The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (essential books to read .txt) 📗

boy’s firework godfather, come from far off to teach him how to light a wick. The boy must have been eight. The man must have been a ghost. Together they held a smoldering twist of paper to the fuse and stepped away. Mistress Mickle felt the rocket’s rising shrill at the back of her throat, absorbed its pop in her tonsils. It tore itself into three red branches, then faded.

“Fucking awesome,” Jonas called to the kid.

“Extraordinary,” she said, in a four-syllabled, English way. Then, “Yeah, awesome.” Already the man and boy were righting the bottle for a new rocket.

“Sixty-five million euro, according to the papers,” said Jonas. “That’s what the Dutch spent on fireworks this year. Hey, did I tell you? I’m going to apprentice to a hatter.”

“You’re too old to be an apprentice,” she said. Then: “A hatter?”

“Felt hats,” he said. “They’re the next thing. They’re coming back.”

“Come and went, haven’t they?”

He’d been smiling but his smile slipped. Then he smiled more broadly: that his sister might know anything was something he could believe for only seconds at a time. “No,” he said. “Real hats. My friend Matthias. He’s, like, a genius.”

That perfect, round beard: it looked like a hatter’s apparatus, come to think of it. A form for the crown of a derby, a tool to bring up the nap of the felt.

“I’ll give you more money,” Mistress Mickle told him.

“That’s not what I’m saying.” He had his hands in his greasy mechanic’s jacket—he who had never been a mechanic. “I don’t need your money.”

“Oh?”

“No,” said Jonas. “That’s why I invited you here. To show you. I don’t need you anymore. Your help, I mean. Look! I’m standing on two feet.” He added, “I think she’s pregnant. She is pregnant.”

“Who? Oh, Irish.”

“Siobhan,” said Jonas. “Yes.”

“So you’ll want the money, then.”

“Listen to me! That’s why hats.”

“Hats,” said Mistress Mickle.

Bickering into the New Year. Typical. They’d heard no countdown, but the turning of the calendar was unmistakable—the syncopation of bottle rockets replaced by whumps, thunderclaps, the crackling aftermath: beauty. Ordinarily Mistress Mickle was afraid of both loud noises and house fires, but the fireworks over Rotterdam—no, she realized, not over Rotterdam, the fireworks over this particular neighborhood—she goggled at them. Nobody was sighing in unison, as in the States. There wasn’t time to sigh. Every inch of the sky was stitched with flash. Fingers were being blown off, and heart attacks induced, and underneath the explosions you could hear dogs of all sizes bark in agonized registers—but how could Mistress Mickle not marvel? She’d never seen anything like it.

She thought of the invisible woman at the science museum, that mannequin who showed her various systems through her Lucite epidermis: circulatory, nervous, respiratory, reproductive, lit up in turn. The fireworks lit up Mistress Mickle: the blond ones her nerves and the white ones her bones, the red ones her heart, the blue ones her capillaries. They cured her. She was not just fine but better. Soon they’d finish, and she’d be new. But they didn’t finish. They kept going. Cured, afflicted, cured, afflicted, cured, until she realized there was no waiting for the end. The Dutch would set them off till the dark was done. Maybe Jonas was right: maybe this was the year he’d stand on two feet. Hope saturated her.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said to him. She’d learned through the years that saying made it so, at least sometimes. “Really, Jone.”

“This is going to be the greatest year of my life,” said Jonas, and she said, “Yes, it will, I know it.”

Not blond but ginger ale. Not ginger ale but champagne.

Later, in the Irishwoman’s bed, she heard a clunk against the roof and realized it was fallout from the night’s barrage. Ordinarily she would have stayed awake, waiting for the inevitable smell of disaster. Now she thought, Icarus, Newton’s apple, David Bowie, impossible beautiful falling things. A rocket set off hours earlier by the boy in the middle of the street, flown so high it had gone into orbit, circumnavigated the globe, and—like so many flying things—gotten homesick, decided to plummet back.

Should she throw something to the kitchen tabletop, to give her brother the same exhilaration on his bedroll beneath? Would it work?

The table was still scattered with empty hot dog cans. In the Netherlands, they were called knaks.

Twelve hours later, Mistress Mickle—her name was Jenny Early, though forty-nine seemed to her too old to be Jenny and too late to be Early—boarded a ferry at the Hook of Holland, headed for Harwich, where her car was parked. She’d lived in England for twenty years, working as an actress, more or less, all that time: in an experimental theater company (“experimental” meant foodstuff and nudity); as a stilt walker in a new-wave circus; as a minor recurring character on Coronation Street; as the slowest member of an improv troupe; as a reader to the blind; as a voice-over artist in cartoons and, later, video games; and finally as Mistress Mickle, which involved stilts and a multicolored Victorian dress and yelling, week after week, at an audience of children, from which six players were plucked and protected by a young hero named Micah. (The eponymous Barnaby—actual surname O’Malley—had been fired for sleeping with seventeen-year-olds, which he told the papers was unfair, as there were no seventeen-year-olds in his audience.) Mistress Mickle would attempt to kidnap the children, and even when she managed to land one in jail—on stilts! In a hoopskirt!—Micah would always be waiting with the unconvincing cardboard key, which was the size of a leg of lamb. The children would boo her.

Micah was the beautiful child of a Danish mother and a Nigerian father, as genial off camera as on, though in real life guileless, dumb, incapable of outwitting anyone, never mind a woman so many years his senior. He reminded Mistress Mickle of an alternate Jonas, one whose every slapdash decision raised him up instead of knocking him down. She hated Micah for his