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

clattering child’s toy, a dragon that smacked its jaws as it rolled along. The man wore a round embroidered Chinese hat and pants that showed his ankles, and he tweaked balloons into dogs and handed them to children. She supposed she and he were members of the same tribe, or the same theoretical union. Keep your distance, she thought at him.

Where was Jonas now? He’d ridden the bus with her to the central train station, used her credit card to buy her ticket to the port. He was going to be a father. (She resolved to believe it.) Fathers should not sleep beneath kitchen tables. He needed money. She would send it happily, without negotiation or expectation.

She walked through a door out onto an open deck at the end of the boat. Not end. Stern. She walked to the stern of the boat past the smokers and stared sternly out. The sharp salt air did her some good, though the smokers all looked fucked off with the cold. Why she’d quit: after the ban in restaurants and pubs, smoking had become a standing endeavor, and she had no interest in smoking upright. She stood at the rail and looked at the water.

She thought—as she often did when she saw an opportunity—of doing away with herself. Wait till the deck cleared so nobody would witness her. Jump in. Drown. How long would it take till she was noticed missing? She might be an enduring mystery, like Judge Crater (US) or Lord Lucan (UK). You waited to disappear till nobody watched you go. Otherwise you’d be only a dull suicide.

This was a lifelong habit. It didn’t feel suicidal but the opposite, a satisfying of a not-quite-urge. Whenever she moved to a new place, for instance, she looked for the support she’d hang herself from. In her current house, a barn conversion, there were beams everywhere, though the best was in the kitchen, with an iron hook. Finding the spot calmed her. She didn’t want to kill herself, but she did want to think about it. After all, she wasn’t afraid of death.

She decided to live forever or as long as possible. She would learn to be a better person, for her niece’s sake. (Why niece? She couldn’t imagine Jonas as the father of a son, was all.) Today it felt entirely possible. Was this optimism? Was this what Micah and Jonas felt?

The water behind a boat is the deepest wishing well in the world: It has drag and intention. Throw your dreams into it. If they don’t pull you in and drown you, perhaps they’ll come true.

On a table inside she found a flyer. CHILDREN’S ENTERTAIMENT, it said, 2:30 IN THE KID ZONE! MAGIC, BALLOONS! Well, she thought. Why not. The boat appeared so empty she imagined nobody else might show up, the sea sufficiently turbulent that any children were lying flat and sipping warm water. Professional courtesy, one children’s performer to another. She would be his audience.

But the KID ZONE!, a glassed-in space just beyond the cafeteria, was full. With palpable delight, a young white woman (English, Mistress Mickle was pretty sure) watched her two-year-old daughter waddle up to the man in the Chinese hat: how lucky, the mother clearly thought, that the world had the chance to experience her child! A plump redheaded boy clutched a model of the very boat they were on, purchased from the gift shop. Two-thirds of the audience seemed to be one large Muslim family, or several families traveling together: kids in the front row, a couple of men leaning against the far wall, four young women in matching robin’s-egg-blue head scarves who could have been mothers to the audience, or older sisters. Not all the teenage girls wore head coverings, so probably they weren’t all related. They were different strains. Denominations. The God of one allowed you to show your neck, and the God of another allowed you to wear slacks.

Where were they from? Somewhere in the Middle East. Even if she heard them speak, she wouldn’t know. She had a bum ear: probably why the height of her acting career was a villain on a children’s game show. Dutch sounded like German to her, and Portuguese like Russian. Were they Iraqi, Yemeni? Then one of the teenage boys sighed and said to a teenage girl, in a voice of dread and Birmingham, “This is taking forever. I wish we’d flown.”

“Fly, then,” said his sister. “Go ahead.”

Returning home. At sea with the English, as per usual.

One elderly woman, tucked in a porthole frame, clapped impatiently at a small boy who’d stood up and started to wander. (She was from elsewhere, surely, the original cutting on the family tree.) (They were at sea, they were all from elsewhere.) The boy was little, in elasticized jeans with prominent belt loops. Mistress Mickle wanted to set him in her own lap, whisper in his ear, Shh, let’s watch the show, lay her cheek against his hot head. She did feel inclined toward some children, little ones, those not yet taught by television to hate her. The boy’s older sister, a girl of six, knit her already comically serious eyebrows and grabbed him by the waist and gave him a good slug on the arm. Then, as though overcome with love, she seized and kissed him.

Mistress Mickle sat on the floor by the door.

The man in the Chinese hat turned to the audience. He held up to the light three balls filled with glittery fluid. Wordlessly he began juggling. Three balls was relatively easy, Mistress Mickle knew from her years with Circus a Go-Go, and then thought: but hard on a pitching boat. With a military hup, he popped the third ball, then again, again, till all the children were watching.

“Hello,” he said. “I am the Magnificent Jimmy.” He had a London accent, despite the Chinese hat and Moroccan slippers. Then he said, more firmly, “Hello!”

“Hello,” the audience answered, the way you might greet a friendly lunatic in