by Sara Levine
“‘A U-Haul,’” Patty replied.
“Old joke,” Sabrina explained, looking over at me.
“She knows you’re not a lesbian,” Patty clarified.
“Are you a lesbian?” Sabrina asked.
“I’m very homosocial,” I said, dredging up a word from college.
“Steer the boat, girlfriend!” screamed Richard.
“Go, bird, go!” Sabrina said.
“I’m celibate,” I added.
“It’s weird,” Patty replied sharply. “You always talk a big game about your ex-boyfriend, but you seem kind of—”
“Book-centered?”
“No.” She frowned. “I don’t know. Intense.”
“Shut up!” Richard said.
“This one’s a hoot!” Sabrina said. “Can we feed him?”
Richard edged over to the bars and took a pretzel out of Sabrina’s hand, but half-heartedly, I thought, and with half an eye on the chocolate-covered Bing cherries Patty had torn open. There followed a great to-do in which Sabrina and Patty took turns feeding Richard rice cakes, pink Himalayan salt, ice cubes, and a pencil. Each time Richard plucked an object out of their hands, they laughed like fools. Which gave me an idea . . .
“It’s a shame I can’t touch his money,” I said, almost to myself. “But his earnings are all tied up in a trust fund.”
“Whose money?” Sabrina said.
“Richard. Didn’t I tell you? He performs.”
“The bird’s got a trust fund?” Patty said. “What does he do?”
“TV mostly.”
Sabrina stared at Richard as if she were mentally rearranging his feathers. “I thought he looked familiar.”
“Maybe you’ve seen his commercials.”
“Is he the one who can open beer bottles?”
“Oh yeah!” Patty said. “He rides a scooter on late-night talk shows?”
I indicated that his was a vast scroll of talents, still unfolding.
“He’s done pizza, toilet paper, peanut butter, Carpet Barn, House of Tan . . . ” It was surprisingly easy to make stuff up, like that moment when Jim Hawkins realizes he can paddle off and cut the schooner loose. One cut with my sea-gully, and the Hispaniola would go humming down the tide! I cut the ropes and Richard drifted into celebrity. “Did you see the movie that won Best Picture at Sundance last year?”
“No.”
“Richard was that movie!” I cried.
It was extraordinary how well they received that news, given the impression they gave of not following independent film. Soon all three of us were chatting about animal movies and the best cat and dog commercials we had seen on TV.
“Look, here’s what I’ll do,” I said after a pause calculated to suggest some internal struggle. “If I can stay here, I’ll keep Richard’s cage in the living room. I’ll guarantee you intimate access.”
“Really?” Sabrina said.
Patty looked a little doubtful. “But isn’t he out working half the time?”
“No way.” I explained that he’d just come off a time-consuming shoot and was going on hiatus. He always went on hiatus while molting, I added.
“Could we take him out of the cage?”
“Sure.”
“Could we use him at parties?”
“I’ll even waive his fee.”
“It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” Richard said and then he said it a few more times, with some meager variations in pitch.
Sabrina applauded. I was glad to score a point, but I knew the narrowness of my corner. The free association, the feather plucking, the loose bowel movements, could start any minute. I stood to signal my readiness to go.
“Talk it over,” I said in an offhand tone. “Let me know.”
They stroked the top of Richard’s head. They’d pretend to talk it over; I’d go home and pack tonight. Little Richard was going to save me, I thought, but just then, while they tickled his feet one last time, another sound came from his beak.
At first it seemed like a laugh. Then the laugh sort of fell down the stairs and became a wail. That intractable bird, that bird in whom I could barely wedge a useful phrase, had been studying my misery when I’d thought he was asleep. I threw the cloth over his cage and my hands began to tremble. The sound was terrible: defeated, despairing, almost crazy. Shut up, shut up, but he carried on sobbing, relentless as a wave.
“Freaky,” Sabrina said. “He cries like a girl.”
“He’s studying for a heart-breaking dramatic role,” I said.
CHAPTER 18
I loathe you,” I told Richard. “Don’t flap. Don’t grind your beak. Don’t speak. The cloth means darkness. Night hath fallen. Would that it fell forever on your paltry, coarse, double-crossing soul.”
“Have a nice time?” my mother said from the laundry room, where I’d gone to get a damp bath towel to fling on top of his cage—for emphasis.
In the kitchen Adrianna and my father were seated at the breakfast bar, spooning applesauce from a large ceramic dish. My mother followed me in and asked if I wanted some applesauce. No, I said, the firmness of my tone a warning, but my mother pressed on: Sure I didn’t want some applesauce? Did I know she’d made the applesauce with cinnamon and vanilla? Was it Adrianna who had always liked it, or was it me? Which one of us had always liked the applesauce? Well, we all had liked the applesauce, hadn’t we—
“For god’s sake, no applesauce!” I snapped so sharply that my mother’s eyes pooled with tears.
“What the heck is your problem?” Adrianna said.
“Nothing,” I grumbled.
“I mean, jeez, if you don’t want to talk, get out of the kitchen.”
“Jeez, heck,” I jeered.
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” my father corrected.
“I’m not speaking idiomatically,” Adrianna said.
“It’s all right,” my mother said. “I wasn’t offended. Really.”
“This is about courtesy,” Adrianna insisted.
Which happens not to be a Core Value, I reminded her, though recently I had displayed courtesy as I affected not to notice all the incredibly annoying things that went on around me. For instance, I hadn’t said anything about the fact that Dad stunk up the bathroom, or that my mother’s bread rolls were frozen even after she defrosted them, or the fact that she, Adrianna, had been keeping me up half the night with her sobbing.
Diversion accomplished.
My mother turned to her favorite daughter. “Is this true?”
“No.”
“Have you been crying?”
Adrianna flushed. “Oh, god. No. I mean, maybe I had one rough night, but hardly . . . ”
“Sweetheart, what’s upsetting you?” My mother took Adrianna’s face in her hands.
“Nothing! Don’t you see?” Adrianna squealed. “She’s trying to shift the focus!”
“Honey, if you’re depressed, your father and I want to know about it.”
Your father and I. I laughed out loud; she was radioing in for backup. I swiveled to look at my father who, sure enough, sat placidly eating applesauce, showing no signs of having engaged with Adrianna or her “crisis.”
“You can tell us anything,” my mother said.
“Do you want me to clear the air, Adrianna?” I asked.
“No.”
“Clear the air about what?” my mother said.
Have I said that I live for the plain speaking of Treasure Island? When I think of all the interference, subtext, and evasion of my childhood, I want to scream and pull the antimacassars off the furniture—and never mind the oily blots on the back of the chair. It was time for someone to tell our parents the truth, I told Adrianna, thinking of how Jim Hawkins speaks the truth to Silver, even at the risk of offense. It could either be her or me, I said, but the fact was she had been drifting around in a leaky ship for days, with no sight of landing.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Adrianna cried.
“Darling,
what’s wrong?” my mother said.
“Why does she have to talk like that? Why do we put up with her talking like that? I know she’ll try to make this conversation be about me, but if anything, we should be talking about why she’s wrecking her life!”
“You girls are always so melodramatic,” my mother said.
“She quit work and responsibility and civility just so she can wallow in an escapist boy-oriented book utterly lacking in psychology or spirit!”
I’d known she didn’t like my book, or the intensity I brought to my book, but she’d never articulated my doings in such a heartless way.
“Escapist?” I said. “You know what, Adrianna? F-U-C-K you.”
“Now, now,” my mother quavered. “Don’t start . . . spelling.”
“ . . . I’ve seen those index cards scattered around the house. I don’t understand the point. Are you writing a diary? An account of your adventures? A ‘captain’s log’? Why are some of them written in silver, and some of them written in purple? They seem like the ravings of a lunatic. I found one in the bathroom the other day.”
She sprang up and ran out of the room.
“Where is she going?” my father asked.
I knew where she was going; I also knew how to take advantage of her absence.
“Adrianna is having a hideous sick twisted love affair with an older man who you know and trust!” I blurted.
Adrianna ran back into the room, squinting, holding one of my cards in her clumsy hand. She began to read aloud its contents in an extravagantly objectionable tone.
“‘Well, let ’em come, lad, let ’em come. I’ve still a shot in my locker, which is how he turns the Black Spot around. Always time left to turn fate around—’”
“An affair with who?” my mother broke in.
“What?” The blood drained from Adrianna’s face. She realized she should never have left the room. Not for a minute! Fetching evidence against me, my ass!
“Don’t you want to see this card?” Adrianna faltered.
“No, I want to know about you having an affair. Is he married? Is it someone we know?”
Adrianna looked stricken. I don’t know why she thought she could trust me. With pleasure my mind leaped ahead to the long ugly scene that was unfolding, the slow torturous way my parents would extract the mineral details from her granite psyche. But in fact, there was hardly time to relish the event. Adrianna was actually dying to unburden herself. No sooner had the question been asked than she collapsed in a heap and began telling my mother all about it. She seemed pretty oblivious to how much she was upsetting my mother in the telling. “Oh, he’s wonderful, Mom,” she said as she put her head into my mother’s lap and began to weep. “But it’s tearing me apart. All the secrecy and lies. It’s better that you know about us. You won’t be angry with him, will you? Promise me you won’t be angry, Daddy. Daddy?”
She turned to my father, who—rare event—had been listening. He was also biting his spoon.
“Who is it?” my father said.
“Don,” Adrianna said with a shivery, hopeful smile. “Your colleague, Don Tatum.”
My father stared stunned for a moment. He picked up his bowl and threw it against the electric range; it shattered instantly and fell in pieces onto the floor.
“What?” Adrianna said.
My mother pushed Adrianna’s head out of her lap and began to cry.
CHAPTER 19
One of the reasons I kept index cards on Treasure Island—not that anybody in my family deserves to know—is that I was devising a system to cut like a machete through the book’s dense undergrowth. At the top of each index card, it was my habit to write a quotation, which encapsulated an important lesson. Beneath this line, in my own words, and in as succinct a sentence as possible, I wrote the lesson’s distillation; and beneath this, in a smaller hand, one or two notes about the lesson’s practical application. For instance, card #12 contained these helpful words from Jim Hawkins: “I began to be horribly frightened, but I kept my head, for all that.” So below that the lesson: “Keep your head, even when you’re scared or you think things are going haywire.” And then under that, I wrote my application: [but this part I always wrote in code in case the card should come into the wrong hands].
“How many of those damn cards do you have anyway?” Adrianna asked me. It was one in the morning, of the same night in which The Affair Had Been Revealed, and we were just getting around to sweeping up the pieces of the broken applesauce bowl. My mother, with uncharacteristic neglect, had abandoned the kitchen, and my father had followed her into their bedroom and then into the garage, where they had been yelling and/or weeping for three hours straight.
I crouched with the dustpan; Adrianna swept.
“A hundred cards,” I said. “More or less.”
“And they’re all about Treasure Island?”
“Well, obviously.”
“I read a few. What’s a gunwale?”
I had forgotten.
“What are rollers?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, it’s your book. Don’t get mad at me!”
“What do you think they’re screaming about?”
“I don’t know. I left Don three messages.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“I know,” she said, looking distraught. “Either he heard them and refused to pick up, or he went to bed early and hasn’t got them. He goes to bed at eight thirty sometimes.”
“I’m sure he does,” I said. And then, as an afterthought, I added, “Well, I’m sure he’ll call in the morning then.” I was shocked by my niceness.
We dumped the shards of the bowl into the trash and Adrianna went off to bed, looking like a zombie. Later she told me she had slept with her laptop on her stomach, in case Don got her messages and decided to email. But silent was the Don. About 2 A.M. my mother emerged from the garage and staggered past me, where I sat waiting at the breakfast bar, and began to wash her hands furiously. She looked like Lady Macbeth doing the sleepwalking scene, only she had the advantage of anti-bacterial soap.
“Mom?”
She jumped. “Oh. You. What?”
“Um . . . where’s Dad?”
“He wants to sleep tonight in the car.”
“Oh. Okay.”
There was a rather long pause during which I tried to decide if I should pretend that this was normal, or ingratiate myself to my mother by inquiring, more deeply, as to why.
I decided to skip it.
“And why are you up?” She put out a hand and absent-mindedly smoothed my hair behind my ear.
“Mom, a person has quiet and harmless but also personally helpful obsessions, and they’re not to be trifled with just because a stray card lands in the bathroom. Honestly. I was surprised you let Adrianna talk so disrespectfully to me tonight.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you. You’re upset about the index cards?”
“I was sitting up waiting for you and I started stewing. I hope you don’t believe Adrianna that I’m keeping a logbook. And the diary idea especially offends me. I would never stoop so low as to measure my life by the pulse of domestic time! Where’s the mastery in it?”
“Hobbies are nice, dear. Never mind what anyone thinks about it.”
“It’s not a hobby! And why is Dad sleeping in the car?” The question just popped out; I swear on Israel Hands’ watery grave that I didn’t really want to know her answer.
My mother settled in beside me at the breakfast bar. “I suppose there’s no point in having secrets now. Don Tatum and I have a bit of a history, you see. Which of course you and Adrianna have no way of knowing about. It was when you and Ade were very small. Your father was just starting out at Leonard Milkins, and Don was the new assistant vice principal. There’s a long version and a short version. But at this hour, I think a short version will suffice.”
Which is how my mother came to tell me, quite abruptly, that twenty years earlier she and Don Tatum
had, for a period of three weeks, fallen into a passionate affair while my father taught summer school, and that she had mistakenly ascribed more importance to the sex act than it warranted, and temporarily left my father, only to return, six days later, asking for forgiveness. Which, she added judiciously, had been granted, so far as it was possible with these things.
“You left Dad? Where was me? Where was I and Ade?”
“You were with your father.”
“But you said he was teaching summer school. Where was we—where were we—during the day?”
“Maybe you weren’t with your father. I think Aunt Boothie might have come to stay. You should ask your father. It was only a week. It’s a long time in a young marriage, but a very short time in the span of a life.”
“I can’t believe you are minimizing this. You had sex and because you liked it, you left us?”
“It wasn’t the end of the world, it was just an adventure.” My mother smiled. She seemed to be enjoying her memories a little too much, forgetting that the essential note to strike was one of repentance. “It was . . . We were . . . Oh, it’s just too complicated for my brain right now,” she murmured. “We’ll all deal better with this in the morning.” She stood up briskly. “I’m glad you’re mature enough to handle it. Thanks for listening. Nighty-night.”
She tripped off to her bed, her neat little figure disappearing into the darkness of the hallway.
Had I heard her right? Had she called that an adventure?
This was a woman who lived in a world in which nothing dangerous or exciting could be undertaken; a woman who devoted herself to the tedious, net-mending tasks of family life. She had subscribed to Bon Appetit for three decades and still had every issue, arranged in chronological order. How could she have had a restless heart?
An abyss of possibilities opened up before me. Now would be an excellent time to attach my mouth to a cask of cognac, but my parents didn’t keep hard liquor. I dug up the original hand-lettered sign I’d made on a creamy seventy-pound piece of paper with a lovely deckled edge—
