The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories Read online

  I nod.

  He tells me I wouldn’t know it from the news, but people are buying commercial like it’s going away sometime soon. He laughs. “That shit isn’t going anywhere except in my pocket!”

  I thank him for coming over. I look into the hallway to see his son standing there looking at me. The boy is smiling at me; then he approaches and stands about three feet away from me. I smile at him. I look at his father. “I haven’t had a good conversation about real estate in so long,” I tell him.

  He says, “What’s the point if you’re not in the business?”

  “That’s reasonable,” I say.

  “What happened to your face?” the boy asks.

  I say to his father that I’ve always felt the empty strip malls in Middleton were a gold mine of opportunity.

  He laughs in such a way that spit flings off his lips. “Shit gold,” he says. “Those places sit on a septic field ten miles long.”

  “That explains that.”

  The child has edged even closer. He has his hand extended and I lean back. His father is still admiring our ceiling. “I’d like these in my garage,” he says.

  “Easy, pirate,” I say to the boy.

  “What happened to your face?”

  I take the child’s hand. “They were very big in the eighties,” I say to the father.

  He looks at me. I am sure he will address his son now, now that he sees the boy in my hands. “You’re fucking me,” he says.

  “I think it was the eighties,” I say. I am just staring at the child now, straight in the eyes. I say to the father, “Good-looking kid you’ve got here.”

  “Look,” the father says. He clears his throat. “Maybe now isn’t the best time for this.”

  “O.K.,” I say.

  “Maybe we could meet for a drink, because this may not be appropriate.”

  “O.K.”

  “I just want you to know that Angel and I have talked about it a lot. We just want you to know where we’re coming from.”

  I make a noise. I nod. I try moving the man’s son away from me.

  “We know we shouldn’t have shot you. We get that. We believe in reality, right? We believe in being real.”

  “O.K.” I have to look at him over the top of his struggling child. This boy is nearly in my lap. He has one hand on my thigh, and I am actively staving off his other hand by gripping the child’s wrist. I am using a good deal of my strength in this grip, and the child begins to feel the pain. He begins to moan. I release him and he runs to the kitchen.

  “Fucking kids,” the father says.

  “Maybe I should get you a drink,” I say.

  “You got any port?”

  And then, mercifully, within that very breath, we are summoned to the dinner table. I let him stand and go ahead of me. I am to be seated, it appears as I enter, right beside their enormous child. My wife has placed me near this child, and she has placed our children at the opposite end of the table, near where she’ll be sitting. She wants to keep our children away from their children, and I understand this. It’s the right thing and best thing for the cycles of evolving humanity. Yet I am the one who is now made to sit beside him. And he goes right to work. “You look like you’ve had some trouble,” he says. “Has someone hurt you?” I look at my wife. She is smiling. I smile. We don’t speak. The man-boy repeatedly tries to touch my face, and somewhere during a bite of salad I finally let him.

  “You’re deformed,” he says, running his wet fingers across my nose and my cheekbones. “You’ve been beaten.”

  My son asks what it means to beat.

  “It means nothing,” I say.

  “My dad isn’t deformed,” the boy says. “He has scars all on his knuckles.” He then asks his father to show us those knuckles, and the father does so.

  My children are interested. They look at his fists. My daughter asks what a scar is.

  “It’s a boo-boo,” I say.

  The man clears his throat.

  “We should put Band-Aids on his hands,” my daughter says.

  This makes me laugh. The boy kicks me. He tries to grab my leg, and he asks again to touch my disfigurements.

  Apparently becoming aware that I am not at ease, the mother of this child, Angel, repeats what the husband has already told me about their belief in reality, in being real. She says this in a very concerned way. She touches her glass while she talks. She nods softly to herself as she explains a stance no one solicited. “We just believe in accepting the consequences of a savage and unkind world.”

  My wife says, “That’s nice.”

  “Yeah,” the woman says. “I guess I’ve always believed that in a world like this one, you have to pay to play.”

  My wife and I nod. We are certainly paying.

  “If you aren’t willing to pay,” she continues, “you aren’t ready to play.”

  I say, “We’re definitely paying to pay, yes.”

  “Play,” the woman clarifies.

  “Pay,” I say. “I heard you.”

  “Well,” my wife will later say in our bedroom, “I’ve never been more proud to call you my husband. I’ve never seen you sexier than you were in your restraint. I love the new tame you. The new thoughtful and humane you makes me exceptionally interested in you.”

  “I’m not sure I’m a fan,” I will answer.

  And she will say, “I would like to show you some things the old you would never see.”

  She is a woman of powerful restraint, my wife, and I will follow her whenever she moves toward indulgence. And she will drop her pants and step out of her underpants, and she will lift her T-shirt over her head and drop it at her feet, and she will bend over the bed and tug the sheets off, and she will flip them in the air and spread them on the floor. She will turn to me and take off my shirt, and she will kneel and slide my pants down my legs, and she will tell me to get down on the floor with her, and I will do this, and the machinations of the condom will seem ridiculous, but she will do it for me, and she will do it in earnest, and she will say, Oh god, and she will have those long fingers on me, and she will get down on top of me, and she will say, Does this hurt you? and she will ask again, Does this hurt you? and I will hear the boy’s voice asking me this, “Does this hurt you?”

  “Does this hurt you?”

  And then the boy’s hand is up against my face, patting it, and I don’t know where the conversation at the table has gone, but everyone seems to be having a nice time until I take that kid’s hand, and I squeeze it, and I twist—and I snap it. Just like that. But it’s not what I thought it would be. It’s not what you see on television. It’s not what you’re told. It’s not what you expect. The child is loud, screaming. The boy is nearly blue. You really feel for him, it’s true. The bone comes right through. The bone is huge. The skin falls back, peels right back and all that’s left is this bone sticking out. But it’s also so small. It all seems so tiny, like a little chicken bone. And it also feels so just, and I really do, I really do think everyone sitting there looking at one another, I really do think we finally understood one another and what we were all dealing with here.

  WHEN OUR SON, 26, BRINGS US HIS FIRST GIRLFRIEND

  Our son’s departure to college helped. That’s a fact. The house went quiet. We had very little to discuss. The amount of sighing decreased. Life slowed to an inching. I swear I could count the staging seconds of the rising sun, and also those of its setting out the other window.

  Weekends, the boy would come home, parched. He drank water straight from the spigot, hours on end, replenishing for the coming week.

  Fantasizing about my funeral, I would sometimes imagine everyone dry-eyed, rock-faced. I would imagine this—the day of my funeral—is the first day in my son’s life he doesn’t cry. He’d dump a few of his toy trucks down on my casket and walk on. He’d hug his mother. Arm in arm, they would walk away from the grave and discuss their lunch. He feels full, my son would say to her. He feels a little bloated, truth be told. My wife
would say that’s funny, because she feels disemboweled.

  But because I didn’t die, we ended up living for many years in the perpetual horror and guilt of our son’s ceaseless crying. His departure to college helped, as I say, but we are parents—we still fretted. What must his professors think? What a shame to be his roommate, his friend. Who will clean all those fucking shammy cloths?

  Then one weekend in his sophomore year he brings a girl home, a nice girl, very big. She glares at me glaring at my son, a sign of what is to come, but I imagine he finds this wary vigilance of hers soothing. He jags up the crying that night in his old bedroom, just as he’s always done. We dip toward sleep until we hear her climb the stairs from the guest room; we hear her slip into his room and tell him he is such a loser and if he doesn’t pull his emotional shit together she’ll leave him, straight up. How could he expect anyone to handle his parents while he does all the crying, all the stealing of the obvious drama?

  My wife and I look at one another. We smile. We could hear our boy sobbing without restraint at those remarks. It’s hard. No one wishes this sort of thing for their child, but we smile.

  Then she suddenly apologizes and collapses onto his bed and tells him she was wrong—way, way wrong, how cruel she could be, he brings out in her a personality she had long feared she possessed. We hear silence, and then we hear them making what we recognize must be exceptionally uncomfortable love on his tiny childhood bed, and I fall asleep, for just a few minutes, just a knot of disgust.

  —In the sudden darkness I start up again, realizing I can no longer hear our boy crying. It’s a Sunday morning, I think, and I don’t know what this means, and I look over at my wife and sitting up in the bed, shaking her, tell her Listen, Listen, Listen, I hear nothing.

  We spent what seemed like years driving around that morning looking for an open ice cream place so we could suckle cold dairy together in celebration. Our baby boy laughed and laughed with his girlfriend, and whenever he stopped laughing, to catch his breath and suck his ice cream, my wife and I froze for an instant, terrified the tears would return.

  But that was it. He wouldn’t start crying again. I had not died, not literally, and still we had found our way to the day when our boy, at twenty-six, stopped crying. It was enormous. It changed everything. We were no longer guilty of the crimes that had made our son cry all these years. It’s unsavory to use the word relief, but there it is, and I told my wife I would go back to work again, and I said I would try to be a better person to strangers, and my wife and I had sex again sometime later that year.

  O SWEET ONE IN THE BLUFF

  At first I actually could speak to her. I could speak to her quite often, actually quite naturally. She just couldn’t speak back, and that really helped. I repeatedly told her I was in love with her, every time I saw her rolling on the carpet, ogling the ceiling, anytime I could catch her conscious. “My god,” I could say to her then. “I love you so much, my little beautiful sussypants.”

  And my wife would roll her eyes. “Must be nice,” she would say.

  But then my daughter started speaking and it was enormous and awesome in its own way. She was twelve, thirteen months old. She manufactured verbal things like “ad” and “non.” It was awesome, and the awesome totally silenced me, utterly shut me down again. I went solid stone with her—and sulky. It was as if I was trying to date again, back on the scene some twenty years later.

  I had major problems with dating, as everyone knows, because it’s very hard to date when you can’t speak naturally to the intended objects of your interest. You have to rely on your body. I have a really good body, really fit, thank god, and everyone knows that if my wife hadn’t been into my body and therefore determined to break me socially, back when we were in college, I might have tumbled, silent and abstinent, into my lonely, filthy little grave.

  But my wife did break me, thank god.

  Or so I thought. For all these years I’ve been pretty much broken, talking to men and to women with relative comfort, relative niceness. But then we had this daughter of ours, and she wanted to speak to me pretty much as soon as she could begin speaking, and I could not say a thing back to her. At first I could talk to her, yes, but this lasted—in the framework of a lifetime—about twenty seconds. My wife absorbed my silence to my daughter as she would a personal injury to herself. She couldn’t summon the same determination to break me as she had when we’d been courting. She was wounded by it, hurt, suffering. She cried a lot. She whimpered. She got frustrated and loudly banged things on the counters in bursts of anxiety. And yet she tried to help me. She sat me down across from our daughter and said things like, “Go ahead. Just say, ‘Hi.’ Just say, ‘Hey.’ Just start with one word.”

  I would have to shake my head. I had a rock in my throat. “No.”

  “Just say the first thing that pops out of your heart,” she tried.

  “I want to tell her I’m in love with her.”

  My wife took a breath and looked off to a distant country. “Maybe try something less dramatic.”

  She was very patient. She is an extraordinary woman. She stood there and watched me staring at my daughter. “Dad,” my daughter would later say to me, “play with me.” And I would play with her. But I would do so in silence. I maneuvered fancy-smelling purple and pink horses into and out of fairylands. I combed her long honey hair. I took her to the swing set, pushed her. I just did it all without voicing a single word to her. I just looked at her. And my wife just looked at me, often agape.

  “Either this indicates you’re a misogynist,” my therapist offered, “a hater of all women, or else you’re homosexual and closeted. Perhaps you’ve transferred your wanton cravings for men into an abject contempt for the natural interest your daughter might have in speaking with you.”

  My wife offered, “I worry the only thing we talk about anymore is our daughter.”

  “I sometimes talk about me.”

  “Yes,” she answered quietly. “Let’s not do that anymore.” So in time I didn’t talk to my wife about our daughter, or about anything, and I stopped talking to everyone and entered a phase of comprehensive silence where I was only writing notes down on a piece of paper at grocery stores, to pester a shelving clerk about the new location for the organic produce or something, and I answered the telephone only to hear someone speak to me before hanging up on them. At work, I wrote to my boss and director that I had my tongue severed for religious reasons, and I handed them a copy of my protected rights. I fell into studying my domestic life as a qualitative scientist might study a troubling case: I took extensive notes on my wife’s patterns of toiletry usage and tended nightly a three-dimensional scatter chart depicting the angles at which my daughter would prop her cell phone against her face while speaking to different interlocutors—males, females, adults (10–13, 14–16, 17+).

  Then one afternoon while my wife was out of the house, my daughter came to me in the kitchen. I was scouring pans. She was unusually fidgety, very pretty. She said to me, “I am a total fuckwaste.”

  I shut off the water and turned to her. “That is a lie,” I said.

  “Holy—” she said. She put her hands over her mouth. Then she put them on top of her head. She was smiling. I hadn’t seen her smile in more than a decade.

  The power of sight is often smothered by its sister senses, especially sound and smell, but I have found sight to be my greatest and closest friend over the years, particularly in my silence. It was our first direct exchange in her cerebral life, and I found the visual dimension of that moment its most gratifying aspect. She had amazing teeth, it turns out, and her cheeks formed dimples that ran clear to her ears. I had never seen that. It wasn’t the way her mother had ever smiled with me. Perhaps, indeed, her mother had never smiled with me, a gutting thought.

  “I need to get out of here,” my daughter repeated.

  I nodded.

  “My life is about to end,” she said. “And I have to get the hell out of here. Let’s just
go. You don’t need to talk. I want to go to the mountain. I’ll drive. You don’t have to talk or do anything. I just need to go. I just want you to come with me. We can pan for gold, or something, I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to talk?”

  She thought about this for a moment. “No.”

  She must have seen me sink.

  “That’s why I asked you and not Mom. I just need someone to be with who won’t tell me what to do.”

  I nodded and rubbed my face. I had a lot I wanted to say that she was making me swallow.

  I had never been to the mountain. I had no idea what people did on the mountain. It is the only mountain in Wisconsin. Indeed, it is the only mountain within a one- or two-thousand-mile radius. Indeed, it’s not a mountain at all. It’s a bluff, and because we see it as a bluff, a total fraud, we call it a mountain. Miners liked it years ago. But that didn’t last, and I can see why. It has always seemed a particularly depressing mountain to me. It has always seemed like some ecological flaw, a misstep of creation, an eyesore that suppressed our property values and our perspectives—a painfully slow rising from the earth matched only by its salient and rather unpleasing drop back down again—a metaphor to kill the pleasure of all metaphors in and around and about this countryside.

  I probably should have discouraged her from driving. She was fourteen. She passed cars on the right edge of the highway. She played extraordinarily loud music. The music seemed unbelievably unrelatable. I wondered at the calibration of their anger and what a world looked like in which people wore their anger so openly, or a world in which people paid money to hear people so fluent with their anger. I nearly bit my hand off as we rounded the tight switchbacks. I have never been more grateful to see a parking lot.

  We left the car and crossed a wooden bridge leading to a prefabricated cabin built off the face of the mountain. I wanted to know how she’d known this place was here, but she would not read my note. She said, “Let’s go” like we were actors in some television crime drama. But I kept pace with her, and I remained silent. We paid fifteen dollars each (she paid for herself on a credit card I had not, to my knowledge, cosigned for her) for a flimsy tin lid. The broken-toothed and partially bearded man at the counter said, “He know what he doing?”