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

pained nor interested her. They weren’t her lost ones. But every now and then a Pearl or a Sammy would smile at her, and even giggle, and she would, she would want a nibble, a kiss, in the old way. A raspberry blown on a neck, a kiss with a bite at its heart: nibble, nibble, yum. They weren’t hers, but they were sweet. But if you were the mother of dead children, that was over. You weren’t allowed.

On those days she ordered a second loaf of bread, which she dragged home and tore apart.

Five years passed like nothing. She was recognized in the neighborhood as the monument she was, constructed to memorialize a tragedy but with the plaque long since dropped off. She was Leonora. Her name had survived, because the bakery workers remembered it, but that was all. Nobody imagined that she was a mother. She was (anyone who saw her presumed) a person who had always been exactly thus, poisoned, padded, eyes sunk into her face. She existed only at the table, eating bread in her finicking way. She spoke to the people behind the counter. That was all. Some of them were patient, and some of them weren’t.

Then one day a man came into the bakery, caught her eye, and smiled.

Poor Alan, she thought reflexively, but then she remembered Poor Alan was dead, though he’d remembered her in his will and set up a trust to take care of her. This man wore a green wool hat like a bucket. The hat looked expensive, imported. He pulled it from his head and revealed a mop of white hair. No, he never was Poor Alan, who’d lost his hair long before it faded. But she did know the man. He sat down across from her. The tabletop was Formica, the green of trolleys.

“Mike Wooster,” he said.

“Hello, Mike Wooster,” said Leonora. She could smell her own vile breath. She slept in a bed and washed herself, but she did not always remember to brush her teeth. Why would she? She scarcely used them.

He bounced the hat around on his fists. Then he set it in front of him. She had a sense he wanted to drop it over the remains of the day’s bread: Dolly this time. He said, “I’m Madeline’s father.”

She heard the present tense of the sentence.

Everything about him was rich and lulled. “I heard you came here,” he said. “That bread good?”

She tore off a brown curve. A cheek, a clenched hand. She sniffed at it before she pushed it in her mouth.

He cleared his throat. “We’re having a memorial service. And my wife and I and our kids—well, we thought of you.” He picked the hat back up, brushed some flakes of challah from the brim. “I’ve thought of you.” He said that to the hat, then got hold of himself. “Every single day I’ve thought of you. You know,” he said, “they turned my daughter into a monster, too.”

The alcohol, the coat, the ice. Everyone said that if one of those things hadn’t been true, they never would have crashed. “Too?” she said.

The animals of her body were roaring back to life. They—whoever they were—had not turned Leonora into a monster. They had erased her. Newspapers, television, the terrible gabbling radio, which spoke only of the children’s father, the left-behind man, the single parent. That poor man, looking after his children. To lose all of them at once.

Poor Alan had held a funeral, had invited her. Though he’d asked her to come to the front, she’d sat alone at the back of the church—a church! Since when!—drunk and unmoored. Nobody spoke to her. She was a mother who’d let her children go, a creature so awful nobody believed in her. She’d had to turn herself into a monster in order to be seen.

“Madeline never got a chance,” said Mike Wooster. “To redeem herself. But you could. You could be redeemed.”

She laughed, or part of her did, a living thing sheltered in a cave inside of her. “Redeemed,” she said. “Like a Skee-Ball ticket.”

“Like a soul. Your soul can be redeemed.”

“Too late,” she said. “Soul’s gone.”

“Where?” he said.

“Where do you think?” she said.

At that he took her hand. “This only feels like hell,” he said. “I know. I do know.”

She shook her head to refuse his sympathy: she could smell the distant desiccation of it. No. Why had he come here? She could not be redeemed, a coupon, a ticket. He had a dead child, too. She could feel it twitching through his fingers, the sorrow, the guilt, like schools of tiny flicking fish who swim through bone instead of ocean. He was not entirely human anymore, either. Indeed, she could hear the barking dog of his heart, wanting an answer. Her heart snarled back, but tentatively.

If she accepted his sympathy, then she would have to feel sorry for him. She would have to transcend. Some people could. They could forgive and rise above their agony.

She could feel the turning of her organs in their burrows, and she felt an old emotion, one from before. Gratitude. She was thankful to remember that she was a monster. Many monsters. Not a chimera but a vivarium. Her heart snarled, and snarled, and snarled. She tried to listen to it.

“The thing,” Leonora told Mike Wooster, and she pulled her hand from his, “is that you can’t unbraid a challah.”

“No?” he said. “Well, I’d guess not.”

“Would you like some?” she asked.

He looked at the rubble of the day’s loaf. “Oh no. No, that’s yours.”

“Let me get you one. Please.”

“I don’t need—”

Leonora said, rising, “It will be a pleasure to watch you eat.”

The Get-Go

Sadie’s mother was tall and narrow, with a long braid down her back, black when Sadie was very little, then silvery, then silver, an instrument to measure time, an atomic clock. Her father had been tall, too, both he and the mother the tallest members of short families. In photographs and at reunions, they