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

There was nothing alarming on Robin’s Facebook page, once Jack checked, but also nothing recent. He tried the Anne Frank House again. He was 276 in line, better, even hopeful, though soon enough he got the same message, that tickets were sold out and he should try again later. He waited in line for the Anne Frank House at the Monday market; at the Café de Prins, where they drank beer and ate bitterballen. He waited when they accidentally walked into the edge of the red-light district, and he didn’t even notice: they were going to see the Oude Kerk and passed by a bunch of women in their windows, a whole row curving around the back of the church. Not the ordinary second-story windows that Sadie had imagined, leaning as though in kissing booths, but plate-glass windows at ground level, so you could see all of them in their platonically ideal lingerie, bustiers, stockings, garters—human women, just like her. Once she had seen a pigeon at a zoo, looking at an emu. Jack was poking at his phone. He waited online at dinner at a café devoted to the memory of a 1930s singer who had clearly been very famous in the Netherlands: every wall covered in pictures of him, black-and-white, his mouth open, his eyes sorrowful at his words but filled with pleasure at the sound of his own voice; below on the checked tablecloth little wooden boats of mayonnaise sailed to the edge of the map. He waited online at breakfast, at the Rembrandt House—where you could just walk in, and which, like all of dry land, heaved around Sadie. She wanted to go back to the boat, to read, to drink wine, to peer out at Amsterdam.

The way Jack looked at his phone reminded her of the bad few years, a decade before, when he’d suddenly become obsessed with scratch tickets, a dedicated niche problematic gambler. What he liked was to hold the scratch ticket in one hand, a quarter in the other, and concentrate. Suspense, but not too much. Occasional reward, enough to keep you going, to reinvest. He spent thousands of dollars two bucks at a time. His money, his money entirely, she couldn’t say anything, but she did. “You have to stop!” “I know.” “This isn’t like you.” He might remember to throw away the spent tickets (though he had to check them again to make sure he really had, he had lost), but the material he scratched off—what was it called? what was it made of? was it safe to inhale? on the tickets it looked silver but rubbed off it was gray—it was everywhere, excretory, snotty.

Now he looked at his phone with the same arrogant hope, the same handsome panic, as though whatever happened would prove his worth, at least for the next twenty-four hours.

So many shop windows in Amsterdam were pleasing at a distance but dizzying close-up, whole windows of Delft: tiles, mugs, clogs, towering tulip vases, figurines. There was no better blue, but even it couldn’t make everything classy.

“I like the rabbit,” said Jack.

“Who, Miffy?”

“The rabbit.”

“The rabbit with the Xed-out mouth,” she said.

“Those’re whiskers, surely.”

“Miffy,” she said. “The bunny rabbit’s name.”

“You don’t like it.”

“It’s twee,” she said.

“It’s not!”

“Bit twee.”

“You’re an American. You don’t even know what twee is.”

“You’re an American,” she said. Then, “Okay, what does it mean?”

“It’s—it’s like wet,” he said. “To describe somebody who’s dim. Americans don’t know what wet means because you’re all wet.”

“You’re all wet,” she said. “You’re all twee. Prezzies,” she said. “Sammies. Mozzies. The English are twee,” she said suddenly and with passion. She had never believed in anything so deeply. She had hated tweeness her entire life, the cutesy, the sweet, the things that could not wound you. She’d rather be an idiot than twee. “You have to be from a small country to be twee. I’m from a large one. You like puppets,” she said accusingly.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. It’s all right.” He put his arm around her, and they started walking. “I don’t want to go back to America.”

“Me neither. I have to work Monday.”

“God,” said Jack, whose semester did not start for weeks. “I wish I knew what to do. Where to live.”

“Live where you live,” she said. “With your wife.”

“Yes with you,” he said. He got his phone out again. He thought about calling his sister Katie, the twins’ mother, but he couldn’t figure out what to say: she did not need his premonitions. He pulled up the Anne Frank House website—they were passing in front of it, and maybe there would be a last-minute, end-of-the-day ticket.

“Can we sit a minute?” he said.

“It might not happen,” said Sadie.

“You have to believe it’ll happen.”

“It’s okay if it doesn’t.”

“It’s not!” he said. He looked at the grand modern entrance they’d built onto the nineteenth-century Dutch one. A glass front with heavy doors, the new and pristine lobby visible. Anything Anne Frank had touched was hidden.

There was nobody waiting in line to get in with their timed tickets, just a young bespectacled guard with a walkie-talkie strapped to her shoulder. A father approached with his daughter. The daughter was ten, perhaps, or eleven, and seemed to have dressed herself in a way that in a few years would seem louche on her but now looked like a costume: mismatched socks, Mary Janes, black pants, a piebald cardigan falling off one shoulder, a beret. She looked bookish and doomed; she was just coming into glamour. The guard shrugged and smiled.

The father was speaking English. Jack could just hear him, gesturing to his daughter—little girl, end of day, any chance? The guard hesitated, then held up a single finger and began to confer with the walkie-talkie on her shoulder. You could see the man and child take each other’s hands to silently tell each other, Hold still. It might happen. It could happen. We only had to ask.

No.

Jack said it aloud—“No”—and then he stood.