The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (8 page)

The piñata is a star; it's a perplexing choice. I say to a couple standing next to us that a lot of people wouldn't appreciate the long history of the pirates, the Mexicans, and the Jews. They raise their eyebrows. I nod at them. “It's kind of cool,” I say.

I smile at my wife. “Please,” she tells me.

Our four-year-old has been cowering for quite a long time in the shadows of his peers, deeply uneasy about all this striking. He has been sniffed out by the bulky father in charge of the piñata and shepherded against his will to stand up to the star and beat it with a stick. It won't be long before he's being told to reach for the stars. He's fascinated by space travel, though it wasn't long before this event that he was terrified of the science museum. Then he became fascinated by the science museum and space travel. Then he began drawing space shuttles and reading books about novas and constellations. And now he is being asked to strike a star.

“Give it the A-Rod,” the man says.

My son asks him why.

“It'll make sense after you hit it,” the man tells him.

Our child takes the stick, and his first swing is more of a fairy godmother's magical tap of a wand on the very tip of the star's point. Silence grips the performance. Everyone is watching. No one knows what to say. “What a nice boy,” wouldn't quite work. His three-year-old sister, who is watching her older brother, shouts, “Kill it!”

But he is four and tender, and he's been told not to strike anything as recently as that morning, and he's said he
understands
this, and perhaps he really does—because he begins to crumble. I open my mouth. My wife steps forward. But the bulky father snatches the stick from my son's hands and says, “Like this, son.” He pushes my son back, stands tall, throttles the star so hard it flings off its twine tether and lands in the neighbor's yard several hundred feet away.

My son is stunned by this. He hasn't even seen where the star has gone. It's just gone, vanished, a magic trick. He laughs and cries at the same time.

And then later that night we are in bed—all four of us—discussing the value of our day. The three-year-old wants to know what
killing
is; the four-year-old wants to know what it means to
A-Rod
. I explain
that piñatas are naughty and tend to bring out the worst in everyone. “So do pirates and parties and weapons,” my wife says. I nod with her. The children, however, laugh. They understand that this makes no sense. This is when my daughter takes the book she's holding and swings it into her brother's face.

She connects spine with eyeball. Before our son is screaming, there is silence, a broad sucking of air from the room. And then he is wailing, thrashing about in the bedsheets. We tend to him. The three-year-old is screaming, terrified at the work of her own hands. We reprimand her. She says
stand
before we can even get the word
under
out of our mouths, which means she probably willfully rejects understanding what she's done. Or it means she understands everything perfectly well but cannot tolerate reconciling what she understands. I pull her aside, sit her down, and ask her again if she really understands—and she
stands
so quickly I can't even get the
d
off the back of my teeth. I tell her to look into my eyes. I tell her to look at my face. My wife comes over and asks her if we look like we think this is funny. We ask her if she would like to be hit in the face with a book. We
ask her if she would like to be injured. She says she would not.

We let this end the discussion. We bed them. We shut off the lights. We demand
silence
until morning. We go downstairs. I start a glass of wine. My wife goes to the bathroom. Then I pour my wine into the sink and fill the wine glass with gin. I pick up the phone and call the father of the pirate boy-man whose party we attended. I tell him about my night. I ask him if he's worried about breeding violence in a world already rocked by so much violence, hatred, mistrust, and rage.

He's silent on the other end. He gets what I'm after. “They're five,” he says.

“Mine are three and four.”

“Do you want me to apologize?”

“I need to think about it.” I hang up.

Then he calls back and asks if I could give him a lesson on raising kids like female genitalia. I call him the name for male genitalia and ask if he'd like his lessons over the phone or in person. We meet an hour later at the McDonald's on the corner of Main and University. It would have been about eleven at night. I have no idea how I got there. I have no
memory of grabbing my keys, driving there. I have no memory of waiting at stoplights, listening to something on the radio. I remember seeing him step out of his silver Range Rover. I remember going over to him, facing him, and then coming home in a police car.

I am beaten so badly the police say they couldn't even describe me as having been involved in the disorderly conduct charge leveled against the other boy's father. They want to call an ambulance, but I plead my poverty and insist my wife will take care of me and keep me safely locked up in the prison of our home. The next thing I remember is meeting my wife at the front door with the police officer. She covers her mouth with her hand as she looks at me standing there.

“He had a big pipe,” I say.

“Those were his hands,” the officer says.

My wife takes me by the shoulder and hugs me. She tells the officer I have psychological damage that even the doctors don't understand.

At Early Childhood Education on Monday morning, I walk past the five-year-old birthday boy and
his mother. She smiles at me. I thank her for the party.

“I'm good,” she says.

I nod.

“How are
you
?” She is smiling. “I've been worried about you.”

“I have reason to be worried about you too.”

“Oh,” she says, “he treats me like a princess.”

I touch the stitches above and below my right eye. “Me too,” I say.

She laughs.

I think this is flirting. I go with it. I flirt with her for the better part of ten minutes. She is touching my face and shaking her head. The teacher of our children is looking at us. She comes over and asks what happened to me. The birthday boy's mother tells her that her husband kicked my ass. “Absolutely destroyed me,” I say. They laugh. We are all laughing.

Later that afternoon, an e-mail is sent to the parents of the class asking for donations to cover the cost of my medical bills. The e-mail details the night of the fight, the specifics of what her husband did to me, and makes the urgent plea that while my family “may have the bills covered at present for the
superficial injuries,” there is no telling the number of injuries that may have “latent manifestation—brain and emotional injuries, primarily.”

“Is this supposed to be funny?” my wife says when she reads it.

“I really don't know.”

My wife doesn't find it funny. “It appears the woman is trying to make you look like an idiot.”

“It would appear,” I say.

My wife suggests I go over to their house and talk about this with them. She suggests that, despite the clear success of my hostile engagements with this family, I might try something less obvious: like human reason.

I nod. I am not optimistic. I am married.

And the streets of our Madison suburb on this Monday afternoon are a lesson in the sublime. They are sprawling hilly blocks of sweeping plots of lawn without sidewalks. One is kept on the street at all times if one is not on a driveway. I find this forced distance between the street and the houses flatters the houses in a false way. It's true of our own house: the closer you get, the less remarkable the house becomes, the more you wish you were
still standing down on the street looking up to admire it.

Moreover, the distance between the houses is deceptive and stunning. By the time you've arrived at the door of your neighbor, which is, as we often like to lie to ourselves,
just down the way
, you're so winded you really can't recall what could possibly have mattered enough to take this walk in the first place. In turn, very few people walk through our sublime. It's untenable. And it's lonely and quiet and eerie. Yet, I know very clearly what I'm doing, why I'm approaching the house of the family that just recently assaulted me.

The five-year-old boy who looks more like a fifteen-year-old man opens the door when I ring the bell. He looks at me. “He isn't home,” he says.

“I'm here to talk with both of your parents, pirate.”

“Want some lemonade?”

I take a glass from his hand. We sit down on the small step off his front doorway. “I'm bored,” he says.

I nod. I ask where his parents have gone. He tells me he doesn't know. I ask him how old he is. “You were at my birthday,” he says, “like a few days ago.”

I nod. The lemonade is terrible. It isn't lemonade. I don't know what it is. He has made it himself, he tells me. I pour it out. He looks at it streaming down the steps. I apologize. I ask him if he frequently stays home alone.

“I'm not alone,” he says.

I look at him.

He asks me what happened to my face.

“Who's home? Is your father at home?”

“My parents aren't here.” He reaches to touch my face. I pull away. He tries to touch my face again. I stand.

“Let me touch your stitches.”

“No. How are you not alone if no one is here? Is someone here?” He stands up and goes right after my face. I grab his hands in mine. I hold those little hands firmly. They are tiny wrists, even for a large boy. I look him in the face. He is clearly five, maybe four. I have his attention now. He's in some reasonable amount of discomfort in my hands. “They're fucking around in the back,” he says.

“They're in the backyard,” I repeat. I let his hands go.

He nods. “They'll kill you,” he says, “and probably they'll make me eat your testicles for dinner.”

I touch his shoulder. “Don't talk like that.”

He doesn't say anything.

“Anyway,” I clarify, “I'm not here to fight.”

He laughs. “Good luck with that.” He gives me a thumb over his shoulder.

And then I walk through the enormous entryway to the house and into their grand living space, which is cleaner and more pristine than any living space I've ever seen. I hadn't noticed this at the party, when the house had been bloated with people inside and out. Their living space is a vast and unadulterated hollow, a catalog image. The kitchen is also without blemish, perhaps never used. In the back, through the French doors, I see the schooner that entertained the children at the party. I open the French doors and stand silently a few steps into the yard.

Before I am shot in the shoulder and then directly in the center of my chest, I see the child's mother in a black do-rag and eye patch charging me from behind the ship's rudder. I see smoke and fire rising from her hands and I think, though I cannot be
positive, I see she is missing teeth as she is shouting, her face rent in expressions of contempt. And she is approaching me in full sprint until I can no longer see her. The impact of the gunshots has delivered me, strangely bent and generally without feeling, to the lawn. A man is above me. His face is upside down. He is speaking to me. I take his hand and, just before he strikes the bridge of my nose with the hilt of a glinting saber, I think I may not have been shot after all, may have imagined it. Then I'm on my back again. I feel my nose pressing against my eyeball and my lip is sneering, the wind brushing the gums along my upper teeth. It crosses my mind with more certainty and clarity now that I have been shot and that these people are attacking me and that I am in danger. I cannot move my extremities. I cannot see for a liquid altering my sight.

The man's boot is in my crotch, I can vaguely make out, but I don't feel this. He is standing on me with both boots. There's pressure without feeling. Then the woman's face appears again with the black aperture of her gun in my one working line of sight. Then it's dark. Then there's a pressure loud enough to ring like the highest-pitched weeping of
my scarlet-faced child, who I am next seeing in dull purple, and she is a lovely face, just three, but she has my hand in her hands. She is saying to me, looking right at me, “Dad, we're just screwing with you. We get it. We totally understand. We totally
stand
. We know right from wrong. It's just more fun to see the way you hate wrong.” And then she laughs and helps me to my feet.