The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

slid a little on the marble. Now he looked entirely undone. In another version of this story I’d be made modest by a little cocktail dress of bubbles, but no person who really loves baths loves bubble baths, nobody over seven, because bubbles are a form of protection. They keep you below the surface. They hide you from your own view. He looked at me in his bathtub with that same disappointed look: just like you to bathe in your birthday suit.

“I have some advice for you,” I said to him.

“Lay it on me,” he said.

“Lay it on me. How old are you?”

He shook his head. “What’s your advice?”

“You should call your callers Caller. Like, Are you there, Caller?”

“They like to be called by name.”

“Overly familiar,” I said.

“That’s your advice.”

“Yes,” I said.

He was sitting on the edge of the tub then. The ice in his glass, if there had ever been any, had melted. I had no idea what he might do. Kiss me. Put a hand in the water. His eyebrows had peaks. Up close his mustache was even more impressive. I had never kissed a man with a mustache. I still haven’t. It’s not that I’m not attracted to men with mustaches but that men with mustaches aren’t attracted to me.

“Can I have your maraschino cherry?” I asked.

“No maraschino cherry.”

“I love maraschino cherries. All kinds. Sundae kinds, drink kinds, fruit cocktail. Tell me to change my life,” I said to him, and put a damp hand on his knee.

“I won’t tell you that.”

“But I need someone to tell me.”

He put his glass down where the little bottle of shampoo was. Such a big hotel. So many minuscule bottles. “You must change your life,” he said.

“Good but I’m going to need some details.”

“I keep sitting here I’m going to fall into the water.” He stood up. “You know where to find me.”

There isn’t a moral to the story. Neither of us is in the right. Nothing was resolved. Decades later it still bothers me.

No way to tell how much later I awoke, facedown in the bath, and came up gasping. I had fallen asleep or I’d blacked out. It was as though the water itself had woken me up, not the water on the surface of me, which wasn’t enough, not even the water over my face like a hotel pillow, up my nose, in my lungs, but the water that soaked through my bodily tissues, running along fissures and ruining the texture of things, till it finally reached my heart and all my autonomic systems said, Enough, you’re awake now, you’re alive, get out.

That was one of the few times in my life I might have died and knew it. I fell asleep in a bathtub at twenty-seven. I was dragged out to sea as a small child; I spun on an icy road into a break in oncoming traffic on Route 1 north of Rockland, Maine, and miraculously stayed out of the ditch; I did not have breast cancer at twenty-nine, when it was explained to me that it was highly unlikely I would, but if I did, it was unlikely, it would be fatal, almost never at your age, but when at your age, rapid and deadly.

Those are the fake times I almost died. The real ones, neither you nor I ever know about.

The radio shrink would have said, I guess she died of a broken heart, and I would have ended my life and ruined his, for no reason, just a naked drunk dead woman in his room who’d gotten herself naked, and drunk, and dead.

But I wouldn’t see the radio shrink again. I was gasping and out of the tub, and somebody was knocking on the bathroom door. I don’t know why knocking—the door was unlocked—but the water was sloshing onto the floor, the tap was on, it couldn’t have been on all this time, and I would find out it was raining into the bathroom below, I had caused weather, and the radio shrink had packed up and left but had hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, and had paid for my room. Was gone. Dawn from Baton Rouge was a disembodied voice again, but the redheaded woman from the front desk, Eileen, she was here, slipping across the floor, tossing me a robe, turning off the tap, tidying up my life.

“You’re all right,” she said. I could feel her name tag against my cheek. “You should be ashamed of yourself, but you’re all right now.”

I would like to say this was when my life changed. No. That came pretty quick, within hours, but not yet. I would like to say that the suggestion of kindness took. That I went home and wished everyone well. That I forgave myself and it was as though my fury at myself was the curse: forgiveness transformed me and I became lovely. All that came later, if at all. He was wrong, the shrink: nothing ever happened to me that made me cry more than I did in those weeks of aftermath. I’m one of the lucky ones. I know that. I became kinder the way anybody does, because it costs less and is, nine times out of ten, more effective.

At some point it had snowed. Last night, this morning. It had been hours since I’d been outside. The snow was still white, still falling, the roads with the ruts of tires. Soon the snowplows would be out, scraping down to the pavement. My clothing, left behind by the side of the tub, had gotten sopping wet, so I was wearing a sweat suit abandoned by some other guest at the Narcissus Hotel, found by Eileen, a stranger’s socks, too, my own shoes and winter coat. I had to walk past the house of the couple who’d been necking everywhere, a story that seemed already in the past. By past I mean I regretted it, I was telling the story in my head. The