The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  The current picked up. The banks of the river were made of tile. The palisades were tiled as well, and studded with more bored lifeguards, standing like unemployed goats. He looked up and longed for the pelicans of the morning, their competence and precision. His biceps ached from holding on. He couldn’t see Cody’s face. At the next turn, a young park employee stood up to his waist in the crashing water. His job was to catch inner tubes as they threatened to bash into a wall, to send them in the right direction. How could so badly designed a thing exist at a place meant for children? Bruno paddled his feet. He wanted to avoid the guy, but instead they knocked right into him. “Sorry!” he shouted, and then they were shoved away, in the opposite direction, in front of the wave machine.

  Now they were surrounded by loose boys and empty bobbing inner tubes. “Hold tight!” he commanded Cody, as he heard a wave behind them. A woman in a neon pink swimming dress clung to a single inner tube. Clawed at it. They hadn’t seen this stretch of river from the bridge. Every few seconds some hidden mechanism slapped out a wave, which then lifted the flotsam—people, tubes, goggles, swim shoes—and dropped the flotsam, and smacked the flotsam on the head. Even artificial rivers are careless, Cody.

  Survivors of the Whaleship Essex at the Waterpark. The Lusitania at the Waterpark. The Poseidon Adventure at the Waterpark.

  He’d thought he hadn’t wanted children because Eleanor hadn’t wanted them. He hadn’t wanted them for that reason. Eleanor was already forty when they’d married and she’d convinced herself she was too old. Perhaps he was too old, too, but here was his heartbreaker, screaming as they bounced along.

  “Are you all right?”

  The boy nodded the back of his head. You could hear the waves from the wave machine behind you before they lifted you up. That was good. They were just one turn from the beach. Now Bruno was holding Cody’s right wrist to the starboard handle of the inner tube. Every wave threatened to scupper them. What would happen then? Would it jolt a lifeguard into action? Would the boy be picked up by the passengers of another tube? Sucked into the filtration system? Bruno thought of Ernest drinking at the swim-up bar, Ernest who would never forgive himself, though he would forgive Bruno, and that would be the worst thing that could ever happen to either one of them. No, not the worst thing.

  A bullying wave pushed the edge of their raft, tipped them, rushed overhead, and swept Cody away.

  Above the river the burghers of Schlitterbahn saw the flash of pale flesh, the hair that streamed behind as though a cephalopodic defense, Stay away. The last inhabitant of the lost city of Atlantis, washed into the waters of Torrent River—that was its name. A little boy, surrounded and then eclipsed by the bigger boys, the wild boys of the German-themed waterpark. “Look out!” shouted a blue-tongued woman from the bridge, but she was drunk, and already the other people doubted what they had seen, and besides, so what? Those feral boys would take him in. They never went home, those boys; they lived here, they circled and circled, howling and laughing and dreaming of home.

  “Cody!” Bruno shouted. “Cody!”

  The boys found the body, and lifted it up, and then there was his own child’s stunned face, one hand out, and Bruno snagged it, and they were back in each other’s arms, bumping up onto the incline of the concrete beach. Cody coughed. He was alive. Not a lifeguard had shifted. They were surrounded by wild delight, shrieking, flesh, stove by a whale, but safe.

  When they had staggered out—not onto dry land; there was nothing, nothing, nothing dry in all of Schlitterbahn—Bruno realized that the water had stripped the swimming tights right off, that Cody now stood naked, just as God had made him—though God hadn’t been anywhere near Cody’s conception, an event Ernest called a miracle. Quite the opposite, Bruno had thought. Ordinarily he hated God getting credit for Science’s good work. Yet here the boy was, the narrow naked awkward miracle.

  “Jesus,” said a voice. A man, this new model they now made, tremendously fat from the hips up, an epidermic barrel, skinny as a kid from the hips down, such a precarious construction it hurt Bruno to look at him. “Cover that kid up!”

  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 bird, but I could fuck you up.

  Thea had been a young mother and Florence an old one. They had brought their children to the same eurythmic dance class, Georgia because she was clumsy and Orly because he was graceful. The class was taught in a converted fire station by a Hawaiian woman the size of an eleven-year-old; she skipped and hit a round drum, followed by her dazzled students. There was a plate-glass window parents could spy through. “Make yourself a butterfly!” said the teacher. Georgia, age three, made herself a disgruntled Quasimodo with sciatica. Her leotard was too big and gapped around her legs, and Thea loved her entirely. “Which one’s yours?” Florence asked, and Thea pointed, said defensively, “I couldn’t skip to save my life,” and Florence said, “Chances are it won’t come to that.” Her own child, Orly, wore a little blue jumpsuit, like Jack LaLanne’s but mid–chubby thigh, and even when the class was led in “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” Orly somehow did it expressively. He was an olive-skinned child with dark curly hair. Georgia was skinny and pale and freckled. Both of them three, but Thea was in her mid-twenties, and Florence somewhere in her forties. Old enough to be—

  “Don’t say it,” said Florence, who in those days—on that day—wore striped dungarees and a sheer Indian shirt. Flowered, like the rumored muumuu. Altogether she seemed highly patterned, light blue eyes with navy blue flecks, a large nose with vertical creases at the bridge. Florence was happily married then to a lean professor of philosophy named Loren; Thea to Max, she thought also happily. If Thea tried—if she tried now, in Austin, Texas—she could conjure them up. The children, not the husbands; the husbands never met. Orly and Georgia, Georgia stumble skipping and Orly dancing. Beautiful children. That’s what Florence said that first day, as they watched the class: she turned to Thea and said, “Wouldn’t it be awful not to have beautiful children?”

  The doll Thea sought was Baby Alive. You fed Baby Alive’s mechanical mouth, and Baby Alive’s mechanical digestive tract eventually emptied its mechanical bowels into its diaper, which you changed. Please, Georgia had said when she was eight, in the stunned weeping voice of a child whose parents didn’t understand her passion, peh-lease. “You’ve got a baby doll,” Thea had told her. “Pretend it can eat.” Just a year ago, at her wedding to Martine, Georgia had mentioned the doll, and Thea had said, “Oh, if you’d really bugged me I would have gotten it for you,” and Georgia had gasped, betrayed.

  Thea couldn’t buy anything for the baby until after the birth, for fear of attracting the evil eye, but she could buy the doll for Georgia. Georgia would find it touching, or she’d be hurt. Thea wasn’t sure which reaction she hoped for. She knew her maternal love would always be edged with meanness, so as to matter: sometimes you needed a blade to get results.

  Of Orly, Florence said, “Frankly, I worship that boy.” Thea thought it was a funny way to feel about your own child. You worried about your kid; you loved her; you wondered what her existence said about you. Florence’s adoration of Orly would have been intolerable had she not genuinely loved all children.

  “I worship him,” said Florence, “and you worship Georgia. Geor-jah,” Florence called, and then said it again, the syllables distinct, cherry-dark and cherry-sweet.

  “Hello,” said Georgia.

  Florence said, as though just remembering, “I think there might be cake.”

  They were sitting in Florence’s kitchen, the children cross-legged on the floor eating canned spaghetti, the mothers at the table eating pumpernickel bread and salted butter. The amiable Loren had baked the bread himself. At the mention of cake, Orly shut his eyes and rubbed his stomach. “Cake,” he said. “Cake, cake, cake, cake.” “Cake,” Georgia agreed, though she regarded Orly with caution: he kept saying it like a toy machine gun—“Cakecakecakecakecake.” She turned to her mother with a worried expression, a flutter of a smile, a private joke. No, thought Thea, I do not worship her. That would be immodest and unlucky. She worshipped no human being, except Florence herself, a little.

  Every Saturday for two years, except summers, Thea and Georgia had lunch after dance with Florence and Orly in their house in Southeast Portland. The house had brown unpainted vertical siding, and looked like a hearty sport-related building somewhere in Europe: a sauna or ski chalet or the place where you strapped and unstrapped your ice skates at the edge of a frozen lake. It was the year that Thea’s husband was finishing his dissertation, followed by the year that their marriage was breaking up.

  After lunch, in the piney backyard, Orly would cartwheel or walk on his hands or spin until he fell down, and Georgia would somersault knock-kneed and askew, and they both ended up on their backs, laughing at the sky.

  Then kindergarten, and Georgia was off to Meriwether Lewis and Orly to Woodstock, where he lasted a week.

  “He bit his teacher,” said Florence. “Mrs. Pietsch. I would have bit her, too.”

  But once you get used to biting, to expulsion, it’s hard to stop. He’s a wonderful kid, his teachers said, but he bites. Or: He’s wonderful, but he can’t sit still. Or: He’s a good kid. Come get your kid. You need to get your kid. I’m sorry. Orly outgrew dance and he outgrew sports and he outgrew school. He outgrew his bed: he slept on his floor, in his closet, out in the world. In those years Thea heard from Florence only when he’d been missing awhile. “I was wondering if he’d called Georgia,” said Florence. “He’s always loved her so.” He always had loved her, Thea said; he never had called. He went to rehab twice the year he was thirteen. Twinkle-eyed Vandyked Loren turned out to have a nineteenth-century streak to his parenthood, and Orly was sent for three months to a camp in Idaho for wayward boys. He came home furious, but with roses in his cheeks. He overdosed and detoxed five times before dying in the parking lot of the Safeway at sixteen, brought down to earth for good.

  Perhaps he had died somewhere else and been brought there, the police said, as though that might be a solace.

  The children weren’t friends any longer, tha
nk God. Fate and their mothers had kept them apart—Florence most of all. She decided that he was contagious—he must have caught his troubles from some other, worse boy—and this was the way she failed her son. Wasn’t caution catching, too? Shouldn’t he have been exposed to plenty of it?

  That’s what Thea guessed, anyhow.

  The funeral was open casket, which surprised Thea. They’d combed the curls right out of his hair, though maybe he’d done that himself, alive; maybe they’d been working from a recent photo. On the church pew Thea and Georgia slid on the needlepointed cushions and did not know whether they were supposed to pray aloud with the believers or not. It was jam-packed. People wailed. You’d think the whole world would never recover.

  Afterward, at the house, Florence held them by their elbows. How different did she look from the day they’d met thirteen years before at the converted fire station, the groovy mother, the mother of many colors? (How different would she look now, her child gone nearly that long?) This was the last time they might see each other, thought Thea. She wished she had done something, slept with Loren, loaned Orly money for his fatal dose, something that could not be forgiven. She didn’t want Florence to come looking.

  “He loved you,” Florence said to Georgia, caressing her elbow, squeezing it.

  “He loved everybody,” said Georgia, who’d had to borrow a pair of her mother’s pantyhose for the occasion.

  “No,” Florence said. “He loved you particularly.”

  Florence knew what she was doing. She was the sort of person, thought Thea, who said a thing aloud when she suspected it wasn’t true. Not lying exactly, but as though she were wrestling with an immense and troublesome and essential emotion, and in telling you, gently, that it was a thing to be venerated, an unusual variety of love, she was handing you the corners so you could help gather. He loved you particularly. You always loved each other.