And then she let go, and Georgia was left holding that unwieldy feeling. It blew back over her, and she was caught.
She was sixteen. Not a prodigy at annihilation, like Orly, but a quick study.
The store on Burnett was not a mineral cave but an animal den, carved out by a creature partial to must and floral sheets and PEZ dispensers. A junk shop, a proper one, like walking into somebody else’s disordered brain, which operated on this lie: it was good to collect ephemera because if things were worth saving—if a volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books with abridgements of Ngaio Marsh could persist—why not all of us?
Thea peered into a display case full of drinking glasses that had once been jelly jars, with pictures of the Flintstones on them, another thing Georgia had begged for, and Thea could taste cloying grape on the crest of her tongue, bad jelly that you had to suffer through so you could drink later. They’d only ever gotten one, which Thea would have jettisoned when she’d left Portland. She had boxed up the board games and the stuffed animals, the decks of cards and bowling trophies, all of it now seemingly, eerily here, mangled and for sale.
The emptied rooms of dead children, she saw now. Or whose parents had given up on them. It wasn’t really a store; it was too dense, too personal for that. A hoarding. Evidence of damage. You hoarded because you lost someone. Lost someone, and decided, never again, not a person, not a thing.
From the back room of the junk shop stepped the proprietress, a shopworn woman in her fifties with long knotted hair. The authoress of the hoarding. She wore gunmetal blue jeans and a plaid cowboy shirt with pearl snaps. Thea realized, with the feeling of a dropped package, that the woman must have been about her own age. It wasn’t that Thea forgot she was fifty-two, only that people who were her own age were also fifty-two.
“Want something, darling?” the woman asked.
“I’m looking for a doll.”
“We got dolls!”
“A particular kind,” said Thea. “It was big in the seventies and eighties.”
The woman covered her mouth, the way already quiet people do to listen, and nodded encouragingly.
“Baby Alive,” said Thea.
The woman looked at Thea with a wet-eyed, accusing, marsupial expression. This went on for a while. It was like being on the phone with someone and not knowing whether you’d been disconnected. The longer Thea looked, the more varieties of emotion she detected: sorrow, fury, a tiny sense of humor trying to fill its sails with wind.
“If you don’t—” said Thea at last.
The woman took her hand from her mouth. “Do,” she said. “Think so. This way.”
Longing always did bring you worse and worse places, to junk shops and deserted parks; longing had in Georgia’s life taken her to unfamiliar dorm rooms when she was still in high school, to group houses and dingy apartments, to drink in, smoke in, shoot up in, and finally overdose, which she did for the first time in an abandoned house in East Portland. First time, that’s what Florence called it when she phoned Thea. How had the news found her? But Thea was glad to hear Florence say, in the calm voice of a driver spinning into a ditch, “Here we go.”
“Listen,” said Florence. They were driving around the city. Georgia was locked up in rehab near Medford, but Florence was showing Thea the places she would need to look next time: the public parks, a particular arch under a particular bridge, the empty houses, the old communes gone off the rails. “You can’t blame yourself, and you can’t blame Georgia. She’ll lie to you. I mean, obviously she’s already lied to you, you know that. But she will lie and she’ll steal. It’s not her. It’s the disease. It’s out of her control. Your job is to love her. You have pills in the house? She’ll steal them, and once she’s stolen drugs she’ll steal the next thing. That’s what I’ve learned. Once your kid has done the first thing he’d never do there’s nothing he won’t do. Sorry. This is the truth. Sweet Georgia. I’m sorry. I just love that girl, we all do. Sometimes I think the mistake I made was I was too easy on him, and then I remember what he was like when he came back from Cullen—sorry, Idaho, the place we sent him—and then I think that was the mistake, that’s what we couldn’t come back from. I never wanted to send him there. It was Loren. He hit me once. Orly, I mean, Orly hit me. I don’t think he ever remembered that he did that. In the ear. Thought he’d take it right off my head. You see this place? There’s a group of kids? Goes all the way back. I’ve missed you, Thea. I’m sorry this is what’s taken for you to call me. Nobody called me. Nobody. No, nobody. I had a kid everybody loved, and then he died, and where did that love go? Into outer space. Into other people’s kids. I hope you know, Thea, that I will love you forever.”
You could think a grackle was somebody you’d lost, or wronged, or owed a favor to, come back to settle accounts.
If Georgia, for instance, had not survived, Thea would have looked for evidence of her persistence everywhere. She would have kept everything, the board game called Life, the board game called Sorry!, the board game called Monopoly: Georgia’s existence. Chinese checkers, and wept over the missing marbles, the empty dimples in the metal board.
“You,” she might have said to a particular grackle. “Georgia. Is it?”
When Georgia got out of rehab, Thea took her to all her childhood favorite places: the ice cream parlor decorated like a nineteenth-century brothel, the mall skating rink, the walk-through heart at the science museum. Inside, you could hear it beat.
“Oh God,” said Georgia in a voice of terror, touching the heart’s wall. A ventricle hung over her head. “They should fill it with blood for the full effect.”
“With cholesterol,” said Thea. “Or heartbreak.”
“With cocaine,” said Georgia, then, “Do you think it beats all night long?”
“Yes,” said Thea, but of course it was some man’s job to turn it off at night, and on again in the morning. She pictured a mad scientist’s horseshoe-shaped switch with a rubber handle on a wall.
Ka-thump, ka-thump. We gotta get out of here, she thought. Not the heart but the city. She’d already found the job in Austin when Georgia announced that, with money from her father, she would leave the country to clear her head. To do what you want out of my sight, thought Thea, who had assumed that Georgia would follow her to Texas, and Thea would never again have to drive around the neighborhoods of Georgia’s disappearance, remembering she might be in there and she might be dead. That whole terrible night with Florence. But they’d both been wrong about Georgia.
Thea got rid of her house and everything in it. Burn the city to the ground, find the inflammable heart like a poet’s in the ashes, wrap it in a handkerchief, bury it in a mausoleum beneath a mile of marble.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
The word meant nothing. They should replace it with another.
In the junk-shop back room, the woman scaled an outcropping of stacked record albums, covers scuffed to show the shape of the discs inside. Nearby was a box of thick seventy-eights, grackle black and grackle brilliant. Thea thought the cliff might come down. But the woman was goat-footed; she got to the top and came back down and handed over the doll.
Georgia, aged eight, had not just wanted Baby Alive: she had thought it would make the difference. What difference? The only one. Maybe it would have. It was hard to tell, ever, what would make it: the walk-through heart, the indulgent mother, the mean one. They’d driven into a ditch, then away. They’d kept on going. They’d used up every bit of luck they had, making their getaway. Thea never spoke to Florence again, though Orly was still dead, would be dead forever.
And who’s to say that’s the order things happened in; was it only her junk-shop memory that had arranged them so? Maybe Orly had nothing to do with Georgia, child of divorce, always so uneasy in her body, made to take dance lessons because her mother wished her otherwise, and maybe it was Georgia who’d first pulled a plastic ba
g out of her pocket and waved it at Orly, Georgia who even now was vowing to raise her child differently: the baby would sleep in their bed, would have two mothers, two actual mothers, who planned to bend the world for their child instead of the easy other way around.
The doll was diaperless, and played with, and autographed: KITTY on its bicep. Its hair, like many an old lady’s, had gone mauve with age.
“She’s written on,” said Thea, looking for a way out.
“Ballpoint.” The woman spit on the tip of her finger and rubbed the K of Kitty away.
“Does it work?”
“Needs a battery, honey,” the woman said, to the doll instead of Thea. She reached into her jeans pockets. “D or C,” she mused, “D or C: D.”
The doll had a hatch in her back, and the woman loaded a battery, flipped a switch, and turned the doll over.
The baby suckled at nothing. The woman lifted it to Thea, who put out her arms as though the baby were real. She took its churning weight. Instinctively she put her hand on 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 must be preserved at all costs. No dancing allowed. Any sudden movement might knock the bar into the turnpike. No jukebox. Never a band. In the ladies’ room, you could pay a dime, press a plunger, and get misted with perfume.
“Bar stool?” he said, their first negotiation, but bar stools were made for long, lean fellows like him, not for women as short and squat as she. The bar stools were red-topped and trimmed with ribbed chrome.
“Let’s see,” she answered.
He gave her his hand. “Allow me.”
The bartendress was a middle-aged woman with brown hair and auburn eyebrows and the oversized eyes of a cartoon deer. If she were a man they might have thought she looked like a cartoon wolf. She wore a bow tie and a skirt with suspenders. It was an era in America between fancy cocktails, before American pints of beer or decent glasses of wine in bars like EATING DRINKING PIANO.
“What’ll you have?” the bartendress asked them.
“What’ll I have indeed,” said Jack. He tried to remember what you drank in America. “Gin and tonic.”
“You?”
“Vodka soda with lime.” She said to him, “My mother calls that the alcoholic’s drink. Goes down easy and odorless.”
“Are you?”
“No,” she said, though if you’d known her then you wouldn’t be certain.
Beer nuts on the bar top. The drinks came in their little glasses crammed with ice, and Jack remembered why he liked the place, what he’d missed about America. Ice, and narrow straws you used to extract your drink as though you were a
hummingbird.
They clinked glasses.
At the end of the bar a greasy-looking man drank a boilermaker. “Lovebirds,” he said. “How very revolting.”
Jack put his hand on the bar and pivoted on his stool in order to give the man a serious look. “Hold on, there, Samuel Beckett,” he said.
“Samuel who, now.”
“Beckett,” said Jack. “You look like him.”
“You look like him,” said the false Beckett from his bar stool. It was hard to tell whether he was Irish or drunk.
“How about that,” said Sadie. “You do.”
“I know,” said Jack, irritated.
“You’re wearing a scarf,” she observed, and touched the fringe of it.
“It’s cold.”
“You’re wearing a woman’s scarf. It’s got polka dots on it.”
“Are polka dots only for women?” said Jack.
“I do not look like Samuel Beckett,” said Samuel Beckett at the end of the bar. “I look like Harry Dean Stanton.”
“Who?” Jack asked.
“The actor,” Sadie explained. “You know.” She tried to think of a single Harry Dean Stanton movie and failed.
“Unfamiliar.”
“Another?” asked the bartendress, and Jack nodded. She put down the drinks and scooped up the money from the pile Jack had left on the bar.
“He’s my cousin,” said the man.
“Samuel Beckett?”
“Harry Dean Stanton,” said Samuel Beckett.
“Sorry,” said Jack. “I lost track.”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Really?”
“No. But sometimes people buy me drinks because they think so.”
“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Sadie, and she flagged the bartendress.
“Ah,” said Samuel Beckett, “maybe it’s me she loves.”
“It is not,” said Jack.
She was the sort of person who liked bar stools, after all. It felt easier to talk to somebody next to you than across, a slantwise intimacy in which you looked at the person less but could bump shoulders or elbows more. Even so she was astounded when his hand landed in her lap. It didn’t feel carnal, but architectural: whatever they were building wouldn’t work unless they put things down right the first time.
The Souvenir Museum Page 14
