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

hadn’t flushed, a number of jokes about the Dutch, one about the French—it turned out that Eloise’s long-ago divorced husband had been French—and an unarmed American, who Sadie realized, with surprise, was her. “To the bride and groom!” said Michael Valert. She was at a table with the unmarrying sisters and their families. The two blond twins played mumblety peg with a butter knife and their sweet blue hands.

“Which one’s Pie?” Sadie asked.

“They both are,” said Katie. “Easier that way.”

Instead of a cake there were three Dutch cheeses in graduated sizes. Where was Jack? Michael Valert announced into the microphone, “The bride and groom will now cut the cheese.”

Now, that, thought Sadie, was funny, and she burst into delighted laughter.

That was how she discovered that the euphemism was only American, and she the only American there. Jack was American, too, no matter how he denied it, but Jack was elsewhere. When Sadie realized that everyone in the stables was looking at her, she began to laugh harder. Her laughter was not silent. She could hear herself shriek.

“What is it,” hissed Eloise, and Sadie could only manage to say, “It means f-f-fart.” Across the stable, Michael Valert stared at her with his exceptionally blue eyes, as amplified as his voice had been, and for a moment she felt ashamed but then, as though her soul had been turned over with a spade, the shame turned to jubilation. She could have stood and sung, she thought, though she could not sing. Indeed the bride and groom had cut the cheese. Fiona’s dress was scallion green and glorious. The Dutch had put too much gel in her hair.

That night they slept in the room of the dead man—“What if he died in this bed,” asked Jack, and Sadie, brave for once, said, “People have died everywhere, you can hardly avoid it, come here,” and tomorrow they would drive to the Dingle Peninsula, and she would think, over and over, I am going to drive off this road and ruin everything, but she never did, and she told him about the cat and dog, and explained to him that she’d thought his father had purposely made a funny joke—the bride and groom will now cut the cheese!—and they both laughed so hard she had to pull over to the side of the road, and when they recovered they drove out to Inch, where they were the only people on the beach, and so quickly and laughingly had sex, there on the damp sand, there was not a place in all of Ireland that wasn’t damp, but what else do you do when you are all alone, and liberated?

For now, when he came back to the table, he found Sadie laughing so hard she couldn’t speak, and all his family arranged around her. She was crying with laughter, and every time she tried to explain, she laughed harder, and his family looked more appalled. “What is it?” asked Jack, who felt suddenly the depths of his love for her, like Pavlov’s dogs, all of them in love with Pavlov.

“Why is that woman laughing,” Michael Valert said into the microphone.

“Tell her to stop!” said Eloise. “Make her stop!”

But he couldn’t, and she couldn’t either.

Proof

What beach this was, Louis wasn’t certain. Rock and sand, a harbor town, and everywhere the sort of broken pottery he’d combed for as a boy in the 1940s. Let his brothers fill their pockets with sticks and shells, ordinary sea glass: he knew how to look for the curved ridge on the underside of a slice of saucer. Flip it over and find the blue flowers of Holland or China, a century ago or more. Once, on the beach outside their summer cottage down the Cape, he had found two entire clay pipes, eighteenth century, while his six older brothers sharked and sealed and barked in the water; beyond them he could see, almost, the ghosts of the colonists who had used the harbor as a dump, casting their broken pottery out so he could find it in his own era and put it in his own pockets. But this wasn’t the Cape, or even Massachusetts. His brothers were mostly dead. That is, they were all of them dead but in his head only mostly; they washed up alive every now and then, and Louis would have to ask himself: Is Phillip alive? Is Julius, Sidney?

Study the beach. Here, half-buried: a tiny terra-cotta cow with its head missing, otherwise intact, plaything for a child dead before the Industrial Revolution. The sea-worn bottom of a bottle that read EDINBU before the fracture. Lots of bits of plate, interesting glaze, violet and coppery brown. All his outgrown fixations had returned to him now that he was old. On an ordinary day in his bedroom at home he might hesitate to reach down for fear of falling over. Not here. He found the pottery and snatched it up. A teapot spout. A cocked handle from just where it had met cup. A round brown crockery seal with a crown and the word FIREPROOF. He thought: that which is fireproof is also waterproof, but he wasn’t sure whether that were true. Good picking anyhow. Some boy was calling far off for his father, “Dad! Dad!” He looked up. He was that father. There was his boy. Boy: a full-grown man, shouldering a plaid bag, standing on the steps that led from the storefronts of the harbor town down to the little beach. On the street above a man in a kilt passed by. A Lady from Hell. What they called the Black Watch. They were in Scotland. His son had brought him here, to this island.

“We’ll miss the boat,” his son said.

“Let’s not,” Louis answered, and put the treasure in his pockets.

He had wanted a kilt and Arlene (née MacLean) had forbidden it: that was the story of their marriage. He was one of those Jews who could pass for a Scot, redheaded and