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

in the magazine. “Same thing,” she concludes.
    â€œNo,” my wife says. “Not at all the same.”
    The woman brings the paint litmus and the magazine up closer to her face, lifts her glasses off her nose, props them on her forehead, and seems almost to smell the Country Rill. She is very serious. “No,” she finally says, “not the same. But they’re as close as can be.”
    â€œYou have thousands of paints,” my wife says. “Can’t you mix a blend to get it to look like this?”
    The woman looks up, hands the magazine back to us, and studies my wife’s face. “Yeah,” she says, “but it still won’t be what you want.”
    There is silence. My wife is looking at me. She wants me to confront this woman. I think about what to say to coerce her to make the color. Then the woman speaks again. “Look, if I mix this paint for you, to try to get you this color, you won’t like it. Trust me. You have to just get a color and like it. This”—she points to the magazine in my wife’s hands—“this isn’t your paint. It’s someone else’s, and you cannot have it. That’s the way it is with paint.”
    This enrages my wife, who contends that she has never heard anything more ridiculous in her life. “Color is a science, not an art. Paint is not unique. Color can be manufactured to a precise and desired specific quality. We aren’t dealing in the subjective,” she says, and I agree. But because we’re both originally from the Madison, Wisconsin, area, we’ve reserved all this direct outrage for the car ride home and really let the car windows have it.

    All day Sunday we’re on broadband scrolling over online paint resources. By sunset we have selecteda 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.
    â€œYou’re freaking out. You’re freaking out about nothing. Do whatever you want. Paint a little, painta 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