by Sara Levine
“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.”
“I was only seventeen. It was horrible.”
“What? Patty, have you heard a word I’m saying?”
She stared right at me: “You need a place to crash.”
“Yes, exactly! Do you live alone?”
“No, I live with my girlfriend.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. “You have TWO bedrooms?”
“Three, actually.”
“Then you have extra space!”
“Not exactly.” Attempting an emphatic gesture, she knocked over a stack of Styrofoam cups, which rolled across the counter.
“I don’t put much faith in your math skills,” I said as she pursued a cup approaching the edge. “You live with ONE girlfriend, but your apartment has THREE bedrooms.”
“Yeah, but one of them is sort of our media room . . . ”
“Less TV, more reading. I recommend it. And I’d even sleep in the living room, or a sun porch, if you have that. Jim Hawkins sleeps in an apple barrel. Anyway, this is excellent! Roommates with Patty Pacholewski! In fifth grade, I never would have thought it.” (Seventh grade, I wouldn’t have wanted to think it, but didn’t say.) “Tell me the truth, Patty: would you have asked me, if I hadn’t asked you first?”
“Did you ask me?” All t
he color had gone out of her face. Her day job sucked the life out of her. “You don’t even know my girlfriend, Sabrina.”
“But I’d love to know her.”
“Listen, I really have to go fill the napkin dispensers now—no offense.”
“None taken, mate! You, me and Sabrina—let’s find a time!”
Thank god for Patty Pacholewski, I thought as I walked home, kicking at snow boulders, many of which shattered violently at the first touch of my boot. When, I wondered idly, had she become a lesbian?
Back at the ranch, I discovered that someone had placed a letter into Chapter 1: The Old Sea Dog at the ‘Admiral Benbow.’
“What’s this?” I said.
“That came for you yesterday,” my mother said. “I wanted to make sure you’d see it.”
The note was from Rena on a fine hand-made rice paper embedded with marigold petals. I read it rapidly; it was plain she was worked up.
. . . I miss the Gratuitous Pancakes. Why do all my calls go straight to voicemail? Are you mad that I took your shift at The Pet Library? Please write back. XOXO, Big Love, Rena
I ignored the letter. I had Patty now.
“Rena called,” my mother said.
“Rena called,” Adrianna said.
“Somebody’s on the phone for you,” my father said. “Her name’s Rowena.”
Eventually Adrianna chased me down, phone in hand. “She’s right here,” she told the receiver in a loud, aggrieved voice.
“Yes?” I said (politely, almost secretarial).
“What’s happening? Do you want to get a cup of coffee? How’s Richard, how’s living at home?”
“A hundred questions at once!” But I regretted my sharpness. What if the Patty situation didn’t pan out? Crashing with Rena would be a retreat to primordial self without the boon of my mother’s well-stocked pantry, but it would do to keep my options open. “Sorry, Rena, don’t mean to be blunt. I’m just in such a rush.”
“Why?”
“Meeting someone.”
“Lars?”
“No,” I said with a snorting laugh. “Lars means nothing to me now. He’s like a bad dream. A distant vapor. I can’t even remember the color of his eyes.”
“Green,” she said.
“He’s like a bank of fog that hung over everything and then the moon came up and burned him into nothing. What did I ever see in him?”
“I don’t know,” she said with just the slightest tremor in her voice. “Green . . . with little gold tiger flecks.”
“Wait, first my crappy job, now my crappy boyfriend? Rena, you wouldn’t dare!”
“I didn’t do anything,” she pleaded. “But he was lonely, and I’ve been missing you. We didn’t do anything, I swear. I wanted to sound you out first.”
“Sound this, you treacherous dog,” I said and hung up.
Lying on my crumb-laden bed, I thumbed through Treasure Island in search of solace, but the words blurred together, and I threw my book to the floor. Over the last few nights I had been pretending not to hear Adrianna making sad noises in her bedroom. She had been having long talks with Mr. Tatum and taking steamy baths at night, during which I was pretty sure I could detect, under the sounds of splashing, her sobbing. The girlish misery in this house was rising like a sea tide. Squelch it, I thought. I deliberately made myself think of Lars as a compendium of flaws and inadequacies. I remembered his lack of ambition and his habit of smudging his glasses. I remembered his boyishly servile way with my parents (until my mother had finally put a stop to it, he’d called them “ma’am” and “sir”) and his piercing, bed-shaking sneezes. I remembered his clothing—all of it, bad; in fact, the best you could say is some was neutral in color—and his penchant for supernatural sci-fi movies. By boarding the brig of his unappealing qualities, I managed to calm myself. Then I picked up my book, thrust it under my pillow, and slept.
When I awoke at dawn, I had an angry red crease on my right cheek where the spine had pressed. No cucumber slices, I vowed, no lotion. The book had cut me like a saber.
BOLDNESS
RESOLUTION
INDEPENDENCE
I didn’t care that I couldn’t remember the fourth one. Let the rude mark lie. On my way to breakfast, I did a capital imitation of a seaward whistle.
CHAPTER 17
Patty’s girlfriend Sabrina sat cross-legged on the floor, in a dark grey smock and cargo pants, smoking. I liked her instantly, even though her tattoo alarmed me: a mermaid stabbing herself with Neptune’s fork. Patty had gone out for more cigarettes.
“Steven King,” she said, when I asked her what she liked to read. “Road and Track, the magazine.”
There was a long pause in which she drank her beer, and I drank my water, both of us gazing at Richard, whose cage I had placed on the floor.
“Nice bird,” she said at last.
“Thank you. He’s supposed to be a helpmate, but he’s more of a talisman for my journey towards bolder selfhood. I got him after I read Treasure Island.”
“Okay,” Sabrina said.
Richard rocked from side to side, pupils slightly dilated. He bobbed on his perch in the dance style of Shirley Temple.
“Is he going to talk?” Sabrina asked.
“No, that dance always wears him out. He’ll take a nap soon.”
He would. I’d given him a piece of Xanax. Although etiquette required me to disclose to Patty and Sabrina that I had a pet, I hadn’t wanted to showcase his irritating qualities.
I explained to Sabrina that I knew Patty from fifth grade, and she explained to me that she had grown up in Michigan but at fourteen had run away from home. She had lived on the streets, then in the back of somebody’s truck; she had moved here and taken a job fixing motorcycles, which she quit abruptly it seems, or maybe it was just her manner of telling it; then she went back to a different school; dropped out; rode around the country a bit; worked in a fish cannery in Alaska, and before she met Patty I don’t know where she lived, though she spoke repeatedly of a drug-dealing person who went by the name of Midas, both because he was regarded as a king of sorts among his peers and because he liked to wear gold chains.
I could not hide a sense of awe. “When Patty first said she had a roommate, I assumed she meant some boring person we both knew in high school.”
“I barely attended high school,” she said cheerfully.
They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks . . . I seen a thing or two at sea, I have.
“What do you do now?” I asked Sabrina. “Odd jobs?”
“Bad jobs, odd jobs, shit jobs. Dishwasher, house painter, deckhand.”
“Deckhand,” I murmured and mentally gave Sabrina a tarry pigtail.
“Riverboat casino. The people suck, but those jobs are easy to get, if you’re looking.”
“I haven’t been on a boat since I was seven, at Disneyworld. It’s A Small World After All.”
“That’s a flume ride, not a boat.”
“Well, technically, but I didn’t take to it. The colored lights, the dark tunnel, the dolls that sing; even if you close your eyes, their teeny tiny voices bore into your ears. I hurled on the fiberglass deck and had to be evacuated at an emergency exit platform. I never stepped in a boat again.”
Sabrina took a slug of beer.
“But people change,” I added.
“Not that much,” Sabrina said.
“No, that’s what’s so inspiring about people. People change.”
She looked skeptical, but we didn’t get into it, because just then a snow-flecked Patty walked through the door in a long wool coat. She pulled off her wet boots and gazed at us, almost in disbelief.
“You came?”
“She came and she brought stuff,” Sabrina told Patty.
“To new beginnings,” I said as I presented them a double-handled shopping bag, which they rifled through with enthusiasm. Pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, five-pound bags of Jolly Ranchers. “There’s al
ways more where that came from.” I ignored the vision of my mother in the empty pantry, steeling herself for another Costco run.
When two women live together they create a world of gestures—flicking of hair, twitching of lips—which make their approval of you seem to hang in the balance. As Sabrina and Patty rummaged through the herbal selection in the mahogany tea chest, I watched them closely. I assumed a relaxed posture on the floor (my hosts having occupied the futon) and tried not to look at Richard, who, pupils further dilated, had started to daven. Sabrina put some throaty folk music on the stereo, and Richard screamed, “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!”
“Wow,” Patty said.
“He is a talker!” Sabrina said with elation.
“So how’d you guys meet?” I said abruptly.
“Softball team,” said Patty. “Internet,” said Sabrina.
Since they had overlapped, I pretended not to have heard Sabrina and feigned an interest in softball. The conversation tottered along, with intermittent shrieks from Richard.
“Bird’s getting lively,” Sabrina said.
“Shut the fuck up!” said Richard.
“Sorry. Sorry! I don’t know where he—”
“It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” shrieked Richard.
“So the extra room?” I put in hurriedly.
“Right now we use the space—I mean it’s kind of convenient for storage and TV watching—”
“Can’t you watch TV in the living room? Because you’d hardly notice me. I’m very considerate, I’m independent . . . ”
“How much can you pay?” Sabrina interrupted.
The free gifts from Costco, the peanut butter pretzels that they had already ripped open and were snacking on, for godsakes, how much of me did they want?
“I can contribute, obviously. Are you open to a barter economy?”
“Not really,” Sabrina said, her mouth full of pretzels. “‘What does a lesbian bring to a second date?’” She gave Patty a private, almost misty look.
