Praise for Imaginary Museums
“What are these? Weird parables? Dark dreams? Warnings about the afterlife, death, marriage? Like the best writers, Polek is willing to go to a disturbing place and stay there. She will not save our hero. She will join the shadowy forces and lead us in.”
—Deb Olin Unferth, author of Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution
“Nicolette Polek’s Imaginary Museums is a collection of pressure-cooked little diamonds: smart, funny, succinct, and sure to be a classic. People will be reading this book for a long time.”
—Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac
“These rhythmic bulletins of crisp delirium infiltrate the bloodstream in a manner I can describe only as symphonic—a tender, lucid world takes shape beneath the world we know and swells to submerge us in its understated magic.”
—May-Lan Tan, author of Things to Make and Break
“Like little crystalline shards, these wonderfully subtle, often laconic stories suddenly catch the light and cast it in unexpected, profoundly revealing directions. A quirky, startling debut.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
“There are texts I always go back to because they both ground me and take me somewhere else, and Imaginary Museums is part of that list now, along with Robert Walser’s Microscripts and William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. Polek’s wonderful ability to create such clear imagery both delicate and epic in only a few pages, sometimes only one, is absolutely magical. Her stories are like a vivid and revelatory dream that one unexpectedly has while taking a nap under the sun.”
—Amalia Ulman, artist
“Nicolette Polek’s stories are little circuses of wonder and surprise. They make me feel wide awake. Plus Imaginary Museums is really pleasingly full of stuff: you’ve got hairpin narrative turns, unexpected drownings, saltshakers, trapdoors, chain saws, vodka. In one of my favorite stories, a bluebird sees the main character, but she never sees the bird. Imaginary Museums is delightfully alive.”
—Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL
“Nicolette Polek’s voice is resigned, hopeful, funny, tender, and melancholy, with an older European sensibility that reminds me of some of my favorite translated works. The ambiguous tales in Imaginary Museums are full of the pleasure, disappointment, possibility, and mystery of life.”
—Kathryn Scanlan, author of Aug 9—Fog
“There’s the sense that anything can happen in the stories of Imaginary Museums—a book full of surprising turns, fascinating characters, and perfect endings. The timelessness of Nicolette Polek’s voice is a wonder, and it will stay with you long after reading.”
—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
“In Polek’s deliciously unnerving debut, the mundane is made very strange, as everyday objects or normal people are considered in new and unsettling ways . . . A surprising and potent catalogue of small, eerie discoveries.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Polek offers an enjoyable balance of light and dark subject matter, sweet and bitter characters, cuddly and cruel moments . . . She has immense talent for sudden, quietly affecting turns of phrase, luminous details, and word choices that firmly pin images down . . . Some [stories] offer sharp social commentary, a bit like Diane Williams but with more warmth and vulnerability . . . A moving, impressively varied first collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2020 by Nicolette Polek
All rights reserved
First Soft Skull edition: 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Polek, Nicolette, author.
Title: Imaginary museums : stories / Nicolette Polek.
Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027087 | ISBN 9781593765866 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781593765873 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3616.O5578 A6 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027087
Cover design & art direction by salu.io
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Published by Soft Skull Press
1140 Broadway, Suite 704
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
For Beata and Jozef
CONTENTS
MINIATURE CATASTROPHES
The Rope Barrier
Coed Picnic
Winners
Grocery Story
Garden Party
Arranged Marriage
AMERICAN INTERIORS
A House for Living
The Dance
The Nearby Place
Invitation
Doorstop
Imaginary Museums
Your Shining Trapdoor
SLOVAK SCENERIES
Sabbatical
Flowers for Angelika
Thursdays at Waterhouse
The Seamstress
How to Eat Well
Owls Fall in Nitra
LIBRARY OF LOST THINGS
Girls I No Longer Know
Guest Books
Field Notes
Rest in Pieces
Pets I No Longer Have
The Squinter’s Watch
Love Language
Acknowledgments
Miniature
CATASTROPHES
The Rope Barrier
The woman invested in a rope barrier, with a green velvet rope, which she carried around in her backpack like a tripod.
She assembled it when she sat down on the subway. She assembled it at work when she responded to emails. She placed it beside her when she visited the cemetery, and in front of the curtain when she showered. Her husband sometimes stood on the other side of the rope and watched her rest in bed.
When driving in the mountains she assembled it across her lap like a second seat belt. There were lynx and black widows in the forests nearby, so she assembled the rope barrier while she bird-watched. She’d heard somewhere to never turn your back on mother earth, but it felt okay to do it this way.
Eventually the woman and her family moved into a brick house with a turret and a gargoyle. The woman began to feel an occasional presence, like a heavy judgment or a fallen angel, so she assembled the rope barrier whenever she felt a chill creep up.
Her friends called it the meditation median, despair wall, uncrossing the line. Her niece called it the slinky barrier. For birthdays she received replacement ropes from her family, in novelty colors, like glow-in-the-dark, or snakeskin.
The woman brought the rope barrier to functions. If she was seated next to someone she didn’t like, she put it between their chairs. When she ignored phone calls, she assembled it as a symbolic gesture.
The woman’s sneaky distrust of things grew. Her sister moved to the other side of the country, started practicing mindfulness and seeing a therapist. The sister sent happy letters, and the woman enviously read them in bed while her husband watched.
After a while, the woman still used her rope barrier, but it no longer protected her. Her hands shook when she hooked the rope onto the posts. The ropes twisted and frayed. The colors faded.
She placed the rope barrier between her baby son and dessert until his vegetables were eaten. He still didn’t listen. A m
an at the airport tried to steal it when she was rummaging through her bag. Members of the mafia moved two houses down. The woman put the rope barrier across the porch steps, but the mailman or the wind would knock it down. Termites infested the walls of her house, and what was she supposed to do about that?
The woman both despised the rope barrier and hissed at those who approached it. She felt singled out and angry at the things that were bigger than her. It felt, now, as if she were forced to put herself on a side of things she encountered, and that she often chose the wrong side.
She wanted a rope barrier for her rope barrier, or a long rope that coiled against her body. No, she didn’t want ropes: she wanted curtains, and blockades and stacked tires, and legal representation.
She became gloomy and mercurial. She went into the garden with an axe and started knocking the heads off the sunflowers. She swung it at an ancient oak tree. She tried splitting a rock. She imagined the sound of rustling in the distant hedges and pursued the sound with passion. When she saw the rope barrier she brought the blade down on it, again and again.
Coed Picnic
She ditches her archery lesson and goes to her older brother’s picnic by the fishing pier. Her thighs are pale like coconuts and the boys imagine her squashing guavas between them. She bites into a tomato while wearing a white shirt. She licks the relish off her hot dog before eating it. She picks a bony honeysuckle blossom off the bush and sticks the stem under the elastic of her bathing suit bottom. She’s fifteen and listens to them talk about fractals, hydroponics, and how Canada geese choose one mate for a lifetime. They take her picture by the boathouse, smoking, with her eyes closed and lips pursed. She’s that summer’s Darling, the sweetest kiss. She stubs the cigarette on the trunk of an ornamental fig tree to be tough. The boys laugh because the worst forest fires occur in suppressed environments, where layers of dead plant material build up on the ground, ready to make a spark dance. She spikes her cranberry juice and dives off the dock wearing only a sapphire ring. At first they watch her disappear, her blond hair spreading on the surface like a lily pad. They are satisfied by her display. When she starts to flounder the boys shift around the barbecue. One revs his motorcycle; another crushes a Narragansett can on his forehead. Only when she yells do they rush to the edge. One leaps in and lets her grasp his shoulders. The most experienced swimmer can drown at the hands of someone who cannot swim. A weak swimmer will probably drown at the hands of one who just learned. The one who aggressively knows nothing can have more power over someone who is still in the process of knowing something. She climbs onto the boy and pushes him under the water long enough for him to sink, as she reaches for the edge of the dock.
Winners
The new Fellows are sitting in a sports bar after orientation, drinking.
They are talking about things that interest them—books, words and what they mean—but also things like good sandwich shops in the area, and how someone had broken into the YMCA to smoke opium in the lifeguard chair.
On the walls behind them are many television screens playing basketball, golf, river football, and soccer. The Fellows compliment one another, how they all seem intelligent and qualified.
Fellow 1 shows someone a picture of her cat, Beckett, sleeping on The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound.
“Wow,” says Fellow 2, who goes on to talk about Ezra Pound and all that she has done for the world of modernist poetry.
A waitress in a tiny apron brings them all whiskey shots.
Fellow 1 is confused. Why did Fellow 2 refer to Ezra Pound as a woman? Fellow 1 begins to think that maybe she did know Ezra Pound was a woman, but had for some reason forgotten. She tries to remember what Ezra Pound looked like, and imagines her looking similarly to George Eliot, whom she had also, at one point, thought was a man.
Fellow 1 feels profoundly embarrassed, thinking of all the times she had referred to Ezra Pound as a man, and vows to never make the mistake again.
Some of the Fellows go out to smoke cigarettes and to remark on the view from atop the hill and laugh a big, booming laugh. They leave behind Fellow 1 and Fellow 6, a confident boy from Nebraska who has taken an interest in a tennis match on one of the many television screens.
Fellow 1 strikes up a conversation with him about how Ezra Pound was rumored to have translated a book of love poems from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it turned out she had made it all up herself.
Fellow 6 nods, taking a long sip from his drink. “I’ve read that,” he says, then pauses. “Ezra Pound also made vibrators by putting bumblebees in glass jars,” he says, “and after orgasming would throw them at pedestrians from her seventh-floor apartment in Paris.” He turns his attention back to the tennis match.
The ball bounces back and forth on the grass court. The players move closer to the net and volley. They sound like little angry creatures, weirdly struggling, until the louder and more attractive player hits the ball into a corner of the court.
He smiles a winning smile and throws his racket into the crowd.
The camera pans to a young boy in the stands, who catches the racket and keeps it under his bed for years. He later tells his friends that it belonged to Venus Williams herself, and that her breath smelled sweet, like a pear, when they kissed.
Fellow 1 looks into her drink. “Yes, I remember reading that too,” she says.
Grocery Story
It is a Saturday morning and the grocery store is crowded. People yell “excuse me,” bumping into him. There are lots of arms reaching for things they want. He finds himself in an aisle where a woman frantically wiggles her stubby fingers toward a pickle jar on the top shelf. A tall, thin man scuttles past with a cart full of canned corn. Fluorescent lights illuminate many different lumps of cheese. A group of people circle their carts around a watermelon display like a death dance, and a small girl stares at him as she crawls out from under a table, clutching a salami. He leaves within one minute without having looked for licorice.
She looks down multiple times at a folded memo, each time whispering “licorice,” then slipping it back in her pocket. She can’t remember where the natural foods section is; she imagines it’s where the dehydrated fruits would be, next to the nuts or the flax. She somehow gets herded into the dairy section, where she nervously compares prices of yogurt. Later she is seen holding two grapefruits, weighing one in each hand, up and down, then putting them back. She smells every hand soap and stares at sudoku covers in the magazine section. She leaves an hour later without licorice.
Garden Party
He says she looks wow, like a flower, like this blue-petaled thing that he holds up and poses next to her face. Side by side they look nothing alike, because she is Marylane, not a forget-me-not, but he says they’re like sisters. Marylane blushes.
They’re flirting through a garden. Not a particularly exceptional garden but a garden gardenly enough to set the scene for things to bloom. She proposes a picnic, which allows them to stretch out. They share a ratty quilt that her grandmother patched from her childhood denim jumper. Ladybugs are embroidered on it. He looks at them and imagines her wearing the jumper as a child. Cute. She wants him to feel close to her. There’s a stain where she spit up as a baby. She wants him to feel that close.
There’s only one thermos—they’re reaching toward each other. Their hands warm from the thermos the way hands warm from hands. Instead of a kiss, they prolong eye contact, smile excessively, nod often, and wait.
In the greenhouse, the crane lilies slip off drips of moisture. The dense air of the tropical garden moves Marylane to slip off her cardigan. He intentionally lets go of his greenhouse map so she can pick it up, and when she does, he breathes loud, once, against her neck. She looks at him drive his hand through his hair. She looks at him look at her. One cannot help the way one feels, or doesn’t feel. Sometimes she needs validation. Sometimes he doesn’t want to spend an afternoon alone. As they exchange childhood anecdotes they listen half-impressed. Not every human experience
is inherently valuable.
A woman with a twitchy mouth exclaims over a flower, and Marylane rolls her eyes.
They kiss and get in separate cars. Marylane’s attention goes to a radio show. He stops to buy some ginger ale feeling distant but content; at the stoplight he watches a pug get tangled in a bush. He would wake up the next morning, and instead of a forget-me-not he could pick a sunflower and to him they’d look the same.
Arranged Marriage
In which Jacob and Lilith get married and go on a hike in the Blue Woods, where they think about health, opening a pottery studio for children with disabilities, starting a vegetable garden, and God.
Lilith wakes up feeling strange and apathetic. Looking at the numbers on her alarm clock, she remembers “today I get married,” and says it over and over, only to understand the line as one long muttered word that she doesn’t know the definition of. Lilith gets dressed peacefully in front of the window. She watches a bird that has been flying around with long pieces of string for building a nest. Lilith doesn’t get dressed. Squinting and suddenly feeling spun by the reality of agreeing to marry Jacob, she leaves her small apartment in a lacy slip, and at the convenience store trades in her iPhone for a bottle of champagne, a truffle, and a lotto ticket.
She ignores directions for the opening scene in which Lilith walks down to the docks and sees her fiancé, who is taking his last unmarried look at the Bay, and instead looks up into the sky, says “no,” and goes on a sloshy and melancholic brunch date with her sister.
This is fine. Lilith looks exactly like a young girl except bigger, so the neighborhood girl named Susan, who is in eighth grade and looks exactly like a woman except smaller, is contacted to play Lilith’s part, the bride.
Susan puts on a white halter top and linen pants in preparation for the part, and, feeling fluffed up and glamorous from being solicited for a major role, texts her boyfriend. She slips out of the house around lunchtime, to see her boyfriend, who waits in his banged-up BMW under an elm tree. From there, they drive to a junkyard and park among many other demented vehicles.
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