Treasure Island!!! (7 page)

“We all met him. We thought he was nice. Nicer, at times, than you. You're not really saying that if I'd told you to ditch him, you'd have done that? That's crazy! As if you could run your heart by committee . . . ”

“I don't want to talk about Lars, that dumb asshole. I want to talk about
your
boyfriend. Come on. I'm your sister. When do I get to meet him?”

“Never.”

“At least tell me his name.”

“No.”

“Why? Give me one good reason.”

“Because you have boundary issues. Because you're mean-spirited and unsentimental about other people's affections. Because if young love was a flower growing on your lawn, you would crush it under your heel.”

“Jesus. Are you saying you're in
love?
”

“This conversation is over.” She licked a dollop of mashed potato off her wrist and lumbered off to bed.

 

I guess I should have waited. She might have softened in time, and I certainly would have preferred to leave her to pursue her romance in privacy. But her words alarmed me. Two weeks, by my calculations, she had been seeing this guy and now she thought she was in love? And worse, that love was a flower? Given how little experience she had in the domain of personal relationships, I thought it my responsibility to keep an eye on her.

I found my opportunity one Thursday afternoon when Adrianna came home around five o'clock—just to change her clothes, my mother told me; she was going out again.

“Where?”

“I don't ask where,” my mother said.

She was in the laundry room (folding, always folding).

“I'm going out too,” I said. “Don't be alarmed if I'm not back for dinner.”

“In this cold weather?” my mother answered. “You don't have a car. Where are
you
going to go?”

I masked my resentment of her tone and muttered something, admittedly improbable, about fresh air and exercise.

Adrianna was still in her room, scuffing around in her closet, so I had ample time to struggle into my coat and secret myself in the backseat of her surprisingly filthy car. There I lay, perfectly still, resisting the urge to read her crumpled mail or put the caps back on her ballpoints. When the driver's door opened, she slid herself in with a hummmph, and started up the motor, having, thank goodness, taken no notice of me.

I don't know that I've had occasion to mention this, but I don't drive much. I have a license, but I don't like unfamiliar roads, or narrow lanes, or driving at night, or on highways, or in bad weather. Under the best conditions, my heart thumps and my palms drip and don't even get me started on my perineum. Because I prefer anyone but me to do the driving, I pay scant attention to navigation and tend, when it comes to street directions, to be a little vague. Although I know Adrianna drove down Curtis Boulevard, once she took a few quick turns, I was disoriented. I could only see the treetops and couldn't follow the curves the roads were taking. I was completely clueless as to our whereabouts, when a sudden crackle of static made me jump.

A drive-in! Did her boyfriend work here? She gave her hamburger order, and the voice on the intercom answered her without love or undue recognition. We drove to a second drive-in; did her boyfriend work
here
? No, she ordered a Caramel Frappucino and drove on. I had just begun to doubt this adventure when the car came to a halt and she cut the motor. I could tell we were parked in somebody's driveway. She ate the last bite of her burger and tossed the paper bag into the back seat, where it landed on my neck. A long silence—during which she checked her teeth in the rearview mirror—and then she opened her door and plonked herself out. I counted to twenty-five and then followed.

She had led me to a house—a modest two story with sagging windows and yellow aluminum siding. A narrow cement path, adequately shoveled, led to the front door, but I trod on the lawn for fear of alerting Adrianna to my presence. As soon as the snow crunched underfoot I realized, with regret, that I was leaving footprints. But even with this mistake, the cold night air, and the silvery moon in the sky, and the sudden realization that Adrianna could be in danger inside this squat little house, exhilarated me. I ran for an opening in the shrubs and crouched under a curtained window, hoping to hear something. I heard wind. A squirrel fussing in a tree. A neighbor's stereo (Bonnie Raitt, I think). And then, from within that unknown house, I distinctly heard a scream.

There was no time to think. I sprung from my crouch and fell upon the front door, which swung open and immediately plunged me into darkness. I took a few tentative steps and heard sounds—short, weird, panting sounds—as if Adrianna were on the floor getting her throat slit.

“Who's there?” I cried, stumbling forward, palming the wall until I found a switch. The lights blazed on and there was my sister sitting on a man's face.

I knew him. Not right away, of course, but as the tableau dissolved, his face was plain to me. He was the principal of the middle school where my father taught and a friend of my parents. In fact, now that I thought about it, I had been to this house as a kid, once or twice, to trim the tree.

It's shocking and unpleasant to see your sister getting eaten out by anyone, let alone an old man. I screamed; she screamed; I gagged a little; then he, Mr. Tatum, got up, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, and tried to pretend this was the kind of situation where people can look each other in the eye.

“Did you
follow
me here?” Adrianna said. Then—I forget her exact words—she called me a stalker and said some more in that melodramatic vein. Mr. Tatum tried to calm her down.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Everything all right with your folks?”

My parents' health was everything we would wish it to be, I admitted.

“Then why are you here?” Adrianna said.

“Because I thought you said you had a
boy
friend. And I wanted to make sure you weren't in over your head or needlessly debasing yourself.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I am not debasing myself!”

“But Adrianna!” Obviously it was an effort not to say terribly rude things about Mr. Tatum as he stood right there, fussing with his belt buckle, but I did my best. I alluded to him not by name. I called their relationship ‘this.' As in “
This
is a terrible mistake.
This
is one of those instances where you're confusing age with experience. Maybe
this
is something you ought to discuss with a licensed therapist.” Here she clearly took offense, but in an effort to keep things civilized she said, “Well,
that's
the pot calling the kettle black.” “Well, don't you think
the old grey mare
just ain't what she used to be?” And so on and so on, strangling our points in a hideous macramé of clichés. I wouldn't judge a book by its cover. I'm not judging the book by its cover, I'm just saying all that glitters is not gold. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I had only cried, “Don't blame the messenger,” when Adrianna grabbed a Lucite paperweight from the coffee table. “Somebody has to
send
for a messenger,” she howled.

“Ladies!” said Mr. Tatum.

There were no ladies present—it was an imaginary appeal—but it got her to put the paperweight down. They had a brief struggle themselves, which involved an embarrassing number of clutches and endearments I tried not to witness, and then Adrianna tore out of the house and drove off before I could explain—especially that she was my ride.

Mr. Tatum looked at me with quiet dismay.

“Do you want to sit down?” he said.

“Not where she was sitting.”

I was aiming to lighten the tense situation, but he didn't get it. He was
so old
.

“You've had a shock. Why don't you sit down on the Chesterfield?” He indicated a high-backed leather sofa, tufted and cracked. “I'll get you some water.”

Once he had passed me the green rippled Depression glass, he began: “It's not what you think . . . ”

“You don't know what I think, Mr. Tatum.”

He raised a purple-veined, age-spotted hand. “Please. I've known you forever. Call me Don.”

“And I've known you,” I scoffed, “since you were fifty.” I sat with my arms folded, ankles crossed. “Where is Mrs. Tatum right now? Tutoring refugees? Shopping for Christmas presents? Taking your grandchildren to dinner?”

“My wife died eight years ago,” he said softly. “I believe you came to the funeral.”

“Did I?” Oh god. There rose a dim memory of being dragged to a funeral parlor for some lady's untimely demise, a vague recollection of a woman who had somehow seemed to die of her femaleness. I couldn't recall the details, but I wasn't about to be disarmed by pity, so I expressed my condolences to Mr. Tatum swiftly, and then reminded him that this match with my sister was hardly what anyone in my family might have hoped for. The fact that he and Adrianna were carrying on in secrecy indicated that he already knew as much.

He answered my objections in the blustery pseudo-sophisticated way you'd expect. A matter of privacy, not secrecy. Two consensual adults. An unexpected and noisy bit of sunshine in his quiet not to say cloudy life. Once I took a moment to collect myself and understand the facts, I might even discover I wanted to apologize for my intrusion. I imagine this is how he spoke to the delinquent adolescents­ he met in his office: reasonable, slightly disappointed, even-handed, with a note of self-pity, convincing you that he was the wronged party.

“Mr. Tatum, are your hands shaking right now because you're nervous, or because you're old?”

He withdrew his hands, in surprise, and folded them in his lap. “My dear, I do think you're over-reacting. Your sister isn't underage.”

“No, but she's under-used. She's never had a boyfriend. Has she told you that?”

He smiled indulgently and tsk-tsked me. “You always
were
the provocative one.”

“I was the good-looking one, if you want to know the truth, and I don't like your thinking you can mess around with Adrianna just because she's the ugly duckling.”

He looked taken aback. “You underestimate your sister, surely. She is anything but ugly.” He rose to indicate our interview was over. “I think you should have the rest of this conversation with Adrianna.”

“Fine. But I don't have a way home.”

“How did you get here?”

And then that old embarrassing conversation. You didn't drive? No, didn't drive. Don't you drive? Well, yes, can drive, but don't have a car. No car? Well, phobic about driving. “All right,” he said icily. “I'll drive you home.”

That was a fun ride.

 

 

A
drianna didn't talk to me for two weeks. In the absence of her explanations, I began to consider her “love affair” in new lights. Maybe, I reasoned, she was sitting on his face for monetary reasons. Maybe she let him do things to her in exchange for cash, with a long-term plan to pay off her credit card debt and move out of our parents' house. And yet, however hard I tried to imagine Adrianna as a player—someone who would trade sexual favors for cash—I stumbled on her basic goodness. She had spoken of love as a flower that might be crushed underfoot. More likely she thought she loved Mr. Tatum and was oblivious to how large a role his financial steadiness played in the attraction. I once used the term “Sugar Daddy” in her presence and she missed my meaning entirely, recalling instead, with childish enthusiasm, the milk caramel lollipop of the same name.

Still I needed to understand the contours of this affair. How long had she been seeing Mr. Tatum? Was she seeing only him or might there be other old unattractive men involved? To answer these questions I ventured into her room when she was at work. I was looking for a diary; instead I found a batch of letters. Pathetic things! She had wrapped them up in a gold ribbon from a chocolate box and hidden them under her mattress. Reader, you can imagine what an old man writes a young woman when he thinks nobody else is going to read the dreck.
Last night was unforgettable
(and then tedious quasi-poetic, quasi-porno reminders of what he couldn't forget). Foreign-language endearments:
mi muñeca
,
mon petit canard en plastique
. Places he wanted to take her, show her, touch her, et cetera. His penmanship was all right, but he probably wrote the letters wearing his best bifocals. Was it my imagination, or did the very pages smell of milk of magnesia, glycerine soap? Adrianna hadn't arranged the letters in chronological order, but gradually I began to make out an emotional pattern. On the left hand of the desk, I placed the booty letters: Thank you for last night, You are so lovely I hardly believe I deserve you, et cetera. On the right hand of the desk, pleas and promises: Give me time, Tell me what I did wrong, I know I can make it up to you, et cetera. And in the chaotic middle, everything else: a photocopied Shakespearean sonnet (the one about “bare ruined choirs,” for
obvious
reasons); the lyrics to “Ain't Misbehavin'”; and a memo from The Board of Education about school lunches regarding the importance of incorporating whole grains.

I
thought
I was interested in playing detective, but by the third encomium to a salty pair of Adrianna's underwear, I couldn't bear to read another word, let alone arrange the letters in order and figure out the dates.

I knew enough already: the affair was farther along than I'd even feared.

“Mom, do you know who Adrianna is seeing at nights?”

“Oh,
is
she seeing someone?” My mother looked up from the apples she was coring on a medieval-looking appliance she had clamped to the counter.

“Someone you know. Don't you want to ask her?”

“If she wants to tell us, she'll tell us.”

“‘When she's ready,'” I mocked.

“Exactly!”

That's the thing with liberal parents. Proud of their so-called respect for boundaries, they averted their gazes while we stepped in the dog shit. Did they have curiosity? If they knew their youngest daughter was fucking an old family friend, would they care? Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they'd say, Well, I'm sure if it's not a match made in heaven, she'll figure it out for herself. “We've always believed in letting our children find their own way,” I can hear my mother saying.

I'm sorry to say that despite the shocking discovery of Adrianna's affair, things carried on much as usual. Adrianna avoided my company, and I kept her secret, annoyed as hell, but confident that its value might appreciate in time. I got used to a certain companionable rhythm with my mother, who divided her time between cooking, laundry, housework, water aerobics, dance lessons, trips to Costco and Wild Birds Unlimited, and tutoring Latin stragglers. On weekends my father and Adrianna fell upon us, boring us with their lesson plans, scrounging through the kitchen, watching TV. Some nights all four of us would eat together and then sit in the main hold to watch
Moulin Rouge
or whatever was on television; other nights I would eat with my parents alone, imagining Mr. Tatum eating Adrianna. Then my mother would get out the classifieds and in her discreet way try to excite me about future employment.

“All right,
here's
one.”

“One what?”

“CROWDED CLOSET. Experience with sales. Ask for Doug.”

“I'm not interested in retail. Especially a thrift store. Dead people's clothes and other people's cast-offs? I'll stay in my
own
closet, thanks.”

“Which reminds me,” my mother said. “I did some reorganizing for you. Just went through and pulled out
very
worn things, your hoodie from high school, the drama T-shirts, old socks with holes.” I nodded. She read on:

 

Want a job that will “MEAT” [she spelled this out and winked before continuing] your expectations? Local grocery needs MEAT CUTTER.

HOUSEHOLD HELP. Fun loving family of 6 needs help keeping home running smoothly. Please have superb laundry skills, including washing, ironing and mending.

 

THE PRETZEL PLACE looking for upbeat, high energy people to fill counter positions. Apply at mall location.

 

“You like soft pretzels,” my mother added, eyebrows raised.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “If you want to work on someone's problems, look to your
other
daughter.” But she never took my hints.