Ah ha! I knew there was a “By the way”!
        In a few moments, Alice will turn on Ralph, the fawning lilt in her voice dropping to the flat, hard tone of a self-righteous woman defending herself—Why do you always have to be so cheap?—eventually matching Ralph's empty threats—You wanna go to the moon, Alice? You wanna go to the moon?—with the blunt edge of sarcasm: That would be an improvement. Now let me tell YOU something, Mr. Financial Security: I want a television set and I'm going to get a television set. That's it. That's what I really remember about this show: the classic pattern of ongoing arguments in the Heller house. Father's eyes bulging, the veins in his neck swelling as he bellowed at Mother for some perceived slight. You think you can get away with this? You think you can get away with it? Dressed in the gray khaki of the Oklahoma capitol building maintenance crew, looking like a bald version of Ralph Kramden in his Gotham Bus Company uniform, Father would stalk the room, waving his arms every bit as dramatically as Ralph—though, like Ralph, he never once laid a hand on his wife.
        What kind of love was this?
        I was still a young boy when I first realized that my parents' arguments—their whole relationship, it seemed—was modeled after the Kramdens. I was a little older when I began to wonder if their lives were less an imitation than a reflection of something. The other family shows on TV, the ones with children—Ozzie and Harriett, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show—were very different. These families lived in clean, modern houses with shiny electric appliances and tidy yards. The fathers wore suits and ties, sometimes inside their very own houses at dinner time, and they labored under duress to provide models of calm reason to their sons and daughters. The mothers wore housedresses and didn't have to work as secretaries or clerks or nurse's aides. With clever kindness, they tried to conceal their husbands' stupidities and other imperfections from their children. These other shows, I gradually discerned, were all filmed in a foreign country: a young, ambitious nation somewhere near our own, whose attractive citizens strove heroically for perfection, a place I would hear about repeatedly from teachers and preachers and politicians, but would never have the opportunity to visit.
        Among those other shows, only I Love Lucy, which my parents also watched, seemed to bear some relation to the Heller house. But the Ricardos lived in New York City, the Upper East Side of the other Manhattan, a world so far removed from Yukon, Oklahoma, it seemed to orbit a rogue star in another galaxy. Ricky, though emotional like my father, was not a bus driver nor a maintenance man, but a handsome Cuban American band leader who wore sharp-looking Italian suits to the Tropicana Night Club each evening. Lucy was an over-the-top goof who wore prim outfits with perfectly matched accessories while she dusted the lamp shade. Ricky Jr., once he was old enough to speak, resembled no human child I'd ever met. No, only the volatile, hardscrabble Kramdens reflected life in the Heller house, even though in the Kramden's apartment there was no Ralph Jr. around to help mess things up.
        When I was very young, Mother was no Alice. A decade younger than Father, inexperienced and inhibited, she took Father's verbal abuse in silence, the way I imagine Alice must have taken it at first, in their early years long before the first episode aired, swallowing her anger and letting other feelings—humiliation, inferiority, injustice—build up inside her slim body until at last it could no longer contain them, and suddenly all the suppressed emotions burst out in strong words only Mother's lips could form: Don't you raise your mad-ass voice at ME, Mr. Big Nothin'!

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