The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  My wife doesn’t want to hear it. She flips a hand at me.

  “And,” I say, “to the matter of education and the poor subjects in Lapland: your sister has no idea how many people are actually painting in Lapland, very likely none.”

  I dream of kneeling and working by the fireplace, those shit corners. What size brush should I use? And the tape job. That blue stickless tape. Of the trim along the floor, the carpeting.

  By Monday colleagues ask me my story, say things like, “What’s your deal?” and I tell them.

  “Oh my god!” one of them says, a woman I dated years ago and who seems determined to maintain an ongoing interest in my personal life. “You are going to do such a good job! I can completely see that for you, for your house! Your wife must just be like, ‘Ah!’”

  The males don’t have a response at all to the painting question, only that I’ve shared anything about my domestic life with this old girlfriend. Do I think she won’t somehow take advantage of this personal information, ask, for example, to come over and see it—help even, somehow? They laugh.

  They haven’t married yet, these guys. They have no idea what lies ahead. I try to level with them: “Can you paint trim every night or does this make the job uneven? Can paint go bad or change color if it’s left too long?”

  They look at me and shrug. One of them answers, “Keep that shit to yourself. Trust me, you don’t want people telling you what’s best for you and your wife.”

  “I’m talking objectively,” I protest. “What’s best for paint, generally speaking?”

  “That’s like asking what’s best for cement, generally. It all depends on what kind of cement you want. Rough, textured, flat, matte, shiny. I can’t tell you what you want. Anyway, even when you know what you want, to a certain degree you’re just going to have to take what you get. You can’t control cement. That’s the bitch of Mother Nature.”

  That evening, the sun is at an odd angle, gleaming off the cans on our front stoop. They have arrived. I yank them each inside the house and read their instructions over and over. It’s exhausting. I feel woozy, the smell of the cans and of the future with the cans. I’m predicting the cans’ smell. I close my eyes . . .

  I open them, and my wife’s ready. She throws her bags on the floor and tears off her shirt and slacks. She’s in her underwear before I’ve sat upright. “Let’s go,” she says. “Get that lid off. Did you shake it? Stir it.”

  I say, “Is this the right color?”

  She says, “It’s fine. Let’s go.”

  “I’m not sure it’s at all the right color.”

  “It’s fine,” she says again. “Just shut up and stir.”

  “We need to tape.”

  “You didn’t fucking tape?”

  I look at her.

  My wife swears a noun, an ugly thing. She throws herself onto the sofa. She is ruddy and damp. Her warm body is twisted on the sofa and hangs loose, pretty. She pushes her hair back from her eyes and sighs, and she swears again. She closes her eyes, and just as I think she has forfeited her interest, she shakes her head and says, “To hell with it.” She hops up again and takes my brush, thrashes it through the roller dish.

  “The carpet!”

  She is deaf and she is dumb. She is swiping at the chair rail in long, reckless strokes. She’s made a speckled rill of Green Rill on our old berber. She’s crouching like a catcher, raking along the wall next to the fireplace walls. Paint is flinging and dripping. She strokes in those long, reckless strokes, lavishing the wall above and below the rail. Her muscles tremble and twitch. Her knees crack. I take a glob in the forehead and come to. The small of her back.

  I have lost my breath.

  I haven’t really ever seen her like this. She turns and takes my hand, yanks me toward her, kisses me, her tongue firing into my mouth. “C’mon,” she pants. “Get into it.” Those walls that had kept me up at night are done in thirteen minutes. In thirteen minutes I’m on my back panting beside my wife looking. We’re both breathing out of our mouths, leaning against the sofa. It’s a whole mess we have here. However, in the public sense, it is done.

  Or, as my wife puts it, “It’s started.”

  Later, the nooks of the fireplace wall have filled like lake locks. My wife and I are strewn across the floor like castaways, drunkards. She lies flat, draping her arm over her eyes. Her cheeks are red. She swears again. She asks me if I smoke. We laugh. We are utterly wasted. We are glowing. She says, “Could you do more?”

  “Right.”

  She looks up at me. “Seriously.”

  I am thirty-four years old. I am a little bit nauseous.

  Later, it’s Tuesday evening, and we are stripped down again and going at it like reckless teenagers, like we are doing something lewd that needs to be done very lewdly, very quickly. The windows are done in ten minutes. The cat has Country Rill paws. We laugh.

  The laugh is not, as it had been on Monday, robust.

  I say, “Do you like it? Is this something you’re liking?” I shake my head. “I mean, are you glad we’re doing it?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Is it the color?”

  “No. It is what it is.” She scratches her cheek. “It is what it is. But it’s good.” She is not telling me the truth. She cannot tell me that if she were able she would just do it all herself. I cannot be obviated, because the project is too enormous for one person. Science hasn’t yet really come this far. Not to the Midwest anyway, not to the suburbs and the middle class. It is the contract we’d agreed to, for better or worse, that I be included here. All this is sticky-noted across her face, and then, because she knows that I am reading this, she rolls on the floor and laughs affably.

  The first thing we see at the Engelvedts’ is their trim. It’s running up and down every room in the house. Every damn inch of their house blinds us— finished and lovely color, matted color, glossy color, the shadows of work completed and past, distant hardships. In tremendous insult, they have even sanded away some of their color for a look of fashionable oldness. The kitchen stings with what I’d seen called Icicle spreading above their tall cabinets, just a subtle flourish, but it’s there plainly enough to gall. The bathroom has crown molding the color of mud. I have my eyes shielded through half the visit. At dinner, I compliment their attention to detail. “Really,” I say.

  Bob says, “Really?”

  I push the matter. I want to know how long it took them. How long did they have to work, wait. “Give me a ballpark.”

  Years, for them.

  I suggest we take a day off on Wednesday, a day away from the painting. It’s clearly become a mechanical thing, a means to an end, and is in no way enjoyable. This should be enjoyable, right? Everyone says it should be fun, right?

  And we finish off the master on Wednesday night. And we shower together, and my wife says, “We have to do a second coat, you know,” and she waits for my expression and says, “We aren’t done, little buddy,” taking my penis in her hand. “We have the rest of the week to do more. We still have Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and maybe even Monday morning. We need to get as much paint in there as possible—as much as we’ve got, as much as you’ll get, we need to get it up there.” And she calls me little buddy and tells my penis not to pretend he didn’t know all of this when we started painting. Because nobody likes a forgetful little buddy.

  Thursday, we paint, I think.

  Friday, the brush is frayed and starchy, limpid and stiff at the same time—caked in a sort of translucent lacquer and generally incapable of offering a stroke of Country Rill that does not somehow ruin a previous stroke. My whole rhythm is off. I’m doing harm. My wife just winces, says things like, “Oh Guud.” I have covered the kitchen walls three times over. My arms ache, and my hands are blistering badly. I picture my shoulders as the inside of a rotting boat on a destitute beach. I drink water like a dog. I’ve taken to eating M&M’s again. I’m taking down the big bags from megastores that require paid memberships.


  I have no idea where my wife is by Friday—

  She’s glassy eyed across the dining room table from me. Our dinners are fast food, delivered, frozen. When we drag ourselves to the dining room table we no longer pray, no longer regard one another, no longer speak. Anything that does come out of our mouths has to do with the painting—and it’s all bad news—and we bite it off the instant it materializes, without our consent or wishes, so that neither of us has to hear that which is bothering our heads in silence. I say on Saturday a.m., “Well?” She shrugs.

  Who am I kidding? The house and its paint will always be hers. It will always reflect most on her. No one’s damning me for anything in this labor. I apply myself.

  I say I’m going running on Saturday afternoon. My wife raises her eyebrows, questions of where this energy will suddenly be discovered appearing on her brow. It isn’t being discovered; I am lying to her. I take the car instead to the store where we were agitated by the rough worker, because they are hosting a free painting clinic there from eleven to two, and I have seen this in the paper at some point, and the rough woman stands in the middle of a square countertop unit that is mounted by at least five cash registers on all sides, and I cannot believe how many people have come to hear her speak.

  I can only imagine what things must be like for these others to have brought themselves to this lowness. I came because I did not expect this woman to be the person sawing off advice.

  The rough lady goes on and on and on about paintbrushes, concluding that of course no brush is actually any better than what you ultimately do with whatever brush you have. She moves then to paint itself and paint cans and paint types and concludes with the exact same premise, that all paint is the same, insofar as it depends on what you do with the paint you have.

  The other customers—geese—are nodding and pecking frantic notes in ink on their palms. I am about to leave when I hear her say something I take with me out the sliding doors near Floral: “Once you start painting, you can never really stop it. Painting is a snowball.”

  My wife breathes deeply. “I don’t know,” she says. The clouds outside are bursting, and when all has been cleared and touched up by late, late Sunday, when at last everything is shoved away into the garage and vacuumed and clean and finished, we hold each other, hold each other so tightly I have my wife’s rib in my hand. She is trembling and hot, and we can see plainly that we can see nothing clearly. That’s it. The color is there, but it exists now as its own thing, unrelated to us.

  The rest is up to everyone else, we guess. We guess we have done our part. We guess the time after will be worth the time before.

  LOCAL ACCIDENT

  A truck just hit a woman in our neighborhood. The woman lived, but her baby was pronounced dead at the hospital. There were witnesses. They have yet to catch the driver. Many believe he will be found and sentenced, though the incident occurred at night and not one witness can provide a coherent set of details consistent with the details of other witnesses. For days now this event has sobered everyone in the neighborhood. We have brought dolls and candles to the intersection. We have wept and shared stories. We have sung, held and hung signs damning “the coward” who could not face his accident.

  In fairness to the specifics of this tragedy, I have yet to mention to anyone that I myself have hit two people with my car before. Neither person died, just as our neighbor did not die, but I hit them both on the same day and both were very much deliberate acts. I hit one of them at exactly 8:30 a.m. and the other shortly after the lunch hour. They were both male. It was the end of the spring. I was very busy. I had many errands. My mind was, as they say, awash.

  The first man went up the hood, then down; I clipped the other one and sent him into a dramatic spin. In both cases, I stopped and got out. I did not flee the scene. I could have. I had time. I definitely gave it consideration. How many decisions you can squeeze in a moment! Rather, I stepped out of my car and helped each gentleman—because this is how it’s done—off the ground.

  Both victims were my bosses. My program director said, “You know, a more detailed explanation would really help me see your side of this a lot more clearly.” Then he closed his eyes and told me he needed to sit. He walked away and sat down on the curb. He is a poet, bald, and goes by three names. I let him sit there in silence. He had his head in his hands. I got back in the car and pulled away from the edge, turned off my blinkers, rolled right past him.

  My dean is also bald but he always wears a black Orvis Stetson. He insists we address him by his title and his abbreviated first name—Dean D. He popped back up after his dramatic spin and said he was “fine,” “excellent,” and “this sort of thing happens to the best of us.” He was bleeding from the mouth. His knees were exposed through the shreds of his pants. He was very friendly. He dusted me off, swiping at the front of my shoulders. He nodded. He adjusted his hat. I just looked at him. He laughed. I put my hand on his cheek. “Let’s call it a career,” he said, “shall we?”

  After helping him across the street to his office, I got back in my car and drove home. I played ball with my son that afternoon. I remember it well. At eighteen–nineteen in what had become an uncharacteristically physical contest, he received one free throw because we were in the one-and-one bonus. If he’d made the first, he would have received a second and probably carried the game. But the boy missed his first free throw, I wiped that shit off the glass, and I spun elbows-out and called him a “tool” to his face.

  He did not care for this. It was too much. He walked away.

  I dropped the ball, called after him—another, uglier name. I followed him. I didn’t let up with the name-calling. Then I jogged abreast of him and asked him where the hell he was going. He wouldn’t speak to me. He sprinted ahead. I watched him run. It was not nice to watch. He’s athletic enough, but when he’s upset he hobbles like an old lady, all frail hunch and wobbles.

  But I knew we were going to the grocery store because my son loves the grocery store. He’s drawn there, magnetized by it, by what I don’t know exactly, but it’s obviously linked to the affair I was caught organizing with a woman there about six years ago. That affair didn’t end well for me, our family, or the community at large. Whenever I come in to the store now, everyone looks up, drops their eyes, and shakes their heads. Whenever he comes in, by contrast, they embrace him with a false warmth and familiarity usually reserved for caricatures of Southern domestic life.

  I found him sitting in Bread, gagging on Vündercrüst. I sat down in front of him. The linoleum was cold. “Look,” I said, “let’s not dick around. This is about your hypothalamus, and you know it. My first time was in a grocery store, actually. Let me tell you about it.”

  He stopped crying and started to laugh. I could still make him laugh, after all those years, all the injurious behavior of my past.

  “I’m sorry I called you those names,” I said.

  “Do you really believe in repentance?” he asked me.

  “I’m not sure trash-talking is really a sin, buddy.” But I was thinking about the men I’d struck and nearly killed earlier that day. There is no way he could know, I remember thinking. I tore open the softer Vünderbüns and handed him one. “Atonement,” I said and winked, “is way better with starch.”

  He said, “I’m pregnant. Mary and I are pregnant.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And Elsa. I’m also pregnant with Elsa. I have two girls pregnant.”

  There are various ways to experience accidents. There must be. I cannot know if “the coward” designed to strike the pregnant woman, as I had designed to strike my employers. I don’t know for certain the role of premeditation in the experience of accidents. Personally, I found the experience a little flat. I’d expected more. I expect my son expected more also. I stood up and walked to the front of the store.

  I pulled the display propane grill into Bread. I cranked it. I nabbed some franks from the outskirts of Produce and began rolling them across
the grates with a chopstick. My son just sat there at the base of the grill. I ate seventeen hot dogs in about one hour of silence; my son ended up eating half of one. “One thing I know,” I finally said to him, when all the food had been eaten. “You are permanently in the bonus and can shoot two free throws for any foul in the indefinite future.” He looked wan.

  “Look,” I said to him. “The fact is you don’t always choose your choices. You don’t always choose your victims and you don’t always choose your witnesses. That’s why we call them accidents.”

  He nodded. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You’re young.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  The way the bald poet’s head hit my hood reminded me, in that moment, of the way I have from time to time tried to put a glass down on a shiny granite countertop: misjudging the distance, I bring the glass down too quickly and the impact surprises me into violent recoil. And of Dean D. in his dramatic spin: who was that ice skater who, in the most recent Salt Lake Olympics, flung herself through the open doorway during warm-ups, one minute spinning and the next minute—just gone?

  I couldn’t answer him. I just used my hand to indicate it was time to leave. He stood up. I put my arm around him. I left the grill and the packages right there in the aisle. The people in the grocery store warily watched us leave. We walked home. At some point as we walked, he asked me again if I was angry. “Are you going to kill me?”

  The timing and phrasing of this question felt heavy. “I don’t like that word,” I said.

  “But you’re not talking.”

  “Talking isn’t the only way to talk,” I said.

  After a moment, he said, “I don’t know what that means.”