Treasure Island!!!

her foot. She walked away, keys jangling.
    “Asswipe,” Lars repeated. “My god, weren’t we, like, in love once? I’m still trying to get my mind around how it all went wrong. Did you ever love me? Maybe you just used me.”
    More blathering on in this vein: the downside of choosing a sensitive boyfriend. Good looking, solvent,
tried
to be sensitive to my needs, but when we broke up, whoa Nelly! It was all about
him.
Feelings, feelings, feelings; out of nowhere a torrent of emotion as if someone had just turned on the Oprah hose, and
then
he sidles over to give me a hug.
    I shrank from him. “Look here, are you keeping the bird or not?”
    He was not.
    Later I learned that he had privately nicknamed me “Hamburger Helpless,” owing to my habit of not helping out more around the apartment. But at the time he said nothing about that. We said goodbye, Lars solemn and unbending, me incensed, and then I struggled out the door with Richard’s cumbersome cage in my hand. The bird, shocked by the cold winter air, squawked a little as I hit the street. “Shut up,” I said. It consoled me to think I was draining two-thirds of the life from Lars’s apartment.
    “Good for you!” my mother said.
    “What on earth are you talking about? Take this psychopath, please.”
    She found a niche for the cage in the back, assured me it had plenty of air pockets, and then climbed into the driver’s seat, having already loaded the heavy things.
    “Well, we’re off!” she said, as if we were going to sea in a schooner, with a piping boatswain and pig-tailed singing seamen, when in fact we were going to her house, with a freaky, self-righteous, red-eyed, greasy-feathered, clapper-clawed parrot in the back of a rented van.
     

CHAPTER 14
     
    T he move home was a turning point for me. Well, less like a turning and more like a case of emergency in which you smash glass. Even with my post-collegiate trickle of bad-paying jobs, I’d never worried that I’d have no place to live. I’d always thought my parents would subsidize my apartment. A year earlier, my sister had gotten herself into such a credit card mess she elected to move home to get her finances in order. How incredible that Adrianna would slide backwards, I’d thought many times, that she would sacrifice the INDEPENDENCE she had earned by agreeing to not only eat meals with my parents, but to share the same bathroom!
    I worried about my sister if I made time to think about her at all. She didn’t have many friends; her devotion to her job seemed unhealthy; and then there was her weight. “Pleasantly plump,” my mother said, if pressed, but my mother was pleasant herself, and my father, who resembled a string bean, claimed judiciously that all of us were “lookers.” In high school whenever I had mentioned Adrianna’s weight, my parents circled their wagons. “No, we
don’t
think teasing strengthens character,” they’d say. Adrianna read storybooks to sick children, played F5 and G5 in the handbell ensemble, volunteered at the county board of mental retardation, and won the Latin Club essay contest three years in a row. There was no doubt she was their favorite daughter. Whereas I, the eldest, baffled them because I did not scan the horizon for volunteer opportunities; because I ran from anyone stinking of need; because I hung out at the mall and chased after boys. What was I interested in? Why did I insist on watching TV? How come I didn’t apply myself? Was I
really
interested in celebrity beauty secrets or pretending just to rile them?
    You can imagine how great it was to jump out of that house at age twenty-one, and now, four years later I was back. As I pulled my banana boxes through the front entrance, past mailbox, mezuzah, and my mother’s idea of a whimsical doorknocker (contented pig, antique bronze), past my father’s study (“
Per aspera ad astra
,” he said, looking up from his stapler), I could hardly believe what was happening to me. My attention snagged on the pencil-marked ladders on the kitchen doorframe, one rung for each daughter’s surge of height. Five feet four and a dark lead bar. They thought they had me pegged.
    The house hadn’t changed since I’d lived there. In the living room there were a few new throw pillows, my father had added to his wardrobe a knit shirt, identical to the one he’d worn the past twenty years, and when I banged around in the kitchen drawers, I invariably turned up some new gizmo. (“What’s