Sylvie
“So you were gonna tell me what this place is?”
“It’s a house,” I tell him. “On a rock.”
We’re looking at the unprepossessing building from the parking lot.
“It’s like . . .” I’m searching for the right words.
“You know how you see those signs on the side of the road? World’s Biggest Ball of Twine.
Mystery Spot, with three exclamation points and a bunch of red arrows.
The stuff that’s meant to get you to pull over and pay ten bucks and when you get there it’s, like, a shriveled hand in a glass box, but the hand is, like, made of Silly Putty? ”
“It sounds like you have a lot of specific experiences with tourist traps.”
“I watched a show on Nat Geo about it.”
“Oh. So . . . this is a shriveled hand thing?”
“No, it’s the opposite. It’s what you’ve always wanted every tourist trap to be. It’s like walking through the trap door into some other world that might be kind of interested in, like, eating you.”
Knox looks at me with mild alarm.
“It can’t eat you,” I clarify.
“Thanks,” he says. “Really.”
“I wish they allowed dogs. It would have been nice to have Winslow being his huggable teddy bear self. There are moments in here where you feel like . . . I don’t know.
Like you need to hug something, maybe. Or be hugged.
Or maybe I was just a very impressionable thirteen-year-old when I came here the first time. ”
“Did you go with your mom?”
“No, this is definitely not a My Mom Place. There’s no gift shop, and even if there was, I don’t think they’d be selling Hermès scarves.
No, my friend Alice May and her dad took me to Madison for a football game and they planned this trip for the next morning.
I wasn’t big on the football. But I was big on House on the Rock.
” I hop out of the car. “We should get in there, we want the most time we can get before they close.”
Knox shuts his door with his good hand. “How late is the doggy daycare place open again?”
“Till eight. We can be back to Madison by then, easy. And I’m sure Winslow will spend the whole afternoon in their paddling pool with the other fluffy-butt golden retrievers.”
Inside, we get in the long line.
“Wow. This is expensive. Thirty-seven bucks? Each?”
“I know. I’d say it’s worth it but that phrase always makes me kind of uncomfortable.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I get it. What’s worth it depends on a lot of things. Like how much you have in your wallet.”
“Well, this and the doggy daycare is going to clean us out for now, minus what I have squirreled away for gas money. So it’s going to be instant ramen all the way back down to Springfield tomorrow, but then we’ll have a new credit card and we can get on to North Carolina and your grandma.”
“It’s a luxury,” Knox says, “to pay for art over necessities. Isn’t it?”
“I mean, isn’t that what your mom did, though?
She had you all give up a lot of what other people would consider necessities to live on her terms. To live .
. . authentically, I guess, or at least authentically to her.
” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t ever be the person to talk about giving stuff up.
My life before this was basically a long exercise in materialist gluttony.
It feels good to have a day like today, where I’m paying for something that I can’t take with me. ”
“I like that,” Knox says. “Embracing impermanence, right? That’s what the Buddhists say. Or at least that’s what Lancelot said that the Buddhists said. I read up on it later, but I didn’t get very far in the little book of Buddha’s sayings.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“No, I did. Well. I don’t know. I don’t know what I think about the idea that you can’t get attached to anything. I’ve been so unattached for a long time, and not by choice. I wanna know what it feels like to barnacle myself to something for a while.”
“Like a house? Or a hometown?”
“Maybe.” He looks at me. “Or maybe just to a girl with a map.”