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By Root 681 0

all they could manage. Maybe hi could be the key to their old world. Keys were smaller than the things they opened, and some keys did not look like keys. To lock his shed Treadway had a stone he kept on a string threaded behind a skinny hole in the boards. If you slotted a stick through the hole and pulled down, the stone undid the latch. Where was the stone Wayne could hand to Wally Michelin now? Tim McPhail wound his way through the crowd balancing Wally’s Sprite and his own Pepsi, his elbows managing to stick out awkwardly and gallantly at the same time. The crazy thought came to Wayne that he could give Wally Michelin his cummerbund. He unhooked the back, crumpled the material into a smashed satin rose, and slipped it into her hand.

19

Hope Chest

“HOW,” WAYNE ASKED HIS MOTHER, “can a postcard take five months to get here?”

“A postcard is such a scrap of a thing,” Jacinta said. “It’s a miracle any arrive at all, especially from across the sea.”

The bridge on Thomasina’s card from Bucharest was only half a bridge. It started in the middle of a field and ended in mid-air. It was not beautiful, and it could not be completed because there was not enough money, or the engineers had failed to consider that the height would interfere with power lines on the far side, or some combination of these things, along with other factors that made the city such a mix of grandeur and chaos.

Thomasina could see how a person could become addicted to moving all over the earth. You started in a new place and the whole city, in this case Bucharest, was a spiritual opening. The people were beautiful. It did not matter that you had been so lonely in Paris you began talking to cedars in the parks. You were out of Paris now, with its smell of Gitanes and violets, and you were in Bucharest. “I have never seen,” she wrote to Wayne, “so many interesting shoes in my life. People rushing, rushing, rushing.”

After Paris, with every street corner and balcony curated, Bucharest felt random and wild.

“I like the ugly parts,” Thomasina wrote, “the old concrete-block buildings, the noise and the dirt, and half the place dug up for repairs. I like that as well as the main boulevard with its cobblestones and very old, grand row houses.”

There had been a stack of books on the sidewalk that she tripped over as she was looking at pieces of sculpture on the lintels.

“I thought it was wonderful,” she wrote to Wayne. “A book sale. Of course I realized I could read none of them. Books started at the door and came down over the steps, filled the little yard, tumbled out the gate, and spread themselves along the sidewalk . . . it looked as if someone opened the door in the morning and the books marched themselves out and plopped down comfortably wherever they felt like it. I had started to pick through them when I saw, slouched against the fence, a thin man smoking a cigarette. Not only was he surrounded by books, he was face and eyes into a book. You could not distinguish him from the books. I nearly stood on him. I laughed out loud and he never moved. I imagined him getting up at dusk, going up the steps, and saying, ‘Time to come in for the night,’ and the books would sleepily find their way back into the house for a nap . . . and burst happily out the door the next morning to do it all over again.”

Four months was the length of time Thomasina could stay in a new place and feel the euphoria that comes with exploring streets you have not seen before, hearing a new language, and eating new food. The curiosities of Bucharest would last this long but then other things would take over. She would not write a second postcard when this happened. She would not tell Wayne Bucharest was full of people wearing the same clothes you could buy at the Avalon Mall in St. John’s, or that the same fast-food chains were there, with the same seagulls cramming pieces of fried potato down their throats in the parking lots. She would not talk about the overweight people, the poverty, the sun damage to people’s skin: everyone with gigantic moles. When Thomasina grew weary