Treasure Island!!!

this?” “Asparagus peeler.” “What’s this?” “Pineapple slicer.” “What’s
this?
” “Microplane grater,” my mother said, blushing.) But in my bedroom, time had stood still. A child-sized desk contained a sheaf of water-stained notebook paper, three butterscotch candies, a perfectly preserved Chapstick, and two broken hairclips. I trod on the shag rug in which I’d burnt a hole when I was fifteen, flicked on the bedside lamp shaped like a ballerina, and lay on the chenille bedspread, yellow with pink fringe. On the pillows my mother had propped up the old, soft, heart-sickening gang of stuffed animals: Skipper, Frisky, Buttons, My-Mys, Silky Boy, Toodles-Free, Plush . . . Fuck you all, I wanted to say, and hurl them against the wall.
    The only new feature of my room was Richard. I had tried to establish his cage in the kitchen, or the living room, or the dining room, but my father sneezed and streamed like there was no tomorrow. So feather dust decided it: Richard lodged with me. “Do I even know for sure he sleeps at night?” I thought our first evening together, the blankets pulled up to my chin. Down the hall, the dishwasher had long ceased rumbling; no cars tore along the road; not even a dog walker tramped by to adorn the silence with a cheery jingle. I listened: no sound. No squawks, no creepy snores, no rustling in the cage. Wildly grateful, I took two Xanax and fell asleep.
    As the dawn crept in, Richard began to scream. Scraaaaw! Scraaaww! Scraaaaawww! This became routine. Even on the rare morning when he was quiet, I lay awake, sweating bullets,
waiting
for the screams.
    “Darling, just uncover his cage,” my mother said. “I think it’s his way of saying, Heigh-ho, let’s start my morning!”
    And it wasn’t as if the rest of the house offered peace. Often, under the guise of cooking, my mother monopolized the kitchen for hours, clattering pots and pans, singing along to the music of the swinging forties, and running the garbage disposal. What was she
grinding
in there, I wondered. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a human carcass. My father, by no stretch of the imagination a talker, nevertheless whistled, stomped, coughed, and called out domestic requests to my mother, which he amplified, against his nature, in order to be heard over her swinging forties. Adrianna was the worst, though. She waylaid me in any room for casual conversation; played computer games that beeped and buzzed; and in the shower, vigorously blew her nose (into a washcloth? Into the water stream itself? Did I
want
to know?). “Well,” Adrianna said, “have you heard from Lars?” “I just
left
him.” “I know,” she said eagerly, “but I thought maybe he’d call.” A few days later: “So,” Adrianna said. “Any word from Lars?” “I told you, I left him.” “Sometimes things drag on.”
    By the third week, the best thing about living at home, I’d decided, was the square footage. I don’t cherish the ranch house as an architectural form, but my parents’ house ran to so many rooms that, in daylight, I could fall into a stride and imagine myself aboard the Hispaniola. I came to think of the kitchen as the galley; and the living room as the main hold; and the long dark coffin of a dining room in which I endured countless suffocating family dinners, I renamed the round-house, not knowing what that meant but liking the idea of its not having any corners. In this way the stale homestead became a vessel of fresh adventure, though once I made the mistake of picking up the phone when Aunt Boothie called and listened to her talk, quite brazenly, about what it meant that both my sister and I were living rent-free in our parents’ house.
    “Quite frankly I don’t think of this as a house,” I said.
     
    I have to hand it to my mother. My first week home, she cooked my favorite foods, or what she
remembered
were my favorite foods; her memory had stalled, like a wet engine, at my senior year in high school. She lit candles, broke out the cloth napkins, and tried to pretend that we were celebrating some kind of holiday. What kind of holiday would that be? Take Your Daughter In When Her Boyfriend Kicks Her Out Day? Anyway she tried. She served wine at dinner in hand-blown amethyst-swirled Mexican glasses and smiled wet-eyed as she raised her glass: “How wonderful that we’re all together again!” But she didn’t have the family behind her. Adrianna sighed heavily, my father looked