Treasure Island!!!

had such a good time I might have been jealous, except I didn’t want the bird to sit on me. The sharp beak. The black tongue. The scaly claws. Ugh!
    “Don’t let him vent on my index cards,” I said. “And if he gets anywhere near my new bag, I’ll kill you.” My calfskin bag boasted two small side pockets and a main compartment exactly big enough for
Treasure Island
. Rolled leather handles; turn-lock enclosure.
    “Maybe you resent him because he cost you your job,” Lars said as he walked around the room in big figure eights.
    “
That
job? Are you kidding?”
    I resented Richard for other reasons. He screamed frequently and imitated Lars’s morning cough. A white fungus stippled his beak.
    “You can take that off with a little soap and water,” Lars said.
    “I don’t want to coddle him, I’m sure birds in the wild have it. But what in the world should I do about the talking?”
    Richard had proved to be a fine mimic, but he favored the voices he heard on the television, which I kept on to overcome the tedium of his lessons.
    “Steer the boat, girlfriend,” I said.
    “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!”
    “Steer the boat, girlfriend.”
    “Fall blowout carpet sale!”
    “Steer the boat, girlfriend. I’m speaking loud enough, aren’t I?”
    “You always do,” Lars said.
    “There’s
nothing
in
Treasure Island
about how the parrot begins to talk. No tips at all on the learning process.”
    “It’s a story, not a user’s manual. But don’t give up, you’ve got time. Parrots can live for a hundred years, you know.”
    A hundred years? I glimpsed myself grown old. With a liver-spotted hand, I reached out for the birdseed; an empty house, a funeral procession, Richard on a stranger’s arm, flapping his wings on my grave. These images cooled my fervor for the project. One afternoon when the bird let loose a familiar torrent of enthusiasm about a hot double beef patty stacked with cheese, I threw down my book and glared. It was the middle of the day. I covered his cage with the cloth.
    “There. Now you’ll let me read.”
    “Scrrraw,” he said softly and then quickly fell asleep.
    A few hours later, as I rifled through Lars’s desk in search of photos, letters, and ticket stubs from his previous girlfriends, the quiet apartment began to feel like a tomb in which I had been buried alive. The autumnal light, the sound of Richard grinding his beak. But at six o’clock, the door burst open, and there was my boyfriend with a bag of dinner in hand. How I leapt from the sofa, how I forgot the indeterminate contents of the desk, how we clung to each other like newlyweds! The sofa that had seemed a desolate raft in the sea of his absence now became a schooner in which we glided, watching television, eating fried food, and kissing each other’s ears.
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    I don’t have the training,” I said to Rena in the coffee house. “I love cake decorating, but to actually get a job, I’d have to go to pastry school and learn fondant and . . . tart doughs and . . . petit fours.”
    “Well, maybe you’d like that,” Rena said.
    “Right now I’m liking the freedom of being cut loose from the job, and the lease on my studio, and the old expectations! I can’t describe it. When Henry James read
Treasure Island
, he wrote Stevenson a fan letter and said, ‘I feel like a boy again!’ Exactly how I feel, but I never was a boy. I’m giddy, can you tell?”
    “Too much sugar, maybe.” Rena looked down at the bill and flushed. “Speaking of which, I think she forgot to charge us for a coffee. No, there it is. Oh, well.” Gloomily, she slid a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check. “How’s Richard? Did you bring pictures?”
    “Was it you who said a pet would be good for me? The responsibility? Maybe it was Adrianna’s half-brained idea. He’s a drag. Every time he fails, it’s like I’m failing. I say, ‘Steer the boat, girlfriend’ twenty times and he looks at me like I’m part of his seed tray.”
    “Birds like seeds.”
    “I’ve pretty much given up on him for decent conversation. But I don’t like the way he follows me around the apartment with his eyes. It’s creepy, how he always seems to be looking. He sits on his perch and stares—like this.” I goggled my eyes and willed my nose to appear like a sharp hard beak. “I used to read
Treasure Island
out loud, but he inhibits me.”
    Rena took the sugar dispenser out of my hand.
    “Pets have to be chosen