Surviving Valencia Read online

  Instead I put the photos back in the envelope and slid them into a big decorating book on a shelf in the hallway. I thought I would come up with a plan.

  That was January.

  I thought if I slept on it, I would work it all out. But for the weeks following this I could barely sleep at all. My mind raced as I lay still beside Adrian. So many times I almost asked him, almost showed them to him. He did not seem to notice that I had not slept in weeks, which I appreciated. He is good at taking me at face value. He doesn’t usually ask if anything is wrong, and if I tell him I am fine, he simply believes me. It’s such a masculine trait.

  Of course, I did not stop thinking of the pictures, even when the sleep came back in early February, hitting me in heavy twelve hour waves which he also did not find peculiar. I slept and slept, dreaming bad dreams of him cheating on me with everyone I had ever known.

  What I have finally taken the pictures to mean is not necessarily that my husband was having an affair, but that someone wants to upset him. Threaten him. Scare him, blackmail him. Or maybe it was nothing: Just some lonely person trying to bring drama into an empty life by creating a façade of connection to someone important.

  I continued to wish I had someone I could talk to about it, but there was no one, and the days rolled by as they always have. I waited for something else to happen. Something terrible. And then, of course, more did happen. But for quite some time Adrian was just Adrian, proving to me again and again in his ordinary actions that nothing was wrong, proving to me that if something truly was wrong, he was not the catalyst. When he got excited over some fancy cheese spread from the grocery store, for instance, it made me feel safe and reassured me that he was not the enemy. No one to blame could care so strongly about cheese spread, I reasoned.

  And the pictures stayed between the pages of Shabby Chic for Modern Homes where I occasionally visited them when I was alone.

  Chapter 7

  The great thing about Valencia was that she was an excellent braider. She could French braid my hair into two tight pigtails in under three minutes. She knew tricky braids too. Fishtail braids and braids using four strands. Braids that curled around my head and supposedly made me look Swedish. Princess Leia donut braids and sideways braids that ended in a ponytail behind one ear.

  She had a brush with a faux tortoise handle she started with, brushing my hair until it was perfectly smooth. It never hurt when she brushed it. Now I sometimes try to make Adrian brush my hair, but it’s not the same.

  I liked the Pippi Longstocking braids best, and she would do them in the morning at the breakfast table, while I sat on the stepstool my mother used to get things off the upper cupboard shelves.

  “Do you two have to do this at the kitchen table?” my mother always said.

  “My hair is clean,” I would say.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I don’t mind some hair on my toast,” Valencia would say.

  After my hair was brushed, she would lightly draw a line from the top of my head down to my neck, with her fingernail, making two equal sections. She said it looked better to not have a too-perfect line. “You can’t seem like you’re trying too hard,” she told me. She did the left side then the right, her fingers flying.

  “There you go, Nellie Oleson!” She would say when the second hair band snapped into place. I don’t look anything like Nellie Oleson; Nellie Oleson had curls, not braids. But I loved it.

  “Do it again,” I would tell her, pulling the rubber bands out and shaking my hair loose on mornings when I wasn’t about to miss the school bus.

  “Don’t shake your head out at the table. You’re getting hair everywhere,” my mom would say. This genuinely stressed her out. I was so much braver with my sister there, because she made everyone slightly more normal than we were without her.

  “No, no, no! Leave it in place!” Valencia would tell me.

  “Too late. You have to do it again. Pleasssse.”

  “One more time. Then I have to go.”

  “Okay. Okay. Maybe this time just one braid. It will look more grown up.”

  “You look like you’re in a wind tunnel when you have just one braid,” my mom would helpfully tell me.

  “She does not,” Valencia would say. And she would do what I asked, adding, “You look cute either way, though I don’t know why you always shake it out and make me start over.”

  “I don’t know,” I would say, wanting to push my luck and try for a third time. The bands would snap into place and my school bus would be waiting, or she’d be out the door to cheerleading practice or some other fantastic destination before I had the chance to try.

  Chapter 8

  I turned eleven in May of 1986. My mother lumped my birthday party together with Valencia and Van’s graduation party. There were two large cakes with lions for the graduates, and a small cake with Tweety Bird on it for me. Had most of the guests realized the Tweety cake was for me, I might have been embarrassed.

  My two best friends were my entire guest list. They were as unpopular as I was and were unfazed by Tweety and the lack of planning on my behalf. I opened my presents from them: Makeup. It was all I wanted. Just lots and lots of makeup. Eye shadow and lip-gloss, mascara I was too squeamish to bring near my eyes, and bright pink crème rouge that destroyed my chances of having a decent school picture for the following two years. I tried to show my mother the colorful array of tubes, compacts, and click-shut shadows, but she was busy dishing out generous hunks of purple frosted cake to our neighbors and relatives. So my friends and I disappeared into the downstairs TV room and ate the Tweety Bird cake while we watched Mr. Mom.

  My friends’ names were Heather and Jenny and they were better friends with each other than either was with me. They lived next door to one another and their moms were far-off cousins. I could feel them getting bored, and I needed to do something to keep them from wanting to leave. I had been through this before: Jenny would start looking at Heather from the corner of her eye and say she was “sick.” Then Heather would get ridiculously worried (but it was fake, I could tell) and one of them would call a mom so they could leave me and hang out together.

  “Do you want more cake?” I asked.

  “No,” said Heather.

  “No,” echoed Jenny. She put her hand on her stomach and scrunched her face into a grimace. “My tummy hurts,” she murmured.

  “Should we try out the makeup?” I asked. It was the last thing I wanted to do, to open it all and share it with them, but I was desperate.

  Jenny perked up a little at that. “Sure.” Without hesitating she reached right into the stash I had arranged in front of me on the floor and grabbed a package of Cover Girl eye shadow. She tore it open and dug the fresh little pad of the applicator into the sparkly, chalky blue compartment of shadow.

  “Heather, come here,” she said, pulling her true friend down from the recliner. She filled in the area from Heather’s eyelashes to eyebrows with a thick smear of blue. I watched as she dipped the applicator again, this time into the sable brown, and made up Heather’s other eye.

  “You look just like a rock star! You look like Cyndi Lauper!” They went running to the bathroom to look. I followed them, sick to my stomach over my new eye shadow’s speedy turn from pristine to ruined.

  “Doesn’t she look exactly like Cyndi Lauper?” Jenny squealed. No, she did not at all look like Cyndi Lauper. The very comparison made my nostrils flare in disgust. Big boned Heather with her crooked teeth and hairy little mustache on her upper lip. I shrugged. This was the point where I could either go along with them and watch all my new makeup be destroyed, or save the makeup and have them think I was boring, as usual.

  “I don’t really feel like playing this. Should we keep watching Mr. Mom?” I asked.

  “Do my lips in purple!” said Heather, ignoring me. Jenny ran back into the TV room and scooped up the rest of my birthday gifts. She returned to the bathroom, grinning, and carelessly tore open my purple sparkl
y Cover Girl lipstick, letting the cardboard backing float down and land in the toilet bowl. I just watched. I hated them and I hated myself.

  I grabbed the raspberry crème blush, the one article she had missed in her haste, and headed upstairs to my bedroom. The party was in full swing, spilling over from inside to outside and room to room. I caught a glimpse of Valencia’s friend Naomi Shelton, looking woozy and sitting on my Uncle Ted’s lap. Gross. Somehow through the din of it all, I heard my mother’s shrieking laughter.

  Some little girls from down the street were in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, playing with my Barbies. They could not have reached the Barbies, or even known they were up on my closet shelf, unless some awful grown-up had helped them find them. Which meant my mom had taken the Barbies down, on purpose, without asking me. From pure frustration I started to cry.

  “Those are mine and I didn’t say you could play with them.” I said. The three little girls stopped playing and sized me up.

  “Your mom said it was okay,” said one of them. Her blue, icy eyes met mine like a dare.

  “But I said you couldn’t.” I wiped at my tears, noticing a popped off Barbie head stuck upon one of the girl’s fingertips.

  “We’re going to tell on you if you don’t let them play with us,” said the Barbie killer in a squeaky voice, wiggling her Barbie head finger in my face. Her friends giggled menacingly.

  I looked around my room. It was worse than I had initially realized. I saw that my dresser drawers were opened and the top drawer of my desk had been snooped through. A whole sheet of stickers were now decorating the back of my desk chair. I found myself both horrified and impressed at their gutsiness. They couldn’t have been older than seven.

  “Fine. Fine. I don’t care. But you can’t play with them in here.” I picked up the box that held the Barbies and set it in the hallway outside my door. “I have a headache and I need to lie down right now.”

  My eleventh birthday was the day I first put into use the favorite excuse of grown-ups: I’m sick. Case closed. It’s the one point no one ever argues. Everyone knows it’s a lie, but it works anyway. I had been watching Jenny use it for years. She was born knowing about it. It was how my own mother had survived the holidays for as long as I could remember, a warm rag on her forehead while my grandma served the food.

  The girls glared at me but gathered up the Barbies and outfits around them and left. I locked my door and smoothed the bedspread where they had wrinkled it. I closed my dresser drawers and carefully peeled the stickers off the back of my chair. Outside, a volleyball game was in action. Valencia and Van’s friends were everywhere, filling picnic tables we had borrowed from neighbors, stretched out in lawn chairs and hanging around by the barbeque grill. My aunts and uncles drank wine coolers and talked with the other adults.

  I pushed aside my line of Trixie Belden books on my windowsill and kneeled on the carpet with my chin propped in my hands, watching as a brown station wagon slowly made its approach. Uh oh. It was Jenny’s mom’s car. The last thing I needed was for my mom to notice and come looking for me to see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have worried. The car pulled up along the curb and Jenny and Heather ran out to it and jumped in. In a moment they were gone and the party went on as if nothing had happened. Then I was hit by a new worry: Had they opened all the makeup? I needed to get to it before these little neighbor girls went downstairs and found it. I cracked open my bedroom door and saw that they were now down the hall on my parents’ bed playing with the Barbies. Ha!

  I raced downstairs to the little bathroom off the T.V. room and there I found all my new makeup, out of its packaging and much too destroyed for the damage to have been accidental. I made a little hammock with the front of my shirt and slid the smeared and broken cosmetics into the sling. Back upstairs, back to my room I went, finding that it thankfully was still vacant. I closed and re-locked the door. Then I opened the drawer of my bedside table and plunked my birthday gifts inside, slamming it shut so I wouldn’t have to look at them.

  That was the first day of being eleven. Eleven turned out to be a very hard year.

  Chapter 9

  Because of the photos, I was a little uncomfortable with Alexa staying at our house. They were still hidden in the book, and in no way did I think she would have any interest in a “Shabby Chic” decorating book, but I was afraid of what might happen if something else showed up. Because things had been happening.

  A few weeks ago on a Saturday, Adrian and I were coming home from a trip to the coffee shop just as the mail was arriving. I saw the letter – it looked just like the other one from what I could catch in that quick glance -- and my stomach tightened up. We were both wearing sunglasses so at least he could not see the way my eyes shot open. He shuffled through the mail and swiftly tucked that familiar envelope with its typed address into one of his art magazines. Then he handed me a clothing catalog and a postcard from his parents.

  “Look. They’re in Delaware,” he scoffed. I guess the joke was, Who would send a postcard from a place like Delaware? He was just trying to be distracting. So this meant he had intersected one or more of these letters already. I suppose I shouldn’t say intersected; after all, it was his mail. But if he had never seen one before and did not know what to expect, he simply would have torn it open. So that one slippery move said quite a bit. And there was something else I learned too: He was far smoother than I realized. There was no hint of discomfort or fear about him. He slid the letter into his magazine, passed me the postcard, cracked a joke, unlocked the front door with our going-for-a-walk key. He didn’t miss a beat, didn’t crack a sweat, all aspects of his behavior a choreographed dance of benign casualness.

  That was my chance to confront him but I didn’t take it. In fact, I even made things easy for him. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, leaving him there to do what he would like with his letter.

  Chapter 10

  My parents decided that we needed to go on a family vacation during the summer of 1986. It was our last summer together as a family before Valencia and Van went off to college. So in mid-June we took the camper and headed to Glacier National Park. My dad was really excited and talked more than I remember him talking before or since. He was like a brand-new person, sharing trivia with us non-stop the whole way there.

  “Do you know that the glaciers are disappearing? They are drying right up. You’ll all be lucky if there are any left by the time you bring your own kids here so take a hell of a lot of pictures! Your mother and me came here back when you were babies, Valencia and Van. You probably don’t even remember that, do you? We had a good time, right, Patricia?”

  When he wasn’t talking, he was playing a cassette tape of old music with a horrid song on it called Patricia, singing along, trying to make my mother smile.

  That was a funny summer. Funny strange, I mean. There were times I saw my family, my parents especially, in a way I hadn’t before and never would again. They seemed like a T.V. family. Like the Keatons from Family Ties, maybe. It’s funny how even then as a child I looked at our family in terms of they instead of we, how I saw myself as an insignificant filler character, like the way the little blonde sister fit in beside Alex and Mallory.

  What I did not know then was that my mother had just ended a nine-year affair with a neighbor. She and my father had been about to call it quits, but she changed her mind and decided to try to work things out with him. And he was so happy that summer because of this glimmer of hope of my mom loving him again. Now it all makes sense. But at the time I thought he was just happy to be with all of us and to be in that camper going to look at glaciers.

  I wasn’t even sure what a glacier was and was having a really hard time picturing it.

  “A glacier is a big hunk of snow,” Valencia told me.

  We lived in Wisconsin where there was snow all the time. I couldn’t understand why we would want to see more snow in June when it was finally all gone, but I wasn’t about to argue as long as everyone seemed to be
having a good time.

  My dad kept his word and took roll after roll of film. Stupid pictures that made my mother angry. “Stop taking pictures of the car, Roger. It costs money to develop those.” Everyone was concerned about money in the 80’s. But for once he ignored her nagging and the camera kept snapping away, freezing my brother in a goofy cowboy hat and my sister in her favorite tangerine sundress. There were pictures of my mother taken by the fire after we kids had gone to sleep, her face less tight than usual, dark, barely visible against the lapping orange flames.

  “Say cheeseburger!” was his catchphrase on that trip. We all said cheeseburger a thousand times it seemed.

  “Van inherited your dorkiness,” Valencia told him when Van put on a filthy pirate style eye patch he’d had the good fortune to find on the floor of a truck stop bathroom in Bismarck. My dad beamed when he heard this and my mom bristled silently in her seat.

  We pulled over again and again. Every hill of wild flowers and every mountain was a notable backdrop. Any memory was worth saving.

  “Let’s get one by this historical marker. You too, Patricia. Take your ponytail out. You look real nice. Van, ask those Japs to take a picture of all of us. No, no, keep your eye patch on. It’s funny.”

  I inherited just his desperation. He was trying to capture my mother but did not know we were all slipping away.

  When he got home he took the film to a store downtown that only developed pictures and sold film. I don’t know if they even make stores like that anymore. He got twenty-five of the photos turned into big, matted eyesores in rustic wood frames. These frames were so rustic that they could not be dusted without the duster getting a sliver. He hung them throughout the living room, dining room, hallways, even one in the first floor powder room. Unlike the other ladies I knew, Mom was never much on decorating and our house really showed it.