The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (5 page)

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