Treasure Island!!!

had been worried that I was
not
a noticing person, but of course, I am; I just notice different things.
     
    “Who?” my mother was saying to me a few hours later, as she bent over and stuck her head into the dryer. “This lint trap is eating our towels. No, I don’t remember. Well, the name sounds familiar. One of your elementary school friends?”
    “Honestly, Mom. How could you not remember? Patty Pacholewski was a deity in fifth grade.”
    I pushed aside an empty basket and sat down on the counter, thinking about Patty. How we had shared her heart-shaped bangles, her dolphin rings. Her puffy-sleeved, round-collared, pastel-colored blouses. The holiday concert to which she wore a blouse of slippery, white sateen. Her charm bracelet with a heart toggle clasp, my own parrot green windbreaker whose white hood ties I had chewed to a pulp, her pale pink car coat made of light brushed wool which hung on the peg in the cloak room three pegs down from mine. And her umbrella! Also pink, with a white handle in the shape of a swan.
    “I used to move my desk around the classroom, to get a better view of her blue eye or a better view of her green one.”
    “Was she the diabetic?”
    “No, that was Johanna Miller,” I said testily.
    “Sweetheart.” My mother dropped a dark globe of lint into the trashcan and turned to me with an openly worried face. “Did you feed Richard today? When I went in your room to get your clothes, he looked lackluster. I took him the left-over tabbouli.”
    “Okay, whatever.”
    “Darling, a bird is a responsibility. You have to feed him
every
day, not just when you feel like it.” Insert lecture on nutrition here. “Your father thinks he needs exercise.”
    When my mother first mentioned Richard, the sternness of her gaze had given me a pang; I felt like Jim Hawkins, pinned by a knife to the mast. But now I started to laugh. “Daddy
said
that?”
    “You
know
how he is. Why are you laughing?”
    “No reason.”
    But later I marched into Adrianna’s room and said, “How many times has Mom pulled you aside, and told you in a calculatedly casual way, ‘Your father feels this,’ ‘What’s important to your father is that’?”
    “I thought we weren’t talking.”
    “Oh, let’s give that up,” I said. “I’m sorry if I barged in on you on top of old Smokey, but when I followed you to his house, I didn’t know what I was going to see. Anyway, I haven’t told Mom and Dad. So your secret is safe with me.”
    She regarded me warily. Lately her “dates” had been a bit erratic and there had been some late night muffled phone calls. I’d gathered the affair wasn’t going all that well, but had strategically made a point of not prying. Now I lay down on the rug of her room and gently guided my legs over the back of my head. “If you can’t afford the healings,” Bev had said, “take up something you
can
afford,” and she had demonstrated, quite powerfully, a yoga maneuver called “the plough.” I often did the plough while reading
Treasure Island
, but it made my neck hurt.
    “Anyway,” I panted, “you do know what I mean about Mom. It’s like she radios into headquarters for Dad’s feelings, when she senses hers need backup.” I lowered my legs back to the rug and exhaled.
    “You need a job,” Adrianna said. “You need a wider perspective on life and a wider range of interests.”
    “A materialist way of looking at things. Right now I’m on a spiritual journey and not so naïve to think a job is going to solve my problems. When the log-house fills with smoke, and Jim Hawkins and the crew think they’re trapped, the captain cries, ‘Out, lads, out, and fight ’em in the open!’ So Jim grabs a cutlass.”
    “I’m afraid the opportunities for brandishing a cutlass have long passed,” Adrianna said. “I’ve been fighting with Don,” she added abruptly.
    Apparently when I had been at pains to share a crucial incident in a life-changing novel, she had given her mind permission to wander, and it had wandered right into the cul-de-sac of her sorry-ass relationship. I couldn’t pretend to be surprised, but I did pretend briefly not to know who she was talking about. Her need to confide was so great that she let my jibe pass.
    “Not exactly fighting,” she said. “But things have been a little rough lately. It’s absolutely baffling . . . ”
    “I thought you guys were so in love.”
    “Well, we are,” she said, deaf to sarcasm. “Our feelings for