice:

“How ’bout let’s all of us going to a movie? How ’bout it? Let’s all take in a movie!”

Ten minutes later we’re all in the Oldsmobile, on our way to see Johnny Weissmuller.

The drizzle had become a full rain by the time I realized I was the only one left in the windswept garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The lights were on inside, warm and glowing, and I could see a pink arm reaching skyward. I went back in to have another last, loving look at
IT HASN’T SCRATCHED YET
.

The male human animal, skulking through the impenetrable fetid jungle of Kidhood, learns early in the game just what sort of animal he is. The jungle he stalks is a howling tangled wilderness, infested with crawling, flying, leaping, nameless dangers. There are occasional brilliant patches of rare, passionate orchids and other sweet flowers and succulent fruits, but they are rare. He daily does battle with horrors and emotions that he will spend the rest of his life trying to forget or suppress. Or recapture.

His jungle is a wilderness he will never fully escape, but those first early years when the bloom is on the peach and the milk teeth have just barely departed are the crucial days in the Great Education.

I am not at all sure that girls have even the slightest hint
that there
is
such a jungle. But no man is really qualified to say. Most wildernesses are masculine, anyway.

And one thing that must be said about a wilderness, in contrast to the supple silkiness of Civilization, is that the basic, primal elements of existence are laid bare and raw. And can’t be ducked. It is in that jungle that all men find out about themselves. Things we all know, but rarely admit. Say, for example, about that beady red-eyed, clawed creature, that ravening Carnivore, that incorrigibly wild, insane, scurrying little beast—the Killer that is in each one of us. We pretend it is not there most of the time, but it is a silly idle sham, as all male ex-kids know. They have seen it and have run fleeing from it more than once. Screaming into the night.

One quiet Summer afternoon, leafing through a library book, with the sun slanting down on the oaken tables, I came across a picture in a Nature book of a creature called the Tasmanian Devil. He glared directly at me out of the page, with an unwavering red-eyed gaze, and I have never forgotten it. I was looking at my soul!

The Tasmanian Devil is well named, being a nocturnal marsupial of extraordinary ferocity, being strictly carnivorous, and when cornered fighting with a nuttiness beyond all bounds of reason. In fact, it is said that he is one of the few creatures on earth that
looks forward
to being cornered.

I looked him in the eye; he looked back, and even from the flat, glossy surface of the paper I could feel his burning rage, a Primal rage that glowed white hot like the core of a
nuclear explosion. A chord of understanding was struck between us. He knew and I knew. We were Killers. The only thing that separated us was the sham. He admitted it, and I have been attempting to cover it up all of my life.

I remember well the first time my own Tasmanian Devil without warning screamed out of the darkness and revealed himself for what he was—a fanged, maniacal meat eater. Every male child sweats inside at a word that is rarely heard today: the Bully. That is not to say that bullies no longer exist. Sociologists have given them other and softer-sounding labels, an “over-aggressive child,” for example, but they all amount to the same thing—Meatheads. Guys who grow up banging grilles in parking lots and becoming captains of Industry or Mafia hatchet men. Every school had at least five, and they usually gathered followers and toadies like barnacles on the bottom of a garbage scow. The lines were clearly drawn. You were either a Bully, a Toady, or one of the nameless rabble of Victims who hid behind hedges, continually ran up alleys, ducked under porches, and tried to get a connection with City Hall, City Hall being the Bully himself.

I was an accomplished Alley Runner who did not wear sneakers to school from choice but to get off the mark quicker. I was well qualified to endorse Keds Champions with:

“I have outrun some of the biggest Bullies of my time wearing Keds, and I am still here to tell the tale.”

It would make a great ad in
Boys’ Life:

Many of us have grown up wearing mental Keds and still ducking behind filing cabinets, water coolers, and into convenient men’s rooms when that cold sweat trickles down between the shoulder blades. My Moment of Truth was a kid named Grover Dill.