Free A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd Page A

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 quietlyat 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