by Sara Levine
“But you have to be careful,” Lars said when we talked about it over burritos. “If you lost your job, what would you do? Unless you want to borrow money again from your parents.”
I didn’t want to get into a money discussion with Lars. I was pretty sure he had more of it, though it had taken me a while to catch on since he works a low-paying job at a computer help desk and spends next to nothing on his clothes. “How’d you get that?” I’d said the first night I stumbled drunkenly into his condo. Turns out that behind even a slightly bedraggled guy there can lurk a Bang & Olufsen sound system. “What kind of music do you like?” he answered and further discussion got muffled in the make-out moves. Since then we had managed to dance around the big ugly sinkhole subject of money. I knew that two years ago he’d backpacked in Guatemala and had immediately paid off his debts for the trip by cleaning a foundry. I suspected he had a work ethic I wasn’t interested in exploring.
“Treasure Island,” Lars mused. “Ever worry that if you only read one book, you’ll get scurvy of the brain?”
“You can learn a lot by reading deeply into one book. In fact, in Japan, that’s how literature is studied. People read one book all year. It’s only the stupid Americans who skitter around.”
“Who reads one book a year?”
“Japanese literature majors.”
He looked skeptical. “I’ll ask my friend Yusuke.”
“No, don’t. We’re off the point. Weren’t we talking about my lousy job?”
Lars paused to ingest some refried beans. “I’m reading this book about the Beslan school siege. In Russia, remember? When Shamil Basayev sent those jihadists to slaughter school children in North Ossetia?”
“Excuse me?” I muttered. “I’m eating.”
“Okay, maybe you wouldn’t like it. The situation is so fucked up. The violence alone—”
“I don’t know what you think Treasure Island is, Lars, but people do kick it. Heads roll.”
Lars smiled. “The Federalist Papers,” he went on. “That was the last thing I read. No, no—it’s good, but I think you might find it a little dry. You prefer fiction, right? I know: the new Nora Roberts! You ever read Nora Roberts?”
I sighed. “I’m not looking for a book, Lars.”
“Did you ever think about joining a book club, though? My office mate, Chelsea, does a reading group, and she might have room for another person. They meet at The Flying Saucer. I’ve seen the books on her desk—history, linguistics, science stuff—it’s pretty broad. Chelsea says they read great books.”
“Great books? Great books? Lars, would you know a great book if it hit you in the ass with its registration papers? Treasure Island is a great book!”
I dropped my burrito into its soggy bed of shredded lettuce. Was Lars capable of recognizing merit? The lanky brown hair, the smudge on his glasses, the inability to intuit I was too sophisticated for some geeky co-worker’s book group. A stray thought wandered into my mind and swished its mangy tail: should I dump him?
“Have you even read it yet, Lars?”
“I’m going to.”
“Yeah, that’s what Rena said, too. But now she’s all caught up in some dutiful tome on global warming.”
I pulled Treasure Island out of my backpack and nudged his plate aside, so that the volume lay before him on the Formica table. Something about the tableau reminded me of the time Aunt Boothie parked me in front of her photo album so I could get the blow-by-blow on the Senior Singles Mississippi Riverboat Tour.
“Okay,” I said, “of course, I’m not going to force this down your throat,” and refrained from pointing out the passages I deemed most important.
“Are you saying you want me to read it now?” Lars said.
“I’m tempted to read it aloud to you, but I don’t want to be a control freak.”
“No, don’t,” he said quickly, and we agreed he could wade into the book at his own pace. Which turned out to be deadly slow if not downright chicken-shit. It was a book; what was he afraid of? I ate a basket of chips while he lingered on the frontispiece: a dull brown map of the island, porcupined with lines illustrating I don’t know what: longitudes, latitudes. Turn the page, I urged him silently. Turn the page, plunge in!
“I find maps interesting,” he said.
So violently did I expel my breath, I spat on the map—one of those weird, nervous spits where you accidentally trigger a salivary gland and, as if your tongue had discovered your mouth’s G-spot, the saliva erupts in a concentrated jet. Thinking I’d meant to do it—“gleeking,” he called it; as if I’d ever “gleek” on my bible!—he took the occasion of my nervous laughter to close the book. “Let’s order two flans,” he said affably, and thus our discussion of the salty book was derailed by sugar.
Something has to budge, I thought as we walked home that night, arm in arm, ostensibly happy, but inwardly one of us (me) seething. Already I felt big with book the way a woman feels big with child. Was there room in this relationship for the two of us?
“Lars, I want us to talk seriously about Treasure Island,” I said as we reached my apartment. “Like, pretend we’re in a seminar.”
“Piracy and the expansion of the nineteenth-century nation-state,” he replied. “I’ll talk for twenty minutes and then turn it over to you and Jimbo.”
“Jim,” I said. “Jim Hawkins.”
“Whoa, you’re mauling the door! Didn’t I tell you,” Lars said as if this were his apartment, “turn the key and pull at the same time. Otherwise it sticks.” He put his hand over mine and pulled. The door popped open.
Inside, Lars removed my backpack and slung it on the futon. We kissed, and the kiss was a wrecking ball; walls crumbled, plaster sifted, a grey bird flew through the dust and emerged white as snow. What a heap! Later somebody from the salvage department would come by and look for usable, well-conditioned pieces of me.
“What’s a ‘nineteenth-century nation-state’?” I asked later as I searched the tangled sheets for my underthings. But Lars had drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER 3
Cooped up in a library with twelve rabbits, eight hamsters, six hermit crabs, one rooster, four large sullen cats, a tank of fish, five mutts, and a purebred poodle whose needs are as bountiful as the sea, a person gets to thinking. Neither Rena nor Lars was helping to strengthen the hold of Treasure Island on my life; they said they were supportive, but talking to them about the book’s Core Values—
BOLDNESS
RESOLUTION
INDEPENDENCE
HORN-BLOWING
—was about as interesting as talking to a couple of Tic Tacs. What I wanted to bring the message home was a parrot, a parrot who would sit on my shoulder every day, or at least every day I worked at The Pet Library, and be a living, squawking reminder of the active role I meant to play in my life. In Treasure Island Long John Silver’s parrot shouts, “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” Mine would shout, “Be bold, but be kind, be yourself but be plucky, be flexible and yet tenacious,” assuming a parrot could be trained to say such a long and syntactically complex thing. If not, I would accept “Steer the boat, girlfriend!”
The morning I fixed on the idea of the parrot happened to be a morning Nancy had taken her ancient mother to physical therapy and wouldn’t be back until noon. The library was awash in gloom. One of the cats had been vomiting and because I’d been pretending not to see the puddles, the place stank. Also, the week before, in a fit of apathy, I had allowed a teenager without any ID to check out the rooster, and now the bird was back, its neck feathers ruffled and a stormy look in its eye. In the old days, by which I mean my pre-Treasure Island days, I wouldn’t have thought of leaving that smelly Pet Library, I would have soaked up the bad air and all the rest until Nancy came back to release me. Oh yes, I am quite sure, in the old days, my tiny train of thought would have circled around a papier-mâché landscape of imaginary needs and catastrophes, and thinking I was obliged to stay at work, I would have missed an opportuni
ty for decisive action. But I had a scheme in my head.
The point of the scheme was to show Nancy that I was capable of action. Lately, our relations had been tense, and I didn’t want to waste any energy discussing the further responsibilities I craved. No, I would show her she could rely on me and I knew just the way to do it. As I cast my eye around the dreary room, a dozen ideas for improvement flooded my head.
Nancy, who had an immigrant’s mistrust of banks, kept a box of petty cash in the back room. A few times I had seen her open the box before she sent me out, like an errand girl, for feed. Now I removed the key from its hiding place and though the lock was very stiff, I turned it and threw back the lid. A faint smell rose from the interior, almost like scented toilet paper or over-ripe apples, but nothing was on top except a plastic tray containing a few pieces of junk jewelry, a pair of foam earplugs, and a harvest of bright red, floozy-length Lee Press-On Nails. I pulled up the tray with impatience, and there lay ten crisp one hundred dollar bills. Nancy! I’d never dreamed she had this much capital! If only she would trust me with it—and here I lost a few moments to a potent daydream in which I tore out the Library’s U-shaped circ desk and installed a slab of black walnut. Or Zebra Wood. Then I shook myself awake and pocketed the cash. I returned the key to its hiding place, and was about to make for the door when I heard a sound that brought my heart into my mouth—the door chime chirp, alerting me that we had a patron. As I came out of the back room, I saw it was a boy come to return a goldfish. He was about ten years old and walked, the little glass loaner bowl close to his chest, as if he had another ten years to make the journey from the door to . . .
“Hurry up then,” I said. “You won’t drop it. I was about to close up.”
Goldfish returns are the easiest, or should be, since you don’t have to interact with the pet. When you do a mammal return, you stroke the animal and make a big fuss to pretend you missed it. With the goldfish, I just checked to make sure its fins were still there, and dumped it back into the tank. I didn’t even pretend to know which fish it was. “Vinny, huh? Alberto, huh? Or is this Iphigenia?” “This is Percevaux,” the boy said. “Sure it is, good old Percevaux.” I grabbed the record book, found the boy’s name, and crossed it off. (Another way Nancy might have used me better: Hello, computer age!) “You’re all clear,” I told the boy. He had followed me over to the tank and remained there, watching Percevaux flick a fin. “It’s not the circus,” I said. “Come on, I’ll walk you out.” In my haste I forgot to lock the door.
On the pavement the boy threatened to walk my way, but by lingering at the corner and pretending that I was about to catch a bus, I quickly shed him. You have to be careful in this job; certain kids glom on to a Pet Librarian as if to a celebrity. Something of the animal glamour attaches, the way it would for a zookeeper or a lion tamer. I don’t pretend to understand it, but fortunately this boy wasn’t too hard to shake. “You ever think about maybe getting a panda?” he said dreamily. When I roared, “No!” he scuttled off.
For reasons I don’t wish to go into, I don’t have a car, and I was too impatient to wait for a bus, so I began to walk. Walk and walk and walk, past pizzerias and dry cleaners and fast lube franchises until I reached Cutwater Mall, a downscale place with a crappy food court and a hideous green and black linoleum floor rolling past stores with names like Gifts ‘n’ Things and Sox ‘n’ Stuff. My family used to go here before a better mall was built—one with skylights and a fiberglass reproduction of the Trevi fountain.
The pet shop I wanted sat in a dark corner on the lower level, its floor seething with woodchips and hair. Puppies and kittens cowered in the front window, fish tanks bubbled and glowed along the sides. I threaded my way through the mess and found a regal teenaged girl, her hair done up so elaborately she appeared to wear a Zulu basket on her head. Lethargically she unpacked a crate of ferret shampoo.
“I came for a parrot.”
For the benefit of anyone who has never been to a mall pet store, the people who work there don’t know a thing about pets, nor would they care to. Without any affect she led me to aisle nine. There, in the fluorescent corridor, after rows of twittering songbirds, none of whom caught my fancy, I discovered a cage labeled “Yellow-Naped Amazon.” Its occupant was one foot high and came at my eye like a bit of migraine, its feathers so brightly colored the air around them seemed to pulse. I studied the hard curled beak and two glittering eyes, one of which studied me. Then the bird made an unearthly noise, a metallic call pitched to pierce through hundreds of miles of Amazon canopy.
“I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” the salesgirl told me. “They don’t come in tagged. But we call it Richard. Little Richard.” Having done her duty, she turned away, and as the sweet perfume of her hair oil receded, a musty smell took precedence in my nostrils. Bird. Bird smell. Did I want to bring this thing into my workplace? It was larger and more alive than I had expected. Running back and forth along the perch, “Little Richard” let loose a long, harassing whistle.
“I’m a fool, if you like”—I walked the aisles in panic—“and certainly I’m going to do a foolish, over-bold act, but I’m determined to do it”—which is what Jim Hawkins says when he sets out to recapture the ship from the pirates. I found the salesgirl, tapped her on the shoulder.
“You want him?”
I clutched a shelf for balance and accidentally knocked down a noisy Swat ‘n’ Swing. “I do and I don’t, of course. I came for a parrot, but I wonder if a parrot is really the thing. Does he creep you out? Look at that tongue, I didn’t even realize birds had tongues. You’re probably getting minimum wage, and here I am, taking up your time, trying to figure out . . . I love your hair, by the way.”
She didn’t smile; she heard that compliment all the time.
“The thing is, I’m torn. What do you think?”
“Why do you care what I think?”
But I did care, I mean not pathologically, but a little. In another scenario, this girl and I might become friends. I looked at the bird and imagined it sitting on my shoulder and pecking my eyes out. The girl turned around to . . . “Wait!” I shrilled. I picked up the cage, produced the cash, and in a loud, jovial voice, announced that I would buy it.
I began to feel pretty excited as I walked the parrot back to The Pet Library. He was excited too. He screamed the whole way.
A car filled with teenage boys came roaring by, its tires spitting mud, and one of the boys stuck out his head and called, “Eeeeeeeeeeeyaaaaaaa Polly, want a cracker?” which was not even remotely witty, and yet as witnesses to my bold business, they were somehow kindred; they were scrappy, fearless fellow adventurers. I waved and walked on, a smile on my face.
CHAPTER 4
As soon as I got back to The Pet Library, the smile disappeared. The door, I now realized, I had left unlocked. This might not have mattered; in fact, at first I was relieved that, cage in hand, I wouldn’t have to fuss with the keys, and pushing my way in, I said, “Welcome home, Richard.” Immediately I sensed a disturbance. I placed Richard’s cage on the desk and caught sight of the marmalade cat, tied to a chair with a dog leash, like a prisoner awaiting interrogation. I leaped over and untied him, for which he thanked me not at all, only slunk off, his tail puffed up and bristling. A cat tree lay on the floor, its feather toys torn off; cabinets stood open; on the floor lay canned goods, bags of dog food. “What the hell?” I said.
My first thought was the animal rights people, who for years had been sending Nancy hate mail. In the beginning, she’d thought that she could win them over, naively supposing that she and the animal rights people were on the same side. They would come round ostensibly to inspect the cleanliness of the cages and Nancy would wheedle them to apply for a membership card. But they never so much as checked out a hamster. Instead they organized protests, wrote letters to the newspaper, and once they covered The Pet Library’s windows with black spray paint that said, “2-DAY LOAN PERIOD = 2 MUCH TRAUMA.” Luckily, that wasn’t so c
atchy. Their movement fizzled out when the local leader left to set up a handicraft cooperative in the Kyrgyz Republic.
As I walked around, checking out the damages, I realized I wasn’t looking at the work of the animal people. They would have escaped with every animal in tow, and although I hadn’t done a head count, already I was conscious of having kicked the rooster away with my boot. Now he was pecking away at a torn bag of dog food, greedily keeping pace with the mutts. The record book was on the floor, a few of its pages bent, but nothing was missing. No, whoever had come in had not wanted to destroy the place. They had vandalized it, almost carelessly. I was wandering around, noting the large amount of water on the floor—did the fish jump out of the tank?—when the door chimed, and Nancy stepped into the room.
She screamed. It was such an awful blood-curdling scream—and not, may I remind you, the first scream I’d heard that day—that I almost wet myself. Her scream was answered by Richard’s scream, which was answered by the dogs barking, which was answered by the cats yowling, which was answered by the rooster crowing, which in turn set off a car alarm right outside the door.
“Look this place! What happened? You drink vanilla latte?”
As Nancy darted around the room, taking inventory of the disaster, I felt a hard knot in my stomach, twisting and turning. This was an admirable opportunity to put the Core Values into action—particularly RESOLUTION—but I hardly knew where to begin.
“Where is Willie?” Nancy muttered in a low voice. “Where is poodle?”
