Surviving Valencia Read online

  “She has the gait of an old man,” added her assistant. I pictured a fat, flat-footed old man wearing overalls, swinging on a gate.

  Thus I began walking on my tiptoes in an effort to be more lady-like. Not just in the dance studio, but everywhere I went.

  “What are you doing? Where did you learn that? Do you want to drive me to take pills?” my mother asked me.

  “Can’t you drive yourself?” I said back. See, I was not slow. That was a good comeback for someone who was not yet five. It got me a slap across the face. Slaps were also a commonplace occurrence back in those days. Everything was rougher and children were not special. Really, it was not so bad.

  “Valencia, help me walk like you do,” I told my sister one day, after I had followed her around the house on my toes for an hour.

  “Just walk,” she said, looking at me suspiciously. “You know, walk, like anyone does.”

  My father, who was sitting at the kitchen table clipping coupons for my mother, had to get up and go for a drive by himself at that point. I knew it was my fault, and I knew that no matter how well I learned to walk, I would never make my parents as happy as Van and Valencia could make them.

  When I was five or six, Fame was all the rage. My mother walked around the house with a laundry basket singing along to her huge, 1970’s style headphones.

  “Stop it mom,” I told her.

  “Sing along with me!” she yelled over the sound of the vacuum cleaner she was pushing, smiling and bopping her head. “Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember!” Back then, before they were gone, she was sometimes happy.

  Along with the torture of watching her sway and jiggle and croon along, Fame reignited my mother’s interest in turning me into a dancer. Several months or a year had gone by and she seemed to think it might not hurt for me to have another go at it.

  She outfitted me in a stylish ensemble of a purple leotard, black tights, pink legwarmers, and off the shoulder sweatshirt that said Heartbreaker, and took me to a different, fancier dance teacher across town.

  “Behave yourself and do everything Madame Strathmore says,” she told me, smacking my butt on my way out of the car to really send the message home. But on the second visit, when she returned to pick me up, we were stopped as we were leaving. In front of the whole class and all the other mothers, Madame Strathmore said, “She got cut from Dance Fever on Eleventh Avenue for being uncoordinated, so don’t try to trick me into teaching her.”

  It turns out those dance class ladies travel in a tight circle.

  I had my coat halfway on and my Snoopy backpack still on the hook by the door. Aside from being a little embarrassed, I was unfazed by this turn of events. The surprise ending of my getting kicked out of dance class for being unteachable was an obvious conclusion no matter how you sliced it. What was there to do but shrug and trudge on ahead? My mother hauled me out the door.

  “You won’t be seeing us around here again,” she yelled to the teacher. As if it was her decision.

  “My backpack!” I reminded her, but it stayed hanging on the hook, my entire scratch-and-sniff sticker collection inside.

  When I turned seven, the age my mother told me was the start of being a lady, she and my father paid Valencia to tutor me on dancing, walking, being cute. I remember being put into one of my good dresses and seated at the dining room table after school, waiting for Valencia to come rushing in, rolling her eyes in good natured conspiratorial exasperation with me at the absurdity of our parents, as she dropped her bookbag on the floor and said “Are you ready to do some pliés?” This went on for a few weeks, and throughout it I acted like I hated it also, and rolled my eyes along with her at the silliness of it all, but really, it was great. To have Valencia’s undivided attention, even if it involved money changing hands, was painfully special to me. But Valencia was too busy and by the fourth week, when I sat at the table waiting until it was dark outside and she still had not come home, the whole subject was dropped. “I give up,” said my mother. And she did give up, focusing instead on Valencia and Van for the next five years.

  Chapter 5

  Adrian and I moved halfway across the country because we wanted to start a new life together. We had to get away from our exes because they both were viciously bitter about being dumped; we each thought the other might end up getting killed. His ex-wife Belinda, in particular, is prone to flying off the handle. We chose Savannah because it’s where he went to school, at Savannah College of Art and Design, or SCAD, years before we met.

  When I first got to know Adrian, life was very low for him. He couldn’t sell any of his work, and even with his extra job at Border’s, he and Belinda could hardly pay their bills. He was ten years older than me, spending his evenings helping housewives choose the latest Nora Roberts book. It wasn’t hard to see that he was not at a good place in his life.

  Unlike the rest of his family, Adrian is determined to make his own money. Why he cares I couldn’t begin to explain. But then, a year after he and I got together, things changed. Fame can happen very quickly, and money really does change everything. He is an artist, and he’s very good. Movie stars want his work in their homes. He makes huge paintings of very close-up things you might see in a forest. Like the way a pinecone would look to an ant. Therefore, I would think he could better understand my Gulliver fixation.

  I never saw myself as the kind of woman who wouldn’t have to work, who would have a man taking care of her and buying her presents, but he has turned me into her. It’s like going from being Amish to living a mainstream life, I imagine. Once you get a taste of Pizza Hut and a feel for blow dryers, there’s just no going back to the farm.

  When Adrian and I are in Savannah, I guess you could say we are a little bit famous. We often walk down by the river at night, and now and then I see people point us out to one another. Savannah is a city full of tourists, all the time, usually drunk, often riding in hearses on ghost tours or snapping pictures in the graveyards. Most locals hate the tourists, but I couldn’t imagine Savannah without them. There are usually plenty milling about even in the off-season. It’s rarely the tourists who recognize us though. It’s the residents who read in one of the local papers about Adrian’s latest opening or some painting the governor bought. The locals will point us out to some friend or relative who might be visiting them, and the visitor will nod as if he too could have recognized Adrian. Soon, if things continue the way they have been going, everyone truly will recognize us.

  I have had plenty of this secondhand fame before, from being Valencia and Van’s little sister. It feels good at first but leaves you always a little bit cold, like stepping from icy ceramic tiles into a lukewarm bath. You shiver and want the water to be hotter, but you can’t bring yourself to get out of the bathtub. Living off other people’s fame would leave most people very hungry, I imagine. Far hungrier than me. This time I am handling it with a dignified edge and cool detachment that could only come from experience.

  In the 1980’s, in Hudson, Wisconsin, Valencia was a little bit famous too. We lived on a cul-de-sac, but that did not stop the teenage boys and occasional middle-aged man from finding countless reasons to turn around there. Even as a small child, I wondered if Valencia knew how impossibly lucky she was to play this role. Did she ever wonder “Why me?” the way the rest of us pondered and mourned being so meaningless? Did she ever consider the unlikeliness of her one, single life holding so much potential? But I think she took it for granted. The admiration, the blatant worship she was pelted with. To her, it felt normal and she lived her life straight through it, doing everyday things like babysitting the neighbors and reading my Choose Your Own Adventure books when she was bored. Like a child born in the peaks of Switzerland becomes as immune to the beautiful view as a child born in a wasteland becomes immune to the ugliness.

  One of her biggest fans was our mailman, Ned. Nearly sixty years old with the biggest, thickest glasses ever made. He was a grandfather to fourteen children and a volun
teer phone answerer during public television pledge drives. Once my dad called in to donate ten dollars, all of which was specifically meant to be applied to shows about fishing, and we watched Ned take the call on the air. There was a five second delay and my dad had the hardest time watching Ned while trying to speak to him, and Ned kept saying, “Don’t look at your monitor, Roger. Just talk into the phone.” But my dad couldn’t take his eyes off the television. “This is really happening,” he told us, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand, looking at all of us in disbelief while Ned, on the screen, kept saying, “Roger, Roger, are you there? Just talk into the phone.”

  That Ned, he would still be blushing five houses down after a blasé Valencia met him at the door in her green Duran Duran pajamas. This made my mother furious.

  “Can’t you just wait until that poor man leaves before you get the mail? Or get dressed first. Do you want to give him a heart attack? And what about your reputation?”

  “Mom, these come all the way down to my knees. Relax.”

  I was just a little kid but I could recognize jealousy disguised as concern.

  “Do you want me to ground you?” my mother would ask her.

  “Not really,” Valencia would answer, and smile at our mother as if this was a joke they were in on together. Unlike me, she had an unparalleled charm that got her out of any predicament.

  One summer day when I was nine, a carload of high school boys drove up and parked across the street from our house. I didn’t recognize them as friends of my brother or sister. I was sitting on the front steps, designing my new fall line-up of evening gowns in a big unlined notebook I had gotten from the twins for my birthday. What are those high school boys doing? I wrote in magenta beside a strapless mermaid style dress. They were talking and laughing and shoving each other. Their music played loudly. But I knew why they were here: To see Valencia. She was our own personal Corn Palace. I colored the bottom of the dress purple, my peripheral vision telling me they hadn’t left their vehicle.

  Finally one of them yelled, “Hey, is Valencia around?”

  He pronounced it wrong. Like Valensha instead of Valen-see-a.

  I ignored them and started a new dress. This one was a Southern Belle kind of dress, very full and off the shoulder. Only it wasn’t turning out so great because they were distracting me.

  “We drove all the way from Wausau! We want to meet Valensha!” yelled another boy. One of his friends covered his mouth with his hand. They were all laughing and looked like total idiots. Valencia didn’t have friends like this.

  “If you stay parked there, my dad is going to shoot you,” I yelled back to them. I began coloring in the Southern Belle dress. Light blue. That is the color all Southern Belle dresses should always be. That notebook, if I could find it, if it hadn’t been burned with every other artifact of the past, would prove it.

  “Go get her. Go get Valensha,” yelled the boy who was driving. Then all the boys started yelling her name. Yelling it loud and wrong. Valensha! Valensha!

  They got out of the car, and for the first time, I felt scared. It was a weekday and no one was home anywhere on our street. My dad was at work. Mom and Valencia were visiting my aunt and wouldn’t be back until after dinner. Van was supposed to be watching me, but he had gone to the pool.

  I picked up my notebook and ran inside, locking the door behind me. Then I ran to the patio doors and the garage door and locked those too. I hid in the pantry in the kitchen, my arms wrapped around my knees. All the windows in our house were open, and I could hear the boys yelling her name. I waited for them to break in but finally it got quiet. I stayed hiding in the pantry though, and that’s where I was when Van opened the door.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Hiding,” I said.

  “Why is the house all locked up?”

  I just shrugged. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell the truth. It’s as if my mouth could not form any words.

  Later that night I heard him telling our parents what happened. He made me sound ridiculous, and added fake details, like how I was eating uncooked macaroni by the handful. He made me sound like a gremlin or a monster. I understood why he did it; it was the way to talk to my parents and have them listen and talk back. They loved to gang up on someone. It was what kept them close and the best way to buddy up with them. But usually he was too good to stoop so low. He probably figured if he didn’t throw me under the bus first, I would do so to him for leaving me home alone.

  Teachers used to tell us that children preferred even negative attention to being ignored, but this is not always true. I never liked conversations about how stupid I was; I doubt any child would.

  My clever parents never noticed the beer cans in our front yard or trampled hedges associated with that day.

  “Well, it’s obvious she’s not old enough to stay home by herself,” said my mother, definitively, using the newfangled remote control to turn on Dallas when they were finally done rehashing the pantry episode.

  Then there was Dougie the Lawn Boy. He mowed our lawn for free, loving every shrub and rosebush for allowing him take his sweet time while he gazed at my window, thinking it was her window. (When I was seven Valencia gave me a big sign with her name on it that had turned up unexplained on her locker, and I, as another one of her loyal fans, had stuck it to my window where it stayed for years, hence the confusion.) Now and then, my dad would come outside and tell Dougie that he didn’t need to mow our lawn, that we mowed our own lawn, that we had a perfectly good lawn mower, and would he please leave. But a week later he would be back, as if the conversation had never happened. Pulling up on his Cub Cadet, a wagon of clippers and trimmers behind it, tank top with the big number five on it… Dougie the Lawn Boy was relentless.

  We won the Hudson Lawn of the Year award in 1984, 1985, and 1986. No joke.

  Chapter 6

  A little over two months ago a letter came for Adrian. There was no return address but I instantly recognized it as trouble. First of all, the address was typed, apparently on an actual typewriter, considering that there was an extra letter n added to his name and then struck out with slash mark. Postmarked from Minneapolis. It seemed like the kind of letter that Anthrax would arrive in. Now that Adrian was becoming famous, things were getting trickier. Women he dated once fifteen years ago found excuses to run into him at the Circle K.

  He was in Atlanta for the day, meeting with someone about something (trust me, I have since learned to pay better attention), and as I sorted through the mail I separated this piece out and laid it aside in its own pile. This initial step looked innocent enough: bills, magazines, junk mail, letters to ponder over. That old instinct I associated with Valencia’s dressing table took over. What is it about stalking that is as primal and intuitive as the desire to eat, or sleep, or come?

  I held the letter up to the window, but of course that didn’t work.

  Adrian and I operated our relationship on a level of trust and maturity I had never expected from any union I would be a part of. I could have just asked him what it was when he got home. Instead, I went into the laundry room and found a clothes steamer beneath a pile of linen napkins from a dinner party we had hosted several months back. I still don’t know what made me do this. I especially should know about turning points and the way one day, one moment, can completely change the direction something is going. A steamer can open an envelope and unravel all the trust that two people have spent years building. But if I sealed it back up, and set it back with the unopened mail, only I would ever know. Didn’t I make decisions like this all the time? Paying a little extra on our mortgage when I did the bills, for the good of both of us. Replacing dishtowels once they became stained. Shaving my legs as an expression of goodwill. I reasoned it was all part of being a woman and keeping our life running smoothly. A little practice for motherhood maybe.

  Opening an envelope with a steamer doesn’t work. The steamer spit water all over the envelope, drenching it and maki
ng the address bleed like a watercolor painting. I was defeated going into it. Screw it, I decided, and tore the envelope open. We’ll just say whatever this is got lost in the mail. That has to happen sometimes, right?

  Inside was a piece of notebook paper, fringed edges and pale blue lines. The sheet of paper was blank and was folded loosely around some photographs. I saw the back of them first. Food for thought was scrawled in black ink tilted nearly sideways to the right. Scary man handwriting, I decided.

  From within the sheet slid a picture of my husband, wearing the shirt I had bought him just two weeks before for Christmas. He was uncomfortably close to a woman I did not recognize. The next photo was nearly the same. In neither were they kissing, or actually even touching. It could have been anyone, any situation. I tried to decipher where they were but could not recognize any of the buildings in the background.

  The pictures were grainy and blurry, as if they had been taken with a crappy phone or some really old digital camera. The strange thing is that this is what stood out to me, this is what I dwelled upon in those first moments after seeing the photos: “Some poor person with out of date technology is trying to blackmail Adrian.”

  Another thought instantly followed: Was the food for thought meant to imply that an affair had not started, but that Adrian should consider it? Were these photos sent by the woman, and she was trying to offer herself to him? Why would anyone send pictures to his house? Wasn’t it too risky? Perhaps the photos were sent by someone knowing I would intercept them. Some troublemaker.

  My head was swimming in confusion. I needed someone to talk to. Adrian was who I turned to for everything, and without him as an option I was alone. I needed a friend, but I could think of no one. So many of my friendships depended upon me being Adrian’s wife, or upon me being the kind of person who would be Adrian’s wife. They were the kind of friendships that looked like pages torn from an Elle Décor magazine. Elegant gatherings at barnwood tables beneath small twinkling white lights. If children were invited it was only to picturesquely capture fireflies in mason jars. These were not friendships with room for weighty problems. They were friendships of class and casual sophistication, honoring the unspoken code of We Shall Not Be Flawed. I considered seeking out a priest or some other religious person.