Glances Behind the Scenes: On Nicolette Polek's "Imaginary Museums"

Nicolette Polek | Imaginary Museums | Soft Skull Press | 2020 | 128 Pages

Imaginary Museums is the perfect title for Nicolette Polek’s collection of short sketches of humanity’s often futile quest to connect. Polek, a native of Cleveland and a recipient of the 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, has created four such museums: “Miniature Catastrophes,” “American Interiors,” “Slovak Sceneries,” and “Library of Lost Things.” In each museum, there are six or seven exhibits, if you will, many not longer than three pages. As with many museums, some exhibits will elicit only a glance, but the ones that make you pause are notable for their incisive and sometimes haunting reflections on human nature. In “Miniature Catastrophes,” that piece is the last in the group, “Arranged Marriage.” Polek provides a kind of abstract:

In which Jacob and Lilith get married and go on a hike in the Blue Woods, where they think about health, opening a pottery studio for children with disabilities, starting a vegetable garden, and God.

Except no part of this comic/utopian vision actually happens. In a remarkable moment of delicately balanced metafiction, Lilith declines to participate:

She ignores directions for the opening scene in which Lilith walks down to the docks and sees her fiancé, who is taking his last unmarried look at the Bay, and instead looks up into the sky, says “no,” and goes on a sloshy and melancholic brunch date with her sister.

“This is fine,” Polek writes, as the first of two understudies for Lilith is arranged, but the wedding plans continue to deteriorate. “[T]he last-minute boys' choir goes back to playing basketball in the park. The makeshift taco truck and the Father leave.” When all seems lost, Lilith makes a memorable return. 

“The Dance” is the highlight of “American Interiors,” the most cohesive and accessible museum  in the book. Polek’s ability to unpack the most nuanced and often neglected moment with surgical precision is delightful. A couple, Esme and Ismer, have their rituals, their dances. They play games at dinner to test their observation skills, and their routine continues after dinner. It includes where they sit and how they invariably end up playing cards. This time, though, Ismer has an idea. He wants to actually go dancing. He thinks to himself:

[T]he idea of going dancing for the sake of it – especially with Esme – seemed exciting, perhaps

even reckless, something they could think of next week, in fond remembrance of a night when

they let loose.

Rather than connecting, they spend too much time in their interiors, and the plan goes awry; the inevitable game of cards sets up the saddest of endings. It proves to be true, as Polek writes in the title story “Imaginary Museums,” “that it is difficult to understand what another person wants.”

The walls we construct, both physical and mental, serve as a motif in this section. Whether it’s the “gymnastic balance” that the mathematician is forever manipulating in “A House for Living” or the nearby (and perhaps imaginary?) place where the old man never arrives in “A Nearby Place,” Polek scrutinizes the interiors of our living spaces with the same sharp humor that she explores the interiors of our hearts.

She seems particularly intrigued by the image of the trapdoor, an extra and secret space. In “Imaginary Museums,” Annie is excited to visit a museum in New York City and thinks of the energy that comes with anticipation as “a trapdoor from her heart.” There is a trapdoor in “Invitation” and, touchingly, there are two in “Your Shining Trapdoor.” To improve our relationships with ourselves and with others, we must have access to the secret spaces where, as the wife says in “Invitation,” “[i]t feels very safe.”

Along with “The Dance” and “Imaginary Museums,” the other major triumph in this collection is “Field Notes,” which is featured in the “Library of Lost Things.” Erica, with seven tabs open on her browser, including “a Google Flights price graph for a trip she’ll probably never take” and “a YouTube playlist of ‘stimulating classical music,’” is trying to relax. She “takes deep breaths but still feels the her in her.” She wants to take a walk and even leaves her phone behind in the car, but one gets the sense that she will not find the peace she seeks because she “will walk for a maximum of thirty-five minutes so that she has time to get coffee and return emails before lunch.” Like “The Dance,” this becomes a story of missed opportunity. Polek’s characters are like the kind in “Rest in Pieces” who take the time to “write down a list of tasks on a sticky note to appear intentional” to themselves. They believe they “don’t have time to be down [because they] only have time to be productive.” They are like Annie from “Imaginary Museums” who “had large pores and spent a lot of money covering them up. [She] also had unspeakable grief and a master’s in history.” In the end, they all seem to be “killing time before the next thing comes undone.”

These sad, sharp, sometimes satirical snapshots are well worth your time. Do not walk past them too quickly or you will miss Polek’s remarkable and necessary glimpses into the human heart.