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

remarks. It’s hard. No one wishes this sort of thing for their child, but we smile.
    Then she suddenly apologizes and collapses onto his bed and tells him she was wrong—way, way wrong, how cruel she could be, he brings out in her a personality she had long feared she possessed. We hear silence, and then we hear them making what we recognize must be exceptionally uncomfortable love on his tiny childhood bed, and I fall asleep, for just a few minutes, just a knot of disgust.
    â€”In the sudden darkness I start up again, realizing I can no longer hear our boy crying. It’s a Sunday morning, I think, and I don’t know what this means, and I look over at my wife and sitting up in the bed, shaking her, tell her Listen, Listen, Listen, I hear nothing .
    We spent what seemed like years driving around that morning looking for an open ice cream place so we could suckle cold dairy together in celebration. Our baby boy laughed and laughed with his girlfriend, and whenever he stopped laughing, to catch his breath and suck his ice cream, my wifeand I froze for an instant, terrified the tears would return.
    But that was it. He wouldn’t start crying again. I had not died, not literally, and still we had found our way to the day when our boy, at twenty-six, stopped crying. It was enormous. It changed everything. We were no longer guilty of the crimes that had made our son cry all these years. It’s unsavory to use the word relief , but there it is, and I told my wife I would go back to work again, and I said I would try to be a better person to strangers, and my wife and I had sex again sometime later that year.

O SWEET ONE IN THE BLUFF

    A t first I actually could speak to her. I could speak to her quite often, actually quite naturally. She just couldn’t speak back, and that really helped. I repeatedly told her I was in love with her, every time I saw her rolling on the carpet, ogling the ceiling, anytime I could catch her conscious. “My god,” I could say to her then. “I love you so much, my little beautiful sussypants.”
    And my wife would roll her eyes. “Must be nice,” she would say.
    But then my daughter started speaking and it was enormous and awesome in its own way. She was twelve, thirteen months old. She manufactured verbal things like “ad” and “non.” It was awesome, and the awesome totally silenced me, utterly shut me down again. I went solid stone with her—and sulky.It was as if I was trying to date again, back on the scene some twenty years later.
    I had major problems with dating, as everyone knows, because it’s very hard to date when you can’t speak naturally to the intended objects of your interest. You have to rely on your body. I have a really good body, really fit, thank god, and everyone knows that if my wife hadn’t been into my body and therefore determined to break me socially, back when we were in college, I might have tumbled, silent and abstinent, into my lonely, filthy little grave.
    But my wife did break me, thank god.
    Or so I thought. For all these years I’ve been pretty much broken, talking to men and to women with relative comfort, relative niceness. But then we had this daughter of ours, and she wanted to speak to me pretty much as soon as she could begin speaking, and I could not say a thing back to her. At first I could talk to her, yes, but this lasted—in the framework of a lifetime—about twenty seconds. My wife absorbed my silence to my daughter as she would a personal injury to herself. She couldn’t summon the same determination to break me as she had when we’d beencourting. She was wounded by it, hurt, suffering. She cried a lot. She whimpered. She got frustrated and loudly banged things on the counters in bursts of anxiety. And yet she tried to help me. She sat me down across from our daughter and said things like, “Go ahead. Just say, ‘Hi.’ Just say,