The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  “We were sitting in his car, staring at our houses. He’d stopped talking. I had nothing more to say. It was interesting to just sit and look at the houses, actually. I took a deep breath.

  “‘You like the new owners?’ he asked me.

  “‘They’re fine,’ I said.

  “‘They’ll disappoint you,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it is with neighbors.’

  “We had very little in common, generally speaking, aside from our property lines. We drove in silence and when we arrived I learned that the penitentiary parking lot is a vast—just absolutely sweeping—dirt desert that goes out beyond view for miles. From any particular spot in this desert, you have to walk about a quarter mile before getting to the prison’s tiny entryway, which is shrouded by barbed-wire fencing. When they let you in, you pass through a maze of hallways of windowless cinder block, and you’re patted down and scanned at every steel-barred gate, of which there are more than five between the entry and the open field where selected inmates can take a thirty-minute outdoor lunch. My friend and I went every step of the way through this in silence.

  “Out on the lawn, many of the guys had already gathered, waiting for my friend. They were sitting folded-leg style in the grass. They eyed me as we approached. I sat down. My friend went to the front of them and stood. He lifted his hands and, when they’d quieted down completely, he thanked them for coming and for their willingness to see the world beyond love.

  “The men were nodding. He continued. He spoke for some time on the intrinsic colossal disaster of seeing love that isn’t actually there, and he used an example of two blind dogs he’d come to love when he was interning at a veterinarian clinic in North Carolina. The dogs had, apparently, died. He’d discovered them dead one morning. ‘Just gone,’ he said, his voice beginning to tremble. He snapped his fingers. He cleared his throat. He said he was devastated. He said he had never known devastation like this; no devastation since has ever compared, he said. He said he imagined we knew what he was talking about.

  “The sun was exceptionally warm. I looked around again. One thing was clear from the expressions on faces of the men in that group: it wasn’t a good idea to talk about dead dogs. They didn’t like that. Some of the men began getting up. This agitated one of those still sitting. My friend kept talking as though the exchanges occurring among these men were trivial, subdued. Dead dogs, he said, were only a metaphor. But they were not. One man stood up, shoved another one from behind, called him a slur. The warden shifted and rolled up to his feet. I was trying to stand when three or four other men pushed me back down and jumped the warden, and the guy who hadn’t, at first, gotten up to leave. They kicked him in the head. I saw the man’s head moving in horrible angles. Three or four men kicking a head is a gruesome thing. Then the shots came and the yard was filled with weapons and shouting. I was on my stomach, pinned. I could see others pinned to the ground too.”

  10.

  I look up at my wife. She’s still sound asleep. We have a baby coming in the next few weeks, and she is sleeping so hard, for such short periods of time, in such odd physical contortions to fit her strange dimensions, I am amazed to see the way serenity can sometimes play across her face. We have been married six years. We have planned everything very carefully, very strategically, my anomalous heart attack and double bypass last year notwithstanding. We were ready, I had been thinking until this spate of divorces, to have this baby. I was uneasy that everyone was getting divorced. I tell her this. “It’s crazy,” I say. “What are divorces, anyway?”

  11.

  Eventually my friend turned on a few more of the house lights and seemed to loosen up. He told silly stories to his girls, and I drank a second beer. The television was turned on. His daughters described their favorite late-night television show to me. They said Jimmy Kimmel was kank, but he was also a little bit smunt. They could not have been six. My friend looked at me and shrugged.

  Then I noticed my friend’s wife had materialized in the kitchen, in a blue robe, holding a beer. She stood at the edge of the kitchen, just where the kitchen met the living room, and she asked what time we’d gotten home. My friend didn’t answer, so I told her. I told her it was nice to see her again.

  “Yeah,” she said, as if she was asking me a question.

  Then she asked about my wife. I asked her about her lawn. I complained about the housing market. She said she knew it was strange, but she loved crabgrass. We went on like this for a few minutes, talking small, my friend playing with his daughters by the television. She had come over to me and sat on the arm of my chair. She seemed entirely easy. She only looked in her husband’s direction a few times.

  “Well,” I said. I stood up to leave.

  She looked surprised. “Oh,” she said. “You don’t have to go anywhere.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Have another beer,” she said.

  She got up and went to the fridge, even as I was saying I shouldn’t drink any more, and she opened that beer, twisted it with her bare hands, and brought it back to me. Then she went back to the fridge, opened another, and brought it to her husband. Then she told her husband, my friend, to sit on the sofa.

  And he did. He got up from the floor and threw himself onto the sofa. She sat on his lap. “What else is new?” she asked me.

  I hear you’re getting divorced, I wanted to say.

  “Very little,” I said.

  My wife is still sleeping as I tell her this. I tell her that when I looked up again, I saw the two of them—my friend and his wife—kissing on the sofa and I presumed, at first, it was a quick and conciliatory kind of thing. I looked at their girls, who were also looking at their parents.

  They kept kissing. I looked again at the girls, and then back at their parents. The TV went to a commercial. I saw my friend’s wife’s tongue, and his hand slipped inside her robe. They were both still holding their beers. As soon as he dropped his beer on the carpet, I stood up. I patted the girls on their heads. They took this as a sort of signal. They didn’t look at me. They turned and left the room with me, as if they were going to walk me to the door. Instead they went straight up the stairs to their bedrooms. I whispered “Good-night” to them, and they turned around.

  12.

  My cardiologist took particular care of me during my heart attack and subsequent surgery. He visited my room frequently. He said little, but he checked my stats with a sort of earnest determination, flipping papers, hammering things into his computer. The night before my surgery, after everyone had left, he came to my room and closed the door. He sat on the edge of my bed. He said, “You know what you need?”

  “A hug?”

  He looked at his watch. “I find most heart patients,” he said, “need someone to scare the shit out of them.”

  “O.K.,” I said.

  “If you’re not going to change your lifestyle . . .” he said. He looked at me. That’s all he said. He produced a plastic model of the human heart from his coat pocket, and he stuck his fingers inside and started pulling it apart. He scattered the rubber pieces across my bedsheets and left.

  13.

  “C’mon,” the older daughter said. She summoned me up. I followed. I went upstairs with them. At the top of the stairs, we turned to the right and went into a room lit only by candles. Inside, the walls were lined with mounted game. I stared at a zebra head. “Jesus,” I said. The older daughter told me the zebra’s name was Beverly. The fox was Lenny, the pheasant Jennifer. And the wild turkey had no name at all, because they had just killed it that morning.

  14.

  I take my head off my wife’s lap and sit up. I upset the sofa cushions a bit, bounce a little, so that she’ll wake up. I touch her shoulder. She wakes up. She smiles. She wipes her face. She reaches into a stretch, and she brings her hands to her stomach, to our bursting child inside there. She tells me she feels like hell, and I say I know what she means. She rolls her eyes. “Take me upstairs,” she says. I consider this. I consider carrying h
er. I consider her weight. “C’mon,” she says. I put my arm under her legs. I support her back. I lift her. Her eyes close. Her mouth sags. It’s chilly. The gravel path is lit only by dull moonlight. There’s a breeze. The crickets are calling. I hear the waves lapping at the shore. I hear my boat rubbing the wooden pier. The rope moorings are aching. The cabin is dark. I put my wife down on our creaking bed. I stand upright and look at her form. It’s no easy journey getting her here. I wish we lived closer.

  SCANDAMERICAN PASTORAL

  “Don’t you fucking tease me,” she says. But I’m not teasing. I have manufactured an afternoon alone, the two of us. I am thirsty, very dry. “But why?” she pleads. “How?”

  I can’t remember the answer to these questions. It all seems so complicated in retrospect. It might’ve been just one phone call. We deliver the children by their armpits to her sister.

  We’re off like fugitives. We drive and spar. Then silence.

  The mall strikes me as larger from the outside, smaller and more angular on the inside. I feel my hands needing occupation. I look around my feet, the tile flooring, certain I’ve dropped something. I pat my pockets. She demands I tell her what time it is. I am rocking from one foot to the other.

  We search for things that have been needed at some point in time, but I can’t determine if the listed price of an ottoman is reasonable, or if it’s suddenly through the roof, the way it feels to me, sort of, I really can’t remember, and she can’t remember the space the ottoman was supposed to fill—do we even need an ottoman? Is it an ottoman, or was it a fish tank?

  In the fish tank, fish—small carp—spawn. It’s a vicious visual experience. She’s gone instead for French lip balm, returns with nothing. She needs advice!

  We lunch. Strange breadless pizza—robust, god-awful huge—is smoking in front of us.

  She demands the time.

  I am bored. She is tired. She naps on a leather sofa, beside an elderly man who has allowed her to place her head on the cushion next to him. The man covers her with newspapers to keep her warm, and I fix my gaze on the way in which well-waxed tile floor refracts the soles of rubber shoes an instant before the sole.

  I get up to buy wrapping paper in a cheerful store. The magnetic stripe on the credit card doesn’t work.

  I rouse my wife. It is time to collect the children again. The sun blazes at an odd angle. It is fall. We have started a new season. There is a light that almost fills the car.

  LAST COTTAGE

  We know the Larsons. They come to Slocum Lake each summer. We would like them to stop, but they do not stop. For fifteen years, they have come to Slocum Lake to stay at their place on the waterfront. They own the only remaining cottage on the lake; they possess the only waterfront property that has not been commercially developed. Here, in Slocum Lake, we could use that development. We desperately wish they would sell. Instead, they bring their children and teach them the ways of traditional summertime Slocum Lake living. It’s very depressing, it’s very outmoded, and our tolerance is pressed.

  In June, someone paid to have someone electrocute Slocum Lake, to stun and then kill some of the fish. It wasn’t terribly expensive. A collection was taken. The more expensive part of the process involved gathering the dead fish and corralling them into the part of the lake that runs about twenty yards out from the Larsons’ beachfront, and approximately fifty yards across. The expensive part, actually, was installing the concealed netted cage that kept the dead fish where we wanted them—mysteriously pent up against the Larsons’ beach.

  The Larsons always arrive on one of the first days of July. They roll in at nighttime. We presume they are sheepish people. It is possible their drive down from the north of Wisconsin is longer than we know it to be, because perhaps their children make them stop frequently. We don’t exactly know. We know they arrive late at night, as a general annual rule. We know they carry their children into the cottage, put them in their respective bunk beds, knock off the bedroom lights, lock up, and walk down to the beachfront.

  This year, they arrived this way again. When they walked down to the beachfront, they held hands. Their hot truck engine was still ticking in their gravel drive. Locusts were scorching the ears of the trees on their property, the only native trees remaining on the waterfront, inglorious poplars. Summer had come very early to Slocum Lake. The locusts had hatched early too. The nights were very warm and still. The Larsons exchanged a few inaudible remarks. Their shoulders were rubbing.

  Once they reached the waterfront, they turned to face one another, held one another, and kissed. They kissed for quite some time. They have kissed before, in years previous; they usually stop kissing and go into the water together. This year, they did not go into the water. They dropped onto their knees and continued kissing. Then Robert Larson took his shirt off, and we thought this signaled a move they might make toward the water. We were wrong. Robert embraced his wife very hard. Then he slipped his wife’s shirt over her head.

  They were kissing with great force, it seemed, and it seemed they would not stop kissing. Then they stopped kissing. We thought this was it. Instead of rising from his knees, however, Robert lowered himself onto his back. His wife, Penny Larson, laughed and put herself on top of him. It was dark, and we believe they then made love in this position. We watched it, thinking they would go swimming after, but instead they only made docile, unremarkable love, gathered their clothes, and ran naked back toward their cottage. They were laughing, but when they stepped onto the porch, they stopped laughing and were very quiet as they slipped in through their screen door. They never turned on any house lights. They simply vanished into the dark of their little, dwarfish cottage that everyone on Slocum Lake wanted to blow up.

  We would not want to hurt the Larsons. The Larsons are good people with good intentions. They leave their home in northernmost Wisconsin and head south, just as everyone in Illinois not affiliated with Slocum Lake and its general and perpetual state of impoverishment goes north to summer on the largely virgin beachwater up there. No doubt, the Larsons know exactly what it feels like to have strange people perching on your property, behaving as though it were their own just because they purchased it from you. We actually feel for the Larsons as people.

  We feel for them enough, in any case, that we try not to be awkward about our determination to oust them. We believe confronting them would be awkward and, in the end, because it would likely change nothing, needless. Instead, we have for years determined to be chilly and unwelcoming. We believed this would be enough. Then they had the children, and we could see the future we imagined—fiscal and otherwise—being denied us.

  Two years ago, facing this reality, someone who did not identify himself vandalized the Larsons’ boat launch. Last year, we decided as a community to vandalize their roof. We tore large holes in their shingles with hammers late at night, in February. We believed the water damage from spring runoff would give them pause. They came in early July, studied the damage, left to stay at a hotel, and simply had someone come and rebuild the roof and interior. It was Bernie Benson they hired to do it, and he couldn’t be bribed into doing shoddy work, as no one outside of Chicago can be bribed in this way. Their roof is now better than any roof of ours and their interior looks like a catalog image.

  The Larsons could not be heard at their windows, so we retired; we returned just after dawn. The children were awake. They are darling children, twins, towheaded beauties. They ate breakfast in their pajamas, careful not to wake their parents. They poked each other without laughing, covering their mouths with their hands, and spoke about their dreams for their vacation. They are good children, and we decided on the dead fish because it would impact them directly. We knew the Larsons would not like their children impacted. We believed we could impact the children without devastating them.

  The sun had risen over the buildings on the eastern shore, and it was already blasting the buildings on the western shore. The insects had moved from the water to the grass, because
the water was warmer than the air temperature. The insects were horrific, biting savages. You never get used to that. Time waiting in such conditions is not terribly pleasant. You look at your watch a lot.

  Even with their central air conditioning, installed the year of the children’s arrival, the twins had become a little restless. They had already dressed for swimming—at the age of four years, these remarkable, delightful twins, had dressed all by themselves. Then they slipped out of the cottage, careful not to let the screen door slam. They ran to the boat, which was still hitched to the Larsons’ car. They pulled back the protective covering and climbed inside the boat, under the covering. Every year, they play inside the boat. We do not know what they do in there. We presume they play make-believe games. We think it is peculiar that children from so far north play with boats the way that children from down here do. We often think that, for children and adults from the north, boats are just like old wallpaper.

  They were laughing and giggling in the boat for the better part of an hour. Eventually, they slid out from under the covering, hopped off the boat, and returned to the cottage. They were inflating their toys just as their parents emerged from their bedroom and sat down beside them on the renovated floor. The Larsons kissed their children on their heads and their hands and petted their hair, and you could see the sort of bliss in the eyes of the Larsons we desired very determinedly to remove.

  Shortly thereafter, the children at last received approval to go down to the beachfront, and Robert and Penny stood up to watch their children run from the porch of their cottage down to their sandy beach. The children ran as quickly as four-year-olds can run, shoeless and in minimal swimming-wear. Both were topless; the girl’s bottoms were nearly obscene, and the boy wore only a baggy pair of briefs. We recognize that the Larsons felt they were alone on their property; we believe, had they realized the public dimension of their daily events, they likely would have dressed their children differently. Certainly they would have exercised greater restraint in letting their children run down to the beach and plunge, half-nude, into the infested water. We know the Larsons well enough to grasp they are not reckless, thoughtless types. Like many people from Wisconsin, actually, they are prudent and wry. They remind us of our grandparents.