Between the Icebox and the Stairs

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Curly finds his face and head embedded in a large block of ice after having used it for a pillow. Moe and Larry break him out of it, and they begin their ice block deliveries. After several deliveries they are called to make a delivery at a house atop a long, high staircase. It is so high that every time they go up, the ice melts to a small cube. They make several attempts including relaying it successfully to the top, only to have Curly drop it.

It is during these attempts and arguments that they twice bump into Mr. Lawrence Vernon Dent and ruin his cakes. When the Stooges' antics cause the servants Blanche Payson and Gino Corrado at their customer's Bess Flowers house to quit, they volunteer to replace them and prepare dinner for her husband's birthday party.

Unbeknownst to them, her husband is Mr. Lawrence, whose elaborate cakes they had wrecked earlier in the day. While working in the kitchen, Larry tells Curly to shave some ice — which Curly does by placing a block of ice on a chair, slathering the bottom of the block with shaving cream, and using a straight razor to shave off the cream.

Moe interrupts Curly and tells him to go back to stuffing the turkey, which Curly does by incorrectly following the stuffing directions. When dinner is served, one of the guests finds a ring and a wristwatch in her stuffing, believing it to be prizes. When the birthday cake they prepare is finished, it is accidentally pierced, and it deflates. Hadashi also, the rightful owner, took to his refrigerator right away, and for the rest of his life could be found spending his daylight hours sleeping on the warm Monitor Dome.

And Grandma, did she worry and fret like I did about our neighbors? Did she miss not getting some of the tako that Uncle Shige caught every Sunday when it was still possible to find them along the South Shore side?

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Did she ever mutter a curse against this bachi that equally gave and pushed away in the same motion? All the tightfistedness and shrunken hearts of our neighbors seemed to make her relish her good fortune even more, and she polished that refrigerator every evening after dinner, in plain sight of everyone in the neighborhood, as if to make manifest her joy of rubbing it in their faces. As we walked down the lane, she boastfully complained even more loudly about her icebox, which she rechristened the "Bill-O-Matic" for the amount it drove up her electricity bill.

Whenever I pointed out the latest snub—Mr. She did this often, and would sometimes look at the neighboring houses, as if to compare the paucity of their doorsteps, unblocked by the latest technology. The simple melody of our original whitewashed wooden structure discordant with the newer addition hastily tacked onto the front to make room for me when I was born, accompanied by the warbling extension in the back that settled unevenly over the years, creating a permanent glissando from its high point near the front door, sliding down through the living and dining rooms where it bottomed out in the kitchen, and finally, imposing itself like a strident countermelody; the new electric icebox that looked exactly the same: Grandma gave me stink-eye.

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Which is, of course, exactly what she meant. One evening, soon after her pronouncement, Grandma led a phalanx of men down Muliwai Lane. In those days even construction workers wore uniforms, and these men in their pale blue uniforms and black boots looked less like gang laborers from Japanese Hospital than an invading force.

I stayed in the house and watched Grandma marshal the battalion into her front yard where she proceeded to address the men and point to different areas of the house, formulating a strategy for attack.

She was barely finished before Yeah-No stepped out of the crowd, turned back toward his men, and issued his commands to them. Yeah-No circled around the house with Grandma, occasionally stopping to kick the concrete footers of the foundation, as if inspecting an automobile. Over the next week, mysterious deliveries appeared in our front yard: It would be from Grandma that I would learn how to get things done in this world—not by charming the lunas and their bean counters, but by befriending the people who actually carried the loads, for they were the ones with the most to offer.

By the time the weekend arrived, our yard was choked with misfit building materials. Early the following Saturday morning, I was awakened by voices and hammering outside of my bedroom window. I pulled some clothes out of the two lowest drawers and changed into them while still lying on the floor, which resulted in my underwear becoming twisted and bunched up around my waist like a sumo belt.



But speed was critical, so I would have to wait until later to adjust myself. I snuck out of my bedroom door, and not seeing Grandma anywhere, sped through the kitchen and out the back door, where I ran straight into her backside as she stood on the steps talking to Yeah-No. Grandma looked at me, frowned, and then yanked down my pants.

My escape had proved futile. Yeah-No looked at me and laughed. It was a splendid porch that was wide enough to turn a horse and ran the entire length of the front of the house. Although the porch shortened the front yard some, it had a large overhanging roof that not only protected her new icebox but gave us a sheltered place where we could play outside, even when it rained.

Between the Icebox and the Stairs by DeEds & Reveal: Images - Round Meadows

We sat on the porch and rocked while the men discussed the details of the porch construction with each other in Chinese. They peeked and peered under our porch for a long time with Grandma occasionally interrupting them to point out some special feature that Yeah-No had specified: When they were done and bowed to her in thanks, she pointed to the stacks of unused material Yeah-No had wanted to burn with the rest of the scrap but Grandma had prevented him, telling him there might be some use for that yet. Armed with their information and the scrap wood, the Wongs erected a huge balcony from the second floor of their house.

It had a generous platform, large enough to land a helicopter, and during the daytime was commandeered by the growing number of Wong grandchildren, who used it as their base of operations for their neighborhood adventures. But in the evenings, the balcony belonged to Mr. Wong, who had built a raised stage onto one corner of the balcony so that he could perch even higher and not only see the ocean but also smell it.

He worked like an artist should, spending much of his morning studying the blank wall that was his canvas, before slapping on the white paint in an inspired vision, and then lying in the yard the rest of the afternoon to monitor the drying of his work. Gonzalez, whose yard had always had the severe utilitarian look of a laundry—large vats and sturdy washtub stands networked by the spiderweb of clothesline strung up for maximum drying efficiency—spent her evenings planting a showy flower garden around the edges of her property, which would become our favorite place to net butterflies.