Treasure Island!!!

and say, “What are you doing?” “What are
you
doing?” I’d answer, but she never registered the sharpness of my reply. Instead she gave me the record of her accomplishments since rising at six in the morning and outlined, with cheerful precision, her tasks for the rest of the day. “You know me, I like to keep my ducks in a row.” I knew what she thought
my
ducks looked like—scattered round the pond, wings drooping, heads listing; one call to Animal Patrol would confirm they had West Nile virus. “But what were you doing just now when I called?” I am sure she wanted to catch me out in something frivolous—waxing the hair off my kneecaps, let’s say—but I always told her I was studying my book. “And what are you planning to do?” she persisted one day. “Now that you’ve left The Pet Library?” “Who knows,” I said bitterly, “But I will never be a Latin teacher!” She denied that she had ever harbored the expectation; oh yes, she pretended to be amazed. “We never expected you to follow in Daddy’s footsteps. Whatever you want to do, that’s what you should do, darling. We’ve never expected anything from you or Adrianna.” True, in that they certainly never
helped
me to do anything.
    When this kind of conversation put me into a funk, I bounced around town, picking up niceties for our home and little masculine luxuries for Lars (shaving creams, foot massager, new lizard watch band), and I had time to attend to my own appearance, too, so between the haircuts and eyebrow waxes and cheap Asian manicures, I’d never looked better in my life.
    “But listen,” Lars said one morning, “I’ve been looking over the credit card bill and I think we need to cool it a while. Maybe it’s just too many take-outs, and we could cook more. The thing is, this is the first time I haven’t been able to pay off my monthly balance.”
    “Lars, you don’t have to pay off the monthly balance!” I kissed his unsmiling mouth. “That’s why they call it credit.”
    Lars pulled back from my kiss; we were in the living room and he didn’t like to start anything near Richard. Not that the bedroom was much better; one blood-curdling scream and Lars’s erection would take French leave. As I kissed him again, he responded with demeaning ambivalence. One hand groped me; the other made placating gestures to Richard, who’d begun to scream.
    “Lars,” I hissed. “Stop talking to him.”
    “Wasn’t talking. Was just, you know, indicating, that everything’s okay. His back feathers ruffled.”
    We glared at each other.
    “He gets upset,” Lars added.
    “Scrrraaaawww!” Richard said.
    “Jesus,” I said. “I don’t feel like kissing
now
.”
    “That’s okay. That’s totally cool. No problem.”
    “No problem?”
    “No problem!” he repeated cheerfully.
    Of course, there
were
problems, but the problems were seated beyond the reach of argument—way out in some rural zone where there isn’t even Internet access. I tried to handle Lars with care, as if civility could make up for the deficits, but time stripped our verdant orchard of its leaves. Picture us on a stage with a skeletal Beckett-like tree. Clearly the underlying issue was that Lars didn’t want me to change.
    “I like your hair the way it is,” he said when he heard me on the phone, making a color appointment.
    Lars didn’t want me to grow.
    “You look great,” he said, often without even looking.
    One Saturday when actively weeding through my wardrobe to make the final decision on what to discard, I allowed Lars to come upon me in a butternut squash sweater and a pair of red corduroy pants.
    “That’s a nice sweater,” he said. “Is it new?”
    “This is a filthy old sweater I’ve had since eleventh grade. It’s made of rayon.”
    “Oh.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you like it with these pants?”
    “Yes.”
    “Even though the colors clash?”
    “Yes.”
    “Even though the pants are baggy in the butt?”
    “It looks good on you,” he said.
    Which was supposed to be a compliment, but in its refusal to engage reality was more accurately the verbal equivalent of a chuck on the chin. I knew very well what Lars meant when he praised me, and held me, and indicated through a caress that he liked me
just the way I was
; I knew, better than he knew himself, that he wanted to ensure he never be confronted with what, in his own personality, might need pruning or pushing or prodding, that behind every