The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories by Christopher Merkner Page A

letters have fallen on deafness or preoccupation, it seems. And were the fountains not so nice, generally speaking, a street campaign in Chappaqua might just be on the docket—
    O— Perversions ! Truly—will the fountaining perversions never stop?
    In the meandering canals, the perverts in black sunglasses are ogling my Ingrid from behind, and I must drape a towel over her shoulders. Somehow we have managed to fountain shoulder to shoulder beside these parasites for years without incident. Maybe this was their time. Maybe this was supposed to have been an era without fountain perverts. We may never know now.
    But when my Ingrid realizes I’ve toweled her body, she snaps the towel off and drops or dumps it to the cement. “Don’t be crass,” she says, and she runs a few steps, stops, turns, and says, “or archaic.” Then she runs again, her feet slapping until she leaves the ground full eagle—
    I lose my breath. Her golden naked body is suspended along a line that parallels the earth. You wonder in moments like this if this is what the fountains are all about. You wonder as you watch your daughter like this if the difference between having less and having nothing is American humanity.

TOMTENS
    The tiny creature whose image he saw in the mirror was himself.
    â€” FROM SELMA LAGERLÖF’S
    The Wonderful Adventures of Nils

    T he boy’s father massaged badly: he used only his fingertips and fingernails when stroking his customers. He worked in short, sharp bursts. He pinched. Frequently his fingers would slip, come off the muscle as he was lifting or twisting, and his nails would scrape or gouge a lobe or temple. “God fuck it,” he would say. Then he would pause. He would take a long, sound breath. He was a minister. He knew better. The boy would watch his father dab the wounds with cotton balls and return his hands to the body, resume the pinching.
    The boy’s father had set up his massage chair and station in the front entrance of the local grocerystore. The grocery store had given him the space as a kindness, for the man was a local minister. Times were tough. They knew he could use the money. They couldn’t see the harm in having a man of god with his son posted in the entryway. They knew him to be a quiet sort of person. They expected he would remain a quiet person.
    Indeed, the boy’s father spoke quietly throughout his massages. He talked to every customer. Primarily, he shared the names of people from his parish and his professional knowledge of their personal lives. His best lector had credit card debt into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He worried that this man might be stealing from the collection plate on Sunday mornings. He was unsure if this man could be trusted. But he was going to give him a little rope, he would say. The Pedersons, on the other hand, were more likely stupid than sterile. They wouldn’t make love in the missionary position because Lena was a control freak and Jorge milquetoast. “I mean I love my parish,” the boy would hear his father say, “but at a certain point physics and chemistry tell us semen has to stay inside the woman. You cannot give rope to people like this.”
    In point of fact, the boy’s father seldom had customers. Customers were unexpected. Thousands walked right on by, waving at the minister and his son as they passed. As such, his son was made to fill the hours. The boy really at first had no say in this involvement. He was quite young. His mother had died; his father was plainly alone and poor. When no customers stopped for a massage, and most did not, the father called his son over. If he protested, the boy was seized and dragged and made to put his face into the chair’s padded pillow. He held his breath while his father practiced his techniques on him.
    The father’s techniques were brutal. The man had no training. He had no touch . And he seemed to know this. He