Treasure Island!!! (13 page)

“And no peanuts either. Didn't you used to give him salted peanuts as a treat?”

She began to read aloud from an Optimum Diet chapter in a classroom-specific drone, the custom of lecturing to captive children having eroded her God-given ability to assess a listener's interest. “Onions, no,” she said. “Butter, no. Salty foods, no. Dairy . . . ”

“He's dead and buried. Horrors!” I said, pulling open my sandwich for further study. “This chicken was taken off the grill too soon. What is she doing, trying to give me salmonella?”

“Dairy, no. I distinctly remember cottage cheese. Tabbouli. Avocado chunks and even some bite-size Snickers. You couldn't have fed Richard worse if you'd tried.”

“It was Mom who liked to treat him.” With thumb and reluctant finger, I picked up a book on the floor,
Natural Healing for Parrots,
and quickly threw it down again. “Why are you reading all this? It's a moot point.” I handed her my plate. “Would you taste this please and tell me if you think it's underdone? Do you think it's an insult, this sandwich?”

“It's not good, but it's cooked.”

“Aha! So no
intentional
harm.” I left the sandwich in her hands and went off to my room, satisfied that although Patty hadn't yet forgiven me, she wasn't aiming to kill me. But my sister, in her nest of books, hadn't been gathering grass and twigs as light entertainment. She had a hunch. And while I took a late afternoon nap—the sleep of the innocent, the sleep of the slightly depressed—she rolled that hunch between her fingers until it grew into a thing of prodigious proportions. For years I have insisted that, despite her serviceable academic track record, Adrianna is not (warning: confidential family information)
all that bright
. Dogged, she is; organized, yes; pedantic, check; but possessed of a signal, sinuous, investigatory mind?

Ha! Ha! Ha!

And so it seemed incredible, in the highest sense of the word, that such an uninspired person should discover, in her imagination's underbrush, the secret I had marooned on my desert island heart.

 

A
few nights later when I was sitting at my desk, reading my book, Adrianna knocked: rat-a-tat-tat-BANG (four light knuckle swats, one lead fist).

“Enter,” I said with superb indifference.

Enter she did, rather wildly, tumbling through the door, her face aflame, her eyes lit up with madness. In her hands she held the T.J.Maxx bag—that oversized, unforgettably useful bag. I should have thrown it away—a murderer always throws away the weapon!—but knowing my mother's fondness for recycling, I had put it in the pantry.

“I think we should talk,” Adrianna said.

“Can it wait till morning?”

“No, it can't.”

“If this is about Mr. Tatum, I'll tell you everything I know.”

That diverted her for a moment. “This isn't about Don,” she faltered. “But why—what do you know?”

“I know he and Mom have been talking.”

It was true that I had caught wind of some phone calls, but that had been days ago, when the news first broke, and even then I didn't know for sure what my mother or Mr. Tatum had said. Only that he had been calling her.

“Sit down,” I advised. “I didn't want to worry you, but the fact is, it's been worrying me. Do you think—oh, it's too humiliating to even say it—do you think there's any chance of Mom and Mr. Tatum getting back together?”

I watched the idea of their union bloom in the great arid desert of her head like a time-lapse video of a blooming cactus. She must have changed color three times as she contemplated it. Then she laughed—her unattractive hyena laugh—and shook it off.

“You're crazy,” she said. “There's nothing going on there. That was just a dalliance in their past.”

“Sure it was, but who knows? If Mom isn't satisfied with Dad—which, how could she be?—maybe your thing with Mr. Tatum wakened her old desires for him. And maybe his contact with
you
wakened his desires for the woman who got away. You know, there's nothing like The One Who Got Away!”

“You're vile.”

“I'm imaginative,” I admitted. “But it could be happening, without us knowing it, and just think! Your affair with Mr. Tatum might've been the spark that started it.”

She sneered and shook the plastic bag at me. “You know why I'm here, don't you?” she said in a low voice.

“I
don't
know, Adrianna. I just assumed . . . ”

“Don't play games. You hated your bird from the beginning and you neglected him for his whole sorry existence. You fed him toxic foods, you cramped him in the cage, you never so much as bought him a jingle toy. But when he hung on—and what a fighter!—you wised up and decided to do the dirty work yourself. Directly.”

“Adrianna, what are you talking about? Stop the Angela Lansbury business at once.”

Her face shone. “That bird didn't die from natural causes, and you know it. There are feathers inside this bag. And feather dust. Smell it!”

I guided the bag away from my nose, marveling at the shelf life of that fetid odor. “You poor thing,” I said, switching tactics. “Stop rattling the bag and calm yourself a second. Animals die every day, remember? Think of the spiders we squash in the bathtub. The ants we used to burn with magnifying glasses. I know what you're going through with Mr. Tatum—well, actually, I can't
imagine
how I'd feel if I found out Mom was banging Lars, but I
do
know what it means to have your heart broken. All the same, let's not get animal rightsy. If I'd allowed myself to get mushy every time a frog expired at The Pet Library, I wouldn't have had the energy to keep living. You have to just swash through it all. Sensitivity is a peril. And you know what Jim Hawkins would say? He'd say what good is a life if it can't be dashingly used, cheerfully hazarded?”

“That book again.” Adrianna stared at me, aghast. “Listen, a parrot doesn't get to make choices like you; it doesn't get to play pirates. Torn from the wild, a parrot depends on you for its very existence.”

What a pathetic pile of scrupulosity, what a lot of quibbling!

“I was
BOLD
, Adrianna. I'm a fool, if you like, and certainly I did a foolish, over-bold act, but I was determined to do it.”

“So you admit it? You admit you used this retail bag to suffocate your own parrot?”

“I admit nothing.”

Shuddering, the bag crackling in her hand, Adrianna walked out.

 

 

I
n
Treasure Island
the pirates send a note called the Black Spot when they intend to throw you out of the gang. We used to pass notes like that in elementary school, only usually we didn't draw anything as clear and direct as a Black Spot; it was more verbal—for example, once we wrote a girl named Etta Statchnik a note titled: Everything Wrong with Your Ears and Your Clothes and Your Hair. After that we penned a long list with categories and sub-categories. As I say, it was no Black Spot, but it tipped her off that she was no longer welcome to sit at our lunch table.

One evening not long after my scene from
Murder, She Wrote,
my mother said that the next day she would need me out of the house. She was going to do some major cleaning. “Why can't I stay in my room?” I said. “Because,” my mother said crossly, “I'm cleaning it
all
.” She arranged that Adrianna would drop me off at a mall near St. Catherine's School for Girls, and in the afternoon, when Adrianna finished teaching, I could take the bus to school, and Adrianna would drive me home. It was an odd plan, but my mother gave me nearly a hundred dollars of pocket money and squeezed my arm. “Treat yourself,” she said. So I went with it.

At the mall, it is possible to amuse oneself without effort. I tried on sixteen party dresses and asked the sales assistant to hold five. For lunch I ate a quinoa salad with a plastic fork while sitting on a bench by the Trevi fountain. Then I trolled the jewelry counters and shoe racks. After dropping eighty dollars on a tub of body butter, I ran for the bus.

Half an hour later when I deboarded in front of St. Catherine's School for Girls, I realized that my hand was too light. I'd left the swanky bag of body butter on my seat, but the bus lumbered on, its tires making two black lines on the snowy white road. Too bad. Streaming towards me on the pavement, came a clutch of girls, pale and drab, their slate blue skirts hanging beneath the hems of their puffy coats. I dodged their wheeling bodies and pulled open the school's heavy door.

The hallway was overheated. Too much glitter, too much glue, I thought as I passed the bulletin boards, cluttered with holiday art. Inside Adrianna's classroom, my sister stood with her back to me, erasing equations from the blackboard.

“So this is where you go every day,” I marveled, having never thought much about her work life, except to mock it in a general way.

“Let's get out of here.” She looked hot and sweaty as she chucked books and papers carelessly into a filthy canvas tote.

“Actually, I'm curious about your set-up,” I said, ambling down an aisle, examining the desks' innards. Crayons, markers, pencil boxes, glue sticks. I flipped through a spiral. “Are you
really
marking this girl down because she made bubble letters? Check minus? And she dotted her
i
's with hearts!”

“Put that back and let's go. Mom is expecting us at exactly four-thirty.”

“Mom's not going anywhere. She's probably still vacuuming.”

“Yes, but the others . . . ”

“What others?”

When she tried to backtrack, I pretended to believe her story, partly to see what dumb thing she would say next.

“No others. I mean, just Mom and Dad. We're going to have pie with Mom and Dad. Mom called me. She made a cherry and cheese pie. Isn't that your favorite?”

“Yes.” I gave her a fake smile.

“Good. Then let's get out of here.”

In the hallway she paused to find her keys. Then she decided not to lock her classroom; the janitor would clean it. No, she decided, she would lock it after all; the janitor had a key. I watched her sweaty hands fumble with the lock.

“Adrianna,” I said after a careful pause, “you're not still smarting about Richard's death, are you?”

“I'm not. Looking back over everything, I realize that whatever happened between you and Richard, you were seriously mixed up when it happened.” She glanced warily at me to see how I was taking her interpretation; was the sauce too rich? was the seasoning right? “Don't take this wrong, but I think you may be struggling with a kind of addiction.”

“I don't take drugs, Adrianna.” I banished the memory of Richard's final meal, which we had shared.

“No,” she said slowly, as if humoring one of her third graders. “But you do have trouble distinguishing
your
reality from whatever happens on Skeleton Island, right?”

“Not exactly,” I said, but she took my arm and ushered me through the hallway, telling me softly to never mind, nodding to various homely colleagues, pressing my arm, and gently guiding me into her car. By the time I was in the passenger seat, belted in, I had begun to feel oddly sedated. She wound my scarf around my neck and said a few yum-yums about my mother's cherry and cheese pie. I wondered aloud if we needed to stop on the way home and get a pint of vanilla ice cream. Then I caught myself.

“Now, look you here, Adrianna,” I said, staring unseeing through the windshield as the car bounced along. “I am not such a fool that I don't see what you're up to.”

“I'm taking you home, where we're going to have a nice piece of pie.”

“Yeah, but why?”

“What do you mean, why? Why . . . pie as opposed to cake? Do I need to explain that Mom's done the apple cake way too many times?”

“It smacks me as a little suspicious, me being shucked out of the house all day and now you rushing me off for an appointment with pastry. Did you know Mom gave me spending money today? A lot of it!”

“You're making a big deal out of nothing. Mom cleaned the house. And then she wanted to bake. Is that so hard to believe? She baked a pie and she asked me to hurry us home so we could eat it.”

“Us and who else?”

“Okay. Friends,” she admitted after a little sulk. “People who know and care about you.”

“I can't believe you!”

I scoffed all the way to the house, which turned out to be about fifty yards, since we were already at the bottom of the drive. Adrianna parked her car, as usual, under a small stand of pines, lumpy with snow. When I opened my car door, the air was leaden.

 

T
hey were in the living room, seated in a semi-circle across from two empty armchairs. They had teacups in their hands and folded papers in their laps. The overhead lights were off, and the table lamps emitted a feeble pink glow, so in the late afternoon light the expressions on their faces weren't clear. But they were identifiable. They were my mother, my father, Rena, Lars, and my old boss from The Pet Library, Nancy Wang.

They said hello and remained seated. Rena smiled at me and waggled her fingers. Adrianna sat down in one of the empty chairs and gravely thanked them all for coming.

“This is a joke,” I said, stomping about behind her. “I know what you're trying to do, and you're not even doing it
right
. An intervention is supposed to have a special counselor. Where's the professional?” Right away, they had been cheap.

“Listen, I know all
about
intervention,” Adrianna drawled. “I read about it on the web.”

“And it's supposed to be a gathering of people who are important to me, people for whom I have the greatest affection and respect, who would have the greatest impact on my life if I lost them. So what the hell is
she
doing here?” I pointed at Nancy.

“I know you are an addict,” Nancy said loudly.

“Still smarting about Willie's haircut?” I rolled my eyes. “And where is Beverly Flowers? Where is my healer?”

“I asked her,” Adrianna said sulkily. “But she said she had to pay a parking ticket.”

“Please sit down, darling,” my mother said. “We're all here because we care about you. Come sit down. Would you like a glass of water or a cup of tea? We have some things we want to share with you.”

I dropped myself into the empty armchair and surveyed them. While I had been standing, I'd been afraid to look at Lars as if, by not looking, I could prevent him from looking at
me
. Not that I still cared for him, but an ex-boyfriend always induces the question: Do I look good enough to inspire major regret? Seated, I saw that he looked a little jumpy, his hair was tousled in a sweet way, and he was staring at me, without blinking. He appeared fascinated, almost excited. Everyone, in fact, seemed pretty keyed up, except for Rena, who sat with her hands in her lap looking dispiritedly at her vegan shoes.

Adrianna began officiously. “We think you have an addiction to a book, and we think it's led you to make some pretty poor choices. Choices that have been causing yourself and lots of other people pain.” Here I said I had to go to the bathroom, but Adrianna said, “Look, we've all worked very hard on this, so please don't interrupt.”

“Darling, isn't she allowed to go to the bathroom?” my mother asked. “I thought you said this wasn't going to be an attack.”

“Yes, I'm just saying let us get
through
it, okay?”

It now became apparent to me that Adrianna was sweating profusely; where other sweaty people have half-moons under her arms, she had dwarf planets. She turned to me: “Everybody here can bear witness to the ways in which your obsession with that book has led to the damage of yourself and others—”

“Five fish gone!” Nancy shouted as if no time had passed and she and I were still standing in the puddles of The Pet Library. “Rooster eat dog food! He very sick!”

“Don't worry, Ms. Wang, everyone gets a turn,” Adrianna said. “We've each prepared a list of things that we'll no longer tolerate, finance, or participate in unless you give up this
Treasure Island
nonsense—”

“It's not nonsense. Not one of you has even read it, so none of you knows what you're talking about.”

Lars smiled a little. “
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
”

“
Shiver me timbers!
” my mother tittered.

“
A smack of the sea about him
!” hooted Adrianna.

“
I did a foolish, over-bold act, but I was determined to do it!”
said Rena.

“
By thunder
!” said my father. “
By the powers!
”

“Five fish gone!” Nancy shouted above the derisive laughing.

“All right, so you don't like the book's style. That's your business. But I know my rights and I'm not hurting anyone by being inspired by a piece of nineteenth-century literature.”

People exchanged looks. My parents shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Rena bit the callus on her thumb, and Lars pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Adrianna was enjoying herself now, you could tell.

“Who would like to start?” she said primly. “Rena?”

“Oh, no. Maybe someone in the family?”

“I'll go,” said Nancy.

“We heard from you already,” I said.

“Don't you dare be rude to Ms. Wang,” Adrianna said.

“Would anyone like some more tea?” my mother asked hurriedly.

“I wasn't being rude. I was being
BOLD
.”

“And now she's
HORN-BLOWING
,” Lars said gaily, looking round at the others for recognition.

“You're certainly feeling your oats!” I cried. “Why are you even here, Lars? It's over between us. You can't threaten me with a list of things you're no longer going to finance or tolerate because you're no longer in my life!”

Everyone gasped; even I was surprised at how cruel I sounded. And yet what was my mean streak if not the flavor shot in Lars's coffee? The equanimity with which he met my bad temper convinced me, even now, that my surliness was necessary to his comfort. It enlivened his blandness.

“I know I'm not in your life. But you and I were together long enough that I thought you'd forgive my intrusion here. I came out of duty and affection; your sister said you'd gone off the deep end, and that if we didn't band together and help you, who knew what would happen next.”

“What melodrama! You can
look
at me, Lars, and see I'm not off the deep end.” I smoothed my hair, which I could feel had gone a little haywire, and wiped the spit from the corner of my mouth. Whenever I shout, I expectorate.

“I see”—and here he gave me a look of such quiet, unqualified admiration that my hands fell from my hair.

I don't claim to know everything about deep and long-lasting relationships, but I can tell when a guy is crawling into the palm of my hand.

“You're not off the deep end,” he said. “Maybe you're teetering on the edge, but aren't you always? Still, if I could be of any help . . . ”

“Lars, I always liked you,” my mother said, reaching across the semi-circle to pat Lars on the thigh. Adrianna flinched. I could see the whole train of horrid associations in her face, but I wasn't threatened; my mother wasn't the least bit his type.

“I think this is becoming just a little too much of a free-for-all,” Adrianna said. “What about the lists?”

“Can I just say one thing first? Before we move on?” Rena turned eagerly to me. “I noticed you giving me the evil eye before, and I thought maybe I should explain, that the little possibility that we last discussed on the phone—”

“Out with it, Rena,” I grumbled.

“Well, it's a private matter.”

“There are no private matters in this house, Rena,” said Adrianna.

“Oh. Well, then, perhaps I had just better clarify by saying”—and here she lowered her voice—“Lars and I are not, as you might have thought, an item.” She explained that they had gone out once, fought bitterly about whether eating less meat could affect climate change, and decided the only reason they were even seeing each other was because—hurrah!—they both missed me.

As I let this revelation soak in, it seemed as if my ivy-covered castle had just been visited by a pesticidal genius whose application of the proper chemicals had made the heavy green curtain over my windows shrivel; in brief, the sun shone in.

“Did you kiss?”

“No,” Rena said. “We never even touched hands.”

Thank god, I thought, looking at Lars and remembering the way, despite all the complications between us, our mouths had tended to meet in perfect harmony, relaying a tenderness our speaking selves never managed. Should we have kissed more and talked less?

“Can we please get on to more pressing matters?” Adrianna huffed. “By now we should be well into the family's testimony about how you are ruining us with your obsession with
Treasure Island
. Dad?” She glanced at my father, whose eyes were dimming with sleep.

“Never mind. Mom? Let's hear from you first.”

My mother picked up the piece of paper in her lap and unfolded it as if it were somebody else's dirty handkerchief. “
I refuse to keep enabling you and I will not sit here in pain and watch you
—Adrianna, what's this word? Oh, destroy–
watch you destroy your health and well-being
. Well, is that clear? Would anyone like some tea?”

“Thanks,” I said when she went off to the kitchen. “That was very heartfelt.”

My father, roused at last, leaned forward. “I have a feeling you're not taking this very seriously.”

“Why should I?” I snorted. “I appreciate the attention, but I'm not about to give up
Treasure Island
.
That book taught me more about how to live than any human being in this room!”

“Ouch,” Lars said in his amiable way.

“This is terrible thing to say!” Nancy moaned. “Where is respect for mother and father? For family?”

My mother returned bearing a tray of tea things: pot, plates, forks, and a large pecan pumpkin pie.

“So much for cherry and cheese,” I muttered to Adrianna. “Lies, lies, lies!”

“Get a sharp knife,” my father muttered, as my mother stooped over the coffee table trying to serve. Between her distracted manner, the thickness of the piecrust, and the uselessness of her spatula, she was helpless before the pecan layer.

“You'll never do it with that dull thing.”

“But she doesn't want that,” Adrianna said when my father had fetched a six-inch knife, “that's for boning chicken.”

My mother passed him the pie, and he cut wedges for everyone, destroying Adrianna with his efficiency.

“Is there going to be ice cream with this?” I said.

“No,” Adrianna said crossly.

“If people ate less chicken,” Rena observed, “the reduction of greenhouse gases would be something along the lines of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year.”

“Okay, then let's go on,” I said. While they had been rattling around about the pie, I'd taken a moment to formulate my position. “You're all thinking I'm in a bad way: no job, no apartment, no boyfriend, no plans, my whole future gone to wreck, but do you want to know what? I don't care because
I
did it! After a lifetime of drifting and not-deciding anything, I
found
the book, I
made
the plan, and yes, I bungled up my job—but only because I no longer valued it. As for the parrot, it was I who found him, and I who took him to Lars, and when Lars and I weren't working out, you know what?
I
broke that up too!”

“Not to get technical, but I broke up with you,” Lars said.

“Not now, Lars.” My speech was roughly modeled on the one Jim Hawkins gives in the enemy's camp, and I was extremely pleased to realize I knew so much of it by heart. “I've had the top of this business from the first,” I went on. “You can do your inexplicable intervention or you can leave me alone, but I no more fear you than I fear a fly.”

“You do fear flies,” Adrianna said blandly. “You're always asking me to go after them.”

“Jesus!” I threw down my fork. “Just bluebottles, and will everybody stop interrupting?”

“But I want a turn to speak too,” Lars said. “Adrianna said to write down what we—” He fumbled with the paper and stood up, bumping the table with his shin and rattling the teacups. “I've had a lot of time to think, you know.” He emitted a convulsive nervous cough and then bore down on his piece of paper (graph paper, green tint). “When we first broke up, I felt as though you had sort of taken a dump on our relationship—excuse my French—but then I thought a while and realized it was more complicated.”

“I should hope so,” I interrupted. “God, why did I waste all that time with—”

“And I thought a lot about the beginning, when we first fell in love. The burritos. The hanging out. We never tried to fix each other, we enjoyed each other. Then you met the book and developed a new attitude, and although I admire you for striving, even when it seems you don't know what exactly you're striving for, I don't think you had to go through all that. To be a good person I mean. I think you were already fine; the more I think about it, I know you were fine. So when Adrianna asked if I would come and help you drop the book, I said yes, but I did it with a secret motive. Actually, after you left, I got into therapy”—here his neck began to effloresce in red patches—“and I figured out that you were right: I
had
been lying to my mother, and now that I can talk more openly to her—about a few things—it's better. Which I wanted to tell you and say thanks. So, I don't want to say you have to give up the book, because that would be—well, kind of hypocritical, and also, frankly, condescending.”

“Lars,” Adrianna broke in. “This is a total breach of trust.”

“But if you do decide, on your own to give it up, and want to go back to an emotionally supportive kind of relationship, well, you know where I live. I changed the locks, but I could make you a key.”

“This is good boy,” Nancy said. She was smiling despite a mouth full of pie.

“Jeez, now what?” Adrianna rolled her eyes. “Are you going to propose to her?”

Lars coughed uneasily. “No. I thought—I mean, I'm trying to say—I miss you is all.”