The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (4 page)

All day Sunday we're on broadband scrolling over online paint resources. By sunset we have selected
a Country Rill from a company in Pennsylvania and had it shipped overnight to the house. We pay an ungodly figure to overnight this paint, but there is no looking back: when it comes to paint, when it comes to everything at this point in our lives, cost is negligible. We charge it. We have no time for savings. All the saving we've been doing, all that's over. For the first time that weekend, we eat dinner without rushing. We have even turned on the television. It's the last supper.

We lie awake and talk about timing. How long does it take to paint trim? Can you paint in the evening, or should you paint in daylight? Does daylight diminish the quality of the paint, does direct sunlight undermine the integrity of the pigments? Should we paint every night of the week, or wait and complete the paint job all in one weekend?

I say, “I don't think I could do that, physically.”

My wife reaches across my nude chest and seizes the telephone to call her sister. I can hear her sister's answers to the questions.

“You're freaking out. You're freaking out about nothing. Do whatever you want. Paint a little, paint
a lot. People with a lot less education than you—people in Lapland—paint all the time and have no problem with it. Don't make it a problem. Paint when it feels natural to paint. There's no right way to paint. When our house got painted, we didn't even want it painted. It just happened. We were like, ‘Well, I guess we'll have a painted house now.'”

Her condescension is a wet metal rod—a horse bit—in my mouth.

When they've finished and phone is back in cradle, I remind my wife that her sister has a cardiologist husband to pay for a professional job on their house, that it was a luxurious position to say it didn't matter what you did with paint, luxurious to believe you could do whatever the hell you wanted with the trim and all things would come out right in the end. Of course things will not come out right if you do not do them deliberately and thoughtfully.

My wife doesn't want to hear it. She flips a hand at me.

“And,” I say, “to the matter of education and the poor subjects in Lapland: your sister has no idea how many people are actually painting in Lapland, very likely none.”

I dream of kneeling and working by the fireplace, those shit corners. What size brush should I use? And the tape job. That blue stickless tape. Of the trim along the floor, the carpeting.

By Monday colleagues ask me my story, say things like, “What's your deal?” and I tell them.

“Oh my god!” one of them says, a woman I dated years ago and who seems determined to maintain an ongoing interest in my personal life. “You are going to do such a good job! I can completely see that for you, for your house! Your wife must just be like, ‘Ah!'”

The males don't have a response at all to the painting question, only that I've shared anything about my domestic life with this old girlfriend. Do I think she won't somehow take advantage of this personal information, ask, for example, to come over and see it—help even, somehow? They laugh.

They haven't married yet, these guys. They have no idea what lies ahead. I try to level with them: “Can you paint trim every night or does this make
the job uneven? Can paint go bad or change color if it's left too long?”

They look at me and shrug. One of them answers, “Keep that shit to yourself. Trust me, you don't want people telling you what's best for you and your wife.”

“I'm talking objectively,” I protest. “What's best for paint, generally speaking?”

“That's like asking what's best for cement, generally. It all depends on what kind of cement you want. Rough, textured, flat, matte, shiny. I can't tell you what you want. Anyway, even when you know what you want, to a certain degree you're just going to have to take what you get. You can't control cement. That's the bitch of Mother Nature.”

That evening, the sun is at an odd angle, gleaming off the cans on our front stoop. They have arrived. I yank them each inside the house and read their instructions over and over. It's exhausting. I feel woozy, the smell of the cans and of the future with the cans. I'm predicting the cans' smell. I close my eyes . . .

I open them, and my wife's ready. She throws her bags on the floor and tears off her shirt and
slacks. She's in her underwear before I've sat upright. “Let's go,” she says. “Get that lid off. Did you shake it? Stir it.”

I say, “Is this the right color?”

She says, “It's fine. Let's go.”

“I'm not sure it's at all the right color.”

“It's fine,” she says again. “Just shut up and stir.”

“We need to tape.”

“You didn't fucking tape?”

I look at her.

My wife swears a noun, an ugly thing. She throws herself onto the sofa. She is ruddy and damp. Her warm body is twisted on the sofa and hangs loose, pretty. She pushes her hair back from her eyes and sighs, and she swears again. She closes her eyes, and just as I think she has forfeited her interest, she shakes her head and says, “To hell with it.” She hops up again and takes my brush, thrashes it through the roller dish.

“The carpet!”

She is deaf and she is dumb. She is swiping at the chair rail in long, reckless strokes. She's made a speckled rill of Green Rill on our old berber. She's crouching like a catcher, raking along the wall next
to the fireplace walls. Paint is flinging and dripping. She strokes in those long, reckless strokes, lavishing the wall above and below the rail. Her muscles tremble and twitch. Her knees crack. I take a glob in the forehead and come to. The small of her back.

I have lost my breath.

I haven't really ever seen her like this. She turns and takes my hand, yanks me toward her, kisses me, her tongue firing into my mouth. “C'mon,” she pants. “Get into it.” Those walls that had kept me up at night are done in thirteen minutes. In thirteen minutes I'm on my back panting beside my wife looking. We're both breathing out of our mouths, leaning against the sofa. It's a whole mess we have here. However, in the public sense, it is done.

Or, as my wife puts it, “It's started.”

Later, the nooks of the fireplace wall have filled like lake locks. My wife and I are strewn across the floor like castaways, drunkards. She lies flat, draping her arm over her eyes. Her cheeks are red. She swears again. She asks me if I smoke. We laugh. We are utterly wasted. We are glowing. She says, “Could you do more?”

“Right.”

She looks up at me. “Seriously.”

I am thirty-four years old. I am a little bit nauseous.

Later, it's Tuesday evening, and we are stripped down again and going at it like reckless teenagers, like we are doing something lewd that needs to be done very lewdly, very quickly. The windows are done in ten minutes. The cat has Country Rill paws. We laugh.

The laugh is not, as it had been on Monday, robust.

I say, “Do you like it? Is this something you're liking?” I shake my head. “I mean, are you glad we're doing it?”

“It's fine.”

“Is it the color?”

“No. It is what it is.” She scratches her cheek. “It is what it is. But it's good.” She is not telling me the truth. She cannot tell me that if she were able she would just do it all herself. I cannot be obviated, because the project is too enormous for one person. Science hasn't yet really come this far. Not to the Midwest anyway, not to the suburbs and the middle class. It is the contract we'd agreed to, for better or
worse, that I be included here. All this is sticky-noted across her face, and then, because she knows that I am reading this, she rolls on the floor and laughs affably.