Surviving Valencia (11 page)

I won the Sixth Grade Science Fair on December 12, 1986. I had only been back in school for two days, and had entered an old shoe and a paragraph-long report on the history of shoes (which had nothing to do with science), yet somehow I took away the blue ribbon. The report said something like, “Shoes used to be made so they fit a left or a right foot, just put one on and it would fit, but not very well, but then one day a smart person realized left feet are different from right feet. It may have been Benjamin Franklin, since he discovered many other things. This shoe here is an example of a shoe made for a right foot.”

“Was that your sister’s shoe?” asked a seventh grader I had never talked to before. I nodded. She stroked it, caressing the worn toe until I had to look away in embarrassment. In reality, it was one of my mother’s stinky old loafers and if I didn’t get it home before she noticed it was missing there would be hell to pay.

We did not celebrate Christmas in 1986. My mother had purchased plenty of gifts, but they stayed in their shopping bags down in the basement storage room where she thought no one knew about them. I went down there and looked in the bags one day just before Christmas, finding some stonewashed jeans in my size and purple earmuffs that must have been for me. Most of it was for Valencia. There were new boots in her size and a neat stack of sweaters, jeans, and pajamas. Chunky, matching earrings to go with the sweaters. Romance novels and a cookbook called
College Cuisine
about making casseroles in a toaster oven. Mom had always had the most fun shopping for her, so by November she had already been almost done buying her gifts. There were only some socks and a new basketball for Van. He was hard to shop for, my mother always said. There was nothing for Dad, of course. Parents don’t give each other presents.

On Christmas morning, when I awoke and there were no presents, I tried to help my mom by reminding her of the jeans and earmuffs. “And the stuff you got for Valencia is fine for me,” I said. I didn’t mean to be offensive. But she slapped me across the face, which I really had not seen coming. My dad, normally not one to get involved, even felt that she had gone too far and said, “Patricia, that’s enough.”

Then we pulled ourselves together for the trip to my grandmother’s house. She had some gifts for me: Books like John Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony
and
The Yearling
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. They were old and had already been read, I could tell. They were wrapped in a brown paper bag from the grocery store, and given to me out of sight of my cousins, since she normally gave us just ten dollars each.

My cousins had piles of gifts to open, and my aunts and uncles forced them to share with me. I was given what they wanted least. I went home with a badly knitted scarf and Smurf socks with blue pompom balls on the ankles. Throughout it all my parents drank brandy slush and my mother cried.

“Can I stay with you for a while?” I asked my grandma.

“No, your parents need you,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” I said solemnly. I remember whispering this to her, urgently, my eyebrows raised. I felt like the only sane person in the world. Like I could see things, obvious things, everyone else was missing.

When we were leaving I tried again, desperately. But she was unfazed by my pleas.

“They need you now
more than ever
,” she said, handing me my bag of crappy gifts, loading me into the car with two staggering drunks. I recall looking back at her as she stood on her porch and waved, her little hand folding open and shut. Before we were out of her driveway she pulled her sweater around her and went back inside.

My parents avoided talking about the twins, save for one particular conversation I overheard in early January, when my mother said, “Roger, did you hear that Rob McCray dropped out of college?”

I was doing some homework at the dining room table. My ears perked up.

“Who?” asked my father.

“Rob McCray. That boy Valencia used to go with. He was going to school in La Crosse too. I heard from Mary Kelter-Gurnsey that he dropped out last month.”

I looked down at my math problems, considering for the first time all the others who were missing Van and Valencia. Poor Rob McCray. He had lost the love of his life.

“That kid with the rough looking mom? Yeah, I remember him,” said my father. “I never understood why she wouldn’t wear a wig. She looked like a hag. Wouldn’t you wear a wig, Patricia? If you didn’t have hair. You wouldn’t go around like that, would you?”

“I guess not,” said my mother.

“Out in public…” He shook his head, disgusted.

“Yes Roger, I’d wear a wig.”

“I would hope so.” Then I heard the television get turned up louder. End of subject.

For some time our house was like a time capsule of Thanksgiving, with small turkey statues gathering dust on top of the television all the way into spring. On Easter Sunday I went into Valencia’s room and cleaned up the Barbie Thanksgiving feast. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t planned any kind of a surprise like that for Van and I began to cry, hating myself for being so thoughtless. I went down into his room and lay on his waterbed, looking around at his posters and his falling-apart dresser. It was always cooler in his room since it was in the basement. Right through the middle of his bedroom ran one of those support poles that holds up the house. I used to twirl and do tricks on it until one day a friend of his called me a pole-dancing slut. I was about seven or eight.

“What does that mean?” I’d asked Van, knowing it was something bad.

“Just get out of my room,” he’d said, and shoved me right out the door. I guess we were both trying to show off for his friend.

“Tell me!” I’d yelled through his door. “Tell me or I will kick the door in!” I was always such an embarrassment.

They climbed out his window to get away from me, but left the radio on. I sat outside the door for an hour, waiting for them, until I heard them upstairs playing Atari.

Now it was quiet and still.

There were senior pictures of his still-alive classmates stuck in the frame of his mirror. The girls were all
so
pretty and the boys were all
so
cute. Feathered hair and Trans Ams. Permed hair and Camaros. I went over to the mirror and pulled a few of the photos down, curious what I would find written on the backs. It turned out that people just signed their names on the back of senior pictures. I put the pictures back where they had been and stood at his dresser. I was quiet and still. I did not know what to do. The familiar semi-darkness, the slightly mildewy smell, the blue curtains, the brown bedspread. My surroundings began to overwhelm me. I felt like I was losing my breath. I did not know if it was the reality of his absence or the illusion of his presence that was permeating my soul, making me feel so broken. I sat down on the edge of his bed, pinpricks of light swirling around me. I thought I might faint. I stretched out on his bed with his yearbook before me, trying to calm down, trying to relax. Knowing if my mother found me I would be in trouble. She owned these memories, not me.

I ached for everything I had lost, and for the secret shame of having been a fraction of Van and Valencia’s thoughts, while they had been my entire world.

My parents, in a strange move I had only heard about on television, sent me to camp the summer of 1987. It was just like I had heard it would be, with canoes, crafts, swim lessons, the works. There were big green bunkhouses for boys and girls. At night we sang songs around campfires. It lasted for six weeks and, until I met Adrian, stood out, gleaming pink and gold like a pirate ship of adventure and independence, as the best six weeks of my life.

There I met my first boyfriend. A quiet, mousy little nerd by the name of Donny Hadbrack. We snuggled up by the campfire every night, and none of the counselors even noticed. If they did, they didn’t care. They may have even thought we were cute. There were other little couples at Clear Water Camp for Boys and Girls. Coupling up seemed to be an accepted part of the camp experience.

Donny knew nothing about me. I don’t know if he even knew my last name. I told him I was an only child, and because I had always wanted a dog, I told him I had a poodle named Mork. As far as everyone at camp was concerned, this was my story. I had never had any power over my own destiny before camp, and it was there, for the first time in my life, that I had a sliver of influence. I was telling them who I was, and they were accepting it. This was not the way it worked at school, or at home, or anyplace else. I wondered why it couldn’t always be so easy.

I wasn’t popular, but no one hated me. I felt normal, funny, sweet. I felt like I was finally experiencing what it should mean to be a girl. I was a spreader of laughter and cheer, a net-carrying chaser of butterflies, a screaming, giggling lake splasher. My shoulders burned red and peeled. My fingernails were black crescents of creativity and filth. I was someone else entirely, reborn and happy. Life at camp was one big Country Time Lemonade commercial come to life.

When I got home from camp, Valencia and Van’s rooms were cleared out. Valencia’s room had become a guest room and Van’s was nothing. Just an empty room with brown carpet smooshed down where furniture had been and a stained drop ceiling.

“Where is everything?” I asked.

“We donated it to St. Vincent de Paul,” my dad said. My mother was lying down in bed, resting. They had both picked me up from camp, but there had been a baseball game on the radio that my father had needed to listen to, and none of us had exchanged a word on the drive home.

I wandered through our house, feeling like I was visiting someone else’s home. The furniture in Valencia’s room had been rearranged so that now there was just a bed, a table beside it, and a dresser with a pale gold doily on top. It even smelled different: Pledge and Windex. The smell of Love’s Baby Soft was gone. I opened her closet door but there was nothing inside but a vacuum cleaner.

I went back into the living room where my dad had fallen asleep on the recliner.

“Dad?”

He was snoring.

“Dad?” I wanted to ask him if there was anything left, but he was snoring so loudly that I didn’t want to listen anymore.

I went outside, strolling down the sidewalk in front of our house, spinning the friendship bracelet Donny had given me. “Now you won’t forget about us,” he had said when he pressed it into my palm and kissed me on the lips. My first kiss. My heart had melted.

“Do you want to tie it on my wrist?”

“Okay,” he said.

“I wish I had something for you.”

“That’s okay.” He’d tied it, nervously, and then he had kissed me again. This time longer. We were both smiling really big when we stepped back from each other. We had stood there blushing and smiling, his hands on my hips and mine on his shoulders, like we were at a dance.

“I’ll never forget you,” he promised.

“I will never forget you either.”

“Will you write to me?”

“Yes, Donny. All the time. Will you write to me?”

“Of course I will. Will you be at camp next year?”

At that, I had deflated. I told him my first whole truth, “I doubt it. My parents can’t really be counted on to follow through on things like this. I can’t believe they even found this place and mailed a check in, and then drove me here. It must have required a lot of planning and even looking at a map. So honestly, Donny, I don’t know if we will ever see each other again. But I will sure try to be here.”

He’d never heard me talk so much. His face clouded over a bit and I sensed I had ruined some of the magic between us. I smiled and kissed him again, and this seemed to reset things. When we parted ways, he had looked back at me with heartbroken pain on his face, a look I’d never dreamed would be meant for me.

Thinking about it made me feel all flushed and butterfliesy again, and I pressed my palms to my face. I glanced toward the front window, somehow thinking my parents could read my mind, but no one was watching me.

I sat down on the sidewalk in front of our house, like a little kid. Ants ran over my toes and up my legs but I made a game that unless they reached my knees I couldn’t brush them away. I just spun the bracelet and waited for something to happen. I wanted to call Donny but
Seventeen
swore it was best to let him call me.

Somewhere was a land of crystal blue lakes and campfires, just waiting for me. Nothing to do but be happy and paddle around in canoes. That’s where I needed to be. I couldn’t just settle back into my mundane existence on ranch house road. It was like feasting on a buffet of pizza for a week and then being told to eat brussels sprouts for the rest of my life. There must be some way to break free. But if I ran away where would I go? My parents would catch me and ground me forever.

Then it became obvious: I needed to get kidnapped. I had been warned my whole life about it. How hard could it be? In the 1980’s kidnapping was supposedly as commonplace as jelly shoes. The message had been pummeled into our young brains, from the mouths of teachers and the backs of milk cartons:
Predators prey on children! Don’t hang out in parks by yourself! Stay away from big vans with no windows. Beware of men looking for lost puppies!

I went back inside and changed into a black tank top and a mini skirt. It seemed appropriately risqué. While I listened to my dad snoring, I smeared red lipstick on my mouth, and then I ran out the door, straight to the park. When I got there I was huffing and puffing. The whole park was deserted, which at first made me disappointed, but then seemed like a good omen. Kidnappers liked their privacy.

I crawled on the monkey bars, slid down the slide, even played in the sand until I saw a used condom and started to gag. Was I too old to get kidnapped? After all, I wasn’t exactly a baby anymore. I was twelve. Sure, I looked ten, but kidnappers liked ‘em young. Really young, unless you’re a boy. Then they want you to be about thirteen. We had learned all this in school. This, multiplication tables, news about Ronald Reagan. Not much else.

I wondered what might increase my odds, racking my brain to remember the filmstrip ‘Staying Safe in the Neighborhood.’ I could picture two towheaded little girls, running with a kite, and a big white van, slowly approaching.
Danger! Danger! Avoid that stranger,
sang Chippy Chipmunk, the ‘Staying Safe’ mascot. I hummed the song we’d learned over and over again at the start of each school year, willing it to come back to me. I could picture the filmstrip better now: As the van approached, one of the little girls stopped to tie her shoe.

“Hello there, little girls,” said a man with a beard and dark glasses, leaning out the window of the van, “Would you like some candy?”

The little girl with the kite ran towards him, nodding in a fake, head bobbing manner, but her little friend, after pulling the bow of her laces firmly into place (Smart as a whip! Could tie her shoes and save her foolish friend!), stood up and began singing along with Chippy,
“If you want to be safe, travel in twos! Say no to candy or you’ll surely lose!”

They made it look so easy. Just stand there and wait for the van. But here I was, plunked down on a teeter-totter, trying to make it teeter all by myself in a deserted park. No kidnappers, not even a scary, lurky dad.

The sun was going down. Just twenty-four hours earlier, Donny and I had been singing by the campfire. A year earlier I had been watching my sister and brother pack for college. I stayed there until the sky filled with stars and a big white moon. I looked at my bracelet and spun it some more, dreading going back home to my hushed, empty house. I started to cry and just let the tears run down my face, not caring, not even wiping them away. Mosquitoes were biting. Next time I would remember the Off.

While I swatted at them, I watched as a big white van rounded the corner and approached me. Was it slowing down? For me? I stood up and watched as it came to a complete stop by the edge of the park and a man got out. No beard or dark glasses, but he would do.

“Hi,” I called out, wondering if I should try to act sexy or innocent. Thinking quickly, I slid the straps of my tank top off my bony shoulders for what I hoped would be an alluring look.

“Are you okay?” he asked. I noticed he was wearing white powdery clothes. I figured he must be a drywaller or something.

“Are you here for me?” I asked him, wiping away my tears and practically starting to skip, “Cause I’m not going to fight or anything. Where are we going?”

“Huh?” He looked around nervously, like I was going to get him in trouble.

“Watch, I am entering your van on my own free will. Let’s go.” I tried to open the passenger side door but it was locked. I had heard about this in school. Kidnappers only have one working door to really trap you once you’re inside. No problem. I walked around to his side and opened the driver’s side door. Inside was crammed full of everything from empty drink cups to big cans of paint and brushes. A little dog sat on the passenger seat, wedged between all the garbage. He barked when he saw me.

“What are you doing?” yelled the man, red faced and sweaty. “Get out of my van right now!” He stood five feet away from the van, seemingly afraid to get near me.

“Where am I supposed to sit? Is there room in the back?” I asked.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Will your dog bite me?”

“Get out of my van right now or I am going to call the cops on you.” Sweat was pouring down his forehead in rivers.

He wasn’t very good at this. Maybe I was his first victim.

“I can fit on the seat by you if your dog will let me hold him. As long as he won’t bite me. He’s a little cutie. Aren’t you, boy! Is it a boy? Good dog!” I got in, squeezing myself onto the passenger seat and cuddling the dog who was getting comfortable on my lap. He licked my face. “You probably didn’t think this would be so easy, did you?” I said to my kidnapper.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Go home to your mom and dad, little girl!” he said, reaching inside the van and honking the horn.

“I’m twelve,” I informed him.

“Help! Help!” he yelled.

“
Help?
You’re not a kidnapper, are you?” I asked. The dog looked up at me, searchingly. I could not bring myself to move.

“Get. Out,” he whispered hoarsely, pointing out towards the park, its tire swings and teeter-totters now receding in darkness. I shifted, sliding the dog off my lap, and wriggled out of my seat.  Sighing, I stepped down from the van. Boy, did I feel stupid.

The man jumped in and slammed the door, then locked it with a disgusted swat of his fist. His dog looked at me, barked one, lone chompy bark, and the van took off down the street.

I watched the taillights getting farther and farther away until the van turned onto Fennimore Street and was gone. I pulled the straps of my tank top back where they belonged and, with nowhere else to go, went back home.

I wrote to Donny Hadbrack every day. His letters stopped coming after only a month. How could he go on with his life and forget our relationship? I couldn’t even fathom it. I decided his mother must have gotten in the way, or some other girl.

Four years later when I got my driver’s license, the first thing I would do was to drive the three-hour trek to his house. Even after all that time, he still stood out as the nicest guy I had ever met.

I was listening to R.E.M. tapes and my heart was pounding. I decided I wanted to lose my virginity NOW. I was so sure it would happen that I stopped at Wal-Mart and bought my first matching bra and panty set, and switched into it in the parking lot.

It turned out that Donny lived in just a regular brown house with dented aluminum siding and fake bricks on the front. I saw him looking much the same, shirtlessly riding a yellow lawn tractor. He was picking his nose and singing along to some headphones he was wearing. “Girls, girls, girls!” he sang over the noise of the lawnmower. I watched as he flicked a booger out onto the freshly mowed lawn, then dug in his other nostril for some more.

This meant I needed to find a new boy to love. Damn it.

He didn’t see me so I just drove by and kept going right on home, back to Hudson.