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

Their towels were back by the pirate ship. Bruno took off his shirt and draped it over his son to make him decent.

At the Wasserfest bar, Ernest stirred the slush at the bottom of his drink. O Schlitterbahn! The freckled, the fat, the hairy, the veiny, the chubby girls in bikinis, the umbilically pierced, the expertly tattooed, the amateurishly scrawled on, the comely, the grotesque, all the Boolean overlap: Ernest thought he’d never felt so tender to the variety of human bodies. He loved them all. Every bathing suit was an act of bravery.

“Yes,” he said, to the bartender, whose name was Romeo, “I’d like another,” and there was his family: Bruno with water dripping from his beard, Cody wrapped in some black cape, which he now flung off, saying, “Daddy! Daddy! I capsized! I capsized! I was saved!”

“You’re naked!”

“Naked!” said Cody.

“Marry me,” said Bruno, galumphing in.

A Walk-Through Human Heart

Some grackles might possess souls and some grackles might possess intelligence but it was impossible to believe that any one grackle possessed both: not enough room in their brilliantined heads. A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom. One grackle was missing a foot, and Thea blamed him for it. If they had been magpies, she might have counted them up, wondering what they foretold, but grackles were just seagulls in widows’ weeds. They weren’t omens of anything except more grackles.

She was here to buy a present. The world had promised a baby (though the world broke such promises all the time), and Thea planned to become that uninteresting thing, a doting grandmother. What was doting? A sort of avian love, an affectionate pecking. Thea had already referred to the baby as my baby, and Georgia—who lived in Portland, where she’d grown up and nearly died—said, “Mom, don’t be disgusting.”

“Sorry,” Thea had said. “Comes naturally. You’re okay? You’re taking care of yourself?”

“Martine’s taking care of me.”

“She should. But also—”

“I’m fine. I’ve been fine a long time. Hey, you know who I saw? Florence. At the farmers market. In some weird floral dress. Muumuu, I guess. She’s old now. She got old.”

“Well, she would have,” said Thea. “That’s just math.”

She had not thought of Florence in years in the way she had not thought of furniture, or pavement, or the earth.

The vintage store was a cavern built of confiscated things. Immediately Thea’s hatred of castoffery came upon her like an allergy. She wanted to sneeze with depression: all the fingerprinted objects that had made it just this far. Instead of stalactites overhead, a series of old suitcases hanging from hooks (flowered, plaid, their insufficient metal wheels exposed). Instead of stalagmites, the kind of bar stools once favored by kicky grandmothers.

She wouldn’t be a kicky grandmother. If anybody indeed was kicky these days. Her apartment was so spare, people asked her when she had moved in though it had been ten years. Florence—her long-lost friend, lost on purpose, currently muumuued Florence—might be kicky by now, but she couldn’t be a grandmother: her child was dead. That was only one difference between them, the one that counted.

Now Thea closed her eyes and envisioned the particular doll she wanted to buy. Was she trying to divine its presence or magic it into place? She pictured a baby doll amid the shot glasses and quilted skirts. Then she opened her eyes to the great accumulation.

No surprise that the memorabilia of her childhood was for sale—little plastic homunculi on rhomboid plinths inscribed I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH; Playboy drinking glasses; a lacy and emphatic Cross Your Heart bra. Her childhood was as ugly arranged by color and category as it had been in the kitchens and rumpus rooms and Spencers Gifts of her hometown. Wheat-patterned, avocado-hued: vintage. That’s how it worked. Your belongings marched alongside you, as you moved toward death: thrift shop, vintage shop, antique store, museum. Look, Thea’s chrome childhood bread box, with the Bakelite latch and the identifying badge: BREAD.

Behind the front counter, a woman in a strapless plaid dress shot through with gold stood sorting through a parliament of macramé owls. The owls smelled, no doubt, of tuna noodle casserole and Virginia Slims.

Thea leaned on the counter. The woman turned, holding a beige owl by its top and bottom, like a town crier with a proclamation. She was plump, luscious, with cat’s-eye glasses, carmine lipstick, tattooed wings spread across the territory below her throat and above her breasts, her cleavage creasing the bottom. Her hair was the red pistachios used to be. “Something you’re looking for?” she asked Thea.

“Yes,” said Thea, and got shy. “Do you have a doll section?”

“Not really. I think we got a Pee-wee Herman. Or there’s her.” She pointed to a trepanned bisque head in the display case. “Other than that—not really. Here.” The woman grabbed a photocopied brochure of local vintage shops and circled a number on a map. Soon she would age out of those glasses, or out of the implicit irony: she would be an actual middle-aged broad, not a young woman playing the part. “Try here. Amanda. On Burnett. She’s got a ton of dolls.”

All grackles were beautiful the way all babies were: if you liked them, yes. Otherwise, only an occasional specimen. They were not hummingbirds or cardinals; they did not flash. Sunlight revealed the iridescence in their dark plumage like poison in a glass. In the morning and evening, they held meetings on telephone wires: you drove under conventions of grackles, their shadowy bodies, their long pensive tails. The birds of Portland, Oregon, had wanted nothing from Thea except her dropped crumbs, which they busied away all busboy-like. In Austin, on the lawns of bungalows, grackles had a patient, dangerous, purposeful look. They seemed to walk more than most birds. Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I’m a