Surviving Valencia (23 page)

Three days undercover in a hotel with morning sickness that lasts all day is not an experience I would wish on anyone. I kept a steady stream of porn coming my way, the volume muted and a towel draped over the screen when I’d reached my limit of smut. I tried to read some books I’d brought along, but I could not concentrate enough to even follow along with the room service menu. When I woke up the first morning there, I walked to a coffee shop and set up an email account, just buying a cookie with cash. I sent Sexxy Lady a message that said, “Hi. I think I’m coming down with the flu. What should I do?” but the message bounced right back to me. Well, at least I had it set up. Then I went to a different coffee shop and bought a coffee and orange juice with our credit card. I felt completely paranoid, like I was going to goof up somehow without realizing it. I took the coffee and juice back to the room and sat there, waiting for time to pass. It took all my willpower not to stay planted at the coffee shop with the computers.

I cried every time I thought of the picture of Jeb, afraid I was going to get a letter like that with a picture of Adrian. And then I thought about how my baby had bad, bad parents and I cried some more. If anyone had knocked on the door they instantly would have known I wasn’t half of a happy couple on a dirty rendezvous.

By three o’clock I was starving so I ordered some pasta primavera for myself, and a porterhouse steak for my invisible husband. I put on a slinky little nightie with a robe tied loosely over it and turned on the shower. The food arrived with those big metal domes over the plates, reminding me of decapitations on platters. The man started to push the cart into the room, but I grabbed it instead.

“Thanks, I’ve got it,” I said. I handed him a five-dollar bill. I have no idea about tipping. That’s Adrian’s territory. I set the domes inside the closet.

I worked my way through the pasta primavera, then cut the steak into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet. The baked potato wasn’t too bad though. I decided I had earned the right to watch some non-porn, so I turned on the Gardening Channel and learned how to install a fishpond.

I waited all evening for something to happen, some phone call or something, but Adrian stayed true to his word and the night passed without any contact.

The next morning I went to the coffee shop to check my email. There was a message from my husband that simply said, “I have the flu but everything else is o.k. I am going home.”

So I endured one more day and checked out at nine the next morning. When I got home my car was in the garage. Adrian greeted me at the door with a kiss.

“Did you have a good time in Atlanta?”

“No,” I said.

“I know. I’m just trying to be nice. Why don’t you come with me to pick up Frisky?”

“Why don’t we just leave him there.”

“Right. Come on.”

“Seriously,” I said, “do we need him anymore?”

“No,” he said.

The heaviness of that one word settled over us. I began to cry.

“But,” he continued, softly, “we’re going to get him because he’s our dog. Our pet. Come on.”

“Can we talk about what happened? What did you do?” I whispered.

“I’m going on my own then. I’ll be home soon.”

“No, I want to come with you.”

We rode along without saying anything for a few minutes and then Adrian said, “You need to trust that I would never intentionally hurt anyone unless I had to. He would have killed us.”

“Why couldn’t you have gone to the police? What kind of people are we? I feel like I‘m living someone else’s life. I don’t even know you!”

“That’s not fair! I just put my life on the line for us! You have no idea what I went through these last few days! I have had two hours of sleep in three days! And that’s just the beginning of it. Do you think I ever saw my life going this way? Hell no! But sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do until you do it. Now I need to be able to trust you. Can I trust you?”

“Yes.”

“The police aren’t God. There’s no reason to get them involved. It’s too late for that.”

He looked at me hard. And we were both afraid of what the other could be capable of.

My high school graduation was a no-frills affair. My parents came to it and then took me out for dinner afterwards at an Italian restaurant called Francesca’s. There was no party. Who besides relatives would we invite? Alex Wescott had broken up with me so he could go off to college and become gay for real. So it was fine with me to bypass having a party. My parents gave me a gift, though: A brand new computer for college. That was a pretty big deal. They were also paying for me to go to the UW. Honestly, both were more than I ever expected. I don’t think I even would have gotten into Madison, but to my surprise, Dave Douglas wrote a really nice letter of recommendation for me.

I drove myself there and moved myself in, which turned out to be a weird thing to do. All the other students had their parents and families with them. I thought back to my parents helping Valencia and Van move into their dorms. “Your parents aged thirty years when Valencia and Van died,” my Grandmother told me once. Which made them older than her. So when I looked at it like that, it made sense that they couldn’t be there with me. They were practically eighty!

For the first time I thought about all the things Valencia and Van left in their dorms. Why couldn’t I remember how we got their possessions back? Did other students ransack their dressers and closets? I considered asking my mom about it, but what was the point?

It was 1993, and I was as old as they were when they died. I envied them for starting college with all their dreams planted in the future, believing in the power of their four years of work to sow a life of plenty. I envied them for their hope. They had been clean, vast expanses of promise, looking forever forward instead of dwelling in the past.

I, on the other hand, felt like a person with an infected, stinking wound. I resigned myself to a life of bloodstained bandages and flies swarming around me. I’d given up on being
somebody
. Being average, having a few friends, would have been good enough. But I was continually reminded of how damaged I was by the way nearly everyone avoided me.

My mother would have slapped me if she’d heard me say how I envied them. Then I remembered that, finally, I didn’t live under my parents’ control anymore.

I was nervous to have a roommate. When I got to my room she was nowhere to be seen, but I saw that she had already begun to move in. The bed closer to the door had luggage and boxes on it. I took the other bed but felt like this mystery girl might get mad at me. What if she had just set her stuff on the first bed because it was closer, but wanted the far bed? I paced the tiny room, hoping she would come back so I could avoid making an important decision like where we would each sleep for the entire year. The minutes ticked by.

I paced around some more. “Please don’t let her be a J or a K girl,” I whispered to God. A toilet flushed in the distance, as if in response, and I frowned.

My roommate and I had exchanged one letter apiece over the summer but hers had been, literally, five sentences long without a photo (that gave me hope; A Jenni or a Keeli would probably send about ten pictures, half in swimwear). I knew her name was Sara Murdock and she was from Boise, Idaho. That was all. The boxes on her side of the room were just cardboard boxes and I wasn’t about to poke inside to get a better idea, so I fidgeted with my purse, waiting for her to return. After nearly an hour of thumbing through a magazine, waiting for the door to open, I gave up.

I hauled my boxes in and started to unpack them. Besides my computer, I had only four boxes and a big duffel bag, compared to the crammed-full U-Hauls and pickup trucks I saw all around me. There were student helpers in red shorts and white Bucky Badger t-shirts to help me move my computer. I didn’t have the mini fridge, television, stereo, or other necessities of college life. I wondered what Mystery Girl was bringing into this. I knew she would hate me and be disappointed to be stuck with me. I felt sorry for her already.

It didn’t take long to unpack. I sat on my new bed excited, but a little surprised that I felt lonely. I missed my parents, which was a new feeling for me, and I considered calling them. Just to let them know I was settled in. Then I remembered the elaborate care packages my mom packed for my brother and sister and I started to cry.
This is ridiculous
, I decided. Here I was, away from them. Hadn’t I wanted this for my whole life? I decided to take a walk.

There was a lot to be happy about. I was in a dorm called Liz Waters and it was right by Lake Mendota. Was I really going to live in downtown Madison, by the lake, on my own? This, I realized, was my chance to reinvent myself. I could become anyone. Just like the dream I’d had at the start of junior high school, I had it again, only this time I was older, wiser, and more disciplined.

I am going to be normal. Hell, I’m going to be Better than Normal!

People will like me. People Really Will!

I am going to make it happen. Did you hear that? Yes! I heard that! I am Going To Make It Happen!

I got so excited that I was practically marching. I looked around me and turned it down a notch. I didn’t know that every single freshman on the entire campus had the same dream. Truly, anything felt possible as I walked along the path by the lake, watching sailboats and feeling the warm late-summer wind against my face.

There were only a few things I had to do to fit in, I decided. First, I could not flunk out of school or the whole plan would have been for nothing. My mother had warned me so many times about flunking out that it was starting to seem like circumstances beyond my control, before classes had even started. Step two was to find a boyfriend. No one gross, because he would represent to others who I was. Someone like Alex Wescott would be good. Part three was that I needed to look like I had been popular in my old life. This was, perhaps, the most important step of all, and I already had it covered.

I had spent a fair amount of time my senior year collecting pictures of the popular students. The girls in particular were happy to throw their senior pictures to any stray dog. They carried little plastic boxes with clear plastic lids that they all had the habit of snapping open and closed. If you asked for a picture they would cheerfully spread out four, five, six poses on the table in front of them. There was always one close-up with a class ring adorned hand pressed to a thoughtful, poreless face, and another close-up with a beautiful gleaming smile. Next were the full body pictures, as evidence of being beautiful from a distance as well as from inches away. One would show her standing by a tree, or on a flowery hill. Finally there were the ones taken with a best friend or boyfriend, and the occasional wildcard picture. Different outfits for each was a MUST. They would steer the losers like me toward their least favorite pose, but it was still a vast improvement from four years earlier when they wouldn’t talk to anyone but the most worthy few.

So because of my patience and endurance, I had a thick stack of pictures that I had already plastered to my bulletin board. Hopefully my roommate was back in our room, noticing them all and realizing what a formidable opponent I was.

When I got back to the room she was there, lying on her bed. I gasped when I saw her and then tried to disguise it as a cough. She had to weigh at least four hundred pounds.

“Hi Sara. Nice to meet you,” I said, sticking out my hand, trying to redeem myself.

“Nice to meet you too. My parents just left…” She began to cry. I looked around the room a little and saw she had started to unpack. On her bulletin board were two 8 x 10 portraits. One of a white sheepdog and the other of the world’s cutest, happiest, biggest couple.

“Are these your parents?” I asked, pointing to the picture. She nodded. I felt terrible that she was crying.

“Want to take a walk?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked.

She reached into a purse on her bed and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “Will you get me some ice cream?”

“Okay. What flavor?”

“Butter pecan.”

I had never met anyone younger than my parents who liked butter pecan ice cream. “I’ll be back in a little bit,” I told her.

I didn’t have any idea where I was going to buy ice cream. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was already being taken advantage of. Here I was on an ice cream run for someone I had just met five minutes ago. Why did this kind of thing always happen to me?

“Can I get you anything?” chirped the recording of myself in my head.
That
was my problem, I realized. “Stop asking questions you don’t want answered,” I told myself. It’s a lesson no one ever learns.

It didn’t take me long to stumble upon a small grocery store on State Street. I bought a family sized tub of what Valencia and Van used to refer to as “Nursing Home Special” and carried it back to our room. By the time I got there, the bucket was slippery and the ice cream was slopping around inside. I handed it to Sara, who was already waiting with a serving spoon in her hand. I was prepared to have to share a bowl with her, to be social, but the opportunity didn’t present itself. She peeled back the lid and stuck the spoon in, starting with the soft, runny edges. She didn’t say a word to me, just ate. I started to feel embarrassed, so I turned on my computer and played solitaire. Minutes turned into an hour before I heard the bucket’s lid snap back into place. She set the empty container by her bed and lay down to take a nap.

I took to hanging out in common areas most of the time. Our room smelled like popcorn, salsa, angel food cake, and chicken McNuggets, all rolled into one stench. Sara was in there constantly eating and studying. I was still invisible, never able to grasp the art of being important. I tried jumping into other people’s conversations, tried just sitting around reading, hoping I looked approachable. I struck up conversations with other people who looked lonely. No one wanted anything to do with me. I stopped wearing Valencia’s ring for a while, after some people made fun of me, thinking it was my high school class ring. But then I missed the way it felt and put it back on, even if it meant I looked uncool. I watched life happen around me, as I always had.

People walked past with peace signs drawn on their notebooks and love beads around their necks, but this was just a fashion statement.  Their goodwill and acceptance were theoretical, at best. I kept my grades at about a C average since even this was better than going back to Hudson.