The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  I let him think about it. I said nothing more.

  To the best of my knowledge, my son maintains a friendship with the women with whom he had children at fourteen or fifteen. He may well provide for them emotionally and financially. I don’t know. Presently, I believe he is married to another woman, a woman I have only briefly met, and he has four children with her now. They all live in rural Sweden, in a cottage with her parents, according to the postcards he sometimes sends. He still flies back here to visit his other children in the Madison area from time to time, and the mothers of these other children are married to other men, and they have other children with these other men, of course.

  In what I think is the most painful twist in this whole story, the woman who was hit by “the coward” joined us one night at the intersection after she’d been released from the hospital. It was evening, and I don’t think anyone expected to see her come up behind us. We were finishing a song, a religious hymn I believe, and many of us were crying quietly to ourselves. “Hi,” she said.

  We did not turn to look at her. We had no idea it was her! I’m not sure we really heard her until she began to thank us. “This is just so overwhelming,” she said.

  The sun was setting over her shoulder. It was very bright, piercing, very hard to see her clearly. Most of us were shielding our eyes and squinting as we looked in her direction. Cars were honking through the intersection, so it was difficult to hear everything she was saying. She seemed to be accounting for her recovery, her health, and her gratitude. “But I think it’s time to move on,” I heard her say suddenly. “We’ve mourned the dead, and I ask that we all now, for the sake of my husband and my other three children, and family and friends, try to embrace the living and celebrate the life we have together.”

  Everyone, I could see, was nodding. Everyone, I could see, was lying. Another song was started, and then she eventually left. She just slipped away while we stood there and continued to sing and pray and protest. It was all very hurtful. I think she had no idea the impact she’d had on our lives. I give her the benefit of the doubt, because I have been on both sides of an accident before, but she damn well better believe we deserve more than this.

  SCANDAMERICAN DOMESTIC

  The children wanted me to buy them diapers. It was at first silly. Then they voiced up. I couldn’t follow their logic; I rejected the appeal. I explained they were not in charge. I told them their silliness wasn’t welcome. I may have called them idiots. I may have said they were acting like idiots. It’s hard to remember. I definitely told them it wasn’t personal. Still, they wept. Every friendship has a bad patch.

  I let things cool down. We drove home. I had a cocktail. Then, before bed that night, I kissed the older one on his head. I said I was sorry about earlier, I’d take them to Sweden in the morning. The children leapt from their sheets. We tucked them back in. We shushed them. We hit the lights. My wife’s eyes were white flags in the dark room. We closed their door. We went downstairs to speak.

  In the kitchen, we did not speak. We shrugged a lot. I took a blanket back up to the children’s bedroom for a sleepover. Sometimes you can spend too much time with friends, and somewhere over Greenland I resented my two friends. They were tearing each other apart. The boy wanted to blow up his sister. I tried to call my wife: in this modern day and time, some ten thousand feet closer to heaven, no service.

  I shouldered my unconscious friends through Stockholm’s customs, currency exchange, and baggage. I took a cab directly to an ABBA remake off Sveavägen. My friends woke to “Waterloo.” We rocked. We soared. The sun never set, at least not for as long as we were awake, and it felt, we agreed over a bowl of milkless muesli the next morning, like we were players in a band dream, a bad band dream. We laughed into hiccups. Then we passed out on top of one another and woke up violently ill.

  The concierge called an ambulance. We were wheeled through the lobby. We were studied. We ate intravenously behind thin and flimsy curtains for a day. The children were bored: where the hell is Mommy, anyway?

  We returned to the hotel in the off-pink light of four a.m. the next day. I dumped my friends in their big hotel bed. I called down again to the concierge. I asked if it would be hard at this time of the morning to find someone to watch the sleeping children while I went out. In Stockholm, the concierge said, nothing is cheap.

  The babysitter he sent up was a delightful man about my age, spirited and amiable. He wore a suit. He said he looked forward to seeing me on my return and if, he leaned toward me, if you are to have a companion with you when you return, I will slip out quietly, no need to fuss. I said I’d like him to be my friend. He said, That’s extra. I said, Really? He said, I think we are misunderstanding one another in translation.

  I left. I stood in the hallway outside our hotel door. I just stood there. Then I went back in. I released the nice babysitter. I went to the room and woke my friends again. I had to really shake them. This is the time of your life, I pleaded. For god-sakes, the days don’t get any better than they are right now. Do not sleep this away.

  They sobbed. I carried them through the lobby again, and this time I took them to a bar made of glass, shaped like an igloo. It was approximately six degrees inside the igloo. I spilled all my kronor on the crystalline counter and drank all the Svedka this would afford—two shots. At some point the kids began dancing, sliding across the smooth floor in their footies, steam puffing off their heads. I kept drinking ice water. The business lunches started. We were asked to leave.

  We plopped down on the street corner.

  We talked about their mother, my tentative wife. They said she would have enjoyed this. They said they would have enjoyed their lives more had she been there. They said they wanted something to eat. They said they wanted somewhere to sleep. They said they wanted peace restored to their existence. I told them we all wanted something. I assured them this was not personal.

  DIRECT ASSAULT FROM SOUTH SWEDEN

  Our son used to draw and color and repeat, “Is this me?” But he was three and behind his peers, we feared. We now understand he was asking us a sincere question. But my wife and I, at that time, we did not see us. We did not see him. We just stared at the paper. He would point to a tiny diagonal slash of crayon (“Is this me?”) and we would look at that paper, see nothing, run our fingers through his fine hair, and tell him he was really a wonderful artist.

  It’s very hard to lie to children. It’s also very easy. It gives a person an unpleasing pleasure. But we have so few weapons to tell the truth, we had to lie to him. We clapped and raved and told him we would show his art to various people from whom we would actually hide the art.

  We were aware he might march somewhere into the future with this. We talked about it. We said to one another in the coolness of our bedroom sheets that he may never get better at drawing or syntax or anything if we continued lying to him about his shortcomings and inadequacies. We were in agreement that we might never materialize in his eyes and in his life, as our parents had not materialized in our lives, if we kept this up, if we did not push him. And we agreed we might forever find ourselves having to lie to him, as our own parents, as so many people in our families, over the years had lied to us.

  So, we pushed him: four times a week, we delivered him to a small house in a fancy neighborhood. The teacher was a lovely woman. She was young. She was someone’s daughter. We’d made a few assumptions about her. It was a different era. We were not as progressive and forward-conscious as we now find ourselves. It was true she knew Mandarin, but it was not true that she desired to teach it. She seemed eager to listen to our interest in her language, generally, and very interested in what we were asking her. She smiled so warmly. (We had stopped her in the grocery store, initially.) We handed her a check and told her, “Please, do what you do,” without really clarifying the terms of these sessions except to add, “Just no more art.”

  But this young woman had no interest in teaching our son Mandarin. She desired instead to teach
our son art in English.

  I caught them one afternoon in his second year with her. I had been late by about an hour or two picking him up. I’d jogged to the front door of the nice house and knocked. When no one answered, I tell you I became extremely nervous. Some things a parent just knows, just feels. I went around to the side window and looked in. They were right there at her dining room table. She was reaching across the table, her hand over the top of his. Paper had been scattered, and boxes—huge shoeboxes!—of crayons had been spilled and scattered like a train derailment across the vast mahogany table. He was speaking to her. She was nodding, listening as though he might be offering her counsel.

  I rocked that dining room window, I tell you. They both flinched and spun. They looked at me like I was an intruder, an attacker. And then, on recognition, they softened. They waved. My son turned back to her, finished his sentence, and then she looked at me again and signaled for me to go around to the front.

  She let me in, greeted me without a smile. She asked if I would like to see my “son’s working.”

  “Let me hear my son speak Chinese.”

  I moved past her, charged into the dining room. There, in front of the child, was the gun, smoking: a drawing, a person, badly composed. The person was a bubble mess. I could discern the figure’s head well enough, yes, and his torso, arms, and legs, but the shape was essentially a colorless and fraudulent attempt at realism. It brought everything back. We had not escaped. We had felt so strongly, so urgently, that we needed our son to have something specific and tangible we knew would benefit his future. (We knew the Chinese were going nowhere anytime soon. We knew their language would be extremely “hot” in the coming years of his life. We were no fools! We earnestly, desperately, wanted the best for him. And, yes, we wanted him not to blame us for his failures, as we blamed our own families for our failures, and we wanted him not to hold us, as we held our own parents, in contemptuous absentia for the duration of his life. All lost!)

  “Say ‘hello’ to me in Chinese,” I demanded.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “Say ‘hello’ in Chinese!”

  “Hello.”

  I asked him if he could speak any words in Mandarin, and when he could not—when it became clear he had no idea what I was asking him—I just gazed at our young Mandarin teacher until she fled her own dining room in shame.

  Oh god—was his heart broken!

  He went on weeping without end for days. He spoke in a blubbering we agreed sounded like a foreign language we both knew well. My wife and I nodded: we’d been to this country before. We knew this landscape, this territory, all too well. We knew what it felt like to have your parents undercut, snipe you. We knew what that place sounded like. We knew that language, all right.

  And yet, we spurned it. You cannot go around speaking that language. That kind of language will ruin your life prospects. We both knew this, and we told him this, though in different words. “I sounded like my mother,” I later reflected to my wife in our cool bedroom sheets. My wife said, “You sounded like my father.”

  Looking back now, I probably should have told my wife I was trying to persuade the Mandarin teacher to take our son back. I probably should have told her that I had second thoughts, and that I had doubted myself and the brutal and rigid lines we’d drawn for our son’s future. The boy had seemed relatively pleasant over those two or three years he’d been visiting the Mandarin teacher’s house to indulge his bad art and facilitate the art teacher’s fluency in English.

  I should have told my wife that I’d been making phone calls and stopping at the woman’s house, pleading with her to take my son back. “It would have to be secret,” I’d told her. “My wife really can’t know about this.” I offered to triple her pay. I offered to buy her a new car. I asked her to name her price, name anything, and she could have it if she would just take our son back and make him pleasant again.

  I should have told my wife all of this, because if I had, I would have discovered sooner that my wife had been doing the same thing. But I could not tell my wife this. It’s not easy lying to your wife. I believed our strongest bond was our mutual contempt for the damage our parents had visited on us, and our virulent agreement that we would never allow this damage to be visited on our son. So we would simply rest side by side in bed together in those soft and cool sheets and actively elevate the rhetoric of our love.

  “We should forbid the art entirely,” I would venture.

  “Where can you recycle crayons and markers?”

  Things degenerated rapidly in this way. Within that same year we installed the child in a professional for-profit clinic for languages, where he churned out trillions of words for more than two decades. He eventually moved away from us and our small, unassuming neighborhood and married a woman in south Sweden, Malmbäck, the land of our grandparents.

  Well, it sure as hell seems that he chose Sweden, particularly south Sweden, to spite us. It feels very much like a direct assault, I can assure you. We feel assaulted, at any rate. Not that he would care. He lives there still, as does this Swedish woman’s family we have never met. (We were not invited to the wedding. He told us in an e-mail that he thought it särskild the invitation would have been lost in the mail.) They have four children, apparently. We have seen no pictures of his family. We have not seen one of these grandchildren. All we have now, we have stuck to our refrigerator. We still look at those thin lines he used to draw. The paper has faded.

  Not that it changes anything, because nothing can diminish the assault our son has campaigned against us, just as we have carried on assaults against our own parents and families, our worst nightmare, but one night not long ago, looking at these pictures on the refrigerator, I said, “Is this me?” And my wife, wrenching her neck, said, “What did you just say?”

  It doesn’t change anything now to know what he meant then. We know we are what we were.

  TIME IN NORRMALMSTORG

  Akin to what an infant feels when he gets attention, relieving his thirst, hunger, wetness or fear of neglect—a primitive gratitude for the gift of life, an emotion that eventually develops and differentiates into varieties of affection and love.

  —FRANK M. OCHBERG, ON STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

  We attend a party for a five-year-old the size of a fifteen-year-old and receive long sabers and plastic pistols at the door. There is our three-year-old with an eye patch; there’s our four-year-old in a black hat with a wooden sword sticking through it. We all four come through the busy house, walk out to the backyard. We stand there looking at other people’s children striking each other, falling, dying, and still being struck as they lie on the ground already dead. And then they also shoot one another with their pistols. “This looks challenging,” my wife says.

  “Can we hit people?” our four-year-old asks.

  “Just run for your life,” I say.

  There is the birthday boy’s father brandishing his own, real sidearm for a few of the older children, presumably siblings or relatives of the birthday boy. They are all huddled around this man, and he catches me gaping. It’s not loaded, he assures me. I nod. I thank him for that. He is an enormous and hulking man. He is keeping his gaze on me. Even as he speaks to these children about the way in which a bullet can run through one’s bone, ricochet through more bones and body tissue and, as his friend once experienced apparently, out the bottom of one’s foot into the earth, his eyes keep flashing up at me. My wife leans over and says she doesn’t understand what’s happened to suburban Madison. Then she walks away. The man is still looking at me. He lifts his chin. I give him a thumb and follow my wife.

  One of the birthday boy’s relatives has somehow procured a full-scale sailing vessel and had it beached on this back lawn. This is the real deal, a real schooner, I think, two full masts and all the complex rigging. Its hull is enormous. The children look like dwarves running around, killing one another beneath it. The breeze just slightly shifts the tattered sails and the powerful thrum th
is creates is a stunning whorl you feel in your chest. Our three-year-old is being prevented from going up the ship’s rope ladder by large, surly girls standing along the wooden gunwale some twenty yards above her; our four-year-old has somehow ascended the ladder and is now walking the plank, a sword in his spine. “Defend yourself!” I shout. He jumps from twenty yards, plummets screeching, hits the large inflatable mattress rolling, screams, and runs away in tears.

  Then the sun changes angles and a piñata materializes. The smoldering grill has been rolled aside, and the children who were still eating at the tables beneath the oaks have been asked-ordered to go sit down on the grass so the piñata can be struck without impediment. The large boys tumble forward with their sabers and the first one squares up. He swats at the thing several times. He is exhausted and falls to his knees. Everyone is standing around with a cocktail. It’s nice outside. When the child makes a fool of himself, there’s a warmth and mirth about it.

  The piñata is a star; it’s a perplexing choice. I say to a couple standing next to us that a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate the long history of the pirates, the Mexicans, and the Jews. They raise their eyebrows. I nod at them. “It’s kind of cool,” I say.

  I smile at my wife. “Please,” she tells me.

  Our four-year-old has been cowering for quite a long time in the shadows of his peers, deeply uneasy about all this striking. He has been sniffed out by the bulky father in charge of the piñata and shepherded against his will to stand up to the star and beat it with a stick. It won’t be long before he’s being told to reach for the stars. He’s fascinated by space travel, though it wasn’t long before this event that he was terrified of the science museum. Then he became fascinated by the science museum and space travel. Then he began drawing space shuttles and reading books about novas and constellations. And now he is being asked to strike a star.