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

“It is nice, isn’t it? Wait till you see the wheelhouse. Well done, me,” he said to himself.

“Well done, you,” she answered.

He began to unpack the suitcase, putting his shirts in one little cupboard and Sadie’s dresses in another. He stepped into the bathroom to set out the cosmetic case—“Heated floors!” he said delightedly, unsure whether that was something one should take delight in—and returned to her on the sofa.

“Here,” he said.

“You packed my slippers!” They were gray boots lined with artificial fur of a nearly malign softness. He knelt at her feet and put them on her with pantomime uxoriousness.

“I thought you might be happy to have them,” he said. “I like your hair.”

“Thank you.”

“What color would you call that?”

“Amethyst,” she said. She’d had it done once they were married, once nobody could disapprove. “That’s what the girl called it. I thought I was too old.”

“You’re not,” he said severely. “Maybe I’ll dye my hair amethyst. Carnelian. Agate.”

That was a joke. His hair was the sort of thick silvery gray that made people say, of men, He’s aged well. He said again, “You’re not too old.”

“And yet here I am in my bedroom slippers.” She closed her eyes in pleasure. “You’ve been here before?”

“When I was a teenager.”

“Oh. You didn’t say.”

“My father accidentally walked us through the red-light district. It was a traumatic experience. We should probably go out,” he said. “So we don’t fall asleep.”

“But it’s so nice on our boat,” said Sadie, stretching like the house cat she was. “How’s the bed?”

“The bed is also nice.”

“It’s our honeymoon,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

They woke up—an hour later? Three?—to daylight out the window by Sadie’s head. Porthole, thought Sadie. But square: Did portholes have to be round? Her feet were hot. She was wearing her slippers but nothing else. She felt—glad. She wasn’t sure gladness was an emotion she was familiar with. Happiness and joy, yes, durable, recognizable; gladness was thinner than that, historical, but useful. A shim to even out a wobbly sad table. She was glad they were in Amsterdam. She was glad that they had married.

“That’s the Anne Frank Hoos,” said Jack, pointing across her body.

“Hoos?”

“Hu-ees. I don’t speak Dutch.”

“You certainly don’t.”

“We should go out in the world,” he said, and kissed her shoulder.

He wore a green shirt that she had ordered for him off the internet, intended for a Norwegian cheesemonger, and a pair of corduroys of a color he’d favored since he was three, brownish red. She had bought her flowered Swedish dress in New York City.

“Quite picturesque for a bridge where you leave garbage,” he said as they stopped at its peak. They looked down at the moored barges on the margins of the canal and the tourist barges gliding down the middle.

“Where are the pot dealers?” said Sadie. “Where are the sex workers?”

“In the red-light district.”

“Poor kid,” she said, a cheek on his bicep; he was so much taller than she was, “were you scarred for life?”

“You tell me, Doctor,” he said.

“What time does the Anne Frank House close?” she asked. “Maybe we could go there now.”

“Not sure. Let’s see.”

But it turned out that the Anne Frank House sold tickets only online—it said so on the doors around the side—and when Jack checked on his phone he discovered it was booked up for two weeks. “Dammit. But it says they release some tickets every day. We’ll try tomorrow. I guess we should have done some research.”

“Never,” she said, because they never did, not ahead of time. Never consulted a guidebook, combed through a website (except for accommodation). They were exactly the same in this respect, one of the pleasures of their life together, their love of happenstance. How, when traveling, they congratulated themselves on their luck!

They got a free tourist map from a nearby souvenir shop and examined the spiderweb of Central Amsterdam.

“We avoid this,” said Jack, pointing to the center.

“But what if we want to go to a sex show?” she said.

“Ha ha.”

But what if? she thought.

Sadie had somehow not bothered to imagine Amsterdam at all, beyond bicycles and picturesque houses, though she had an image in her head of the red-light district left over from high school: a friend had gone to Amsterdam and said she’d passed the prostitutes in their windows, which Sadie had imagined as ordinary residential windows, with sashes; she could see women in their lingerie leaning, resting their breasts on the sills.

They walked along the canal, past little design stores and souvenir shops and bars. The sunset was peachy, blue, a parfait, perfect. Every bar was their ideal bar. They passed a lit-up grocery store and went in to get supplies and walked out, swinging the white plastic bags on their wrists. They crossed again in front of the Anne Frank House.

“We’ll crack you!” said Jack, and then, “Jesus, listen to the man.” He stopped. “Do you feel different?”

“Different how?”

“Different married.”

“Oh, that. No,” she said.

“I do.”

“That’s because your parents are alive.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“Poor Thomas,” said Sadie suddenly. “Poor Robin.” Robin was Thomas’s twin brother.

“Poor all of us,” said Jack.

There was a liquor store around the corner, selling mulled wine dispensed from the sort of stainless-steel suburban samovar that Sadie remembered from elementary school functions. “This is very good,” the liquor-store proprietor promised them, working the spigot. He was in his forties, with a saddlebag goatee, wider at the bottom. “This will make you love each other truly.”

“What if we already love each other truly?” asked Jack.

“Why, I don’t know,” said the shopkeeper. “You’d be the first instance in my shop.”

The walls were lined with bottles. Jack pulled a Dutch liqueur from a shelf. “My father would appreciate this place,” he said, and just then an American man walked in, looked around, and said, “Do you sell bread?”

“Do I sell bread?” the shopkeeper said. “Do I sell bread? Look around you, man! What sort of place do you believe you have found yourself in? No, no,