The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  But what about me? thought Mistress Mickle. She felt a dull and radiating pain in her jaw, and she stood, and threw up, and fled.

  She should have gone back to the cabin—to the shower, the clean towels, her full suitcase—but she had the idea that she shouldn’t be sealed in a box. She should be near other people, just in case. So she pulled her coat over her dress (not an unremitting mess: she had vomited directly into a pool of vomit) and stumbled to the open air. The cold was good, and she felt a flare of the day’s joy. Then it passed and she felt doom.

  Throw yourself in. Who would care?

  Over the years, she’d gone through the list: her parents (they’d get over it), Jonas (him, too), various lovers (who would mourn her or not, but their lives would not be ruined), her soap opera character (if she were currently playing a character, and if such character were consequential enough for her absence to matter, she would be gently written out of the show).

  Wait. Wait, now.

  There was no writing Mistress Mickle out of Barnaby Grudge. Was it the water or the realization that made her anxious? The wind boxed her ears. She drew her shoulders up to shield them. She was short of breath.

  How would they explain it to the children? Would they simply hire another tall woman with a deep voice and an aptitude for stilts? Would they offer young actresses her corset like Cinderella’s slipper?

  The parents of those children: they would be the ones who’d hate her.

  They replaced Barnaby. They will replace you.

  “Ahoy!” came a voice from behind. She turned. The Magnificent Jimmy, in a pillowy orange Michelin Man down coat, his ankles bare to the wind and his little velvet slippers horrid, splattered. “You all right?”

  She nodded, though it was a lie. “Quite a finish,” she said. “Was that arranged?”

  He laughed. “Never had a show end like that before! A chundering ovation. Where’s your child?”

  A reasonable question. She looked around before she remembered. “I don’t have one.”

  “Oh,” he said, puzzled. Then, “Me neither.”

  She’d always thought it was good for a children’s performer to be childless. Otherwise you’d meet children thinking, Not as smart as mine. Or worse: smarter than mine, lovelier than mine. She judged every piece of art sent to the show: Martin, age six, of Sussex, you drew that with your foot. Penny, age nine, of Walthamstow, that’s the worst fucking fairy I ever saw: it looks like a wingéd footstool.

  “I hate children,” said Mistress Mickle, with the force of a criminal confession. It echoed the same way. “Never wanted them.”

  The Magnificent Jimmy appeared stricken, and cold. “Oh. Pity. I did. We did. Wanted them. But it didn’t happen for me and the wife.”

  Mistress Mickle felt dizzy. Her whole back ached. Panic. She should say something. Ask for help. Then, “You were great. You were really great.”

  “Thanks very much,” he said, but he was turning away, going back in. “You all right, then?”

  “Listen,” she said, “I can get you work.”

  “I’ve got work.”

  “No, I mean—I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” he said, and went back in.

  She sat in a chair and pulled her coat around her and threw up again, and then, without knowing it was going to happen, without a single premonition, she shit her pants: it was the most awful and bewildering feeling—all that warmth against her cold, sodden skin. Mistress Mickle was dying. Jenny Early was dying. Not of embarrassment after all. She was embarrassed, but that wasn’t what was killing her.

  She was afraid.

  Of death? Yes, she felt the edge of it, like a metal box buried in the dirt of the yard that’s worked its way up. All these years she hadn’t been brave about death but incredulous. On the most fundamental level, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, she hadn’t believed in it. She might have believed when her parents died—her father of a heart attack, her mother of liver cancer—because she did grieve them, miss them. Eventually she cheered up, and it didn’t feel as though it were time healing all wounds, but an incorrect assumption made correct. They weren’t dead, they were elsewhere. Of course, she’d had her mother cremated; she’d gone to the funeral arranged by her father’s second wife. Then she’d seen neither parent for years. But there was no part of her that believed in their permanent absence. That’s why heaven. Heaven was invented not because people believed but because they didn’t.

  She could feel the boat of people behind her. They were in the wine bar or the cinema. They were wiping the brows and mouths of their children. She, she was facing all they’d sailed away from. Jonas in the garret, the Irishwoman home and coming up the stairs, everywhere the tatters of fireworks. Her money would go to Jonas. Her nice house. It would save him or ruin him. The ferry was an hour from Harwich, but she’d never see Harwich again. The crew would find her body an hour after docking.

  She tried to say something to the air. She felt like one of those Rotterdam dogs, barking and barking while the humans laughed and set off explosions. Don’t you understand, I’m not unhappy, I’m warning you, I’m telling you this is wrong, dangerous, calamitous: the sky will fall around your ears at any moment. Stop looking up and laughing. It isn’t cute. It isn’t beautiful. It’s the end of the world.

  And then—how do we know this? reader, we have it on the highest authority—the ocean came calm and smooth, and Mistress Mickle’s heart did likewise, and she felt entirely better, and safe.

  Birdsong from the Radio

  “Long ago,” Leonora told her children, and the telling was long ago, too, “I was just ordinary.” Of course they didn’t believe her. She was taller than other mothers, with a mouthful of nibbling, nuzzling teeth, and an affectionate chin she used as a lever. Her hair was roan, her eyes taurine. Later the children would look at the handful of photographs of their mother from the time, all blurred and ill lit, as though even the camera were uncertain who she was, and they would try to remember the gobbling slide of her bite along their necks, her mouth loose and toothy on a shoulder. The threat of more. She was voracious. They could not stop laughing. No! No! Again!

  Children long to be eaten. Everyone knows that.

  “Don’t you want to devour that child?” Leonora asked. “Oh, look at that bottom. I am, I’m going to bite it. I’m going to eat that child whole.”

  (To speak of love as cannibalism! She would have thought it bizarre herself, before her marriage, but here were the children, Rosa, Marco, Dolly, plump loaves of bread, delicious.)

  Those were the days just before busses replaced the trolley lines. The children could hear from their bedroom windows the screech of the streetcars up the hill. Their father ran his family’s radio manufacturers, and there were radios in every room of the house, pocket and tabletop, historic cathedrals. His name was Alan. “Poor Alan,” Leonora called him, and they both understood why: he was in thrall to his wife. He was a very bus of a man, practical and mobile, and he left the children to Leonora, who had a talent for love, as he had a talent for business.

  Winters she took the children tobogganing. Summers they piloted paddleboats across the city pond. She never dressed for the weather. No gloves, no sun hats, no shorts, no scarves. She was always blowing on her fingers or fanning her shirt against her torso. Sunburn, windburn, soaking wet with rain. The children, too. Other mothers sent them home with hand-me-down mittens and umbrellas.

  Not surprising, said those mothers later: she never took care of her children.

  Rosa, Marco, Dolly: Leonora took them to see the trolleys the last day they ran. She wore a green suede coat, the same color as the trolleys, in solidarity. The coat closed with black loops, which Leonora assured her children were called frogs.

  “It’s raining,” said Leonora. “The frogs will be happy.”

  “Those aren’t frogs,” said Marco. He was five, the age of taxonomy.

  “They are,” said Leonora. “I promise. And my shoes are alligat
or.”

  “Why are we watching the streetcars?” asked Marco.

  “There’s no beauty in busses,” Leonora said. “A bus can go anywhere it likes. A trolley is beautiful.”

  “Oh yes,” said Rosa, who was seven, “I can see.”

  Leonora was as doleful as if the streetcars had been hunted into extinction. They were lovely captives who could not get away, and they left only their tracks behind.

  Her coat fastened with frogs; her shoes were alligator. Perhaps she was already turning into an animal.

  The children grew bigger, and bony. Leonora grew worse about love: she demanded it. She kissed too hard. She grabbed the children by the arms to pull them close. “You seized me,” said Dolly, age six. “Why did you seize me so?”

  “I was looking for a place to nibble,” said Leonora. Dolly was a skinny girl.

  Leonora bit. She really did now. Moments later, contrite, writhing, she would say, “The problem is I love you so. I do. Can I be near you? Do you mind?”

  Later, when the neighbors discussed what had happened, exactly, to Leonora, they couldn’t decide. The story of her family was long and sad—a great-grandfather had lived three decades in an asylum; an aunt had killed herself—and the story had not reached its conclusion: here was Leonora’s chapter. She missed her children, who were growing up. She had been, from a distance, a bonny mother, thin, patient, and now she thickened, and coarsened, and you could hear her shriek from all the windows of the house. She had gone mad, or was going.

  The doctors prescribed her pills, which she refused to take.

  She still tried to eat her children, but they were afraid of her. So she had to sneak. The weight of her as she sat on the edge of their beds in the middle of the night was raptorial: ominous yet indistinct. At any moment, the children thought, she might spread her arms and pull them from the sheets through the ceiling and into the sky, the better to harm them elsewhere. The children took to sleeping in the same bed. Rosa, Marco, Dolly. Too old to sleep together, but they had to. They chose a different bed every night, and lay quietly, as they heard her go from pillow to pillow, the unfurling flump of the sheets like the wings they thought they could see on her back.

  “Come back to bed,” said Poor Alan from the hallway in a terrified voice. “Come listen to the radio and fall asleep.” The top of his head was bald. The children could see the bathroom light pool in a little dent in his scalp, just below his summit.

  The children had radios in their rooms. He snapped one on, to the classical station, to calm them down. “You never need be lonely with a radio!” he always said, but they knew that wasn’t so. A radio station was another way grown-ups could talk to you without ever having to listen.

  It was Rosa who told Poor Alan that they had to go. She was fifteen. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “You can come if you want to. But Marco and Dolly and I are going.” Then, seeing his face, “We’d like you to come.”

  “She needs help,” he said.

  “She won’t get it.”

  He nodded. “How will we manage?”

  “We’re not managing now,” said Rosa. “In a year I’ll get my license. I’ll drive the little kids to school.” The little kids! She was only two years older than Marco, who was three years older than Dolly.

  “What will happen to your mother?” said Poor Alan, wringing his hands.

  “Whatever it is, it’s already happening,” said Rosa. “I can’t watch anymore.”

  “She’s a wonderful mother. You must remember that.”

  “I don’t,” said Rosa.

  He wasn’t a bad man. He could be mistaken for thinking it was a war, an ancient one, and that she would fight against the rest of them as long as she was near. In the autumn he took Rosa and Marco and Dolly to a new house, and Leonora was left behind. He arranged for her disability checks. He did not take her off the bank account.

  “If you get help, we’ll come back,” he told her.

  Poor Alan hired a nanny, Madeline, a jug-eared, freckled beauty. A good girl, as her father later described her to news cameras. She picked the children up at the end of every school day and brought them to the house. Rosa worshipped her; Dolly and Marco merely loved her. This went on for five months until the day after Madeline’s twenty-first birthday, when she woke up in the middle of the day still drunk from the first legal cocktails of her life, start of February, drove to the school, got the children into the car, and found the car was too hot, and as she tried to wrench her wool coat off one shoulder, and as she felt the last of the black Russians muscle through her veins, and as she hit a patch of black ice, she understood there would be an accident. She could see the children hurt in the back seat. The windshield gone lacey. Herself, opening the door, and running away, away, away. When the car stops, I’m going to leg it, and that was the last thought Madeline or any of them ever had.

  No children, thought Leonora. She had intended to get herself upright and go looking for them. She should have eaten them when she could.

  For a while she tried to distract herself with the radios. Each wore Poor Alan’s family name like a crest on the pellicle of the speaker. She went from room to room and turned them on, but then she thought she could hear—behind the sonorous daylong monologue of the news station, or the awful brightness of Vivaldi on the classical station, or jokes cracked by a disc jockey named after an ancient king—the voices of her children. She tried to tune them in. You had to use the volume and the tuning knob in mincing little oscillations. Then, there it was: the tootling rhythm of Dolly’s conversation. Rosa humming at the back of her throat as though ready to defiantly swallow the sound should someone walk into the room. Marco sighing before he explained something. She wondered whether they each had a station, Dolly, Marco, Rosa. Maybe they had different radios, even. No: they would be cuddled up together in one frequency, the way they liked.

  But she could never tune them in clearly, and slowly the noise behind the newscast turned feral, howling, chirping, shrieking: a forest empty of children. Then she knew they were gone. The radios wouldn’t twist off tight enough. The voices of strangers leaked through, no matter how hard she turned the knob. She unplugged the radios, knocked the batteries from the backs. She could still hear that burble, someone muttering or the sound of an engine a block away.

  She lay in bed. At her ear hummed the old clock radio, with the numbered decagons that showed their corners as they turned to indicate that a minute had ended, or an hour, the hum a little louder then. She felt her torso, where her children would have been, had she managed to eat them.

  Not everyone who stops being human turns animal, but Leonora did.

  It was time to leave the house. The top of her back grew humped with ursine fat, and she shambled like that, too, bearlike through the aisles of the grocery store at the end of the street. She shouldered the upright fridges full of beer; she sniffed the air of the checkout lanes. Panda-eyed and eagle-toed and lion-tailed, with a long braid down her back that snapped as though with muscles and vertebrae. Her insides, too. Animals of the dark and deep. Her kidneys dozing moles; her lungs, folded bats. The organs that had authored her children: jellyfish, jellyfish, eel, eel, manatee.

  I am dead. I am operated by animals.

  Her wandering took her to the bakery, where every Saturday morning of their early childhood, she’d taken her children, to let Poor Alan sleep in. In the angled case she saw the loaves of challah. She saw something familiar in the shape.

  “Can I help you?” said the teenager behind the counter. His T-shirt had a picture of the galaxy on it, captioned YOU ARE HERE.

  She tapped the glass in front of the challah. “Please,” she said, and he pulled a loaf out, and she said, “I don’t need a bag.”

  He had already started angling the loaf into the bag’s brown mouth. Who didn’t need a bag for bread?

  “I don’t need a bag,” she repeated. She counted out the money and set it down. “Just the paper.”

  He handed it s
elf-consciously across the counter. When it was in her hands she adjusted the paper around it, admired the sheen of the egg wash, its placid countenance. Then she carried it to a table in the window and spread out the wax paper and set the loaf upon it.

  Marco. She saw his sleeping baby self in the shape of the bread. Knees and arms akimbo, head turned, as always, to the left. The girls had cast different shadows. She put her hand on the loaf to check for oven warmth. Not on the surface. Maybe at the heart. Later she wouldn’t care what people thought of her, she’d cradle the loaf in her arms before eating, but now she patted the bread, and then, with careful fingers, pulled it apart. That sense of invading a privacy that is then offered up to you. Yeast, warmth, sweetness: a child. Her mouth was full with it, and then her head, and throat, and stomach. She felt the feral parts of her grow sleepy and peaceable.

  Thereafter, every morning she went to the bakery and bought a challah and pretended it was one of her children. She knew she could never say this aloud. Rosa slept with her bottom in the air. Dolly, alone of the children, needed to be swaddled. Marco, akimbo. She carried the day’s loaf in her arms to the table. She patted it. Then she ate it. Not like an animal. Knob by knob, slowly: one loaf could last her four hours, washed down with water from the waxy paper cups the bakery gave away for free.

  That was her nourishment. She lived on bread and good manners and felt sick with her children.

  The new mothers of the neighborhood wished the bakery would throw the bulky unkempt woman out. As they wished they felt guilty, because they were trying to teach their children tolerance. But then they looked at the angled case. The center bay was filled with glittering sugared shortbread cookies, decorated according to the season. Hearts, shamrocks, eggs, flags, leaves, pumpkins, turkeys, candy canes, hearts again. Evidence: bakeries were for children, and children were frightened of Leonora. (A trick of the radio again. The children were only tuned to their mothers’ fear.)

  Sometimes a mother and child would walk by her table, and Leonora could see the rictus of judgment on the mother’s face.