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

the baby’s chest to test for heartbeat, or breath, but could perceive only its mechanical hunger.

Could there have been a worse signal to the evil eye? Baby Alive? And what now? She could not take it home, but she could not leave it here. She couldn’t turn it off, but she couldn’t bear to see its empty mouth move and move. Maybe the TSA would see it in her suitcase and blow it up. She got to take her true love home all those years ago, and yes, she would dote on the new baby, but only because the baby would be a pinhole camera with which to look at her daughter, the near-total eclipse, the blinding event. She wanted to buy everything, the jelly jars and the PEZ dispensers, the never-played-with board games with the clicking spinners that told you how far to go and the cards that told you what you had to give up.

“I’ll take her,” Thea said. “Who else have you got?”

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn’t; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle.

Maybe they don’t want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?

Two Sad Clowns

Even Punch and Judy were in love once. They knew the exact clockwise adjustment required to fit their preposterous profiles together for a kiss, her nose to the left of his nose, his chin to the left of her chin. Before the slapstick and the swazzle, the crocodile and the constable, before above all the baby: they’d known how to be sweet to each other.

These people, too, Jack and Sadie. They’d met at a long-ago winter parade in Boston. Sadie had been walking home from a show at the Rat, drunk and heartbroken over nothing: twenty-one years old, the clamor of the smoky club still around her, a trailing cloud she imagined was visible. Her friends had terrible boyfriends, one after another, but she never did. When she felt particularly maudlin, she blamed it on her father’s death when she was nine, though most of the time she thought that was neither here nor there. She liked to imagine him, the man who might love her. A performer of some kind, an actor or musician, somebody she could admire in the company of strangers. He’d have an accent and a death wish and depths of kindness. She wanted love so badly the longing felt like organ failure, but it was the longing itself that had rendered her unlovable, the way the starving are eventually unable to digest food. At the same time she believed she deserved love—not as much as anyone, but more. Only she would know what to do with it.

She was thinking of this, love and fantasy, as she came down Dartmouth toward Boylston and saw at the end of the block a claque of towering, angling, parading puppets, avalanche-faced, two stories high and neither male nor female. Their arms were operated by lumber, their mouths by levers. Some human fools followed behind with tambourines. Nobody whose mother ever truly loved them has ever taken pleasure in playing the tambourine.

By the time she got to Copley Square, the puppets had vanished. How was that possible? No, there was one, stretched out on the pavement alongside the public library. The parade had lost its spine, become a mob, but the downed puppet was away from that, one of its ears pressed to the ground and the other listening to God. Ordinarily she wasn’t drawn to puppets. This one reminded her of a corpse at a wake. It demanded respect. Nobody loved it, either.

Its face was vast, the color of cartoon cheese. She went to its throat, then down its body to its hands, stacked one on the other; she touched a colossal thumb and felt the familiar consolation of papier-mâché. Its gray dress—habit? Cloak? What did you call the robes of a giant puppet?—lay flat on the ground as though bodiless. But it wasn’t bodiless. From beneath the hem came a human man, tall and skeletal, Bakelite-eyed, exactly the sort of mortal a puppet might give birth to. His head was triangular, wide at the temples and narrow at the chin; his hair was dark marcel. He looked at her. She thought, I might be the first woman he’s ever met. The expression on his face suggested this was possibly so. A puppeteer, she thought. Yes. Why not?

Really Jack had renounced puppetry years ago, as a teenager. Tonight he was a mere volunteer who’d carried the puppet’s train so that it wouldn’t trail in the street. Still, many a man has improved because of mistaken identity. Been ruined, too.

She said, “I love puppets.” In the bitter cold, her words turned white and lacey and lingered like doilies in the air. That was a form of ventriloquism, too.

“You don’t,” he said. “You fucking hate puppets.”

He knew everything about her already, it seemed.

Later he would understand that love was a spotlight that had allowed him to perform, but at the moment it felt as though he’d become his true self: not a better person, but funnier and meaner. For now they headed to a bar down the street. The establishment had on its side a sign that said EATING DRINKING PIANO, though inside there was no piano and no food. He wasn’t a puppeteer. He was a sort of Englishman, sort of American, who’d just gotten back from three years living in Exeter.

“Exeter, New Hampshire?” Sadie asked.

“Exeter, UK,” he said. “What’s Sadie short for?”

“Sadness,” she answered.

The bar was a dream of a bar, ill lit and long, with people in all the wooden booths. A precarity: it hung over the Mass Pike like a small-town rock formation—a stony profile, a balancing boulder—something that