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Treasure Island!!!

Treasure Island!!!

Titel: Treasure Island!!! Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Sara Levine
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each other are as strong as ever. Really, I couldn’t ask for a better man than Don.” Here I had to be careful not to gag. “But we’re struggling over little things,” she went on. “And I’m getting tired of having to reassure him all the time about his age.”
    “Oh, is he feeling . . . elderly?”
    “I tell him I don’t care; I like that he’s mature and knows his mind, but he says I don’t know what I’m missing. He worries that he’s depriving me of a more exciting dating life.”
    “It’s true you haven’t played the field much.”
    “I don’t want to play the field!” She shook her head. “Actually I think the problem is that his father is sick, and his mother, who’s a few years younger, is exhausted by taking care of him, and he looks at them having a hard time, and imagines how we could turn out.”
    “His parents are still alive? They must be ancient!”
    “People live a long time now, you know.”
    “There’s not much about love in
Treasure Island
. If you’d read it, you’d find it more of a study of friendships between men. I suppose that’s why I find it so liberating. I’ve had enough of romances where the woman exhausts herself, just pouring herself into her man, obsessing about his comings and goings.”
    Just then the laptop sitting on her desk bleeped. She had mail. “It’s probably from
him
,” she said. “Do you mind? I want to read it alone.”
    “Not at all,” I said, getting up to leave. “But I thought you guys only did snail mail.”
    “What made you think that?”
    Here, I am embarrassed to say, I let my gaze wander to her mattress, under which she stored her horrid collection of billet-doux. She followed my gaze and blushed deeply.
    “Get out of my room,” she said in a trembling voice. “Now!”
    The next time I checked under the mattress, the beribboned stash was gone. I could have found it, I’m sure, but I had better things to do than tear her room apart. By now I had studied
Treasure Island
to a nicety and the studies were paying off. I could stand in line at the sandwich shop and riff on one or two Core Values before Patty had even rung my order up.
    “Where was I?” I said as she knocked a roll of quarters against the register’s edge. “Oh yeah, so now I’ve rid myself of a terrible job, and a terrible boyfriend, I’m free to direct my life in ways I’d never imagined. Did I ever tell you how I met Lars? I didn’t seize on him as a boyfriend; I didn’t pluck him from a field of guys. I drifted into the thing like so much driftwood, do you know what I mean? When do you see Jim Hawkins drifting into anything? Everything he does—thank you, but I think you still owe me a nickel—everything he does, is because he gets an idea in his head. Patty,
you
should read
Treasure Island
. You’re kind of dawdling in the harbor, right, what with this sandwich shop job. I bet if you read thirty pages, you’d lift up anchor and sail into the open sea towards your goal!”
    “I have a goal,” Patty said, “and that’s to get through my shift with as little human interaction as possible.”
    She was a laugh, that Patty!
    Truthfully, I’m the kind of person who throws things away—letters, photos, tiresome clothes and people—and finding Patty was like finding some old thing in the closet that I had
meant
to discard. First there is annoyance (“I thought I’d thrown this out”), then the dawning realization of your luck. Once I threw away a curling iron and wore my hair straight for twelve weeks. Just when I was ready to go curly again, I found the iron under a silk camisole I’d never washed. There was a kind of fate in it. The indicator light no longer worked, but it was basically all right.
    Patty was a great find. In some ways I was more sentimental about her girlhood than my own. She was the only girl whose hair had appeared in a new shape each day: braids, plaits, buns, banana-like funnels. She was the only girl who had worn creased navy slacks and pale colored blouses. Even now, in her sandwich shop blouse, which I knew was not of her choosing, and a visor, which dulled a bit the shine of her hair, she sent my mind flying back to years of kaleidoscopic detail, a time when a fresh pair of rainbow shoelaces or a polka-dot ribbon on a barrette felt, to a girl, like the revolution of a planet. And she was always calling up memories, whether she meant to or not. Once when I complained that she had stinted me on garnishes, she

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