Cleaning Out My Closet: Orcas Edition #1

I was working in the shop last week when a young woman, probably about my age but I'm horrible at guessing age, picked out a bowl and brought it over to me. I reached for my pen and started writing the receipt. I'd barely finished writing the date when the woman exclaimed, "Oh, you're left-handed!"  
     Does the planet's entire population of left-handers vacation on Orcas Island? I wondered. What I said, though, was "Yes. Yes I am."
     "I am too!" the girl squealed, as though this were the best news she'd received all week. Then she stared at me so purposefully that I looked down to see if I'd accidentally spilled something on my shirt. "What's your name?" she asked.  
     Is this... I thought. ...Are you hitting on me?
     "Um," I answered, "Olivia?" I felt like I needed to ask, in case she knew something I didn't.
     "Does your last name start with an O?"
     "Um...no?"
     "I ask," she said, "because my boyfriend and I have started a club of left-handed people whose first and last name start with the same letter." She then proceeded to name off a string of around ten people whom she'd already recruited--a merry band of alliterative left-handers collected during her travels.
     "That's something," I replied, smiling and judging the shit out of her while simultaneously wishing I'd thought of it first.

My mom has been on the island for the past week doing firings in the gas kiln at Crow Valley Pottery with her potter friend Sharon. Because Sharon and her husband Mike have a guest room in their house that my mom adores--seriously, I think she loves this room more than she loves me--she always stays with them when she's here, nevermind that her daughter is also here, all alone and starved for affection in her apartment in the woods.
     The other night I went over to Mike and Sharon's house for dinner. As we were preparing the meal the conversation turned, as most of my conversations do, to literature. I casually (by which I mean I had to work to hide the desperation in my voice) mentioned that the Orcas Island Public Library does not house any of the Anne of Green Gables series. "We have it!" Sharon exclaimed, and she led me into the basement and motioned toward the bookcase. "Take your pick."
     It would be an understatement to say that this bookshelf was magical. Some of the books, Sharon explained, had belonged to her grandfather when he was a child. Dusty, yellowed hardbacks of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, entire collections of Rudyard Kipling and George Eliot with red spines embossed with gold. It was incredible.
     "I'm going back upstairs," Sharon said. "Take your time."
     I was so mesmerized I hardly heard her. "You probably won't see me again," I said as she turned to head up the stairs. I heard her open the door to the kitchen and announce to my mom, "I just showed Livvy the books." My mother, bless her heart, didn't miss a beat. "You probably won't see her again," she said.

For the past few months I've been trying to remember a specific word that has been agonizingly elusive. I wanted to use it the other night, but it was as though it had disappeared entirely from my vocabulary, leaving behind nothing more than the clue that it probably, but not definitely, started with a P. I lost close to an hour of sleep searching the dusty shelves of my brain for that damn word, but all my mind kept giving me was "presumptuous" and "precocious," both of which I know and neither of which were even close to being in the vicinity of right.
     The next morning I rode my bike over to Crow Valley Pottery to visit my mom and Sharon while they glazed. "I've been trying to think of this word," I told them, "that describes someone who tries to impress people with their intelligence, who tries to act way smarter than they actually are."
     My mom, who I thought would shout it out immediately and thus end my months-long misery, stared at me blank-faced.
     "Oh!" Sharon exclaimed, "I know exactly the word you're looking for...but I can't think of it!"
     I asked Michael, the owner of Crow Valley, and he apologetically offered "pompous" and "poser."
     Dejected, I sat down in the grass with my book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and tried to ignore the word that was both everywhere and nowhere. I'd been having issues with the book, as I'm sure those of you who have read it will have also experienced. It caters to the highly intellectual--it is, after all, a Pulitzer-winner--and its elitism irritated me. This book, I thought, is just so goddamn pretentious. PRETENTIOUS! THAT'S IT!
     "Pretentious!" I shouted, and rolled onto my back in relief.
     "Ohhhhh," my mom and Sharon replied in unison. "Of course!"
     "Pretentious pretentious pretentious," I said. "I should get that tattooed on my hand so I don't forget it again.
     My mom laughed. "Most people get tattoos of skulls or hearts with women's names inside them," she said. "My daughter gets vocabulary."