Surviving Valencia (8 page)

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!”

I stuck my head in the ancient water fountain, squinting at the sight of other kids’ spit, catching a few meager drops of what tasted like pure rust. How was I going to become popular? They hated me. A new year had not changed anything. Now here I was, slurping rusty water because I had been told to do so.
You are pathetic
, I reminded myself, taking another drink. Just then Heather and Jenny came walking toward me. Heather had gone through puberty big time during the summer. She now had both a bigger mustache and bigger boobs than any teacher in our school. Jenny, in comparison, looked like she was seven or eight years old, with a huge horse mouth filled with crooked shark teeth.

“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.

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?”

I opened the passenger side door and got in without saying a word. She popped in a cassette tape, turning up the volume, her signal that I should be quiet.

“We’ve both got cheatin’ hearts, yes we do,”
she sang with the music, trying to croon like someone on
Hee-Haw.
She shook her hair and fluffed it up, thinking she looked sexy. I watched the houses we passed, each one harboring some family not as awful as my own. From the corner of my eye I noticed her sniffing about like a rabbit. The smell of my hair remedy hung thick around us. She cleared some phlegm from her throat and continued singing:

“Although we feel the shame, yes we do, we can’t stay away…”

How was she capable of imagining herself alone in the car? It was like I didn’t even exist. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, oblivious to my anger and repulsion. Oblivious to anything but her own excitement over being the belle of the junior high ball.

I wrung my hands, praying for a deer to run out in front of us. We would hit it and it would bust through the windshield. My mother would be impaled on its antlers. Miraculously, the deer would be okay and would wriggle free, a scrap of ugly material caught on its antlers, but otherwise unharmed. Years from now, after the deer had enjoyed a long, happy life, some hunter would shoot it and wonder why it had flowered polyester clinging to its antlers, and it would be written about in the local paper. Would I come forward? Would I tell? No, let it be a mystery. My poor mother would not be so lucky. She would end up in one of those homes like my great-grandma Lindstrom had been in. Diplomatically, I decided that she would not be suffering, due to all the medication they would give her. She would do word search puzzles and we would visit her on Sundays. As she drooled quietly, we would come to love her in a piteous way, and everyone would be better off.

Before I knew it, however, our station wagon was pulling into the school parking lot. All around me cars dropped off other kids and drove away. This was supposed to be the happiest night of my life so far. We walked inside and, to my further humiliation, my mother informed the old lady collecting money that I did not have to pay since she was chaperoning. I am quite sure she invented that rule on the spot.

“Cheapskate,” the old woman muttered. My mother didn’t care what some old lady thought of her. She breezed past her, drawn to the male teachers like a nail to one of those big magnets in a cow’s belly. I followed behind, looking for someone to talk to, but remembering I had no friends. The smell of egg salad that clung to my mother’s dress wafted after her and I stepped to the side to avoid it. Thank goodness I had doused myself in Avon Soft Musk perfume and washed my hair with Glitz! Didn’t she know how stinky she was? I looked around me, hoping to catch some boy’s eye, but they all avoided my desperate come-hither glances. How could I have thought things would be different tonight? It was the same old school, same old gym, same old me.

“Patricia, great of you to make it! We had the hardest time meeting the quota of chaperones for this. They had to borrow me from the grade school,” I heard Mr. Gorton gushing to my mother. He had been my teacher when I was in fourth grade. All the women loved him because he looked just like the Brawny paper towel man. He was standing beside Mr. Davis, the gym teacher, who was cute despite being nearly completely bald. Then something wonderful happened: They both wrinkled their noses and said in unison, “It smells like potato salad in here!” Then the youngest, prettiest teacher, Miss Fields, walked towards my mother but stopped a few feet short of her, waving her hand in the air, “Ewww! Does anyone else smell rotten eggs?”

My mother shot me a quick, withering glance as she struggled to appear calm and cheerful in front of the other adults. “Hmm. I don’t smell anything,” she murmured.

I wandered over to the popular girls, who turned away from me and formed an exclusionary circle of outward facing backs. Heather and Jenny were carrying on with some farm boys. Jenny looked at me, her expression bordering on welcoming, but I resisted the temptation to fall back into my old bad habits. I slinked out the side door of the gymnasium and sprinted down the dark corridor.

The school seemed bigger at night. Quiet. Peaceful. It was better out here, alone, than under pressure in the gym. I decided I would hang out in the library by myself all night. I was relieved to not have to compete against the popular girls. Soon they would be ruling the dance floor, laughing and spinning beneath the sparkly disco ball and crepe paper streamers. Even the teachers bowed down to them. The image in my head was bad enough. Having to watch it play out would have been even worse. But my mother was stuck.

I smirked, perusing the study carrels for lost notes or other treasures. What was this? Somebody’s wristwatch? Finders keepers. I slipped it into my pocket, squinting in the semi-darkness for more forgotten goodies. Yes, here I was, blissfully alone, while she was stuck chaperoning and stinking like my nasty hair, only without the half-gallon of Avon Soft Musk to drown it out. What was she doing
right now
, I wondered. Was she looking for me? Probably not, since that would require tearing herself away from the men. I pictured her trying to fit in, flirting desperately, now and then sniffing her dress and shrugging, a buggy eyed, goofy smile trembling on her face.

Being away from watchful, judging eyes, feeling the sweet rarity of freedom, I put my feet up on the chair across from me and relaxed. I picked up a brand new issue of
Vogue
that had not even made it out to the magazine wall yet, and began tearing open perfume samples, rubbing them up and down my arms. I settled back, content, my only source of light the flickering red hue of the exit signs. I was at peace. It took very little to make me happy back then.