Surviving Valencia (5 page)

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.

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).

Valencia went so far as to yank off her class ring and place it in my hand.

“Here you go. I’m not going to wear this in college. I think that would be weird.”

“Don’t you want it for later? Or to give to your daughter someday?” I asked.

“No. You can have it.”

It’s still on my right ring finger today.

At one point our mother got irritated by it all and intervened. “Why are you getting rid of all these things?” she asked, picking up a pile of teen romances off my bed and stomping down the hall to wave them in my sister’s face. “We just gave you these books for Christmas!
This
Christmas! What are you thinking? Do you think when you go to college you are going to turn into a different person? Don’t you think you’re going to need anything anymore?”

“I have already read all of those. I read the one with that Chinese girl on the cover twice, Mom.”

“Your father and I paid good money for these. Or did you think Santa Claus brought them on his sled?”

I stuck my head into Valencia’s room to try to help, “It’s not like she’s throwing them in the garbage, Mom. She’s giving them to me.”

They ignored me. “Take these books with you,” our mother ordered.

“What?” Valencia shook her head and laughed a mean, uncharacteristic laugh. She never behaved like that, but as the minutes at home ticked down, her true feelings were beginning to wear through.

“Put them in there and take them with you to La Crosse,” said our mother, waving her free hand at a plastic milk crate half full of sweaters, “or you will never get another Christmas present from us again.”

“But she already gave them to me,” I said.

“You have lost your mind,” Valencia said to our mother.

Our mother stood there, frozen, holding the books. I started to wonder if she’d had a stroke, like I learned about in school. I hoped so. I was already picturing her getting wheeled off on a stretcher when she sprang back to life and threw the books, hard, against Valencia’s chest. Valencia’s face kind of crumbled, a look of sad shock leaving her mouth hanging open.

“You’re grounded!” yelled my mother and brushed past us. We heard the back screen door slam and we looked at each other, both of us in shock.

“I’m eighteen,” Valencia said softly. “She can’t ground me.”

I sank down onto Valencia’s baby blue shag carpet and began to pick up the books.

“Don’t worry about those. I will do it,” she said, regaining her composure.

“Okay,” I said. I picked up her stuffed Scooby Doo pillow that had been on her bed for as long as I could remember. Now it was shoved beside her dresser, most likely about to become mine. “What’s her problem?” I said.

Valencia sighed. “I cannot wait to be out of here,” she said, resuming packing. I nodded, as if I understood and could relate, as if I was about to be “out of here” soon also, and didn’t have seven years of solitary confinement ahead of me. She picked up the pile of books and set them back on the shelf where they had lived before she tried to give them to me. “Do you want that pillow?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Take it. It’s yours now. I think Van probably has a bunch of stuff he’d let you have too.”

Something in her tone made me think I was being dismissed. “Okay, I’ll go check. Thanks for the pillow.”

She closed her door behind me. Instead of going down to Van’s room I went into my own room and shut the door. The house had been a flurry of activity since we had returned from our trip. Soon, very soon, they would be at college and the house would be quiet. Just the three of us. Mom and Dad and me. I inhaled, exhaled. It was uncomfortable to think about. I had been avoiding the reality, living in the moment of chaos and prizes piling up. I looked around, studied my plain, dull face in the mirror above my dresser, and tried to push the bad thoughts away.

“The Mystery Machine,” I whispered, reading the words on the pillow. “Mystery. Machine. Mystery Machine.”

I sat on my bed, waiting for something to happen. So much of my life has had that feeling. That peculiar feeling of confusion, boredom and anticipation, all rolled into one unsettling emotion.

I wanted to experience what a potato must feel after garlic and butter and an hour in an oven have turned it into something delicious, when it gets popped into a mouth that, moments later, exclaims, “This is Heaven on Earth!” When just a few hours earlier that potato had been in a sack, brown and dirty, dreaming there was more but unable to fathom what that might be.

Let me tell you a story: The story of Adrian and me. The story of my becoming Mrs. Adrian Corbis.

Adrian and I got married in July. It was so hot that people were actually fainting. We were married in Madison in that little church right on Lake Mendota, at James Madison Park. His sister Alexa was my only bridesmaid, and his friend Scott, from college, was his groomsman. Since he had done all this before, we kept it pretty simple.

I had the best dress. I mean, when they say that you will know when you find the right dress, believe it. I had tried on fifty or sixty dresses and they all fell flat. And then I tried on
the one
, and it was perfect. Satin and strapless, perfectly straight, the tiniest train. I wore it with a poufy veil and a headband with sapphires that cost more than the rest of my bridal ensemble combined.

Our cake was vanilla hazelnut with a whipped buttercream frosting that had shavings of white and dark chocolate all over it. People who normally could not care less about dessert were scarfing down three or four pieces. Good thing we had such a huge, tall cake. Adrian is the one who suggested we add another tier to it. He is so smart like that. There was barely any cake left by the time the evening was over. Which was not such a big deal, considering I would not have wanted the leftovers since I work so hard to not be fat.

Our cake, though extravagantly large, was quite simple. The kind of simplicity that takes a practiced hand. The cake cost a fortune. I’d rather not say how much. Let’s just leave it at that. A fortune. But worth every penny.

Look at me, talking about the cake before I even mention our main course! The main course was a fabulous linguine primavera that was so light and delicious that even die-hard carnivores like my Uncle Burt were raving and requesting more. And we had the best Caprese salad. I love Caprese salad. Adrian introduced it to me. Can you believe I had never had Caprese salad before Adrian? Now it’s everywhere, but there was a time it was something rather new.

We had the loveliest string quartet. I don’t think a wedding is truly a wedding without a string quartet. Adrian’s mother taught me that. She may be a hippie, but
her
parents are not, so she knows these things. Adrian did not have a string quartet at his first wedding. Can you imagine? I think that was the beginning of their demise.

I’m kidding. No seriously, I am not that superstitious. Or snobby. But still, who has a wedding without a string quartet? Honestly? Probably me prior to Adrian. As my mother would say,
Shhhhh
. Pretend I did not even say that. He and his family have taught me so much. I have so much to be thankful for.

As the day turned to evening, it cooled off a little and everyone got
so
drunk. We had red wine and white wine and champagne, of course. The best of everything. We had kegs of beer, but only good beer, and a martini bar. You name it, we had it.

Adrian and I danced all night, and everyone kept wishing us well and telling me I looked beautiful.

“Your eyes match the sapphires in your headband,” was a comment I heard from at least three different guests. Honestly, I already knew that, but it was nice to see that people took notice.

Even my mother seemed pleased with how it all turned out. It was just
so
perfect. The best day ever. I felt like someone else entirely. It was the perfect celebration of the metamorphosis from the miserable girl I used to be to the happy woman only Adrian could have turned me into.