The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

Dedication

For my mother’s sister, Carolyn Matulef,

and my father’s sister, Elizabeth Wrede McCracken

Epigraph

Map of Itself

The idea of travel. The very idea.

—BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY, THE OCTOPUS MUSEUM

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Irish Wedding

Proof

It’s Not You

A Splinter

Mistress Mickle All at Sea

Birdsong from the Radio

The Get-Go

Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark

A Walk-Through Human Heart

Two Sad Clowns

The Souvenir Museum

Nothing, Darling, Only Darling, Darling

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth McCracken

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Irish Wedding

Because Jack didn’t drive—not stick, not on the left side of the road, not at all ever—Sadie piloted the rental car from the Dublin airport to the wedding, grinding gears and scraping along the greenery and—for a few miles—creeping behind a tractor on a winding road. It was ten p.m. and raining. If Ireland was emerald she couldn’t say. The tractor was a comfort, lit up with white lights, which she planned to follow as long as she could. Till dawn if necessary.

“Pass him,” said Jack.

“You pass him,” said Sadie.

“I’m not driving.”

“That’s right,” said Sadie.

Not their wedding but Jack’s middle older sister Fiona’s. Sadie would meet the entire family today, simultaneously: Fiona and her Dutch about-to-be-husband, Piet; his youngest older sister, Katie, and his oldest older sister, Eloise, and their families; and, of course, his parents, the significant Mister and Missus, Michael and Irene Valerts. Jack was the youngest of all of them, the only one born in America—not American, he insisted, despite his American accent. Everyone else in his family was English. He was, too, though he couldn’t pass.

Sadie drove as an act of heroism, though at any moment she might swerve off the road, into a ditch or off a cliff: she wasn’t sure, she couldn’t see. In Boston, where they lived, she almost never got a chance to drive, to perform this act of casual generosity. When she did, Jack was full of gratitude and compliments, passed her snacks and drinks, read to her from magazines. They were still in the early days of their lives together. This was their first wedding.

“You’re a little close,” said Jack. “To the side here.”

He didn’t drive, but his body acted as though it knew all about it. It braked and seized up and readied for death. The rental car was small, bright blue, a brand and model Sadie had never heard of, with some sort of winged scaly mythical creature in the middle of the steering wheel. The wedding would be in a large house near the town of Clonmel. The good news was that the house belonged to Fiona and Piet, who’d bought it for a song after its occupant had died in one of its many rooms, and so they would stay there for free. That was also the bad news, all those hours she would have to perform as herself in front of Jack’s family. They had spent the day traveling, flying through the air and through time zones, and now it was the middle of the night.

“We’ll miss supper,” said Jack.

“We’ve missed it.”

“We’ve missed it. That’s all right.”

The Irish winds pushed at the little car and Sadie leaned forward, as though the road itself were a map she couldn’t read—no, not as though. It was.

“How are you doing?” asked Jack.

“I’m fine!” she said in a cheerful voice. The voice of her mother, she realized, who was terrifyingly cheerful when things were dire. From her mother she’d also accepted, unthinkingly, the advice that you should always buy the full car insurance when driving on the wrong side of the road, so she had, thank God, since the car was already scratched down one door and soon would lose its passenger wing mirror.

The tractor slowed them down, but so did Sadie’s sense that in the dark Ireland was making itself up as it went along, Jack giving directions at the last minute, sometimes consulting a map and sometimes an old envelope upon which he’d written notes. Finally they arrived and pulled up the long drive. They could make out the dull shape of the dark house amid the trees and damp.

“It’s a mansion,” said Sadie.

“It’s a Georgian cube,” said Jack.

Outside the car the rain was friendlier than it had been on the car windows, over friendly, wet and insinuating, running its fingers through their hair and down the backs of their collars. They left their luggage and ran for the front door, which had a mammoth Dickensian knocker, ready to morph into somebody’s face, but whose? Jack shouldered the door open. Then they were in a dim foyer illuminated by a night-light: a black-and-white Vermeer floor and five doors. It felt like a puzzle. There was a lion behind one of those doors, Sadie was sure, and a happy future behind another, and a lifetime supply of Rice-A-Roni behind a third.

The Rice-A-Roni door opened to reveal a small woman holding a flashlight, dressed like a stable boy, or what Sadie imagined was a stable boy, corduroy pants tucked into rubber boots, a sweater that looked handed down by a careless person with a lot of money: brown cashmere with unraveling cuffs.

“This way,” she said in a stage whisper. “Hello!”

“Hello!” whispered Jack.

“We’ve put you in the snug, just for tonight,” she whispered. “Hope that’s all right. Tomorrow some family is shifting to the hotel downtown. You can take our room then.”

They followed her to the middle of the house, to a tiny room filled with a bed. “Air mattress, but it’s a good one. The electric blanket’s on. Poor things,” the woman said, “you must be shattered.”

“We are,” said Jack.

“We’ll meet properly in the morning,” the woman said. “Lenny, your hair’s hilarious. It’s quite big, isn’t it.”

He raised his hands and felt his head. “This is Sadie,” he said.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Sadie. See you in the morning.” The woman went out a door opposite the door they’d come in. They could hear her tick away on the floorboards. Then the house was silent all around them.

“Why’d she call you Lenny?” asked Sadie.

“Because it’s my name.” He gave