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

If it were possible, if exceptions were to be made—

The guard glanced up and saw Jack and turned to the father. With great regret, she shook her head.

“I’m sorry.” She gestured at the encroaching Jack. “You understand.”

“Oh no!” said the little girl. Already she was assembling a stoic expression, the sort that takes muscle, to hold back her tears. She was a well-brought-up child. She straightened her crooked cardigan, took off her hat, and examined the inside. For God’s sake, she even had a notebook under her arm.

“Thanks for ruining it,” the father said to Jack.

“I didn’t ruin it!” said Jack.

“You ruined it,” the man said darkly. “You did. You ruined it.”

Sadie and Jack crossed the garbage bridge in silence. He fidgeted with the key on its wooden block. “You did ruin it,” said Sadie quietly.

The liquor store was shut up. The Cheese Museum was in full swing.

“Let’s go out to dinner,” said Jack.

“I want to read my book.”

“You hate that book.”

“That’s right, I do.”

“We can try again tomorrow. You have to see it.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Hand to God, the way you want me to see the Anne Frank House is starting to feel anti-Semitic.” She regretted saying it instantly, which was how she knew it was true. Not his feeling, but hers.

“That’s not funny,” he said.

“I know,” she said, with a dreadful smile on her face.

“Sadie,” said Jack, “I want to have a child.”

At first she thought he meant, I am leaving you. But it was more preposterous and heartbreaking than that. He’d always been more bourgeois than she was.

“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s just—let’s get carried away on our honeymoon.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

“Human biology doesn’t work that way. It’s not—I’m about to get my period.”

“So let’s stop it,” he said.

“Do you know anything about women’s bodies?”

“You’re mean,” he said. “It’s not too late. For a child. We are at a fork in the road.”

They began to walk toward their boat. They were holding hands. She felt, with great certainty, that the road had already forked. She could not back up. Two roads diverged in a wood, and she had missed the divergence, gone bumbling on, and that was fine.

“You don’t want a baby,” she said. “Your parents want a baby. You’re too old to care so much about what they want.”

He dropped her hand and strode ahead to the boat. All week he’d slowed his pace to hers, she realized now. When she caught up, he was unlocking the hatch, but furiously—she worried he’d drop the key in the canal. “That is not fair,” he said, “that’s not fair, that’s not fair.” There had to be a better phrase. “That is so not fair.” He pulled the hatch up. “Go ahead,” he told her, and she went down the little ladder the forbidden way, facing forward, so that she didn’t have to look up at him. She grabbed her book and took herself straight to the bedroom, slid herself onto the bed like a book herself, turned on the lamp with its elf-cap shade, and began to read in her usual state of irritation, my God, nothing would ever happen in this book, maybe she should chuck it into the canal, and she was at first only dimly aware of the sound of the hatch lowering, and the padlock clucking shut, but a different sound from usual, because it was clucking from the outside.

Jack had locked her in.

Well, he thought, once he’d closed the hasp and slid it home, that, maybe, maybe that is anti-Semitic. His phone rang. He assumed it was Sadie, realizing what he’d done: he’d locked his wife in a boat to punish her for being insufficiently interested in Anne Frank. For being insufficiently interested in his feelings. It was a malady of marriage. His malady, he understood. Maybe he could give the boat a kick and send it down the canal, off to the low countries, whatever those were. The phone was ringing. He answered it.

“It’s Katie,” said his youngest older sister. She was crying.

He hoped it was one of his parents, knew it was not.

Inside the boat, Sadie thought, I am not a vengeful person, but. It was six o’clock the day before they were to fly home. How could they salvage this trip? This honeymoon? She could see people across the canal. Eventually—if he did not come back (he would come back)—she could open the window and call for help. The very thought of it made her feel shy, and the shyness turned to anger. I am not a vengeful person, she told herself, and she opened the window, the porthole. She decided to send a message. The first thing would be his underpants, she told herself, striped orange, knit, she was very fond of them, pants, Jack called them, there were certain things he could only call by their English names, things essential to childhood, pants and trousers and biscuits and pudding. Should she throw out his things piece by piece, or all at one time? Do your best, she told herself.

But then there was Jack at the foot of the bed, his cell phone in the flat of his hands. She could not interpret the look on his face. “You’re kidding me,” she said, because what else could the phone mean? But he shook his head. She let go of the underpants. She went to her husband.

* * *

She loved puppets, too, of course she did. Before, and during, and even after, she loved them, those dear beings—twee, of course they were, which was what made them dear—who died of abandonment over and over. And then were resurrected.

Acknowledgments

I owe much gratitude to many people:

The title “Two Sad Clowns” is taken from an illustration by my great good friend Marguerite White, with whom I have been talking about art and other things for nearly forty years. I thank her for that and so much more.

Everyone at Ecco, especially Helen Atsma, Daniel Halpern, Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Allison Saltzman, and