Think back over the chapters. A goldfish bowl stands suddenly empty, and a penguin looks innocently at the ceiling. A service man drills breathing holes in a perfectly good icebox while muttering about madness. A policeman stands in a kitchen doorway, staring at a bird that stares politely back. And somewhere in city hall, a telephone call about a penguin license is being transferred, for the ninth time, to somebody else’s desk.

For half a century, keeping food fresh in an American home meant one thing: the icebox — a heavy wooden cabinet lined with tin, cooled by a real block of ice. The ice came from the ice man, who drove his wagon — and later his truck — down every street a few times a week, hauling dripping fifty-pound blocks with iron tongs. Families left a card in the window saying how many pounds they needed, and children chased the wagon on hot days begging for chips of ice. Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, the electric refrigerator began humming its way into American kitchens. It needed no deliveries, no drip pan, and no card in the window — just electricity. By 1938 nearly half of American homes had made the switch, though many families, like fictional ones on a house painter’s wages, still relied on the trusty old icebox. Within another twenty years the ice wagons were gone, and a whole trade — and the sound of ice tongs on a summer street — passed quietly into memory.

No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.