The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (9 page)

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 idiot.” 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.”

I nod.

He tells me I wouldn't know it from the news, but people are buying commercial like it's going away sometime soon. He laughs. “That shit isn't going anywhere except in my pocket!”

I thank him for coming over. I look into the hallway to see his son standing there looking at me. The boy is smiling at me; then he approaches and stands about three feet away from me. I smile at him. I look at his father. “I haven't had a good conversation about real estate in so long,” I tell him.

He says, “What's the point if you're not in the business?”

“That's reasonable,” I say.

“What happened to your face?” the boy asks.

I say to his father that I've always felt the empty strip malls in Middleton were a gold mine of opportunity.

He laughs in such a way that spit flings off his lips. “Shit gold,” he says. “Those places sit on a septic field ten miles long.”

“That explains that.”

The child has edged even closer. He has his hand extended and I lean back. His father is still admiring our ceiling. “I'd like these in my garage,” he says.

“Easy, pirate,” I say to the boy.

“What happened to your face?”

I take the child's hand. “They were very big in the eighties,” I say to the father.

He looks at me. I am sure he will address his son now, now that he sees the boy in my hands. “You're fucking me,” he says.

“I think it was the eighties,” I say. I am just staring at the child now, straight in the eyes. I say to the father, “Good-looking kid you've got here.”

“Look,” the father says. He clears his throat. “Maybe now isn't the best time for this.”

“
O.K
.,” I say.

“Maybe we could meet for a drink, because this may not be appropriate.”

“
O.K
.”

“I just want you to know that Angel and I have talked about it a lot. We just want you to know where we're coming from.”

I make a noise. I nod. I try moving the man's son away from me.

“We know we shouldn't have shot you. We get that. We believe in reality, right? We believe in being real.”

“
O.K
.” I have to look at him over the top of his struggling child. This boy is nearly in my lap. He has one hand on my thigh, and I am actively staving off his other hand by gripping the child's wrist. I am using a good deal of my strength in this grip, and the child begins to feel the pain. He begins to moan. I release him and he runs to the kitchen.

“Fucking kids,” the father says.

“Maybe I should get you a drink,” I say.

“You got any port?”

And then, mercifully, within that very breath, we are summoned to the dinner table. I let him stand and go ahead of me. I am to be seated, it appears as
I enter, right beside their enormous child. My wife has placed me near this child, and she has placed our children at the opposite end of the table, near where she'll be sitting. She wants to keep our children away from their children, and I understand this. It's the right thing and best thing for the cycles of evolving humanity. Yet I am the one who is now made to sit beside him. And he goes right to work. “You look like you've had some trouble,” he says. “Has someone hurt you?” I look at my wife. She is smiling. I smile. We don't speak. The man-boy repeatedly tries to touch my face, and somewhere during a bite of salad I finally let him.

“You're deformed,” he says, running his wet fingers across my nose and my cheekbones. “You've been beaten.”

My son asks what it means to
beat
.

“It means nothing,” I say.

“My dad isn't deformed,” the boy says. “He has scars all on his knuckles.” He then asks his father to show us those knuckles, and the father does so.

My children are interested. They look at his fists. My daughter asks what a
scar
is.

“It's a boo-boo,” I say.

The man clears his throat.

“We should put Band-Aids on his hands,” my daughter says.

This makes me laugh. The boy kicks me. He tries to grab my leg, and he asks again to touch my disfigurements.

Apparently becoming aware that I am not at ease, the mother of this child, Angel, repeats what the husband has already told me about their belief in reality, in being real. She says this in a very concerned way. She touches her glass while she talks. She nods softly to herself as she explains a stance no one solicited. “We just believe in accepting the consequences of a savage and unkind world.”

My wife says, “That's nice.”

“Yeah,” the woman says. “I guess I've always believed that in a world like this one, you have to pay to play.”

My wife and I nod. We are certainly paying.

“If you aren't willing to pay,” she continues, “you aren't ready to play.”

I say, “We're definitely paying to pay, yes.”

“Play,” the woman clarifies.

“Pay,” I say. “I heard you.”

“Well,” my wife will later say in our bedroom, “I've never been more proud to call you my husband. I've never seen you sexier than you were in your restraint. I love the new tame you. The new thoughtful and humane you makes me exceptionally interested in you.”

“I'm not sure I'm a fan,” I will answer.

And she will say, “I would like to show you some things the old you would never see.”