Treasure Island!!!

with care. It’s not like buying a pair of shoes or something. Which reminds me, where’d you get that bag?”
    “Anniversary present from Lars.”
    A flurry of activity as I showed her the contrast stitching and the side pockets that held my index cards on
Treasure Island
.
    “Don’t think
he
chose it, Rena. He was going to get flowers. I redirected him.”
    “I’d get a bag like that if it was vegan,” Rena sighed.
     
    “Poor Rena,” I said to Lars as we sat on the couch and pulled apart our chopsticks. “Yesterday she pretended not to like my bag because it wasn’t vegan, when the truth is she can’t afford anything like this because she works as a pet-sitter. Have you ever seen her put on that act? The holier-than-thou voluntary vow of poverty to save the animals thing?”
    “She’s always been anxious about money,” Lars observed. He tipped half the carton of egg foo yong onto my plate.
    “Next time let’s not bother with the plates,” I said.
    “The boat!” said Richard.
    Lars and I turned to each other in amazement. I gripped his shoulder.
    “Did you hear that? I’m going to cry!”
    “Pay-off time,” Lars said, serenely lifting to his mouth a greasy bundle of noodles.
    I peered into the cage. “Again! You can do it!” Richard gazed into the distance and after a moment, raised his tail feathers and excreted something slimy.
    I slunk back to the couch and picked up my chopsticks.
    “Seeing Rena made me realize I don’t want to rush back into a meaningless job just to pay the utility bill. It isn’t worth it. I have bad dreams about the wrong kind of job.”
    “What kind of dreams?”
    In one I sat in the secretary pool at Leonard Milkins Middle School, where my father teaches Latin. In another I was making out with my mother when I had been hired to do yard work.
    “They’re too boring to describe. I go to work with my dad. When I first read the book I dreamed every night I was Jim Hawkins. Clearly I’ve strayed. I think my unconscious mind is trying to warn me to stay unemployed a while.”
    “
Boat!
” Lars repeated and I thought, Why, he’s as proud as I am.
    “To Richard,” I toasted, “our baby bird who’s finally learning!”
    “Here’s to ourselves!”
    “Here’s to ourselves,” I repeated, “and hold your luff, plenty of prizes and plenty of duff! And here’s to me and my state of creative unrest!”
    I expected Lars to say something else, but he only puckered his forehead and drank.
     

CHAPTER 9
     
    S ometimes I consider BOLDNESS a quality one has or does not have; other times I think of BOLDNESS as a quality one chooses to cultivate or to let wither on the vine. To avoid thinking in that simplest of dichotomies—bold, not bold—I try to imagine a continuum on which persons of varying degrees of BOLDNESS may be arranged. Unfortunately, the longer I lived with Lars, the more clearly it came to my attention, like a hangnail one feels smarting and tries not to bite, that Lars didn’t exemplify even the far far other end of BOLDNESS ; in fact on the continuum of BOLDNESS , Lars was off the line.
     
    Boldness Perceived as a Continuum
     
    Boldness—Impudence—Self-Reliance—Timidity—Cowardice—
     
    Every day he trailed off to the same low-paying techie support job he’d done since graduating college.
    “Isn’t it time you made your move?”
    “What move?” he said.
    “Onward! Upward!”
    But he never responded well to such suggestions, insisting that he liked his job, liked talking to people and figuring out problems. One morning when I pressed him to seek out opportunities for advancement, cheer-leading him into a state of energy and self-confidence, exhausting myself at the crumby breakfast table in the hope that he would walk out the door with fresh resolve and make us both proud, he revealed (nonchalantly) that he’d been offered a chance to do something at a software company six months before and passed it up.
    And why?
    He liked that his job left him “free” on the weekends!
    Our weekends, of course, I enjoyed prodigiously; Lars did all the things that I arranged—brunches, shopping, movies. On weekdays, I kept myself in a whirl, partly to avoid missing Lars and partly to insure I didn’t stumble back to The Pet Library and beg for my job back. I avoided my parents, knowing they would fail to understand my devotion to
Treasure Island
and worry instead about my outward appearance of inertia. Sometimes my mother would telephone