Treasure Island!!!

“love affair” in new lights. Maybe, I reasoned, she was sitting on his face for monetary reasons. Maybe she let him do things to her in exchange for cash, with a long-term plan to pay off her credit card debt and move out of our parents’ house. And yet, however hard I tried to imagine Adrianna as a player—someone who would trade sexual favors for cash—I stumbled on her basic goodness. She had spoken of love as a flower that might be crushed underfoot. More likely she thought she loved Mr. Tatum and was oblivious to how large a role his financial steadiness played in the attraction. I once used the term “Sugar Daddy” in her presence and she missed my meaning entirely, recalling instead, with childish enthusiasm, the milk caramel lollipop of the same name.
    Still I needed to understand the contours of this affair. How long had she been seeing Mr. Tatum? Was she seeing only him or might there be other old unattractive men involved? To answer these questions I ventured into her room when she was at work. I was looking for a diary; instead I found a batch of letters. Pathetic things! She had wrapped them up in a gold ribbon from a chocolate box and hidden them under her mattress. Reader, you can imagine what an old man writes a young woman when he thinks nobody else is going to read the dreck.
Last night was unforgettable
(and then tedious quasi-poetic, quasi-porno reminders of what he couldn’t forget). Foreign-language endearments:
mi muñeca
,
mon petit canard en plastique
. Places he wanted to take her, show her, touch her, et cetera. His penmanship was all right, but he probably wrote the letters wearing his best bifocals. Was it my imagination, or did the very pages smell of milk of magnesia, glycerine soap? Adrianna hadn’t arranged the letters in chronological order, but gradually I began to make out an emotional pattern. On the left hand of the desk, I placed the booty letters: Thank you for last night, You are so lovely I hardly believe I deserve you, et cetera. On the right hand of the desk, pleas and promises: Give me time, Tell me what I did wrong, I know I can make it up to you, et cetera. And in the chaotic middle, everything else: a photocopied Shakespearean sonnet (the one about “bare ruined choirs,” for
obvious
reasons); the lyrics to “Ain’t Misbehavin’”; and a memo from The Board of Education about school lunches regarding the importance of incorporating whole grains.
    I
thought
I was interested in playing detective, but by the third encomium to a salty pair of Adrianna’s underwear, I couldn’t bear to read another word, let alone arrange the letters in order and figure out the dates.
    I knew enough already: the affair was farther along than I’d even feared.
    “Mom, do you know who Adrianna is seeing at nights?”
    “Oh,
is
she seeing someone?” My mother looked up from the apples she was coring on a medieval-looking appliance she had clamped to the counter.
    “Someone you know. Don’t you want to ask her?”
    “If she wants to tell us, she’ll tell us.”
    “‘When she’s ready,’” I mocked.
    “Exactly!”
    That’s the thing with liberal parents. Proud of their so-called respect for boundaries, they averted their gazes while we stepped in the dog shit. Did they have curiosity? If they knew their youngest daughter was fucking an old family friend, would they care? Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d say, Well, I’m sure if it’s not a match made in heaven, she’ll figure it out for herself. “We’ve always believed in letting our children find their own way,” I can hear my mother saying.
    I’m sorry to say that despite the shocking discovery of Adrianna’s affair, things carried on much as usual. Adrianna avoided my company, and I kept her secret, annoyed as hell, but confident that its value might appreciate in time. I got used to a certain companionable rhythm with my mother, who divided her time between cooking, laundry, housework, water aerobics, dance lessons, trips to Costco and Wild Birds Unlimited, and tutoring Latin stragglers. On weekends my father and Adrianna fell upon us, boring us with their lesson plans, scrounging through the kitchen, watching TV. Some nights all four of us would eat together and then sit in the main hold to watch
Moulin Rouge
or whatever was on television; other nights I would eat with my parents alone, imagining Mr. Tatum eating Adrianna. Then my mother would get out the classifieds and in her discreet way try