Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him
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Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark
Elizabeth McCracken
Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016
Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark © Elizabeth McCracken 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.
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Source ISBN: 9780008150594
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173517
Version: 2016-03-16
Contents
Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark – Elizabeth McCracken
Why is Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much?
Jane Eyre is “poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects; the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And “Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.
Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up this line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken it to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.
All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.
Tracy Chevalier
ROBINSON CRUSOE AT THE WATERPARK
THEY HAD COME TO Galveston, the boy and his fathers, to look at the ocean and chaw on saltwater taffy, but Galveston was solid November fog. As they drove down Seawall Boulevard, the Pleasure Pier emerged from the mist like a ghost ship: first the multicoloured lights of the rollercoaster and Ferris wheel, then an enormous sign that read, BUBBA GUMP SHRIMP CO.
“Good God,” said Bruno, the older father, the old one. The sky was mild as a milk-glass hen. He would have said this aloud but nobody else in the car would know what milk glass was. Instead he tried, “I hate the seaside. Where are we going?”
“You know where,” said Ernest, the younger father, who was driving.
Bruno had understood – when he fell in love with a young man, when they bought a house together, when he agreed to having children (one child at least) – that his life would become narrower and deeper, fewer trips to Europe, more moments of surprising headlong love. He had never imagined that family life would mean this: a visit to an indoor German-themed waterpark in Galveston, Texas. The fog had done it. They were headed to a location called Schlitterbahn, where there was an artificial river, for their river-obsessed son.
“You’ll feel at home,” said Ernest consolingly. “Being German-themed yourself.”
“Darling, I’m German-flavoured. German-scented. Only my mother.”
“A mother counts double,” said Ernest.
Bruno inclined his head towards their son – born to a surrogate, with an anonymous donor egg – in the back seat. They had forbidden him video games, so the boy had fallen in thrall to a pocket calculator, which he carried everywhere, calculating nothing: he could count, reliably, to six. “Well,” Bruno said.
“I mean, your mother,” Ernest said. “Your particular mother.”
But that was something Bruno and their son had in common. Bruno had an adoptive German-born mother, and a presumably biological English mother who had left him at a public library