The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  “Give it the A-Rod,” the man says.

  My son asks him why.

  “It’ll make sense after you hit it,” the man tells him.

  Our child takes the stick, and his first swing is more of a fairy godmother’s magical tap of a wand on the very tip of the star’s point. Silence grips the performance. Everyone is watching. No one knows what to say. “What a nice boy,” wouldn’t quite work. His three-year-old sister, who is watching her older brother, shouts, “Kill it!”

  But he is four and tender, and he’s been told not to strike anything as recently as that morning, and he’s said he understands this, and perhaps he really does—because he begins to crumble. I open my mouth. My wife steps forward. But the bulky father snatches the stick from my son’s hands and says, “Like this, son.” He pushes my son back, stands tall, throttles the star so hard it flings off its twine tether and lands in the neighbor’s yard several hundred feet away.

  My son is stunned by this. He hasn’t even seen where the star has gone. It’s just gone, vanished, a magic trick. He laughs and cries at the same time.

  And then later that night we are in bed—all four of us—discussing the value of our day. The three-year-old wants to know what killing is; the four-year-old wants to know what it means to A-Rod. I explain that piñatas are naughty and tend to bring out the worst in everyone. “So do pirates and parties and weapons,” my wife says. I nod with her. The children, however, laugh. They understand that this makes no sense. This is when my daughter takes the book she’s holding and swings it into her brother’s face.

  She connects spine with eyeball. Before our son is screaming, there is silence, a broad sucking of air from the room. And then he is wailing, thrashing about in the bedsheets. We tend to him. The three-year-old is screaming, terrified at the work of her own hands. We reprimand her. She says stand before we can even get the word under out of our mouths, which means she probably willfully rejects understanding what she’s done. Or it means she understands everything perfectly well but cannot tolerate reconciling what she understands. I pull her aside, sit her down, and ask her again if she really understands—and she stands so quickly I can’t even get the d off the back of my teeth. I tell her to look into my eyes. I tell her to look at my face. My wife comes over and asks her if we look like we think this is funny. We ask her if she would like to be hit in the face with a book. We ask her if she would like to be injured. She says she would not.

  We let this end the discussion. We bed them. We shut off the lights. We demand silence until morning. We go downstairs. I start a glass of wine. My wife goes to the bathroom. Then I pour my wine into the sink and fill the wine glass with gin. I pick up the phone and call the father of the pirate boy-man whose party we attended. I tell him about my night. I ask him if he’s worried about breeding violence in a world already rocked by so much violence, hatred, mistrust, and rage.

  He’s silent on the other end. He gets what I’m after. “They’re five,” he says.

  “Mine are three and four.”

  “Do you want me to apologize?”

  “I need to think about it.” I hang up.

  Then he calls back and asks if I could give him a lesson on raising kids like female genitalia. I call him the name for male genitalia and ask if he’d like his lessons over the phone or in person. We meet an hour later at the McDonald’s on the corner of Main and University. It would have been about eleven at night. I have no idea how I got there. I have no memory of grabbing my keys, driving there. I have no memory of waiting at stoplights, listening to something on the radio. I remember seeing him step out of his silver Range Rover. I remember going over to him, facing him, and then coming home in a police car.

  I am beaten so badly the police say they couldn’t even describe me as having been involved in the disorderly conduct charge leveled against the other boy’s father. They want to call an ambulance, but I plead my poverty and insist my wife will take care of me and keep me safely locked up in the prison of our home. The next thing I remember is meeting my wife at the front door with the police officer. She covers her mouth with her hand as she looks at me standing there.

  “He had a big pipe,” I say.

  “Those were his hands,” the officer says.

  My wife takes me by the shoulder and hugs me. She tells the officer I have psychological damage that even the doctors don’t understand.

  At Early Childhood Education on Monday morning, I walk past the five-year-old birthday boy and his mother. She smiles at me. I thank her for the party.

  “I’m good,” she says.

  I nod.

  “How are you?” She is smiling. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “I have reason to be worried about you too.”

  “Oh,” she says, “he treats me like a princess.”

  I touch the stitches above and below my right eye. “Me too,” I say.

  She laughs.

  I think this is flirting. I go with it. I flirt with her for the better part of ten minutes. She is touching my face and shaking her head. The teacher of our children is looking at us. She comes over and asks what happened to me. The birthday boy’s mother tells her that her husband kicked my ass. “Absolutely destroyed me,” I say. They laugh. We are all laughing.

  Later that afternoon, an e-mail is sent to the parents of the class asking for donations to cover the cost of my medical bills. The e-mail details the night of the fight, the specifics of what her husband did to me, and makes the urgent plea that while my family “may have the bills covered at present for the superficial injuries,” there is no telling the number of injuries that may have “latent manifestation—brain and emotional injuries, primarily.”

  “Is this supposed to be funny?” my wife says when she reads it.

  “I really don’t know.”

  My wife doesn’t find it funny. “It appears the woman is trying to make you look like an idiot.”

  “It would appear,” I say.

  My wife suggests I go over to their house and talk about this with them. She suggests that, despite the clear success of my hostile engagements with this family, I might try something less obvious: like human reason.

  I nod. I am not optimistic. I am married.

  And the streets of our Madison suburb on this Monday afternoon are a lesson in the sublime. They are sprawling hilly blocks of sweeping plots of lawn without sidewalks. One is kept on the street at all times if one is not on a driveway. I find this forced distance between the street and the houses flatters the houses in a false way. It’s true of our own house: the closer you get, the less remarkable the house becomes, the more you wish you were still standing down on the street looking up to admire it.

  Moreover, the distance between the houses is deceptive and stunning. By the time you’ve arrived at the door of your neighbor, which is, as we often like to lie to ourselves, just down the way, you’re so winded you really can’t recall what could possibly have mattered enough to take this walk in the first place. In turn, very few people walk through our sublime. It’s untenable. And it’s lonely and quiet and eerie. Yet, I know very clearly what I’m doing, why I’m approaching the house of the family that just recently assaulted me.

  The five-year-old boy who looks more like a fifteen-year-old man opens the door when I ring the bell. He looks at me. “He isn’t home,” he says.

  “I’m here to talk with both of your parents, pirate.”

  “Want some lemonade?”

  I take a glass from his hand. We sit down on the small step off his front doorway. “I’m bored,” he says.

  I nod. I ask where his parents have gone. He tells me he doesn’t know. I ask him how old he is. “You were at my birthday,” he says, “like a few days ago.”

  I nod. The lemonade is terrible. It isn’t lemonade. I don’t know what it is. He has made it himself, he tells me. I pour it out. He looks at it streaming down the steps. I apologize. I ask him if he frequently stays home alone.

  “I’m n
ot alone,” he says.

  I look at him.

  He asks me what happened to my face.

  “Who’s home? Is your father at home?”

  “My parents aren’t here.” He reaches to touch my face. I pull away. He tries to touch my face again. I stand.

  “Let me touch your stitches.”

  “No. How are you not alone if no one is here? Is someone here?” He stands up and goes right after my face. I grab his hands in mine. I hold those little hands firmly. They are tiny wrists, even for a large boy. I look him in the face. He is clearly five, maybe four. I have his attention now. He’s in some reasonable amount of discomfort in my hands. “They’re fucking around in the back,” he says.

  “They’re in the backyard,” I repeat. I let his hands go.

  He nods. “They’ll kill you,” he says, “and probably they’ll make me eat your testicles for dinner.”

  I touch his shoulder. “Don’t talk like that.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Anyway,” I clarify, “I’m not here to fight.”

  He laughs. “Good luck with that.” He gives me a thumb over his shoulder.

  And then I walk through the enormous entryway to the house and into their grand living space, which is cleaner and more pristine than any living space I’ve ever seen. I hadn’t noticed this at the party, when the house had been bloated with people inside and out. Their living space is a vast and unadulterated hollow, a catalog image. The kitchen is also without blemish, perhaps never used. In the back, through the French doors, I see the schooner that entertained the children at the party. I open the French doors and stand silently a few steps into the yard.

  Before I am shot in the shoulder and then directly in the center of my chest, I see the child’s mother in a black do-rag and eye patch charging me from behind the ship’s rudder. I see smoke and fire rising from her hands and I think, though I cannot be positive, I see she is missing teeth as she is shouting, her face rent in expressions of contempt. And she is approaching me in full sprint until I can no longer see her. The impact of the gunshots has delivered me, strangely bent and generally without feeling, to the lawn. A man is above me. His face is upside down. He is speaking to me. I take his hand and, just before he strikes the bridge of my nose with the hilt of a glinting saber, I think I may not have been shot after all, may have imagined it. Then I’m on my back again. I feel my nose pressing against my eyeball and my lip is sneering, the wind brushing the gums along my upper teeth. It crosses my mind with more certainty and clarity now that I have been shot and that these people are attacking me and that I am in danger. I cannot move my extremities. I cannot see for a liquid altering my sight.

  The man’s boot is in my crotch, I can vaguely make out, but I don’t feel this. He is standing on me with both boots. There’s pressure without feeling. Then the woman’s face appears again with the black aperture of her gun in my one working line of sight. Then it’s dark. Then there’s a pressure loud enough to ring like the highest-pitched weeping of my scarlet-faced child, who I am next seeing in dull purple, and she is a lovely face, just three, but she has my hand in her hands. She is saying to me, looking right at me, “Dad, we’re just screwing with you. We get it. We totally understand. We totally stand. We know right from wrong. It’s just more fun to see the way you hate wrong.” And then she laughs and helps me to my feet.

  And then I am standing on the street again, just at the edge of the driveway to the man-boy’s house. He is standing on the step to his house, waving at me. “What happened to your face?” he shouts. I wave back and head toward what I believe to be my home. I take some comfort in the walking home. Cars slow down as they pass. I wave. It’s a good feeling, and it’s quiet. I can hear the wind. I can hear people speaking in distant rooms of these large houses that are set way back on enormous beds of lawn—lawn that feels only less soft than it appears. And sometimes I lie down. Sometimes I think about someone covering me with a blanket. But no one stops their car, and no one sees me. So, sometimes I get up and continue home, and sometimes I sit back down and think about what I would have said had the boy’s parents not attacked me. Sometimes I say to the father that he can live his life any way he chooses. I tell him I respect him. I tell him I respect violence and general meanness as a legitimate way of life. Sometimes he asks me what the hell I am talking about. “It’s cool,” I say. “We’re cool.” Sometimes I say, “That’s cool, you’re cool.” “Thanks,” he says, and he turns his vacuum cleaner back on, because he has been vacuuming his tool-shed, and I say there are greater weapons than pipes and candor is one of them. But he cannot hear me and he doesn’t say anything else to me. Sometimes he shuts off that vacuum cleaner and comes over and shakes my hand. And sometimes he comes over and tries, were I not so svelte, quick, and dexterous, to knife me with a small dagger he draws from his sock.

  Through the windows of the houses people appear to be changing clothes, stirring things in pots on stoves, standing and looking at things I cannot see through their walls. My feet press gravel. My mouth opens and shuts. I feel the wind on my teeth. I believe I may be crying. As I near our home, I can hear the yelling of my children through the windows. They are in time-out again. I check my watch; it is four in the afternoon, or it is ten in the morning. The dial is moving strangely, perhaps broken. I close the door behind me after I come in, and I lock it. Brutality can do the work of a million words: my children are struck dumb, finally. Finally, the children are silent. Finally, they understand something.

  And then I hear my wife gasp, and the rest of that year and through the holidays I am in hospitals and police rooms and courtrooms. I sleep frequently. I sleep upstairs in our house on a long chair designed to comfort my healing, and I listen to the children’s mother asking them if they under, and they do, they stand, and they are told to whisper. The Christmas tree comes and goes, as do the white lights, and the days become shorter and then longer through the windows upstairs. A bad cold enters me and leaves me in February, but I am feeling well enough in March to come downstairs. My wife is at the kitchen sink. The children are in time-out. They have destroyed one another’s fairy castles. Dolls are cast across the floor, victims of some marauding. I take my wife in my hands, and I tell her I am sorry. She says she is sorry. I say I am sorry, again. We hold, and it is stunning how clunky it feels to kiss at our age, how bad we’ve become at something as basic as this.

  And still, somehow, there’s something potential and volatile there. We kiss again and the press of our bodies is warming and important. She smiles and says, “Later.” I tell her I like this idea of later. It’s the first time I can remember saying something not thoughtless in a long time.

  “Listen,” my wife says, “I need to tell you something.”

  I think we are going to talk about something sexual, and I fall into listening to discover that she has been in contact with the boy’s parents, the people who tried to kill me for sport. They are still awaiting their trial. “They’re really embarrassed,” she says.

  “Embarrassed,” I repeat. But this is Madison, where embarrassment is tantamount to raped. We feel unspeakably bad toward those who are embarrassed. It’s more painful to see a neighbor embarrassed than the dead in an open coffin. My wife means to say they are racked by the weight of public guilt and remorse and shame. I know this. She knows I know this. “They’re actually good people,” she tells me.

  I really don’t know what to say. So I say, “Did they call us, or did you call them?”

  “They called you, it turns out. They walked over the day they posted bail. This was even before they picked their own son up from social services. I think we should have them over for dinner.”

  “I think that’s a really good idea,” I say.

  She says, “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I think we should probably have them hung.”

  She nods. “Sounds like you’re ready to be an adult.”

  “Sounds like you’re ready to be an i
diot.” This postpones the inevitable for a few more months, until a few days before their sentencing date, when my wife proposes it again. We have already communicated to our lawyers that the only charges we want to press are the ones that will cover the medical costs. Our lawyers just shake their heads. My wife says, “We only have a few more days to make this gesture. After the trial, it’ll seem more awkward.”

  She is probably right. And the children are so annoying, and I have been alone in this house with these people for so many days and months I’m finding myself curious to see what embarrassment looks like on someone else.

  And then they arrive with a bottle of cheap wine and a casserole. Their giant son charges through the door and immediately lunges on top of my daughter. The mother lunges at me with an embrace, and it appears she has been crying. Her breath is whiskey. She holds me and kisses me on the cheek—and then on the eyes and my other cheeks. She is saying she is so sorry. Her husband is laughing as he hugs my wife. Then his wife releases me, and he and I face one another as we did briefly that night in the McDonald’s parking lot. We laugh, and then we embrace. I confess a powerful feeling swelling in my face. I have to look away to avoid letting him see me cry. But I know he is not crying, nor is he close to crying. “Got the game on?” he asks me.

  It is May. I have no idea what game he could be referring to. I tell him I just turned it off. “That’s cool,” he says. We walk into the living room amid all the toys. He seems unaware of the toys as he steps right on top of them, crushing the Duplos and smashing my son’s small cars into the carpet. He compliments my ceiling. “I love ceilings,” he says. He reaches up and touches it, runs his hand along the plaster. “Fuck,” he says, “that’s nice.”

  The women have gone to the kitchen, as I suppose they feel they must, and I sit down with this man and ask him how things have been going. He looks at me squarely. “Business has been hotter than hell,” he reports. “I’m making a killing in commercial right now.”