The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken

Author:Elizabeth McCracken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

My father loved trains, and my mother took many to humor him, including, when they were in their mid-seventies, from Copenhagen to Prague, switching in Cologne. My father had gone ahead with the luggage while my mother walked alongside the cars, wondering how to board. She hadn’t figured it out by the time the train pulled out of the station. Aboard, my father understood that my mother was on the platform, panicked, looked around, saw the emergency-stop cord, considered things for half a moment, and pulled. The train stopped; my mother was lofted by the hands of half a dozen Germans, light as a feather, and everyone involved agreed that this was a reasonable use of the passenger emergency brake.

“And was that a lifelong dream of yours, to pull the cord for a good reason?” I asked when my father told me the story.

“Yes,” he said quietly, moved to be so understood.

My mother preferred boats—wind and water, a panoramic view—and one of the blessings of the electric scooter of her later years was that boats became easier to board. I decided to take one in her honor, the ferry from one Tate (Modern) to the other (Britain). First I found a little grocery store and got myself a sandwich and a brownie and brought them to the counter, where a ponytailed young woman looked at me dubiously. I thought about buying cigarettes—I smoke sometimes when I travel—but they were kept behind doors, so you couldn’t look at brands and then say casually, “Silk Cut, please.” You had to be a serious smoker with a plan, and I wasn’t. Years before I’d been a devotee of the English ten-pack; a lovely thing, to be able to buy just ten cigarettes at a time. Like my father before me, I fooled myself when it came to bad behavior. I worried that the young woman behind the store counter wouldn’t like me if I asked. For any large thing, I don’t worry about judgment. Only the cigarettes, the 10:30 A.M. prosecco. Only going on a Ferris wheel by myself, alone and middle-aged. She had a pretty, lupine face.

I pretended I didn’t speak the language, put my sandwich and brownie on the counter, and paid in coins, which I counted out as though I were unfamiliar with the notion of money. I tried to look worthy of kindness.

“All right?” said the young woman behind the counter, running her dark ponytail through a loop of her thumb and forefinger.

I nodded.

The sandwich was marked cheddar cheese and cress. I wasn’t sure what cress was—English and green, that was the sum of my knowledge—and the cheese appeared to have been prepared in some sort of salad, as in egg salad, or tuna, suspended in what might have been salad cream. (The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.) I took a bite. It was a bad sandwich; I wrapped it back up in the plastic. I took a bite

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.