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

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 alligator.”

“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