The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  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 the air mattress a kick. “My actual name. Leonard. You know that. My family calls me Lenny. I hate it.”

  “I knew it was your name, but I didn’t know it was your name,” she said.

  “I hate it,” he repeated.

  She felt wild with various discomforts. “I need to pee.”

  They were in a room with three doors: the one they’d come in; the door through which the woman had left; and a door to the outside with windowpanes. The rain seemed to patter at all of them.

  “It’s too confusing,” said Jack. “Go outside.”

  “Go outside?” She opened the door they’d come through, only to be faced with half a dozen other doors, all closed. She might find a toilet behind any of them, or a sleeping stranger. Already Jack had opened the back door. “Well, I’m having a slash outdoors,” he said.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “G’wan,” he said. “G’wan, g’wan, g’wan.”

  Could be worse, she told herself. She was wearing tights and a dress, so she took off her coat and her tights and went out in the rain. It was cold, but she was cold—she could hardly get any colder.

  “You done with your slash?” she asked.

  “Done.”

  “Here, give
me your hand. Is your entire family here?”

  “I imagine.”

  “Are they watching me pee in the rain?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Who was that lady?”

  “That lady was the bride. Fiona. Did I not say?”

  “You did not. Okay. Done.”

  Inside Jack found a little lamp to switch on, clamped to the edge of a stepladder. The walls were vivid green, and he looked like a Toulouse-Lautrec lady, lit from underneath, glamorous, sure to die or go blind or mad.

  The idea of an air mattress and an electric blanket had sounded like a disaster sandwich to Sadie, but she put on her underpants and took off her wet dress and used it to dry her wet knees, and then, cold to the bones, she slid in. She’d never slept under an electric blanket. It was warm, lulling, and she felt like a little abandoned animal whose mother has died but who yet might be saved by technology. Incubated. That’s how she felt. Maybe she would be electrocuted, and maybe the air mattress would spring a leak and they would sail around the room as it emptied out. For the moment she had never felt anything more exquisite, this warm, buoyant raft heading out to sleep.

  Mere hours later she heard the noise of children, and then a barking voice saying, “No, Thomas, no, they’re asleep, no, Pie, come here, you’ll play piano later.” It was sodden daylight. The rain had stopped, but she could hear water dripping off things. Next to her was a paint-splattered upright piano. The electric blanket was cold. The air mattress had lost some air, but they were afloat upon it.

  “Ireland,” said Jack.

  “Still?” said Sadie.

  “Yes, and for days.”

  She fell back asleep.

  As she woke the next time she could hear voices behind all the doors, left, right, at the head of the bed. She was in her underwear, locked in a secret room surrounded by Jack’s family. By God, she should have passed that tractor, been braver, driven right past Clonmel to the Dingle Peninsula on the other side of the country. Dingle. What a name for a beautiful place. She had never been there, but a high school friend had once sent her a postcard from the beach of Inch.

  “Jack,” she said. Jack wasn’t there. He was already out, goddamn him. She said, to herself, in a whisper, “Lenny.”

  No curtains at the back. But he’d spread out her dress on the ladder, and it was halfway dry, and she put it on and stood next to the mattress—she had to tick her toes beneath to fit—and listened for his voice. There it was, and the sound of pouring coffee. Or pouring tea. She hoped it was coffee. He was talking to other people. She couldn’t possibly go out there. Perhaps if she went out the other way, she could find her way to the car and her luggage and a toothbrush.

  Behind the door was the black-and-white hallway. At the front of the house a barefoot man looked out a window. He turned to her. He wasn’t English—something about the spikiness of his haircut and the severity of his square steel glasses. He had a sandwich in his hand. “Hallo,” he said, and then, in a calm European voice, “Did you mean to leave the car door open?”

  “What? No!”

  “There is a cat and a dog,” he said. “Inside your car.”

  Her shoes were by the door, damp as oysters. She put them on and winced. “A cat and dog,” she said. It had been raining cats and dogs: she believed he spoke metaphorically. But he didn’t. The driver’s-side door was open, and then a Shetland sheepdog jumped out onto the drive. Already a Siamese cat was picking its way along the cobblestone toward the front garden.

  “So you see,” said the man, who had followed in his bare feet. He closed the car door for her. “I’m Piet.”

  “Sadie,” she said. “Are—is that your dog?”

  “Neighbor’s, maybe? I don’t know. Not yours? You didn’t bring us a cat and a dog from America?”

  In the daylight she could see that they were at the top of a hill, other hills in front of her in various degrees of fog and sparkle. “Do you think they spent the whole night there?”

  Piet nodded. “I like to think so, yes.”

  “Like a children’s book,” she said. The embarrassed feeling of having been so exhausted that she’d left the door open in a rainstorm evaporated. Where else would the animals of Clonmel take shelter? It must be a good sign. An odd and happy marriage, after all. But whose sign was it?

  Piet ripped his sandwich in two and handed the unbitten portion to her. “Breakfast,” he said. Dizzily, she bit into it. She had been expecting ham, but it was sweet and delicious and crunched under her teeth.

  “Strawberry,” said Piet. “Butter, sugar.” He felt his chin. “I suppose I am getting married and should shave.”

  “The wedding’s here?”

  “The wedding’s at church,” he said philosophically. “I could be married on a rock, by a buzzard or a bear, but not Fiona. She believes in God. God is everywhere, I told her, don’t you think? But I am an atheist, and so my opinions on God do not matter.”

  He carried her bag into the house and pointed her to the bathroom, which had a toilet unconvincingly attached to the wall and a claw-foot tub belly-up in the corner, awaiting its installation. The sink worked. Her toothbrush had rubbed up against something soapy in the cosmetic bag, and it tasted like mint and perfume and incompetence. She pulled on a clean dress, a pair of leggings, clean socks, draped her dirty damp clothing over the top, stowed the suitcase in the snug, and went around the other way to follow the sound of voices to a kitchen. There was Jack leaning against a yellow enameled stove, surrounded by English people, all of them dressed like stable hands. Him, too, in yesterday’s clothing. By sleeping in it he seemed to have achieved the correct level of rumpled. The room smelled of cigarettes and sausage. She studied Jack’s face for some evidence of guilt over abandoning her.

  Instead he said, “There she is!”

  She went to him, but he did not—as he would in America—put his arm around her. “Sit,” he said to her, his voice full of kindness, she could tell how happy he was to see her, “sit, sit. What can I get you? Let me make you some coffee. This is Sadie,” he said to the English people. They were all women, with the exception of one small boy who abruptly opened the door to the snug and went to bang on the piano and a man with giant hands who was putting away dishes in a cupboard. These were people who called Jack Lenny. They looked just the sort. “Sadie: you’ve met Fiona, and here’s Katie and Eloise, my other sisters. That’s Katie’s husband, Paul.”

  Together Jack and his sisters looked like the full toolbox: hatchet, knife, spade, trowel. Sadie, having been sat, understood that she was not to make physical contact with any of the people present. She was about to say hello when an older man came through a door in the corner, shaking water from his hands.

  Jack’s father. It had to be. He had Jack’s thick curls, though whiter and tidier. He was a tall man, serrated—Sadie felt cut already, as she would always feel around him—with extraordinarily blue eyes he must have been vain about. He wore a sweater one shade darker—peacock—to bring them out.

  “Still there!” he said in a jubilant voice.

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Jack.

  “It’s not!” said the woman who’d let them in. Fiona. The bride. She was washing dishes and smoking a cigarette. “It can’t be.”

  “Well done, Lenny,” said their father.

  “What?” said Sadie.

  “I think it’s a lovely present that Len has brought,” said Jack’s father. Then he winced.

  The man at the cupboards noticed the wincing. “Pie,” he shouted into the snug. “Stop torturing that piano.” The piano stopped for half a second, then started again with more deliberation.

  “A work of art, really,” said one of the sisters.

  Sadie looked at Jack. He shook his head.

  “A very honored wedding guest,” said Fiona.

  “Do fuh-kawf,” said Jack, in one of the exaggerated English accents he sometimes slid into. He had dozens of them, similar but for subtly different uses, like the bla
des of a penknife. He added, “Would you.”

  “The lingering log of Len,” said Jack’s father.

  Then the little boy was back, and said to Sadie, with the same jubilation, “It’s a turd won’t flush!” He set his hand on Sadie’s knee. She had never been so glad for a human touch in her life.

  The assembled Valerts laughed silently. It was a laugh Sadie recognized from Jack: to make noise would ruin the joke.

  “It is tenacious,” said Fiona. “It’s quite a tenacious turd.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Jack’s father said to Sadie, as though noticing her for the first time. He regarded her with an intensity she couldn’t interpret. Kindly? Aggressive? Flirtatious? “Americans don’t appreciate the scatological, do they?”

  “We do,” said Sadie, thinking, I don’t. The kitchen table was at an angle to the walls, and it gave her a headache. She could feel the sugar from the strawberry sandwich in her molars. How far was town? Could they get out of there? She looked up at Jack. “Coffee?”

  “That’s right, I was going to make some.”

  “This is my father,” said Fiona. She squinted at the smoke from her cigarette. “Daddy, this is Sadie. I’m sorry you won’t meet my mother.”

  “No?” said Sadie to Jack.

  “She’s unwell,” said Michael Valert. “Rotten timing.” It was his eyes that confused things, so joltingly blue they seemed to hold every emotion and its opposite. “You must be absolutely shattered,” he told her.

  “Not too bad.”

  “All that driving. I’d be shattered. I am shattered.”

  “S’shame,” said Jack. “About Ma.”

  “Can’t be helped,” said Fiona. “We’re videotaping it.”

  Jack set a cup of coffee on the table. The little plastic jug in front of her was marked MILK. “Cream?” she said to Jack.

  He shook his head. “I’m going to help Piet set up the tables for the reception. You all right?”

  She nodded. She understood that she would be, in some way, abandoned to these English people. “What can I do to help?” she asked the room at large.

  “Nothing to do,” said Fiona. She dropped her cigarette down the neck of a beer bottle on the counter, which was already filled with cigarettes. “The Dutch have it in hand.”