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

‘Hey.’ Just start with one word.”
    I would have to shake my head. I had a rock in my throat. “No.”
    â€œJust say the first thing that pops out of your heart,” she tried.
    â€œI want to tell her I’m in love with her.”
    My wife took a breath and looked off to a distant country. “Maybe try something less dramatic.”
    She was very patient. She is an extraordinary woman. She stood there and watched me staring at my daughter. “Dad,” my daughter would later say to me, “play with me.” And I would play with her. But I would do so in silence. I maneuvered fancy-smelling purple and pink horses into and out of fairylands. I combed her long honey hair. I took her to the swing set, pushed her. I just did it all without voicing a single word to her. I just looked at her. And my wife just looked at me, often agape.
    â€œEither this indicates you’re a misogynist,” my therapist offered, “a hater of all women, or else you’re homosexual and closeted. Perhaps you’ve transferred your wanton cravings for men into an abject contempt for the natural interest your daughter might have in speaking with you.”
    My wife offered, “I worry the only thing we talk about anymore is our daughter.”
    â€œI sometimes talk about me.”
    â€œYes,” she answered quietly. “Let’s not do that anymore.” So in time I didn’t talk to my wife about our daughter, or about anything, and I stopped talking to everyone and entered a phase of comprehensive silence where I was only writing notes down on a piece of paper at grocery stores, to pester a shelving clerk about the new location for the organic produce or something, and I answered the telephone only to hear someone speak to me before hanging up on them. At work, I wrote to my boss and director that I had my tongue severed for religious reasons, and I handed them a copy of my protected rights. I fell into studying my domestic life as a qualitative scientist might study a troubling case: I took extensive notes on my wife’s patterns oftoiletry usage and tended nightly a three-dimensional scatter chart depicting the angles at which my daughter would prop her cell phone against her face while speaking to different interlocutors—males, females, adults (10–13, 14–16, 17+).
    Then one afternoon while my wife was out of the house, my daughter came to me in the kitchen. I was scouring pans. She was unusually fidgety, very pretty. She said to me, “I am a total fuckwaste.”
    I shut off the water and turned to her. “That is a lie,” I said.
    â€œHoly—” she said. She put her hands over her mouth. Then she put them on top of her head. She was smiling. I hadn’t seen her smile in more than a decade.
    The power of sight is often smothered by its sister senses, especially sound and smell, but I have found sight to be my greatest and closest friend over the years, particularly in my silence. It was our first direct exchange in her cerebral life, and I found the visual dimension of that moment its most gratifying aspect. She had amazing teeth, it turns out, and her cheeks formed dimples that ran clear to her ears. I had never seen that. It wasn’t the wayher mother had ever smiled with me. Perhaps, indeed, her mother had never smiled with me, a gutting thought.
    â€œI need to get out of here,” my daughter repeated.
    I nodded.
    â€œMy life is about to end,” she said. “And I have to get the hell out of here. Let’s just go. You don’t need to talk. I want to go to the mountain. I’ll drive. You don’t have to talk or do anything. I just need to go. I just want you to come with me. We can pan for gold, or something, I don’t know.”
    â€œDo you want me to talk?”
    She thought about this for a moment. “No.”
    She must have seen me sink.
    â€œThat’s why I asked you and not Mom. I just