Surviving Valencia Read online

  Their house is still caught in 1986 because of all those pictures. Despite my mother’s penchant for removing the past, those photos remain.

  Then one vacation wasn’t enough and we had to take two more. My dad said he wanted to get our money’s worth out of the air mattress he had bought. We went to Chicago and to Phoenix, Arizona, that summer too, but the mood had already shifted. He did not play the Patricia tape, and when I try to remember those trips, it seems we all just silently read books or listened to headphones while he drove. I cannot remember those trips nearly as well because there are not endless photos to remind me.

  Chapter 11

  “Happy Saint Patty’s Day,” said Adrian, setting a glass of Guinness in the middle of the magazine I was looking at.

  I took a sip. “Thanks. Are we going out tonight?”

  “Sure,” he said, sitting down beside me at Alexa’s kitchen table. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “I can’t think of any reason not to, but let’s not stay out too late.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think I need to go to Hudson tomorrow.”

  It had been a few years since I last saw Valencia and Van’s graves, and I figured since I was in Madison it would be a good time to make the drive. They are buried in Hudson, a mile from my parents’ house. So of course I would also have to visit my parents while I was there, which was an even bigger pill to swallow.

  I didn’t want Adrian to come with me, but I knew he would insist on driving me. He is always husbandy like that, giving me what he thinks I need.

  “Sure, we can go to Hudson tomorrow,” he said.

  “Let’s go out on the back porch,” I said, picking up my Guinness and fleece pull-over and leading the way.

  “Wasn’t Alexa’s kitchen yellow the last time we were here?” asked Adrian.

  I looked around. Now it was a pale shade of grayish violet. Much swankier. “You know, I think you’re right.”

  “Sehr Modisch,” he said.

  “Yep, sure is.”

  “She never stops improving, does she,” he said.

  “She never stops improving,” I repeated.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “No, of course not.”

  For all the house swapping we do with Alexa, in some ways I barely know her. She is tall and blonde with angular features and eyes like Adrian. A look that is both beautiful and a little harsh. She is often a bit too much, like when she gave Adrian and me tickets to a month-long South American Rain Forest hiking trip and wouldn’t quit pestering us until we went. There were snakes and bugs. It was terrible. I thought I was going to die. That kind of pushiness I could really do without.

  But she accepted me right from the start, when I was afraid I would be seen as a homewrecker for breaking up Adrian’s marriage. Later I came to understand that I shouldn’t have taken her acceptance so personally. She simply accepts everyone. So do their parents. Not out of kindness, but because the drama created by conflict is beneath them. It’s still kind of a foreign concept to me, coming from a family where very little was acceptable and gossip took the place of meaningful dialogue. It made me think they were my best friends until one day when Adrian said, “Honey, you can stop sending them thank you notes after every encounter.”

  I had thought thank you notes were a sign of class. No one in my family had ever written one.

  “Are you sure?” I had asked him, “They’re just going so far out of their way to be nice to me and I don’t want them to think I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Giving us an old album of my baby pictures isn’t that nice; it’s just something parents do. So don’t worry about it. You’re going to scare them!” He gave me a squeeze and a kiss to let me know that he wasn’t scared of me, just his family was.

  “Oh.” I felt like an unpolished dodo egg.

  The other thing that they all have in common is that they’re loud. I thought being loud was obnoxious and rude, but they make me feel like being quiet is meek and insecure. They sneeze loudly, they tell loud stories, they laugh loudly. Those throw-back-your-head-and-go-crazy kind of laughs. My mother taught us not to do that.

  “Shhhh! Stop! Everyone is staring!” she would say if we ever got carried away. If she was feeling particularly tense and vicious, she’d shame us into silence with something like, “Your breath smells like onions and bacteria. And you’re spitting on me!”

  But Alexa, especially, can laugh and snort and even belch a couple of times while managing to look like a Stella McCartney advertisement.

  And she’s so provocative. At parties she’ll casually blurt out some revelation like “Married sex must be so boring. Like unwrapping the same birthday gift over and over.” Or “We women are like dogs. We just want a good master who will take care of us and praise us.” Every man in the room will drop whatever conversation he’s in to focus on her instead.

  Her beauty makes her strangeness work for her now, but I cannot stop myself from secretly hoping there will come a time when she will be seen as a Grey Gardens type of nut. I suppose that is further into the future than my experience with her will reach.

  Most intimidating of all about her, however, is that, like Adrian says, she never stops improving. I know plenty of people who are always trying to better themselves, but few who are so successful at it.

  She has a million hobbies, from playing the cello to saving orphans in third world countries. She speaks many languages poorly and a few very well. I think she may have tried botox and certainly cocaine.

  She is one year older than I am, but has a level of confidence I will never reach. She’s also much cooler than I am. Coolness has to be inherent, I have decided, and therefore, I have let go all aspirations of ever attaining it.

  Adrian and Alexa grew up with everything, fearing nothing, sharing everything, traveling everywhere. They were like rich, affluent hippies. They had a head start in coolness. It really isn’t even fair. Anyone in their shoes probably would have turned out cool. They are what Adrian supposes our children will be, though I have doubts that I could grow anything so fabulous in my mediocre womb. Yes, the Corbis children, with their summers in Spain and their new-age godparents were everything I didn’t even know I wanted and everything I will never be.

  On a side note, but related to self-improvement, according to several of the women’s magazines I subscribe to, it’s not about coolness, but about being fabulous. Fabulous makes me think of Samantha from Sex and the City, and couldn’t be further from what I actually want to be. However, since fabulousity can be bought, I am giving it a try.

  I find a sort of irony in worrying about details like this, in the midst of so many bigger things going on. But I guess that’s human nature. Chugging along, making dinner reservations, flossing. Even terminally ill people floss.

  Alexa would never stoop so low. Alexa would laugh her loud, aggressive laugh if she stumbled upon the Fabulous Girl’s Instructional Guide that is hiding under my bottom dresser drawer. This manual has one paragraph long articles on “How to swallow your sneeze” and advice like “Wake up fifteen minutes before your man and put on a bit of mascara and run a comb through your hair, then get back into bed before he wakes up, so he thinks you are naturally beautiful.” It does not explain how to never sneeze or how to wake oneself up discreetly, every day, fifteen minutes early without also waking up “your man” at the same time. I find it nearly impossible to follow. I just hope when we get back to Savannah it is exactly where I left it.

  Adrian and I sat down on the porch and Alexa’s cat jumped up onto his lap.

  “What do you think of this cat?” he asked, picking him up and holding him up to my face.

  “I guess he’s alright,” I said.

  The cat jumped back down and ran away.

  “So Hudson it is, tomorrow,” he said. He finished his Guinness and set down the empty can. “I need to get some stuff from the art store. Are you coming with?” he asked, curling a piece of my hair aro
und his finger.

  “I don’t know…” I looked out at Lake Mendota. There was still ice over parts of it, despite the warm wind and robins flying about. I turned and looked at him, green eyes, dark curly hair. So terribly beautiful. Why had he settled for me?

  “I was thinking I might go alone tomorrow,” I said.

  He stopped playing with my hair. “Alone? That’s too far for you to drive alone, Baby.”

  “It is not, Adrian.”

  “We’ll both go. I want to come with you.”

  I turned away.

  “How long do you want to go for?” he asked.

  “Just one night. I can’t handle more than one day of Roger and Patricia.”

  “We don’t have to stay with them,” he said.

  “I think they will expect me to.”

  “We could get a hotel.”

  “Honey, you don’t have to go,” I tried one more time. Being in Hudson, visiting the twins, took me to a place inside myself where Adrian did not belong. “Let me go by myself. Then you can work on your paintings.”

  “No. I hate for you to deal with all that on your own. I’m not getting anything done here anyhow. I never do. It’s just an escape, coming here. I didn’t count on getting work done.”

  It would have gone on and on like this, so I decided not to fight it. “Let me call my parents and see if they’re around.”

  They were, and they sounded excited to hear from us. I told them we had just arrived in Madison a couple days earlier. If they knew how often we stayed at Alexa’s they would expect to see us every time.

  “Listen to your Southern accent!” said my mother. Around the time I had acquired what she considered a “Southern accent” I had noticed for the first time what a strong Minnesota accent she had. Now when I spoke with her, it was like listening to Rose Nylund or the cast of Fargo.

  “We’ll be on our way tomorrow, late morning or early afternoon,” I told her.

  “Can’t you narrow it down more than that?”

  “Noon. We will leave here at noon.”

  “I’ll make some pork chops for dinner,” she said before we hung up. Pork chops were the favorite of the twins, not me.

  “Oh. Sure thing,” I said.

  “Let me talk to her, Patricia. Hello? You there? Is it just the two of you coming up here?” asked my dad, taking over for my mom. I had no idea what he meant by that. Did he think we’d had a baby and never mentioned it? Did he think Alexa was in Madison and coming with us?

  “Um, yeah. Just us two.”

  “Alright then.” There was the clatter of the phone being set down. I waited for my mother to pick it back up. A minute went by and I could hear their muffled voices in the background. I heard my mother complaining that now she would have to clean the guest room. I hesitated, waiting for her to realize I was still waiting. Finally I heard footsteps approaching. The phone was picked back up and placed on its old fashioned cradle, and the line went dead.

  I stood there holding the receiver. No matter how much time passed, they always made me feel the same.

  Chapter 12

  Valencia and Van were going to college in La Crosse. They and our parents had decided this as a family. Mom and Dad were happy it was somewhat close, and the twins were happy it wasn’t so close that we would drop in unexpectedly.

  “It’s better than one of those liberal California schools you were looking at,” Dad told Valencia. By better he meant cheaper.

  “She was never serious about California,” said Van.

  “I’m just glad you two will be together,” said our mother.

  What Mom and Dad did not know was that Rob McCray was also going to La Crosse. He was Valencia’s secret boyfriend, who she was supposed to have broken up with. Van must have known that Rob and Valencia were still together; I don’t really see how Valencia could have kept something like that from him. I like to think, though, that he was kept in the dark about it as much as the rest of us.

  When Valencia was a freshman in high school, she and Rob had been inseparable. Somehow, Mom and Dad didn’t know this meant they were having sex. Even I knew they were having sex, and I was just a little kid.

  One afternoon at the beginning of their sophomore year, they skipped school and went to Rob’s house. Since he was an only child and his father had taken off years earlier, they probably thought they were safe. Unfortunately, his mom, sick from her chemo treatments, came home early from work, heard them, and burst into his room.

  The three of them were waiting in our driveway that afternoon when the school bus dropped me off. I guess I must have been about nine years old. I recall waving at them as they sat in silence in Mrs. McCray’s pale blue Buick, not understanding what they were doing or why they wouldn’t wave back at me. I was startled by Mrs. McCray’s appearance: She was bald and bloated from the chemo, without so much as an eyelash. She did not bother with wigs or fancy scarves.

  My father drove in right as the school bus pulled away, and then my mother, who had been grocery shopping. Perfect timing. I was sent to my room while the sordid details were broadcast in our living room. I lay there on the floor by the vent, listening. The afternoon sunlight bathed my wall in soft pink light. We didn’t usually have this much excitement happening in our house and I was enjoying every second of it.

  I heard Valencia crying. Whether they were real tears of shame or the tears of false, obligatory repentance, I was not sure.

  When Rob and Mrs. McCray left, I pulled myself a little closer to the vent, waiting for an even bigger blowout. But Valencia did not get screamed at, smacked across the face, or locked in her room. She was just told she could never see Rob again.

  “What will people think?” I overheard our mother saying. Her tone sounded not irrational and disgusted, but soothing, reasonable, concerned. Her syrupy voice was so out of character that it made me take notice. It told me that there was something very powerful happening between Valencia and Rob. Something extraordinarily threatening, that my evil mother must stop. I clenched the fistful of crayons I was holding until they all broke in half. Then I ground them into the back of a notebook with my palm, wishing I had the guts to grind them into the carpet.

  “Okay, it’s over,” said Valencia.

  “What’s the matter with Rob’s mother?” our father asked.

  Oh my god. I rolled over on my carpet and threw the crayons at my shelf of stuffed animals. These people, these parents of ours, didn’t deserve to reproduce.

  “She has cancer, Dad,” Valencia shouted.

  “Cancer?”

  “Yes. Cancer.”

  “She looks like hell,” he said.

  “So you’re never going to see him again, right?” said our mother.

  “Right.”

  We all thought that was the end of it. Well, I didn’t. I mean, it was obviously not the end of it. But he did not call again and Valencia and Van refrained from mentioning anything about him, and eventually it did seem that Rob McCray had been forgotten.

  But one day, not long before the end of their senior year, I was looking through Valencia’s backpack and found a love letter. It was folded into a square with the corner tucked into itself, the way letters were all folded back then. I wonder if kids still know how to fold those letters. I guess not. I guess they just text now.

  The letter was dirty. It was my first exposure to real sex and created expectations and needs in me that have never been satisfied. Oh, to be Valencia. Though she was really just a girl, generous promises of seduction and love were being offered to her on a silver platter.

  They’d had a fight and Rob was sorry. He wanted to make it up to her. He wanted to kiss her stomach, kiss her back, kiss her everything. He was in love with her. He poured his heart and soul out in smudgy blue ink. I can still picture it as clearly as if it had been meant for me and I read it yesterday.

  After reading it several times, while I stood frozen and listening like a jackrabbit to my family carrying on in other parts of the house,
I carefully refolded it and put it back inside Valencia’s sunglass case in her backpack pocket where I had found it. It had been over two years since she and Rob had been forbidden to be together. Who would have dreamed Valencia had been disobeying my parents all that time? The love letter was the granddaddy of all discoveries, whetting my appetite to search for more. Soon I was hiding in her closet, listening as she made plans to meet him and then told our parents she had cheerleading practice. I silently lauded her, more enamored than ever.

  Chapter 13

  Valencia started packing up her room in late June of 1986, as soon as we got back from our trip to Glacier National Park. She started with her winter clothes, folding them into tidy stacks and inserting lilac sachets into the pockets of sweaters. She took the photos that were stuck into her vanity mirror, curling up like spyglasses, and flattened them into her album with the sparkly roller skating girl on the cover. Then, thinking better of it, she rode her bike down to the Ben Franklin, returning with a plain gold album. She removed the pictures and set the roller skate girl album on my bed. Treasures were arriving there daily. Hourly even. Hot rollers and a boxed set of Garfield all-occasion cards. A zippered quilted bag filled with bottles of thick, oily nail polish, mainly all variations of the same shade of coral pink. A pile of Seventeen magazines. Knitted mittens with snowflakes on the back of the hand (those I was not excited about, considering they were made by my grandmother and I had the same pair in a different color).