Treasure Island!!! (8 page)

 

R
ichard was molting, and scruffy as he was, there was something enviable in his ability to start fresh. I opened my book, but couldn't read a line. The room felt stuffy and hot. “It's big, it's hot, it's back!” Richard said, dragging out a chewed feather.

After further thought, I took the bright green feather to Adrianna's room.

“Want a bookmark?” I said, holding it aloft. She closed the door.

I tried reading in the living room, but my father had the TV on loud enough to reach the Dry Tortugas. In the kitchen, my mother scraped carrots and listened to
The Fabulous Danny Boy Album
: one song; twelve artistic interpretations.

“How long am I to lie here in this old berth?” I said, slumping on the breakfast bar.

“Are you sick?” my mother said.

“No.”

“It's cabin fever then.” She stopped scraping carrots. In a minute she had found her purse, tucked a few bills into my hand, and advised me to get out of the house. The weather was miserable, but off I went. I tramped a few blocks, pretending to enjoy the open air, before making a beeline for a shopping center, where I found a newly opened sandwich shop.

A small and predominantly plastic place, the shop boasted a service counter, three booths sticky enough to discourage loitering, and a vinyl menu board with changeable white letters, most of which spelled something fatally wrong (i.e. “wheat, white, onion role, or rye”). Not the sort of place I would go twice. But as fate would have it, I knew the girl behind the counter—a plump person with one blue eye and one green eye. One glance at her and I seemed to have dropped to all fours and was tunneling deep into the past.

“Patty Pacholewski! What are you doing here? This is a stunning stroke of luck.”

“Do I know you?” the broad-shouldered girl said, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Mrs. Buskirk's class! Fifth grade, and beyond. Don't you remember?”

Once she recovered from the surprise, we fell into easy and affable conversation, reminiscing about the afternoons I had spent at her house (she lived in a carriage house by a lake, with a glamorous spiral staircase, and a mother who descended from it, scowling). I asked how was her little brother (fine), and her dog (dead), and her mother and father (fine and dead, respectively), and she asked why I had been so mean to her in seventh grade, to which I had no answer. I ordered turkey bacon and tomato, but what I really wanted to know was did she remember reading
Treasure Island
and how all us girls had sat with our hands below desk level, passing around her bracelets and rings.

“No, but I kind of remember my rings.”

“Your jewelry never looked like it came from a bubblegum machine,” I said with admiration.

“You drew pictures of it, do you remember? You had a notebook and you made an inventory of all the girls in the class and their clothes.”

“No,” I said, marveling. “But that sounds like me.”

I recalled how Long John Silver says to Jim Hawkins, “You're a noticing kind of person.” A lot of times I'll be out for a walk and somebody will point out something that escaped me: sky seems hazy, crocuses in bloom, just passed a burrow which belongs to some kind of small animal, your guess is better than mine. Since the break-up with Lars, I had been worried that I was
not
a noticing person, but of course, I am; I just notice different things.

 

“Who?” my mother was saying to me a few hours later, as she bent over and stuck her head into the dryer. “This lint trap is eating our towels. No, I don't remember. Well, the name sounds familiar. One of your elementary school friends?”

“Honestly, Mom. How could you not remember? Patty Pacholewski was a deity in fifth grade.”

I pushed aside an empty basket and sat down on the counter, thinking about Patty. How we had shared her heart-shaped bangles, her dolphin rings. Her puffy-sleeved, round-collared, pastel-colored blouses. The holiday concert to which she wore a blouse of slippery, white sateen. Her charm bracelet with a heart toggle clasp, my own parrot green windbreaker whose white hood ties I had chewed to a pulp, her pale pink car coat made of light brushed wool which hung on the peg in the cloak room three pegs down from mine. And her umbrella! Also pink, with a white handle in the shape of a swan.

“I used to move my desk around the classroom, to get a better view of her blue eye or a better view of her green one.”

“Was she the diabetic?”

“No, that was Johanna Miller,” I said testily.

“Sweetheart.” My mother dropped a dark globe of lint into the trashcan and turned to me with an openly worried face. “Did you feed Richard today? When I went in your room to get your clothes, he looked lackluster. I took him the left-over tabbouli.”

“Okay, whatever.”

“Darling, a bird is a responsibility. You have to feed him
every
day, not just when you feel like it.” Insert lecture on nutrition here. “Your father thinks he needs exercise.”

When my mother first mentioned Richard, the sternness of her gaze had given me a pang; I felt like Jim Hawkins, pinned by a knife to the mast. But now I started to laugh. “Daddy
said
that?”

“You
know
how he is. Why are you laughing?”

“No reason.”

But later I marched into Adrianna's room and said, “How many times has Mom pulled you aside, and told you in a calculatedly casual way, ‘Your father feels this,' ‘What's important to your father is that'?”

“I thought we weren't talking.”

“Oh, let's give that up,” I said. “I'm sorry if I barged in on you on top of old Smokey, but when I followed you to his house, I didn't know what I was going to see. Anyway, I haven't told Mom and Dad. So your secret is safe with me.”

She regarded me warily. Lately her “dates” had been a bit erratic and there had been some late night muffled phone calls. I'd gathered the affair wasn't going all that well, but had strategically made a point of not prying. Now I lay down on the rug of her room and gently guided my legs over the back of my head. “If you can't afford the healings,” Bev had said, “take up something you
can
afford,” and she had demonstrated, quite powerfully, a yoga maneuver called “the plough.” I often did the plough while reading
Treasure Island
, but it made my neck hurt.

“Anyway,” I panted, “you do know what I mean about Mom. It's like she radios into headquarters for Dad's feelings, when she senses hers need backup.” I lowered my legs back to the rug and exhaled.

“You need a job,” Adrianna said. “You need a wider perspective on life and a wider range of interests.”

“A materialist way of looking at things. Right now I'm on a spiritual journey and not so naïve to think a job is going to solve my problems. When the log-house fills with smoke, and Jim Hawkins and the crew think they're trapped, the captain cries, ‘Out, lads, out, and fight 'em in the open!' So Jim grabs a cutlass.”

“I'm afraid the opportunities for brandishing a cutlass have long passed,” Adrianna said. “I've been fighting with Don,” she added abruptly.

Apparently when I had been at pains to share a crucial incident in a life-changing novel, she had given her mind permission to wander, and it had wandered right into the cul-de-sac of her sorry-ass relationship. I couldn't pretend to be surprised, but I did pretend briefly not to know who she was talking about. Her need to confide was so great that she let my jibe pass.

“Not exactly fighting,” she said. “But things have been a little rough lately. It's absolutely baffling . . . ”

“I thought you guys were so in love.”

“Well, we are,” she said, deaf to sarcasm. “Our feelings for each other are as strong as ever. Really, I couldn't ask for a better man than Don.” Here I had to be careful not to gag. “But we're struggling over little things,” she went on. “And I'm getting tired of having to reassure him all the time about his age.”

“Oh, is he feeling . . . elderly?”

“I tell him I don't care; I like that he's mature and knows his mind, but he says I don't know what I'm missing. He worries that he's depriving me of a more exciting dating life.”

“It's true you haven't played the field much.”

“I don't want to play the field!” She shook her head. “Actually I think the problem is that his father is sick, and his mother, who's a few years younger, is exhausted by taking care of him, and he looks at them having a hard time, and imagines how we could turn out.”

“His parents are still alive? They must be ancient!”

“People live a long time now, you know.”

“There's not much about love in
Treasure Island
. If you'd read it, you'd find it more of a study of friendships between men. I suppose that's why I find it so liberating. I've had enough of romances where the woman exhausts herself, just pouring herself into her man, obsessing about his comings and goings.”

Just then the laptop sitting on her desk bleeped. She had mail. “It's probably from
him
,” she said. “Do you mind? I want to read it alone.”

“Not at all,” I said, getting up to leave. “But I thought you guys only did snail mail.”

“What made you think that?”

Here, I am embarrassed to say, I let my gaze wander to her mattress, under which she stored her horrid collection of billet-doux. She followed my gaze and blushed deeply.

“Get out of my room,” she said in a trembling voice. “Now!”

The next time I checked under the mattress, the beribboned stash was gone. I could have found it, I'm sure, but I had better things to do than tear her room apart. By now I had studied
Treasure Island
to a nicety and the studies were paying off. I could stand in line at the sandwich shop and riff on one or two Core Values before Patty had even rung my order up.

“Where was I?” I said as she knocked a roll of quarters against the register's edge. “Oh yeah, so now I've rid myself of a terrible job, and a terrible boyfriend, I'm free to direct my life in ways I'd never imagined. Did I ever tell you how I met Lars? I didn't seize on him as a boyfriend; I didn't pluck him from a field of guys. I drifted into the thing like so much driftwood, do you know what I mean? When do you see Jim Hawkins drifting into anything? Everything he does—thank you, but I think you still owe me a nickel—everything he does, is because he gets an idea in his head. Patty,
you
should read
Treasure Island
. You're kind of dawdling in the harbor, right, what with this sandwich shop job. I bet if you read thirty pages, you'd lift up anchor and sail into the open sea towards your goal!”

“I have a goal,” Patty said, “and that's to get through my shift with as little human interaction as possible.”

She was a laugh, that Patty!

Truthfully, I'm the kind of person who throws things away—letters, photos, tiresome clothes and people—and finding Patty was like finding some old thing in the closet that I had
meant
to discard. First there is annoyance (“I thought I'd thrown this out”), then the dawning realization of your luck. Once I threw away a curling iron and wore my hair straight for twelve weeks. Just when I was ready to go curly again, I found the iron under a silk camisole I'd never washed. There was a kind of fate in it. The indicator light no longer worked, but it was basically all right.

Patty was a great find. In some ways I was more sentimental about her girlhood than my own. She was the only girl whose hair had appeared in a new shape each day: braids, plaits, buns, banana-like funnels. She was the only girl who had worn creased navy slacks and pale colored blouses. Even now, in her sandwich shop blouse, which I knew was not of her choosing, and a visor, which dulled a bit the shine of her hair, she sent my mind flying back to years of kaleidoscopic detail, a time when a fresh pair of rainbow shoelaces or a polka-dot ribbon on a barrette felt, to a girl, like the revolution of a planet. And she was always calling up memories, whether she meant to or not. Once when I complained that she had stinted me on garnishes, she slapped on a few more pickles. “I don't care how many pickles you have. They're not
my
pickles,” she said and suddenly I sang:

 

My mother and your mother live across the way.

Every night they have a fight and this is what they say:

Icky bicky pickle pie,

Icky bicky boo.

Icky bicky pickle pie,

Out goes you!

 

“The jump rope rhyme, remember?” I said. “Enid Crawley and I used to do it all the time.”

“Enid Crawley got pregnant in eleventh grade.”

“No kidding! And she was the best at Double Dutch. I
did
run into her at the mall last year, and she looked about a hundred years old. I'm glad
we
didn't get knocked up. I mean, I assume you didn't get knocked up.”

“No,” she said, rubbing a non-existent stain on the counter. “But I did have an abortion our senior year.”

“No kidding! Patty, I didn't even know you'd been sexually active. Excuse me for being forward, but since I rediscovered this book, my whole life has been about being forward.” Knowing what my mouth was about to say, my left leg began to spasm. I leaned more heavily onto the counter. “I've told you about the Core Values, right?”

“Yeah, you wrote them on one of our comment cards last week.”

“So do you know what I mean when I say I can't blow my own horn right now? This winter has felt like a huge setback. I'm
BOLD
, as you know, I'm
RESOLUTE
, but I'm definitely falling short in the
INDEPENDENCE
arena. I mean, I can't live at my parents' house another moment if I'm going to keep evolving. My sister lives at home too, but—did I tell you this already?—she's having a creepy affair with a much older man.”