He found me at Frank’s Friendly Tavern, an hour and seven shots of Wild Turkey later, ready to puke into the lap of the old man on the barstool beside me.
“Honey,” he said, coming up behind me, holding my parents’ car keys in his hand. “I was worried about you.”
He settled my tab and helped me out to their car. As drunk as I was, I realized the irony in not borrowing Alexa’s clothes, yet taking her car all the way to Hudson and leaving it in the parking lot of a redneck bar.
My head was spinning. I hadn’t had this much to drink in years. “Adrian, do you love me?” I asked.
“Yes. Of course I do.”
He started the car and my head slipped against the cool passenger window.
“What’s going to happen when we get back to Savannah?”
“The same things that always happen. What do you mean?”
I rolled my window down and, mercifully, began throwing up before I could say anything more.
We headed back to Madison the next morning. I had been up all night, sick, telling anyone who would listen that I needed my stomach pumped. Adrian too was hungover and the miles passed in silence. The warm weather was gone and icy rain was coming down. My mother was upset that we were heading back in such rotten weather. “I have a work appointment in Madison this afternoon I can’t miss,” Adrian told her. It was a lie. Not that I minded.
Near Black River Falls, Adrian pulled off for coffee, and when we were back on our way he put in a mix CD that one of his fans had sent him. I looked at the case, a hand drawn cat and puffy, happy handwriting: To Adrian, I love your art. I heard Beyonce does to! Sierra Gladstone.
Sierra Gladstone’s mix CD was a compilation of music that probably predated her arrival on Earth. Old songs by Boyz II Men, Billy Ray Cyrus, Simply Red. This CD is Adrian’s current favorite and plays in the car, in his studio, on the back porch while he’s barbequing, and anywhere else he happens to be.
“This girl should be a DJ,” Adrian had enthused when he first listened to it.
“Are you sure you really want to touch that? What if she’s crazy? What if she did something to it?” I asked him.
“Relax. It’s not like I’m eating homemade cookies. It’s just a mix CD. What could she have done to it?”
“There could be subliminal messages on it.”
“She drew a cat. With a Sharpie. I think I’m fine.” He turned up the volume and closed his eyes. “When’s the last time you heard this song? I had forgotten it existed! This Sierra girl is great at putting the right song in the right order. Following ‘It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday’ with ‘Achy Breaky Heart’… I mean, it just works.”
Adrian loves music nobody loves. It’s pathetic really, and so out of character for someone who is usually cool. Perhaps this is that kind of coolness where you shun actual cool things and embrace nerdy things. I don’t know. For him, a really fun shopping trip is blowing twenty dollars on twenty CDs at the Frugal Listener resale store. Billy Joel, Wilson Phillips, Juice Newton, The Ramones.
Unless he is in the car with me, I am embarrassed to have Juice Newton blaring. Honestly, most of his music embarrasses me. But nothing embarrasses Adrian. I wish I could be more like him. I think it takes someone really brave to leave those CDs all over the front seat of his Audi.
Chapter 21
I was unable to change my parents’ minds, and together with Van and Valencia, they left for La Crosse. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to the twins, since they were at the hardware store with my dad when my mom decided to take me to Heather’s house.
“Quit sniveling. They’ll be home before you know it,” she lied.
When she dropped me off, I was crying like a baby. She only took me to the end of Heather’s long driveway, because she hated the way the farm made her car smell.
“I know it’s stinky but please take me all the way there. Are you really going to make me walk the whole way? This bag is heavy!”
“I guess you packed too much. And probably nothing old. See if you can borrow something of Heather’s. We’ve spent as much on clothes for you as we’re going to spend. Now give me a kiss goodbye. Do it. Give me a kiss before someone sees you acting like a brat,” she said, noticing Heather’s father nearby in a field on his tractor, watching us.
“No,” I said, slamming the door and not looking back.
My weekend with Heather and her family was atrocious. Jenny was over at their house most of the time. Their parents’ farms butted up to one another and their houses had been built on the inner edge of the property lines, making it possible to stand in one’s kitchen and watch the other buttering her toast. They were hardy farm girls who were immune to the smell and sounds of it all. I was not. I had a difficult time even eating while I was there, since everything was tinged with the aroma of the barn. They liked to play games like hide-and-seek in the cornfield and have goat milk squirting competitions. They casually used humiliating words like teat and udder in conversation. Dirty words like that got a person grounded at my house. That weekend made it more obvious than ever that I did not fit in with them.
Monday was our first day of sixth grade, which meant we had graduated from the elementary school to the junior high school, but they were oblivious to the magnitude of it. Heather was planning to wear last year’s clothes, a corduroy jumper that I had seen her in a million times. Jenny had new clothes, but they were stiff, bright kids’ clothes from a farm equipment store. I decided that I would ride the bus with them because I had to, and spend my first day smelling like shit, but once Tuesday rolled around I was flying solo, even if it meant I would never have a friend again.
When we got to school, I was ecstatic to learn that we had each been assigned our own locker. Just like high schoolers! Just like the girls in Seventeen magazine or in Sweet Valley High books. I looked into the tiny metal cavern, not seeing a nine square foot box but a world of possibilities. The first chance I got I was going to buy one of those magnetic locker mirrors with a little tray attached for lip gloss and ponytail holders. I would tape up a picture of Kirk Cameron! And John Stamos! Now I might find notes, love notes, shoved through the little slats in the locker doors. Probably having no locker in the past is what had prevented me from receiving such notes. After all, what were those little slats for if not for dropping notes? We each got a brand new padlock too.
While I had somehow forgotten that we would finally have lockers, the popular girls had not. Two minutes after I had located mine and hung my backpack and overnight bag inside, I looked around me and discovered that they had already decorated theirs. Puffy heart shaped stickers that changed colors if you touched them, letters spelling their names. (Kaci, Kari, Jessi, Keeli, Jami, Jenni – to be popular your name must start with a J or K and end with an I. No exceptions.) And of course there was plenty of the obligatory statement, “93 Rules!”
I walked past Jessi and Keeli’s lockers for an unneeded drink at the water fountain so I could get a better look. The decorations did not end on the outside. They each had locker mirrors. Jessi’s had a blue leopard print border and tray sticking out beneath it, to hold the necessary trinkets of popularity. I slowed my pace. If I knew the ingredients of popularity, I could buy them and create some for myself. Like a witch with a bubbling cauldron. Like the guy who created Frankenstein. I took a look from the corner of my eye. The little tray was overflowing with cool markers, scrunchies, tubes of lipstick, packs of gum…
“What are you staring at?” she asked me.
“Me? I wasn’t staring at anything.”
“Get your drink at the bubbler and move along,” she said, making a walking motion with her fingers.
She rolled her eyes at Keeli, who was attaching a magnetic message board to the outside door of her locker. A marker dangled from it on a little cord. If I did that, people would write “You suck bitch” or just steal it, but undoubtedly she would be receiving daily messages like “U R HOT” and “C U at practice, luv U like a Sis!”
“Where’s your locker?” Heather asked me.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and brushed past them.
“Hey, where’s your locker?” demanded Jenny.
I turned back to them and yelled, as loud as possible, “Get the fuck away from me!”
The entire hallway hushed. That moment lasted for what seemed like hours. Then Keeli and Jessi started to giggle, that exclusive but infectious tinkly little giggle of popular girls. Soon the whole hallway was laughing at the three of us losers and my outburst. My new teacher appeared, grabbed my arm, and dragged me straight to the principal’s office.
This marked the beginning of my solitary years.
Life with Van and Valencia at college was worse than I had imagined it would be. For the first decade of my life, I’d had the luxury of being mostly invisible. I didn’t have to hide in my bedroom, because I could sit on the couch watching TV for hours without anyone uttering a word to me. I rarely got presents or compliments or eye contact, but in turn, I had hardly ever been told to do a chore and had only been mildly punished a time or two in my life. In rare instances I had been grounded, which was no different from not being grounded, since I never went anywhere. I was like a pet hamster or gerbil, only I never had to worry about starving to death because I could pour my own cereal.
Once the twins were gone, my parents suddenly realized I was around and felt compelled to do something about it. They became overzealously aware of my grades, which were poor but not exceptionally poor. C’s, the occasional D, a B once in Spanish class when the teacher got me confused with another student and I didn’t correct her. Suddenly they expected me to get A’s. My mother had the gall to even ask me, “How do you think we feel when we go to our bowling league and Jenny and Heather’s parents are bragging about them being on the honor roll and you can’t even make the honorable mention list?”
Well, she had a lot to learn about motivating others, because hearing that made me want to try less than ever. And after my lasting impression at the water fountain, the teachers had no charity for me. I did just well enough to not fail. It was devastating to poor Roger and Patricia. Without Valencia’s prom queen winning ways decorating the local paper, or Van’s high scoring basketball skills leading the local team to the state competition, they had nothing. They were, for the first time, not just painfully aware of my existence, but of my meaningless existence. There was only one solution: I became in a constant state of groundedness, enforced and monitored like never before. Unable to leave the house, unable to talk on the phone, unable to even leave my room until my homework was finished and until I “snapped out of it.” It being dumb, untalented, and ugly.
I wrote letters to Valencia, and tried to explain to her what I was going through, but she only responded once. She sent a UW La Crosse postcard and on the back she wrote, “Sorry life is tough. See you at Thanksgiving. I will take you shopping when I’m home! Take it easy! Your big sister”
My mom saw it and asked me why I was telling Valencia that life was “tough” and what did I have to complain about? Then she grounded me for two extra weeks.
Chapter 22
Big News! The seventh graders were inviting us sixth graders to the dance they were hosting! We didn’t know this happened every year. The Karis and Jessis were so excited. So was I, but I had to hide it. I had some tricks up my sleeve though: I had been saving magazine articles in a pink binder to help me prep for something like this. Every opportunity to break out of my everyday rut was an opportunity to show the world the real me. I imagined myself walking in and all the boys peering out from lowered shades, Miami Vice style, to see who the new hot girl was.
The first Saturday night in November was the night. Everyone in my school hated me, from the principal down to the lowliest janitor who I swore pushed his broomfuls of dirt at me, but that did not stop me from believing in the possibility of change. I begged my mother to unground me for just that one night. Shockingly, she relented.
I rummaged through Valencia’s closet, trying to find something that would turn my puny, flat-chested self into a beautiful movie star. Then I mixed up two tablespoons of Wesson, three raw eggs, and four tablespoons of mayonnaise in a cereal bowl and slathered the slimy concoction into my hair like Seventeen magazine recommended, so I would have “shiny, healthy, soft, glowing locks that any boy would want to run his fingers through.” I wrapped my drippy strands of hair in a big, orange towel and felt my head getting warm and itchy. While it soaked in, I polished my toenails and my fingernails, perched on the vanity top in the bathroom, making model-like faces at myself in the mirror. The whole room smelled like egg salad from my fermenting hair.
Unfortunately for me, Valencia had taken most of her good clothes with her to college, but I was able to pull together an outfit of stretch pants (a little droopy on me, but they would do), an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt with a tank top beneath it (think Flashdance), and a Debbie Gibson style hat that Van had worn in a play a year or two earlier. It looked like an ill-fitting rip-off of something the popular girls would be doing. I was all set.
I took a hot shower, massaging the oily mixture deep into my scalp, imagining my ordinary brown hair turning shiny and soft, maybe even magically becoming curly. I was always bugging my mom to let me get a perm but she said they were too expensive. All the cool girls had perms. Spiral perms.
I washed my hair with some fancy shampoo I had been saving for a really special occasion. It was called GLITZ and it had tiny pieces of copper glitter in it. The egg salad smell started to go away and was replaced with the rich, fruity aroma of GLITZ. I read the bottle. GLITZ will turn BLAH hair into U RAH RAH hair. There was a little cheerleader on the bottle. God, I wanted so badly for this to work. I washed my hair an extra time, working up a mountain of lather, and as I rinsed away the suds, I prayed for the magic of GLITZ to change me.
Getting dressed was the best. I felt just like Valencia. I put on her clothes and used her old blow dryer that she had left for me. I curled my bangs into an extra tall pouf and sprayed them heavily with Aquanet. My hair was soft. I had never felt such soft hair! Except for the bangs of course. Nobody had soft bangs in the late 80’s. I put on a ton of red blush and some blue eye shadow and ten sprays of Avon Soft Musk perfume. Now that Valencia was gone, I was stepping into her role of teenager of the house.
“I’m ready for you to drive me to the dance, Mom!” I yelled, admiring myself in front of the bathroom mirror. She walked by with a stack of folded laundry in her arms. “You look cute, Honey. Why does it smell like potato salad in here?”
I shrugged. She ruined everything.
“Let me put these away and then I will take you.”
I put on my scuffed black flats. Valencia’s shoes were still too big for me.
“Okay, you ready?”
I nodded and grabbed my purse. It cost two dollars to get into the dance. I hadn’t told my mom this because then she probably wouldn’t have let me go. Luckily, I had plenty of quarters saved up from doing Van’s chores.
As we approached the car, I noticed that my mom was wearing the blue dress that had been hanging behind the bathroom door while I was getting ready. I had thought the dress was dirty, and in an impulsive act of spite, I had used it to wipe up the mayonnaise mixture in the sink. Its smudgy flower print did a good job of hiding the greasy stains. She was
completely unaware of the huge splotch in the middle of her back. Didn’t it feel cold and damp against her skin? Was she, as I had long suspected, part reptile? I started to get nervous. I was going to be more grounded than ever. Then I noticed she was wearing makeup. A sinking feeling took over me.
“Why are you all dressed up, Mom?”
“I’m chaperoning the dance,” she said in an irritated, exasperated tone, as if she had told me this a dozen times.
I froze. “What?”
“Mary Kelter-Gurnsey called me the other day and said they were short on chaperones, so I said I would be happy to do it. Get in the car. We’re going to be late.”
“Mom… No…” I felt like I had been punched in the gut. She had never chaperoned one of Valencia and Van’s dances. She hated me. It was obvious. People laugh at children for thinking these things, but now that I am an adult I can see that I was right. She was a bored, mean woman with little else to keep her busy. With her affair ended and Valencia and Van away, wrecking my life stepped up as a new hobby for her to ambitiously throw herself into. Other moms started book clubs or got part-time jobs at Talbot’s. Not her. She was too busy punishing me for being such a bad fit, in what could have been such a beautiful family.
She was in the car now, checking her lipstick in the rear-view mirror. “Get in or I’m going to leave without you. I don’t want to be late. How would that look?”
Surviving Valencia Page 7
