The Modern American Home

Trigger warning: Violent images.

They had just installed the new fridge. The boy’s father grunted and cussed as he jammed it into place, sweat soaking his collar. The Philco V Handle, the finest refrigerator money can buy. Silver chrome, knock ‘em dead. The boy was excited about it, he made a big fuss over the whole affair. He liked the way it could open on either side, depending on how the handle was pressed. “It’s dually-hinged,” the father explained, wearing his classic grin. The boy’s mother said it didn’t have enough room. She stood in the hallway, twisting a cigarette nub between her fingers. She flicked a piece of cigarette ash off her skirt. The boy’s father asked the mother if she had gone out that day. She put her cigarette out with a smile and stalked wordlessly to the bedroom. The boy asked what “dually-hinged” meant. 

It was a very great year in one of the finest American towns. Levittown, where the houses were built so fresh and new they looked like models from the air. An all-American family getting a new start, finally away from all that dirt and sin in Manhattan. The father, Walter Moore, worked on the printing floor of the Levittown Tribune six days a week. It smelled of petroleum ink and when the summer months came the heat would ripple and turn thick like curdled milk. As he drove home he would always put the windows down and the wind would cool the sweat off his arms. They were hairy and tanned. The new Chevrolet moved soundlessly over the fresh asphalt like a toy. Children played in driveways like angels. When they lived in Manhattan had been a news photographer for the New York Daily News. He moved slow through the streets at night clutching his bulky Speed Graphic camera. A burst of light would explode from the flashbulb, illuminating the scene of a murder or the wreckage of a car crash. There was a tabloid cover photo on every other corner. But not here—it was all too new, too clean. So he worked on the print floor and kept all his film negatives in a box in the bedroom closet.

He smacked so hard into the brick wall that his bones fell to the ground one by one. Billy watched the cat pick himself back up and chase the mouse through the fuzzy glass of the television. It was a hot summer morning and the boy lay as still as he could across the floor. The cloth of his t-shirt stuck to his skin. This was before the Moores bought a brand-new GE Thinline Air Conditioner. “Choose your own weather with the flick of a finger,” the nice people at General Electric had said. But these were still the awful days when the environment chose the weather. Billy’s mother had just left for coffee at the Johnsons’, and Billy was home alone in middle of summer. Nobody was playing outside in the heat. He wandered around the house, inevitably drawn to the places he was forbidden.

There was his father’s 1936 long jump medal from Albuquerque High. An art deco athlete strained to leap across the award’s bronze surface. Billy tried to imagine his father as a kid, and he wondered what he used to do when the older boys put him in a full nelson. He looked around, and the master bedroom felt big and cold like a church. There was something very serious about the big bed. The sheets were a scruffy cotton and had been pulled neatly across the bed. Looking at it felt wrong. Curiosity lead him to look in the closet, sliding open the freshly-painted white slat doors. It smelled like dust and starch. There were pairs of shoes, stiff collared shirts hung neatly in a row. He tipped the lid off a brown, time-worn shoebox to find a messy stack of strange envelopes. They were yellowing and thin like parchment paper. He found strips of film tucked away into each of them. He held the tiny frames on the film up to his eye, straining himself to make them out. It was some men in a field, maybe running. A cowboy movie?

What would America be without its wide-open space? Mr. Johnson would shudder to imagine it. “Backyards are what makes America great,” he bellowed happily with the false charisma of an advertising man. Billy was troubled by the meaning of this maxim. He wondered if the Soviets only had front yards. The boys sat on the porch after little league. They gulped lemonade from plastic cups, dirt scattered across their uniforms. A bruise swelled up on Billy’s hip, a baseball sized purple mark hidden underneath the agony of his hot wool uniform. A ball had slipped out of the pitcher’s sweating hand and hit him straight on the bone. In his pain he thought for some reason about the shoebox full of film.

It was early afternoon and he was alone again. The leaves moved in golden sunlight, clouds drifted away. He was in the closet. Beneath the envelopes, he noticed a row of wrinkled paperbacks. He wasn’t interested in the selection, which included The Father’s Guide to Landscaping. But when he took out one of those yellowing books, he found a manilla envelope underneath with a date scrawled onto it in pen: August 26th, ‘44. He dug his hand into it and pulled out a piece of glossy photo paper. It was shocking. A body falling apart. That awful look of torment in his eye. The visible bone, the detached limbs. It was war, not like the war Billy always imagined when he overheard the stories from his parents’ cocktail parties, not like the war on T.V. It was a real person, it was real gore. It was so awful that Billy lay on the floor for a long time. The solder was running through a field, his eyes white in horror, his limbs fountains of blood. The photo was taken from the side, and the photographer had to have been close—right next to the poor soldier. Billy felt his whole body ache and his face was overwhelmed by heat. A chorus of shrill panic rang in his ears as he stood up, and he stumbled away to the bathroom, sick.

Two scorched slices of Wonder Bread leaped into the air like dying fish. The toaster’s metal clang sounded like a bear trap clamping down on a cub. The three of them sat as a family at the round breakfast table, the woodgrain covered by cheap tablecloth. The sun danced through the Windex-polished windows and onto the marble countertops. Saturday morning breakfast, and Billy could not eat—not even a bowl of Sugar Smacks. He couldn’t find the courage to ask about the awful photo. Since discovering it he had felt the need to study it, to master his fear. He stowed it away under his matress, together with the torn out magazine photo of Bettie Page which he had obtained in exchange for his catcher’s mit and six weeks of school desserts. But seeing war had changed things. Dad had changed, mom had changed. His friends had changed. The neighborhood had changed. All of Levittown felt very thin like a fog, and Billy thought that one day he might pass his hand straight through his front door and feel it all slip away. How could this—the azaleas, the Cadillacs, the perfect dollhouses and backyards with families laughing and barbecuing—be the same world as that? How could all of us, the good guys, the God-loving heroes fighting the good fight against the dark shadow of Communism—have had to go through that? How could dad just sit there at the table penning in a crossword as if he hadn’t seen his friends get cut down like dogs? Billy had always imagined what it would be like to shoot a communist. He would be on horseback, chasing the Red across the desert, steel pistol in his hand spinning like a pinwheel. He would show no mercy.

“Hey dad, did you fight in the war?”

The mother and father looked at each other. She got up and walked to the sink.

“You don’t fight in a war,” he said grimly.

“Well, what did you do in the army? Did you ever do anything special?”

“I was a foot soldier.”

“Did you ever take pictures?”

His father put down the paper, exchanging another glance with the mother. “Have you been looking through my things?”

“I was just looking for a spare baseball glove and I saw the photo. Is that real?”

He caught himself getting angry. He took a deep breath. “You should never be snooping through our things Billy. You shouldn't even have been in our room.”

But the boy was not ashamed. He just needed to know. “Is it real?”

“Billy, cut it out,” the mother said. She looked at him with disgust. “Your father doesn’t want to talk about any of that with you.”

“Your mother is right, Billy. It’s not something that we talk about.”

“Is it real?” he asked for the last time. He was trembling.

The father looked at the mother, at the boy. He looked down at the table, observing a stain on the tablecloth. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s real.”