The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories Read Online Free

started promising sexual favors to the one who goes up—the one who wakes him and therein coddles, swaddles, bottles—you see, your entire life sucked as by some insect, pest.
    The stakes are not low, I might add. I have 4,027 blowjobs coming my way someday, it’s not exactly clear when; and my wife has roughly fourteen hours of French-style kissing.
    These favors might accumulate without realization until the cows come home. And I hate to say it, but at a certain point the stakes climb so that the thing being wagered against tumbles into theridiculous and you have no idea what you’re really facing or avoiding. At which point, I am confronted about my drinking.
    When my wife cleans house, she’s surgical: “I think you’re drinking because if you’re drunk you know I can’t trust you to go upstairs and check on him.”
    â€œThat’s flattering,” I say.
    â€œI also think you’re no longer interested in the sex we’ve been bartering.”
    â€œIs it really a form of fair trade, what we’re doing there with that?”
    The grandest joke about the baby isn’t the sort of joke one laughs at. But when I’m offered sex at the grocery store by a strange woman, the entire child-rearing phase of my life looks rather like a farce.
    â€œI have a child,” I tell her, and she says she knows this, has solicited me for this very reason. “But you would never see the child,” I tell her. “Under no circumstances.”
    But she just wants the smell of them. Can’t actually stand children, but she loves their smell, wants to eat the smell.
    â€œYou’re a fine lady.”
    But we live in one of these new communities that orbits a single, fantastic, oversized grocery store, and I keep passing her in the aisles—Shoes and Pets and Car Gear. I smile to be kind, and she keeps saying things like, “Hey, offer’s still on the table.” Or, one time she boldly whiffs the air and says, “Three . . . no, four weeks. Right?”
    I shudder, but I’m a little drunk on four vanilla bottles from Baking, so at some point I titter—
    Yes, I commit adultery against my god, my wife and son, and every time the blowjobs and French-style kissing are mentioned I’m nearly vomiting, and I don’t mind saying my journeys upstairs to my silent-asleep son, just to make sure he hasn’t inexplicably stopped breathing, hurt.

IN LAPLAND

    O n Thursday my wife returns from work and says she needs some color in the house, can’t live in this cell-hole another minute, what have we done to bring ourselves to this way of living at our age, we aren’t twenty-five-year-old twits, not anymore. Country Rill is the green she shows me in a magazine. “Look at that,” she says, thrusting the glossy in my face, “and tell me it wouldn’t change everything.” I cannot tell her this. It’s time to do something, truly. We are in agreement. It is time. We have waited a long time, and at our age we can no longer afford to wait to do anything. Everything must be done last month, when there was time.
    On Saturday we compare Country Rill prices at four stores—none of the Country Rills green the way Country Rill greened in the magazine. A womanat one of these places is juggling the questions of five other customer couples, each team looking plaintive and positioning themselves for sustained explanation of paint application.
    The woman fielding these questions has no time for this. She is a rough sort of woman, a person made hard by excessive painting, I think, and not the person to articulate the ways of reducing such hardness. She is saying to another couple, “Look, paint isn’t permanent. It can always be fixed. You just go and you just do it and you can do it again.”
    When she turns a few minutes of her time to us, she studies her store’s litmus-looking paint sample against my wife’s picture