Surviving Valencia (4 page)

Because of the photos, I was a little uncomfortable with Alexa staying at our house. They were still hidden in the book, and in no way did I think she would have any interest in a “Shabby Chic” decorating book, but I was afraid of what might happen if something else showed up. Because things had been happening.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday, Adrian and I were coming home from a trip to the coffee shop just as the mail was arriving. I saw the letter – it looked just like the other one from what I could catch in that quick glance -- and my stomach tightened up. We were both wearing sunglasses so at least he could not see the way my eyes shot open. He shuffled through the mail and swiftly tucked that familiar envelope with its typed address into one of his art magazines. Then he handed me a clothing catalog and a postcard from his parents.

“Look. They’re in Delaware,” he scoffed. I guess the joke was, Who would send a postcard from a place like Delaware? He was just trying to be distracting. So this meant he had intersected one or more of these letters already. I suppose I shouldn’t say intersected; after all, it was his mail. But if he had never seen one before and did not know what to expect, he simply would have torn it open. So that one slippery move said quite a bit. And there was something else I learned too: He was far smoother than I realized. There was no hint of discomfort or fear about him. He slid the letter into his magazine, passed me the postcard, cracked a joke, unlocked the front door with our going-for-a-walk key. He didn’t miss a beat, didn’t crack a sweat, all aspects of his behavior a choreographed dance of benign casualness.

That was my chance to confront him but I didn’t take it. In fact, I even made things easy for him. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, leaving him there to do what he would like with his letter.

My parents decided that we needed to go on a family vacation during the summer of 1986. It was our last summer together as a family before Valencia and Van went off to college. So in mid-June we took the camper and headed to Glacier National Park. My dad was really excited and talked more than I remember him talking before or since. He was like a brand-new person, sharing trivia with us non-stop the whole way there.

“Do you know that the glaciers are disappearing? They are drying right up. You’ll all be lucky if there are any left by the time you bring your own kids here so take a hell of a lot of pictures! Your mother and me came here back when you were babies, Valencia and Van. You probably don’t even remember that, do you? We had a good time, right, Patricia?”

When he wasn’t talking, he was playing a cassette tape of old music with a horrid song on it called
Patricia
, singing along, trying to make my mother smile.

That was a funny summer. Funny strange, I mean. There were times I saw my family, my parents especially, in a way I hadn’t before and never would again. They seemed like a T.V. family. Like the Keatons from
Family Ties
, maybe. It’s funny how even then as a child I looked at our family in terms of they instead of we, how I saw myself as an insignificant filler character, like the way the little blonde sister fit in beside Alex and Mallory.

What I did not know then was that my mother had just ended a nine-year affair with a neighbor. She and my father had been about to call it quits, but she changed her mind and decided to try to work things out with him. And he was so happy that summer because of this glimmer of hope of my mom loving him again. Now it all makes sense. But at the time I thought he was just happy to be with all of us and to be in that camper going to look at glaciers.

I wasn’t even sure what a glacier was and was having a really hard time picturing it.

“A glacier is a big hunk of snow,” Valencia told me.

We lived in Wisconsin where there was snow all the time. I couldn’t understand why we would want to see more snow in June when it was finally all gone, but I wasn’t about to argue as long as everyone seemed to be having a good time.

My dad kept his word and took roll after roll of film. Stupid pictures that made my mother angry. “Stop taking pictures of the car, Roger. It costs money to develop those.” Everyone was concerned about money in the 80’s. But for once he ignored her nagging and the camera kept snapping away, freezing my brother in a goofy cowboy hat and my sister in her favorite tangerine sundress. There were pictures of my mother taken by the fire after we kids had gone to sleep, her face less tight than usual, dark, barely visible against the lapping orange flames.

“Say cheeseburger!” was his catchphrase on that trip. We all said cheeseburger a thousand times it seemed.

“Van inherited your dorkiness,” Valencia told him when Van put on a filthy pirate style eye patch he’d had the good fortune to find on the floor of a truck stop bathroom in Bismarck. My dad beamed when he heard this and my mom bristled silently in her seat.

We pulled over again and again. Every hill of wild flowers and every mountain was a notable backdrop. Any memory was worth saving.

“Let’s get one by this historical marker. You too, Patricia. Take your ponytail out. You look real nice. Van, ask those Japs to take a picture of all of us. No, no, keep your eye patch on. It’s funny.”

I inherited just his desperation. He was trying to capture my mother but did not know we were all slipping away.

When he got home he took the film to a store downtown that only developed pictures and sold film. I don’t know if they even make stores like that anymore. He got twenty-five of the photos turned into big, matted eyesores in rustic wood frames. These frames were so rustic that they could not be dusted without the duster getting a sliver. He hung them throughout the living room, dining room, hallways, even one in the first floor powder room. Unlike the other ladies I knew, Mom was never much on decorating and our house really showed it.

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.

“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 around 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.