The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (7 page)

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

O
ur 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

W
e 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 this 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.