The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (6 page)

A
truck just hit a woman in our neighborhood. The woman lived, but her baby was pronounced dead at the hospital. There were witnesses. They have yet to catch the driver. Many believe he will be found and sentenced, though the incident occurred at night and not one witness can provide a coherent set of details consistent with the details of other witnesses. For days now this event has sobered everyone in the neighborhood. We have brought dolls and candles to the intersection. We have wept and shared stories. We have sung, held and hung signs damning “the coward” who could not face his accident.

In fairness to the specifics of this tragedy, I have yet to mention to anyone that I myself have hit two people with my car before. Neither person died,
just as our neighbor did not die, but I hit them both on the same day and both were very much deliberate acts. I hit one of them at exactly 8:30 a.m. and the other shortly after the lunch hour. They were both male. It was the end of the spring. I was very busy. I had many errands. My mind was, as they say, awash.

The first man went up the hood, then down; I clipped the other one and sent him into a dramatic spin. In both cases, I stopped and got out. I did not flee the scene. I could have. I had time. I definitely gave it consideration. How many decisions you can squeeze in a moment! Rather, I stepped out of my car and helped each gentleman—because this is how it's done—off the ground.

Both victims were my bosses. My program director said, “You know, a more detailed explanation would really help me see your side of this a lot more clearly.” Then he closed his eyes and told me he needed to sit. He walked away and sat down on the curb. He is a poet, bald, and goes by three names. I let him sit there in silence. He had his head in his hands. I got back in the car and pulled away from the edge, turned off my blinkers, rolled right past him.

My dean is also bald but he always wears a black Orvis Stetson. He insists we address him by his title and his abbreviated first name—Dean D. He popped back up after his dramatic spin and said he was “fine,” “excellent,” and “this sort of thing happens to the best of us.” He was bleeding from the mouth. His knees were exposed through the shreds of his pants. He was very friendly. He dusted me off, swiping at the front of my shoulders. He nodded. He adjusted his hat. I just looked at him. He laughed. I put my hand on his cheek. “Let's call it a career,” he said, “shall we?”

After helping him across the street to his office, I got back in my car and drove home. I played ball with my son that afternoon. I remember it well. At eighteen–nineteen in what had become an uncharacteristically physical contest, he received one free throw because we were in the one-and-one bonus. If he'd made the first, he would have received a second and probably carried the game. But the boy missed his first free throw, I wiped that shit off the glass, and I spun elbows-out and called him a “tool” to his face.

He did not care for this. It was too much. He walked away.

I dropped the ball, called after him—another, uglier name. I followed him. I didn't let up with the name-calling. Then I jogged abreast of him and asked him where the hell he was going. He wouldn't speak to me. He sprinted ahead. I watched him run. It was not nice to watch. He's athletic enough, but when he's upset he hobbles like an old lady, all frail hunch and wobbles.

But I knew we were going to the grocery store because my son loves the grocery store. He's drawn there, magnetized by it, by what I don't know exactly, but it's obviously linked to the affair I was caught organizing with a woman there about six years ago. That affair didn't end well for me, our family, or the community at large. Whenever I come in to the store now, everyone looks up, drops their eyes, and shakes their heads. Whenever he comes in, by contrast, they embrace him with a false warmth and familiarity usually reserved for caricatures of Southern domestic life.

I found him sitting in Bread, gagging on Vündercrüst. I sat down in front of him. The linoleum was cold. “Look,” I said, “let's not dick around. This is about your hypothalamus, and you know it. My first
time was in a grocery store, actually. Let me tell you about it.”

He stopped crying and started to laugh. I could still make him laugh, after all those years, all the injurious behavior of my past.

“I'm sorry I called you those names,” I said.

“Do you really believe in repentance?” he asked me.

“I'm not sure trash-talking is really a sin, buddy.” But I was thinking about the men I'd struck and nearly killed earlier that day. There is no way he could know, I remember thinking. I tore open the softer Vünderbüns and handed him one. “Atonement,” I said and winked, “is way better with starch.”

He said, “I'm pregnant. Mary and I are pregnant.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And Elsa. I'm also pregnant with Elsa. I have two girls pregnant.”

There are various ways to experience accidents. There must be. I cannot know if “the coward” designed to strike the pregnant woman, as I had designed to strike my employers. I don't know for certain the role of premeditation in the experience
of accidents. Personally, I found the experience a little flat. I'd expected more. I expect my son expected more also. I stood up and walked to the front of the store.

I pulled the display propane grill into Bread. I cranked it. I nabbed some franks from the outskirts of Produce and began rolling them across the grates with a chopstick. My son just sat there at the base of the grill. I ate seventeen hot dogs in about one hour of silence; my son ended up eating half of one. “One thing I know,” I finally said to him, when all the food had been eaten. “You are permanently in the bonus and can shoot two free throws for any foul in the indefinite future.” He looked wan.

“Look,” I said to him. “The fact is you don't always choose your choices. You don't always choose your victims and you don't always choose your witnesses. That's why we call them accidents.”

He nodded. “I don't know what that means.”

“You're young.”

“You're not mad?”

The way the bald poet's head hit my hood reminded me, in that moment, of the way I have from time to time tried to put a glass down on a
shiny granite countertop: misjudging the distance, I bring the glass down too quickly and the impact surprises me into violent recoil. And of Dean D. in his dramatic spin: who was that ice skater who, in the most recent Salt Lake Olympics, flung herself through the open doorway during warm-ups, one minute spinning and the next minute—just gone?

I couldn't answer him. I just used my hand to indicate it was time to leave. He stood up. I put my arm around him. I left the grill and the packages right there in the aisle. The people in the grocery store warily watched us leave. We walked home. At some point as we walked, he asked me again if I was angry. “Are you going to kill me?”

The timing and phrasing of this question felt heavy. “I don't like that word,” I said.

“But you're not talking.”

“Talking isn't the only way to talk,” I said.

After a moment, he said, “I don't know what that means.”

I let him think about it. I said nothing more.

To the best of my knowledge, my son maintains a friendship with the women with whom he had children at fourteen or fifteen. He may well provide
for them emotionally and financially. I don't know. Presently, I believe he is married to another woman, a woman I have only briefly met, and he has four children with her now. They all live in rural Sweden, in a cottage with her parents, according to the postcards he sometimes sends. He still flies back here to visit his other children in the Madison area from time to time, and the mothers of these other children are married to other men, and they have other children with these other men, of course.

In what I think is the most painful twist in this whole story, the woman who was hit by “the coward” joined us one night at the intersection after she'd been released from the hospital. It was evening, and I don't think anyone expected to see her come up behind us. We were finishing a song, a religious hymn I believe, and many of us were crying quietly to ourselves. “Hi,” she said.

We did not turn to look at her. We had no idea it was her! I'm not sure we really heard her until she began to thank us. “This is just so overwhelming,” she said.

The sun was setting over her shoulder. It was very bright, piercing, very hard to see her clearly. Most of
us were shielding our eyes and squinting as we looked in her direction. Cars were honking through the intersection, so it was difficult to hear everything she was saying. She seemed to be accounting for her recovery, her health, and her gratitude. “But I think it's time to move on,” I heard her say suddenly. “We've mourned the dead, and I ask that we all now, for the sake of my husband and my other three children, and family and friends, try to embrace the living and celebrate the life we have together.”

Everyone, I could see, was nodding. Everyone, I could see, was lying. Another song was started, and then she eventually left. She just slipped away while we stood there and continued to sing and pray and protest. It was all very hurtful. I think she had no idea the impact she'd had on our lives. I give her the benefit of the doubt, because I have been on both sides of an accident before, but she damn well better believe we deserve more than this.

SCANDAMERICAN DOMESTIC

T
he children wanted me to buy them diapers. It was at first silly. Then they voiced up. I couldn't follow their logic; I rejected the appeal. I explained they were not in charge. I told them their silliness wasn't welcome. I may have called them idiots. I may have said they were acting like idiots. It's hard to remember. I definitely told them it wasn't personal. Still, they wept. Every friendship has a bad patch.

I let things cool down. We drove home. I had a cocktail. Then, before bed that night, I kissed the older one on his head. I said I was sorry about earlier, I'd take them to Sweden in the morning. The children leapt from their sheets. We tucked them back in. We shushed them. We hit the lights. My wife's eyes were white flags in the dark room. We closed their door. We went downstairs to speak.

In the kitchen, we did not speak. We shrugged a lot. I took a blanket back up to the children's bedroom for a sleepover. Sometimes you can spend too much time with friends, and somewhere over Greenland I resented my two friends. They were tearing each other apart. The boy wanted to blow up his sister. I tried to call my wife: in this modern day and time, some ten thousand feet closer to heaven, no service.

I shouldered my unconscious friends through Stockholm's customs, currency exchange, and baggage. I took a cab directly to an ABBA remake off Sveavägen. My friends woke to “Waterloo.” We rocked. We soared. The sun never set, at least not for as long as we were awake, and it felt, we agreed over a bowl of milkless muesli the next morning, like we were players in a band dream, a bad band dream. We laughed into hiccups. Then we passed out on top of one another and woke up violently ill.

The concierge called an ambulance. We were wheeled through the lobby. We were studied. We ate intravenously behind thin and flimsy curtains for a day. The children were bored: where the hell is Mommy, anyway?

We returned to the hotel in the off-pink light of four a.m. the next day. I dumped my friends in their big hotel bed. I called down again to the concierge. I asked if it would be hard at this time of the morning to find someone to watch the sleeping children while I went out. In Stockholm, the concierge said, nothing is cheap.

The babysitter he sent up was a delightful man about my age, spirited and amiable. He wore a suit. He said he looked forward to seeing me on my return and if, he leaned toward me, if you are to have a companion with you when you return, I will slip out quietly, no need to fuss. I said I'd like him to be my friend. He said, That's extra. I said, Really? He said, I think we are misunderstanding one another in translation.

I left. I stood in the hallway outside our hotel door. I just stood there. Then I went back in. I released the nice babysitter. I went to the room and woke my friends again. I had to really shake them. This is the time of your life, I pleaded. For god-sakes, the days don't get any better than they are right now. Do not sleep this away.

They sobbed. I carried them through the lobby again, and this time I took them to a bar made of glass, shaped like an igloo. It was approximately six degrees inside the igloo. I spilled all my kronor on the crystalline counter and drank all the Svedka this would afford—two shots. At some point the kids began dancing, sliding across the smooth floor in their footies, steam puffing off their heads. I kept drinking ice water. The business lunches started. We were asked to leave.