Treasure Island!!! (11 page)

 

I
don't think I slept a wink that night. In the morning, when I heard the others in the kitchen, clanking around with their coffee cups, I crept in. I could hardly believe we were going to eat breakfast together, knowing what we all now knew. Except, I realized, as I saw Adrianna drizzling syrup on her frozen waffles,
she
didn't know it yet.

“You're up early,” my mother said to me from her position at the sink. The coffee maker gave a shudder and began to hiss.

“Didn't want to miss the part where you divvy up the spoils and the blood money. Where's Dad?”

“He decided to take his coffee and toast in the car.”

“He went to work already?” Adrianna asked absently.

“No,” my mother clarified. “He just wanted to eat in the car.”

“You're kidding.” I opened up the kitchen door, which led directly into the garage; there sat the Taurus, and in the Taurus sat Dad, with the windows all rolled up, staring straight ahead, slurping his coffee. He had a view of the rakes and the half-empty paint cans. I closed the door.

“If he's going to sit in the car,” I said, “why doesn't he at least park it in the drive and enjoy the daylight?”

“Maybe he likes the gloom,” Adrianna said.

“He can't handle anything,” I said.

“It's the quiet.”

“If he wants
quiet
, he could have breakfast in the dining room.”

“Or in his study.”

“Or in a box.”

“Stop it!” my mother cried. “
I WON'T HAVE YOU TWO CRITICIZING YOUR FATHER
!” She dropped her dishtowel and left the room.

Adrianna sighed and squeezed the plastic syrup bottle until it sighed and wheezed with her. “
I
didn't say anything! Jeez, what is going
on
with everybody? I know they're upset about me and Don, but come on; we're adults; we have a right to pursue consensual sexual relationships.”

I sat down beside her and studied her graceless attack on the waffles. The house seemed extraordinarily quiet, and the counter, which had not been thoroughly cleaned last night, was scabbed with applesauce. My mother was melting down in her bedroom; my father had traded the house for his car. “Those useless parents,” I said. “They have left me to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Adrianna said.

I tried to say it gently, but in my enthusiasm, I blurted out the tale more coarsely than I planned.

“Mom did
not
,” Adrianna said. “You're so incredibly sick. You've always been jealous!”

After fifteen minutes, in which I had to hold both her wrists to stop her from hitting me, she went from outright denial to an imaginative reworking of the facts. Maybe Mom had had a crush on Don, and Dad had been jealous. Maybe there had been a kiss, at most—a quaintly romantic kiss in the very distant past. I begged her to believe me; about our own mother I would never have thought to invent, let alone burnish, these facts.

“She fucked him, Adrianna. Ask Don, or better yet, ask Mom.”

I dragged her to our parents' bedroom door, which was closed tight. From inside we heard the awful high sound of our mother weeping.

 

*

 

For the next few days our family freaked out in a quiet way. My father went to work, but when he came home, he pulled the car into the garage and stayed there. Adrianna, who parked her car in the driveway, went to work after he had left, and continued to sleep in the house, but avoided all contact with my mother. My mother, normally in constant motion, managed to appear convincingly as a slow-moving version of herself. She continued to cook dinners, to which only she and I sat down. In order not to talk about what was happening, we stared out the window at the crust of snow on the lawn or else talked—and this was the surprisingly nice part—about
Treasure Island
. For long stretches she would be silent, pulling abstractedly at her hair, and then she might suddenly refocus on me, and ask careful, light questions about “my project.”

“So is it an essay you're writing? Or as Adrianna said, a log book?”

“No and no. I don't even know what a log book is.”

“A log book's where the captain writes down all the daily information he needs to keep the ship in order. Things like the ship's coordinates. And how the wind is blowing. Fuel and provisions. Who's on crew and what sort of maintenance is going on.”

“Okay, I get the idea.”

“Barometer and visibility,” she said, perking up. “Tem­perature and tides. The state of the sea. Squall warnings.”

“All right.” I tried to shut her up with a wave of my hand.

“Continuous advance of the boat, distance, ground speed, sea state, waves, wind force and direction, clouds . . . ”

“All right already! Enough already about the clouds!”

There was a terrible silence—it reminded me of the wedding when Aunt Boothie's wrap-a-round skirt fell off on the dance floor and everyone froze, even the band stopped playing.

“Your father hates me,” she said. “All of you hate me for something I did twenty years ago.”

“We don't hate you,” I muttered. “It's just . . . we don't want to hear about it.”

Earlier I'd found her sprawled on her bed with a satin box of mementos from her sole adventure. “Come here, look at this,” she said, refusing to see how her souvenirs embarrassed me. “My hair was so dark then!” “This is a photo of your father and Don Tatum, playing table tennis. You should have seen how hard Don returned the ball. He had to change the rubber on his paddle every week!” It was as if she had no shame.

“Maybe Adrianna hates you,” I said, “but I'm sure she'll get over it. He's her first boyfriend, you know.”

My mother clucked dismissively. “What about Eddie Wisbey? That nice red-headed boy from . . . ”

“They never went out. I forbade it.”

“You're so
hard
on your sister. She wasn't terribly attached, was she? I mean, I know he's a nice man. And very sensual. Probably more available emotionally now that he's matured.”

“Mom, stop! I
cannot
hear this kind of information.”

“I'm sorry.”

“ . . . easier to fight you with a cutlass than hear this kind of talk.”

“I thought you liked candor.”

“I like
my
candor. There's a big fat difference.”

“There certainly is. Do you want any dessert?”

I shook my head.

In the days immediately following my mother's revelation, I began to feel just a bit more like Jim Hawkins. Not the Jim Hawkins I had long admired—the boy who sails off to seek treasure, and upon discovering the crew is a murderous gang of pirates, grabs a gun and heads east to the shoreline, careless, clear-headed, and brave. I was more like the Jim Hawkins when absolute blackness settles on the island, and adrift in a coracle, he is unable to pinpoint the position of the anchored ship.

My mother and I continued to have dinner and she continued to release little pieces of information about her affair with Don Tatum. Often this information acted like a time-release capsule in that, when she shared it, I didn't immediately feel its impact. She might ramble on, impressed with my maturity, and I might nod, feeling somewhat interested, neutral, or, I thought, inured; but before an hour passed I would be reeling from the unwanted information, clutching my head and feeling dry-mouthed, about to vomit. To make matters worse, Adrianna seemed to intuit that my mother was confiding in me. She and Don were on the rocks—I didn't know the details, but figured she was giving him a hard time about having concealed the maternal history—and every morning, before she went to work, she barged into my room, her breath reeking of coffee and Listerine, and knelt over my bed, hissing at me to tell her everything Mom had said. “I don't know anything, I don't know anything,” I'd murmur and try to fall back asleep. One morning she got so angry she pelted me with stuffed animals before she left.

The lowest moment came at half past eleven on the fifth night. Distraught, I had gone to bed early, and was tangled in a thick woolly sleep when there came a knock on the door. When I didn't answer it, my father came in. He was bleary-eyed and wearing his pajamas. It seemed frighteningly intimate.

My father has never done anything remotely sexually inappropriate—I find it hard to believe my father has ever done anything remotely sexual—but I have seen a lot of TV movies about incest, so I pulled the blankets up to my chin.

“I need to talk,” he said.

“Keep indoors, men,” says the Captain when Long John Silver humps up to the stockade waving his white flag. “Ten to one this is a trick.”

“Talk about what?”

My father looked so stricken at this question that I decided to rip out the heart of my remark and hand it to him, bloody and throbbing, because in some ways here was the man-to-man talk I'd been reading in
Treasure Island
and wanting.

“Dad, I don't have the slightest desire to talk to you. Whatever's going on in this house is between you and Mom and Adrianna.”

He leaned against the door. “It's a family matter. You're a part of this family. Let me come in a minute. I've been sitting in the car six hours straight and my back is killing me.”

“Whose fault is that? If you had any communication skills you wouldn't need to sit in the Taurus. I don't even believe in your despair. Anybody who was really upset would gas themselves, right? But you're just sulking, waiting for someone to ask you how you're feeling. It's passive aggressive, Dad. Just go make up with Mom.”

This little whiff of temper seemed to both surprise and animate him. He stepped into my room and closed the door behind him.

“I don't need to make it up to your mother. She's the one who should be making it up to me.” He drooped as though he might sink to the carpet. Were those tears in his eyes? God no. “I'm so confused . . . ”

That was enough. I leaped out of bed and steered him out the door. “Back to the car, Dad. Or wherever you want to be right now. I don't care where you go, but you certainly can't start having a relationship with me
now.”

“Is your sister all right?” he whimpered.

“She's a mess, but isn't she always?”

As soon as he had left—I listened to make sure his footsteps returned to the garage—I let out a howl of fear and indignation. Then I got on the phone and called Patty Pacholewski. She didn't pick up, but I was frantic and left several messages. In the first I said only “call me back,” in the second I intimated that there was “a bit of a crisis,” and in the third I apologized outright for how pushy I was and begged her and Sabrina to let me move into their spare room, pronto. After the final message, which was quite protracted, in that it contained a lot of subordinate clauses and parenthetical phrases, and ended on a falsely jaunty directive to “call me back, okay?” a depression fell upon me like a ten-ton anchor.

I tried to sleep but my father's lost, wet expression kept coming back to me. For twenty years the man had had
no expression,
as far as I could remember. Where did he get off having feelings now?

When the phone rang I fell upon it.

“Patty,” I said.

Richard awoke from the noise and stirred under his cover.

“This is Sabrina. The apartment thing isn't going to work out.”

“If it's about the bird—”

“It's not about the
bird
. He's great and all, but Patty and I decided. Not interested.”

“But if it's a matter of rent—”

“We never promised you anything. You had your chance, it didn't work out.”

“But the parrot, he's not—”

“I said, it's not about the bird, it's about
you
, all right?”

She hung up.

I stared at the phone. “It's not over,” I vowed.

“It's big, it's hot, it's back!” Richard said.

 

In bed that night, my mind was a storm: thoughts, like sea birds, hung screaming and circling in the air. Occasionally a bird landed on the cliff, took a shit, and wheeled off. I tossed and writhed and kicked the sheets into a twist.

Admitting defeat I snapped on the light. In my desk drawer I had twelve yellow Xanax hidden in an amber bottle. With the heel of a stapler, I hammered them into a powder. Half out of my mind I went to the bathroom and lifted a handful of aspirin, three of my sister's allergy pills, one Ativan, and two codeine left over from my father's root canal. These I added to my powder and then I went into the kitchen and prepared a stovetop box of macaroni and cheese. Seven minutes and the pharmaceutical mixture had blended beautifully into the neon grit of orange cheese sauce. I imagined scarfing the lethal dish and being discovered, with a great wailing, by my family as the watery winter morning light spilled across my bed. I took the saucepan into my room and flung the cover off of Richard's cage.

“Eat!” I urged like a Jewish grandmother.

Reader, I felt sadness while he ate it, but I love macaroni and cheese, and this batch was all for him. An hour later he looked much the same, though he was hanging upside down from his perch. “It's big, it's hot, it's back!” he said in a fruity voice, then bit the bars of his cage and said, too joyously, “Scraaww!”

“That's the last scraw,” I answered, for his spirit—still buoyant under the weight of pharmaceuticals—maddened me. Would I never be rid of him? Oddly, a phrase from an old report card tumbled back into my mind: no ability to learn. He was a sick bird. From under my bed I took an enormous opaque plastic bag from T.J.Maxx, wrapped it around his cage and tied it tightly with a ribbed stocking. Through the plastic I saw him haul himself heavily from side to side and peck at the barrier, but he weakened before he could pierce a single air hole. He fanned his tail, swayed from side to side, gave one last angry call, and then lay down and let his soul return to its Maker.