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

hung to his shoulders and was so fair-skinned as to be combustible. Every day he was slathered in sunscreen; the first freckle would be a tragedy Ernest might never recover from. God knew when they’d manage a first haircut. When Cody and Bruno were out in the world together, they were generally taken for grandfather and granddaughter, and this thorough wrongness incensed Ernest, though Bruno had learned over the years not to take the mistakes of others too seriously, not when his own mistakes required so much analysis. He couldn’t explain to Ernest the real trouble with a wedding: Ernest’s shocking taste, which he, Bruno, would have to go along with, and smile, and declare himself happy. “I like peach,” Ernest would say, displaying a napkin. Or, “My family loves disco music.” Or, “We could have beef Wellington.”

Once upon a time, Bruno had had opinions about everything—the politics of Eastern Europe, baby clothes, how airline stewardesses should comport themselves, interior decoration. Then: Ernest. Ernest, from a happy Cuban-American family, had grown up going to Disney World for vacations and watching sports on television and buying clothing in actual shopping malls. Ernest had quite the worst taste Bruno had ever encountered. Up-to-date American taste. For instance: Bruno had never imagined that a person he loved could admire, never mind long for, the abomination that was an open-plan house. Proper houses had doors, had walls, had secrets. But as they watched real estate programs for tips on buying—neither had ever owned property, Ernest because he was young and Bruno because he was lazy—he was horrified to hear Ernest say, “Now see, that’s perfect. You can see everything from the kitchen.”

“Do you know who else likes to see everything from the kitchen?” Bruno asked. “The Devil. Hell is entirely without doors.”

“Heaven doesn’t need doors,” said Ernest.

Then Bruno had to remind himself that Ernest actually believed in heaven and hell, at least a little. So he said of the interior decorator on the television, “Look at that fool. I’m to trust him to arrange my furniture when he can’t even wear a hat at an appealing angle?” Look at that fool, yes, he thought to himself, of himself. That old fool would live in a panopticon, for love of Ernest.

And so Bruno decided to treat his opinions like a childhood collection—decorative spoons, matchbooks—something comprehensive and useless. Put it all away, beneath the bed. Let Ernest decide; let Bruno feel superior. Now they owned a house in Houston, Texas, where when you walked in the front door you could see the kitchen, the dishes in the sink, the nook with the small offering to the gods that was the child’s breakfast: a stem end of baguette, split and spread with jam. The playroom, the backyard, all the ways you could bolt.

Bruno had given up a lot for Ernest. He would not tolerate a wedding.

Schlitterbahn was an enormous medical military arachnoid construction, candy-colored tube slides corkscrewing out of barracks. In the summer it was open to the air; in November, half the park was closed, and half was covered against the weather. Bruno had looked up details on his phone; now he said aloud the fake German names in the most authentic German accent he could conjure, the voice of his mother. “Blastenhoff,” he said. “Wasserfest. Surfenburg.”

No matter what you renounced in this life, fate would provide the parody. At the Schlitterbahn box office they had to offer their wrists, and in a quiet ceremony they were braceleted, married to the park. The outdoor attractions—that was the word, attractions—were closed, but there were plenty of indoor attractions. “Most of my own attractions have been indoors,” said Bruno to the young officiant, a plump woman with calligraphed eyebrows, who brandished another bracelet and asked if they wanted splash cash. Do we? asked Bruno. Yes, said Ernest. He shifted Cody on his hip. The boy had already put on his orange goggles, and he rubbed like a robot cat against Ernest’s ear. “Honey, ouch,” said Ernest. “You take it, Gravy.” He stepped aside so that Bruno could offer his wrist to the young woman a second time.

“I’m a good swimmer,” the boy told her.

“Are you? That’s great!”

“Well,” said Bruno.

“I am,” the boy insisted. The rule of the household was to encourage, but Bruno wanted to say, No, sweetheart, you’re an awful swimmer. You suck. One of the things he hadn’t realized before having a child: how many ways there were to die of self-confidence.

In the locker room they crammed their clothing into a minuscule cubby. Only in a bathing suit did Ernest seem un-American: dark, furred, in a pair of unfashionably short but devastating red swim trunks, a 1960s movie idol from another country. Not a Frankie or a Bobby—a Francesco, a Roberto. “Handsome,” said Bruno, accusingly, but Ernest shook his head.

“Ah well,” said Bruno, and started to pull on his navy swimming shirt.

“You don’t need that,” said Ernest. “It’s all inside.”

“I need it,” said Bruno, touching his stomach. “What’s so German about this place? Apart from the nonsensical names?”

“I want a river,” said Cody, shivering in his lime-green tights—ankle-length, to protect him from the sun and cold both.

“And so you shall have one,” said Bruno.

Bruno took one hand, Ernest the other. They could feel the current flow through their little conductor.

The boy and his rivers. At this, and only this, he was a prodigy. He was slow to walk, to talk, to eat solid food. He still wore a diaper at night, requested another diaper once a day to move his bowels, which he would only do in the kitchen, next to the cupboard with the lazy Susan. Bruno, according to his mother, had been entirely toilet-trained at one and a half, but Cody would be a kindergartener before the process was done. “It’s the sign of a genius,” said one of the mothers at preschool. “Coincidentally,” Bruno had answered, “also the sign of an idiot.” What the mother had meant was it could go either way;