Free The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories by Christopher Merkner

see.”
    She is a woman of powerful restraint, my wife, and I will follow her whenever she moves toward indulgence. And she will drop her pants and step out of her underpants, and she will lift her T -shirt over her head and drop it at her feet, and she will bend over the bed and tug the sheets off, and she will flip them in the air and spread them on the floor. She will turn to me and take off my shirt, and she will kneel and slide my pants down my legs, and she will tell me to get down on the floor with her, and I will do this, and the machinations of the condom will seem ridiculous, but she will do it for me, and she will do it in earnest, and she will say, Oh god, and she will have those long fingers on me, and she will get down on top of me, and she will say,Does this hurt you? and she will ask again, Does this hurt you? and I will hear the boy’s voice asking me this, “Does this hurt you?”
    â€œDoes this hurt you?”
    And then the boy’s hand is up against my face, patting it, and I don’t know where the conversation at the table has gone, but everyone seems to be having a nice time until I take that kid’s hand, and I squeeze it, and I twist—and I snap it. Just like that. But it’s not what I thought it would be. It’s not what you see on television. It’s not what you’re told. It’s not what you expect. The child is loud, screaming. The boy is nearly blue. You really feel for him, it’s true. The bone comes right through. The bone is huge. The skin falls back, peels right back and all that’s left is this bone sticking out. But it’s also so small. It all seems so tiny, like a little chicken bone. And it also feels so just, and I really do, I really do think everyone sitting there looking at one another, I really do think we finally understood one another and what we were all dealing with here.

WHEN OUR SON, 26, BRINGS US HIS FIRST GIRLFRIEND

    O ur son’s departure to college helped. That’s a fact. The house went quiet. We had very little to discuss. The amount of sighing decreased. Life slowed to an inching. I swear I could count the staging seconds of the rising sun, and also those of its setting out the other window.
    Weekends, the boy would come home, parched. He drank water straight from the spigot, hours on end, replenishing for the coming week.
    Fantasizing about my funeral, I would sometimes imagine everyone dry-eyed, rock-faced. I would imagine this—the day of my funeral—is the first day in my son’s life he doesn’t cry. He’d dump a few of his toy trucks down on my casket and walk on. He’d hug his mother. Arm in arm, they wouldwalk away from the grave and discuss their lunch. He feels full, my son would say to her. He feels a little bloated, truth be told. My wife would say that’s funny, because she feels disemboweled.
    But because I didn’t die, we ended up living for many years in the perpetual horror and guilt of our son’s ceaseless crying. His departure to college helped, as I say, but we are parents—we still fretted. What must his professors think? What a shame to be his roommate, his friend. Who will clean all those fucking shammy cloths ?
    Then one weekend in his sophomore year he brings a girl home, a nice girl, very big. She glares at me glaring at my son, a sign of what is to come, but I imagine he finds this wary vigilance of hers soothing. He jags up the crying that night in his old bedroom, just as he’s always done. We dip toward sleep until we hear her climb the stairs from the guest room; we hear her slip into his room and tell him he is such a loser and if he doesn’t pull his emotional shit together she’ll leave him, straight up . How could he expect anyone to handle his parents while he does all the crying, all the stealing of the obvious drama ?
    My wife and I look at one another. We smile. We could hear our boy sobbing without restraint at those