by Sara Levine
My mother passed him the pie, and he cut wedges for everyone, destroying Adrianna with his efficiency.
“Is there going to be ice cream with this?” I said.
“No,” Adrianna said crossly.
“If people ate less chicken,” Rena observed, “the reduction of greenhouse gases would be something along the lines of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year.”
“Okay, then let’s go on,” I said. While they had been rattling around about the pie, I’d taken a moment to formulate my position. “You’re all thinking I’m in a bad way: no job, no apartment, no boyfriend, no plans, my whole future gone to wreck, but do you want to know what? I don’t care because I did it! After a lifetime of drifting and not-deciding anything, I found the book, I made the plan, and yes, I bungled up my job—but only because I no longer valued it. As for the parrot, it was I who found him, and I who took him to Lars, and when Lars and I weren’t working out, you know what? I broke that up too!”
“Not to get technical, but I broke up with you,” Lars said.
“Not now, Lars.” My speech was roughly modeled on the one Jim Hawkins gives in the enemy’s camp, and I was extremely pleased to realize I knew so much of it by heart. “I’ve had the top of this business from the first,” I went on. “You can do your inexplicable intervention or you can leave me alone, but I no more fear you than I fear a fly.”
“You do fear flies,” Adrianna said blandly. “You’re always asking me to go after them.”
“Jesus!” I threw down my fork. “Just bluebottles, and will everybody stop interrupting?”
“But I want a turn to speak too,” Lars said. “Adrianna said to write down what we—” He fumbled with the paper and stood up, bumping the table with his shin and rattling the teacups. “I’ve had a lot of time to think, you know.” He emitted a convulsive nervous cough and then bore down on his piece of paper (graph paper, green tint). “When we first broke up, I felt as though you had sort of taken a dump on our relationship—excuse my French—but then I thought a while and realized it was more complicated.”
“I should hope so,” I interrupted. “God, why did I waste all that time with—”
“And I thought a lot about the beginning, when we first fell in love. The burritos. The hanging out. We never tried to fix each other, we enjoyed each other. Then you met the book and developed a new attitude, and although I admire you for striving, even when it seems you don’t know what exactly you’re striving for, I don’t think you had to go through all that. To be a good person I mean. I think you were already fine; the more I think about it, I know you were fine. So when Adrianna asked if I would come and help you drop the book, I said yes, but I did it with a secret motive. Actually, after you left, I got into therapy”—here his neck began to effloresce in red patches—“and I figured out that you were right: I had been lying to my mother, and now that I can talk more openly to her—about a few things—it’s better. Which I wanted to tell you and say thanks. So, I don’t want to say you have to give up the book, because that would be—well, kind of hypocritical, and also, frankly, condescending.”
“Lars,” Adrianna broke in. “This is a total breach of trust.”
“But if you do decide, on your own to give it up, and want to go back to an emotionally supportive kind of relationship, well, you know where I live. I changed the locks, but I could make you a key.”
“This is good boy,” Nancy said. She was smiling despite a mouth full of pie.
“Jeez, now what?” Adrianna rolled her eyes. “Are you going to propose to her?”
Lars coughed uneasily. “No. I thought—I mean, I’m trying to say—I miss you is all.”
I missed him too, though who can trace the arc of an emotion in its entirety? I wanted him to miss me and he was a great kisser, but as Adrianna had snarkily pointed out: if he loved me, cough up the ring!
All this time Rena had been sitting very still, not eating her pie, her eyes half-closed in thought. I don’t think she was really taking in the tentative steps Lars and I were making towards reconciliation.
“Listen,” she said to me, “probably all of us knew that you hated your job and that you had some ambivalence about Lars. Also it’s no secret that the way you read your book is somewhat partial. My nephew showed me the Disney version. ‘Oh my god,’ I said, ‘this is completely different! How come she never talks about the pirate business?’ But my concern isn’t literary accuracy; it’s Richard. I don’t know what happened to him. And that’s why I came today: to learn the truth about the bird.”
“He’s dead,” my father said.
“Who’s dead?” Lars said.
“I know he’s dead,” Rena said, “but did she kill him?”
I stamped up the crumbs on my plate with a damp thumb. “Rena has a soft spot for birds, and I know the rest of you thought of Richard as family. Well, he was as much a part of the family as Aunt Boothie’s ex-husband—not the one who worked in the steel industry, but the one who ran off with his secretary to Peru, who Mom always suspected wiped his butt on the towel at Thanksgiving. I forget if he was Boothie’s Two or Three.”
“Did you hear the question?” Adrianna said.
My mother put down her teacup. “I know it’s a sensitive question, but you can see, it does make a difference to us, if Richard died of natural causes, than if you, let’s say, under the influence of a book, or whatever else you might be, unknown to us, downloading from the Internet . . . ”
“Focus,” Adrianna said. “Let her answer the question.”
“Why on earth is everybody scrutinizing my obsessions? Don’t you think other people in this family have damaging enthusiasms? Should we call up Don Tatum and let him have a word? It’s not my book—it’s his penis that ought to be getting an intervention!”
“Now you’ve gone too far,” Adrianna said.
“I still can’t get over it,” Lars said, after a pause. His voice was listless and he twisted his napkin. “Nobody even told me Richard was dead.”
My mother covered her head with her hands. “All right, we are not going to delve into these subjects again. This kind of conversation is destructive for everybody. Instead we’re going to enjoy the pie. Tell me, Ms. Wang, do you think the nutmeg overwhelms the pumpkin?”
Adrianna was livid. “Do you want me go fetch that plastic bag? The one from T.J.Maxx that reeks of feather dust? Because this isn’t about Don and me, or Don and Mom, or you and me, it’s about whether you took a life.” Her chin shook as she spoke. Fine rhetoric, I granted her that. But no matter how many arguments Adrianna made—and clearly she wanted to argue until she was blue in the face—I was not going to get exercised about my so-called shortage of PET-LOVE and SLOPPY KINDNESS.
“If you want my ear, talk about BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING!”
“But you’re none of those things!” Adrianna said. “Where did this boy-hero stuff come from? We had the same childhood! We shared an Easy-Bake Oven and a Lite-Brite, remember? You showed me how to use a tampon! We used to like the same books. Remember Little Women?”
“Is that what you think?” I sat up in my chair. “That we shared a childhood? We were two separate people in one house, treated differently, according to how they perceived our abilities and talents.”
Adrianna rolled her eyes. “It’s either Mom or Dad or me—anyone but you—who’s to blame for all the stuff you don’t like. You want to pretend Latin I and Latin II set me up for success? All right, go ahead and think it! But at some point you’ll see your life is the result of your own sorry choices!”
I made a strange, guttural noise of exasperation, picked up the pie knife, and hacked at the crust on my plate. Butter crust, crumble shards. “That parrot died of natural causes and you all know it,” I said. “And even if he didn’t, you can’t pin me with murder. If anything, it was a mercy kill.”
“Mercy?” Rena said.
“He hated his life. A bird is supposed to be able to talk, and he couldn’t
talk—not in a meaningful way—and it made him really miserable. Plus, you know—he lived in a cage.”
There was an appalled silence.
“I was an idiot to think we could help you,” Adrianna said slowly. “I embody your values more than you do. It was bold of us to gather here, it was resolute. I wouldn’t call us “independent,” but so what? Interdependent people are nicer. You live like you’re the only person in the room!”
“You studied my index cards more than you let on. I suppose now you’re going to tell me you know more than I do about HORN-BLOWING?”
“Would you put the knife down now?” my mother asked me anxiously. “You’re mangling that pie.”
“Let her mangle it, Mom,” Adrianna mocked. The intervention appeared to have robbed her of whatever stability she still possessed, for she repeated the statement hotly: “Let her mangle it! I’m getting sad for you now, I really am,” she told me, a lowering shadow over her face. “You get inspired by stories about sailing the high seas, but you’re like a dead goldfish, floating belly-up in the tank. It’s pathetic! Ever since you read the damn book, you’ve been gearing up to do something, right? Well, do something, sister! Take a risk! Go somewhere! Get a job! Try loving somebody—for real, I mean, not just house-playing! There are all kinds of ways to have a life, but you’re the only person I know who thinks she’s risking something when she gets out of bed and thinks, do I have toast or cereal? Cereal somebody else paid for! You know what?” She was raving now, wheeling about the room like a crazy person. “I could forgive your passivity, if you were a gentle, deluded, slacker kind of person. But I can’t forgive a deluded, slacker person who fucks with my relationship and kills an innocent bird!”
I jumped up only to speak, but seeing me lunge, Adrianna panicked. In a deplorable display of cowardice, she scuttled away from me and pressed her back to the wall. I could tell by the workings of her face, and the girlish octave of her screams, that she thought I was going to stab her. The thought amazed me—and in my newfound confidence, stab her I did, pinning her hand against the wall, causing her to bleed copiously all over the Thomas Kinkade print we’d gotten my mother for her fiftieth birthday (“a cottage radiant with the light of love seems to bathe all of nature in an atmosphere of breathless serenity”).
Adrianna, did I do something at last?
I think I did. It was some time before I could remove the knife, partly out of squeamishness, and partly out of a sincere wish not to damage any nerve endings.
CHAPTER 25
Hours have passed since the intervention. Who intervened with whom, you might well ask. Who indeed. Yes, who. But now I am a little deflated and the pen is heavy in my hands. Regrettably I no longer feel like stabbing anyone.
I think I can skip over the particulars of the clean-up—predictable as they are. Adrianna bled against the Kinkade for a good five minutes, during which time Rena dry-heaved into a napkin and Lars called 9-1-1. At last, my parents wrapped the hand in a bath towel and hustled Adrianna off to the Emergency Room. The others fled, Nancy taking care to haul off the remainder of the pie. Alone in the house, I dropped into the chair where Lars had recently sat, and fancied I could smell his personal scent—something I’d always registered as a cross between Pears soap and tree resin. My hand, where I had gripped the knife, throbbed. The intervention had stirred feelings in me that I had been working hard not to feel these past few months. I was like a giant soup pot that had been left a long time to simmer on the stove, and now someone had come along and pried, with a wooden spoon, the burnt bits of onion and garlic, maybe even glutinous pasta, off the bottom. Those little crusty bits of food now floated to the top of the soup and they were, I believed, my feelings about Lars. Did I love him?
I called his cell and, after the preliminary greetings (hi, how are you, is your sister able to move her hand), I asked him if he’d meant what he’d said.
“Um, which time?” he asked.
“About how you missed me and want to make me a key to the apartment.”
There was a pause. “Well, after seeing you go after Adrianna with that boning knife, I think maybe I underestimated the depth of our problems.” Another pause, during which there rose, as if out of a deep trench, a stone wall that could not easily be breached. I had a flash of what I’d looked like with the knife in my hand—mentally speaking, an impressive piece of masonry.
“But when I said it, I meant it,” Lars clarified. “I mean, I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble if I hadn’t thought—but then, you know—you picked up the knife. And, well. It’s probably my fault for being over-hasty in my fantasies about reconciliation. Because, um . . . things change.”
“Do they?” I said ironically, although at that point I wasn’t in full control of my faculties, and a little unsure of where the irony of the situation lay.
Soon after I hung up, my mother called from the St. Vincent emergency room to tell me she and Adrianna were walking through the entrance (I could hear the ppppphhhht of the pneumatic doors). My father was parking the car, she said; I wondered, aloud, if he would manage to come out of it. We hung up, and I rushed around the house in a pointless mania, washing teacups and plates, rearranging pillows. Ten minutes later my mother reported that my father had surfaced and that all three of them were waiting in triage. A kind nurse had given Adrianna something to staunch the blood. An hour later, she called again and said, “We’re still in the emergency room. The delays are unconscionable.” And then again at ten, she called, saying something incomprehensible about Adrianna’s blood pressure. Most people can sustain a hand injury like hers without any trauma, so I ventured to wonder if Adrianna’s complications had something to do with her excess weight.
“This is hardly the time to talk about that. Do you realize you may have cut the ulnar nerve?” My mother hung up.
By midnight, when they had not returned, I felt the need to propitiate the gods, so I took my calfskin bag and walked through the cold night air to the library, where, though I had marked it, bent it, and left thumbprints of garlic mayonnaise through most of Chapter XXIX, I returned the book to a weatherized steel book bin. It made a dull thud as it landed, scattering, no doubt, a bone pile of other books, whose titles and contents I’ll never know. I felt a wild desire to stick my hand down the box’s maw and grasp my treasure again, but I consoled myself by saying I could no longer be trusted with it. And that I could check it out again, if need be, when the library opened. Or buy my own copy, though of course it wouldn’t be the same. No, no—scratch that!—I was done with the book. That was the point of the gesture: heal her hand! Plus, something else would come along one day and waft my consciousness higher.
At 2 A.M. my parents staggered into the house, looking grey and haggard. The TV had been blaring in their ears all night; they had eaten a lot of candy bars in the waiting room. Adrianna still hadn’t seen a doctor and there was some concern about the ulnar or maybe it was the median nerve. I got the distinct feeling that my parents’ patience with me had been exhausted. All these years in which I had refused to drive a car, all these months in which I had refused to get a job, they had indulged me without seeming to indulge me, but now they spoke to me with a flat expectancy in their voices that almost embarrassed me with its bare expression of confidence: as if I had been walking around naked all this time, and someone had casually handed me a towel.
“Take your father’s keys,” my mother said. “We told her you’d be there as soon as you could.”
“Maybe I could take a cab?”
“You don’t have cab fare.”
“But I’m directionally clueless. I’ll get lost.”
“I’m going to draw you a map.” My mother leaned over the breakfast bar, sketching quickly on a piece of pearl grey stationery. “This is our house, all right . . . You’re going to go east on Curtis Boulevard . . . ”
“She may not even want me there,” I said.
“She’s mad at you, all right. But she needs you. She’s frightene
d out of her wits. She asked the triage nurse what was the worst-case scenario with a hand injury like hers.”
“What did the nurse say?”
“It wasn’t a rational question,” my father said.
“The nurse said she didn’t know what was the worst-case scenario, but she’d had a man in yesterday who severed his finger in a snow blower.”
“Adrianna has a knife wound,” my father said.
“—The nurse said sometimes you see a case where the hand doesn’t get taken care of soon enough, so the nerves get compressed, and the hand just stiffens—” My mother stopped writing and held up one hand like a claw.
“Do you think she’s going to lose her hand?” I asked.
“No,” my father said firmly.
“No,” my mother admitted, a little reluctantly. She was angrier with me than I’d realized. I didn’t want to think about that.
I’ve never liked Long John Silver, but reading about him vigorously stumping around on his wooden leg prepared me to see the positive side of a crippled life. I shudder to think of it, but I know my strengths: I could lose a limb and, with the right wardrobe, still come off as sexy. I’m not saying I would want to wear a prosthetic hand, only that I’m the kind of girl who could pull it off, whereas Adrianna—what can I say? Her appeal is limited. Just as I was arriving at that conclusion, Adrianna rang. She sounded small and miserable. Was I coming, she wanted to know. Yes. What was I thinking about?
“Prosthetics,” I answered truthfully.
She began to sob.
“Not for you,” I hastily explained. But she was too far gone.
“Adrianna, come on. It’s not like I did it on purpose. You provoked me, don’t you think? Anyway, Mom and Dad said you’re not going to lose your hand! You dialed the phone, right?”
“Fuck you!” she said. “You should be apologizing.”
She hung up.
“Go brush your teeth,” my mother said. “You can leave in five minutes.”
