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

a teenager when they met. When Sadie thought of it, the act was in the jittery black and white of long ago. But he never spoke of worship. Her ankles were sore. She wondered if there was somewhere to take a nap, or even time enough.

“You must make him tell you about Lottie,” said Eloise. “It’s important.”

“All right,” said Sadie. She crouched to the dog. “Hello, Shithead.”

“His name,” said Eloise, “is Seamus.”

“Oh! I thought—”

“Shithead’s his nickname,” said Eloise, fondly, to the dog.

The wedding was at five, with reception to follow. Most of the party went to the hotel in town to get ready, but the broke relatives—Sadie and Jack, Katie and Fred and their children—stayed behind. Sadie and Jack got ready in the blue bedroom, where the old man had died.

“Where’s my bag?” said Jack. They had not been together long enough to pack in the same suitcase.

“There. Is your family always like that?”

“English? Yes.”

“Obsessed with shit.”

He laughed. “Right. English. That didn’t bother you.”

“I’ve had anxiety dreams more relaxing. Shame about your mother’s gout.”

“Gout? No gout. Where did you get gout?”

“Eloise said.”

“Yes, she would. No: the problem is that Fiona converted to Catholicism and is now marrying an atheist.”

“Which is worse?”

“Hard to tell.”

“How’s being Jewish?” she asked. “If she’s against Catholics.”

“You’re not Jewish.”

“I am Jewish. Are you in the wedding party?”

“No.”

“What’s with the suit?”

He was stepping into striped pants. “It’s my morning suit. It’s what you wear to weddings.”

“You own that suit?”

“Yes,” he said. Then, “Your mother’s Jewish.”

“Yes, my mother’s Jewish, so I’m Jewish.”

“Says who?”

“Jews the wide world over. Didn’t you know that? Matrilineal, mate.”

“Huh,” he said. “Don’t call me mate. No, I think she’d be fine with that. You didn’t choose it, after all.”

“But what if I did?”

“Sadie,” said Jack.

“What about Lottie?”

“She wasn’t Jewish.”

“Did you know she was invited to the wedding?”

Jack smiled, but he also began to arrange his hair, his major vanity, the dark curls that he wore swept off his forehead. “No, she’s not,” he said.

“Eloise said she was.”

He laughed with some relief. “Don’t believe what Eloise says.”

“She says you worshipped Lottie.”

“Bollocks I did.”

“I love it when you speak British. And you didn’t sleep together.”

“Not often.”

Sadie laughed. Jack didn’t.

“Not often,” he said again.

“Near the start or near the end?”

He took his hands from his hair. “Right near the middle,” he said.

When they drove up to the church they were already rushed. “Why does the car smell of wet dog?” he asked, and Sadie thought, Was that today? It seemed like weeks ago. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him the story, which she knew would delight him; it had slipped her mind.

She parked the car.

“Remember the emergency brake,” he told her.

“I always do,” she said, though she’d forgotten.

Inside the church they were hustled up to a front pew by a Dutch person in a red denim blazer. Nobody had to ask bride’s side or groom’s: the English were the ones in floral prints and hats and morning suits, and the Dutch were the ones in long braids and primary colors. Sadie turned to see if she could pick out Lottie among the guests, but all she could see were hats, an armada of them.

The wedding, being a wedding, passed without incident.

Afterward, they had drinks in the check-floored foyer of the house, with plates of pâté and toast handed around. The tempera paint on the walls rubbed off on people’s clothing. The twins’ hands were blue. Shithead’s port side was green. The guests who got too close to the yellow walls came away looking pollinated.

“My mother would hate this,” said Jack. “Better she stayed at home.”

“Do you like weddings?” said Sadie.

“No,” he said. Then, “Lucky for us we’re already married.”

Sadie laughed ruefully.

“That drunk guy,” said Jack. “From the bar. Our first date. Didn’t he pronounce us man and wife?”

“I don’t think he was credentialed.”

“He might have been a ship captain. Do you like weddings?”

She thought about it. The answer was no, but she thought she might like marriage.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They’re all right. No,” she said. “No. I don’t.”

“I didn’t think so.”

She was crying then.

“Oh no!” he said, startled. “No! What’s the matter?”

The matter was she felt, all of a sudden, the force of his family, and understood them as quicksand, and didn’t know whether she should get herself out or try to rescue both of them. Eloise, the father, even darling Fiona, even Katie’s twin sons, Thomas and Robin, with their Rod Stewart haircuts and old-man outfits that matched everyone in the family. She’d understood matching clothing—tracksuits, Disneyland sweatshirts, striped pajamas—as a particularly American insanity. She didn’t like the international version any better.

“I’ll ask you one of these days,” he said, fond and irritated. “When I get some things straightened out.”

She was astonished he understood so little.

After all the rain they had a beautiful night. The ground was muddy, but the stables were paved and covered and strung with fairy lights. There was no dancing—dancing was canceled, because it had been planned for the field and the field was muck. “Like the Somme,” observed Michael Valert to Sadie, daring her to get the reference, which she did not. There was no seating plan, just long tables laid out. It had been a small wedding.

Eloise was weeping. She had seen the guest book that Jack and Sadie had bought.

“It’s nicer,” she said to her father.

“No, it’s not, I’m sure it’s not.”

“It is!” she said. Then she was crying into his shoulder, and Fiona was there, too, and they were all comforting Eloise, whose grown gawn children hadn’t come.

“It can be a different kind of guest book!” said Fiona. “Yours is lovely.” She looked at Sadie. “They’re both lovely!”

Michael Valert had to play MC at the dinner, because Piet’s best man was a small shy Dutch woman named Kick who’d refused. Jack and Kick went off to smoke a cigarette, but Michael Valert didn’t care: he assumed his position at the microphone, and offered a toast that referenced, among other things, the morning shit that