Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us. The noise and smoke brought Ma, screaming, inside. There was an explosion over by the television, a confusion of thick black smoke.

Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position the civil defense lady had made us practice at school. 'Duck and cover!' I yelled to my brother. People's hands and legs and faces would melt like cheese. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table, the submarine base and Electric Boat were guaranteed targets.

I thought the Russians had done it-that Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. Clarabel the Clown was chasing someone with his seltzer bottle. Then I saw it, too: a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set. 'Hey, look,' Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines. Some nights, my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie's truck door by With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. At our house, you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at nine-thirty when Eddie Banas, Ray's fellow third-shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. However angry we could make our mother, she would never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at three-thirty each afternoon, and built submarines at 'We better get out there and help,' Thomas said. Gave the illusion that she was waving in at us. As she Windexed and wiped the glass, her circular strokes Her coat pockets were stuffed with paper towels. She was outside looking in when it happened-standing in the geranium bed on a stool so she could reach the parlor windows. Whenever Ray gave an order, my brother and I snapped to attention, but our stepfather was duck hunting that weekend with his friend Eddie Banas. We were supposed to help her outside with the window washing.

Thomas and I had spent most of that morning lolling around in our pajamas, watching cartoons and ignoring our mother's orders to go upstairs, take our baths, and put on our dungarees. One Saturday morning when my brother and I were ten, our family television set spontaneously combusted.

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