Surviving Valencia

I’m trying. Really trying. To just go with it. To plan for a future the way everyone else who is married does. Luckily, Adrian seems unaware of my doubts. I have always been good at hiding things. And the doubts are very back burner. I can carry on huge conversations while having an entirely different conversation alone in my head. For the most part, I am truly doing this. This marriage, I mean.

The changes are not all bad, really, and the back burner is not always even hot. Sometimes there is just a tea kettle back there, a tea kettle of tiny secret worries, and what is one little tea kettle when it’s on a Wolf gas range in the middle of a great big wonderful life?

So yes, there are good things. Great things. The kinds of things I tell my friends, my eyes bright and glistening with emphatic sincerity. How the biggest difference is this feeling of wholeness. I think I was transparent before, and now, finally, I am solid. I can be seen by him, my words can be heard, I have weight and mass. Before, I thought it was normal for me to be the wispy compilation of other people’s opinions of me, and nothing more. I was only alive when someone spoke my name. But now I feel I stand alone as an actual human being. Or perhaps it’s just that I really am so much to Adrian, and I am feeling that.

I really do feel this way sometimes. And it feels amazing. I think this is something like it must have felt to be Valencia.

I lie awake at night and try to envelop myself in this feeling, pulling Adrian’s sleeping body around me, trying to save this goodness and trying to push out all the doubts. Sometime it almost works, and then I wonder how long it will last.

Chapter 4

I can vaguely remember a time when there was a cardboard box on a closet shelf at my parents’ house. Valencia had put her cheerleading outfit inside it for safekeeping the summer before she went to college. I think it was the kind of box a cake would go in: large with a cellophane window showing what was inside. That’s a blur, but the cheerleading uniform is not. It had a purple and gold pleated skirt and a purple v-neck top with the silhouette of a roaring lion across the front.

Like nearly every material thing that could remind me of the twins, now it is gone. Donated long ago to some metal box in a church parking lot so it could be recycled as a Hallowe

en costume. Or perhaps it was burned in my parents’ backyard barbeque pit during one of my mother’s cleaning crazes. I don’t know and I will not ask. Questions like that are met with avoidance or lies, so I rarely bother asking them anymore.

Valencia was the head cheerleader. In the 1980’s cheerleading got a little more respect than it does today. Back then, being your school’s head cheerleader was really quite an accomplishment.

When I went to the basketball games and watched my brother playing and my sister cheering, I was so proud. They made me feel like I was someone important. I loved bragging about them to my classmates. Valencia told me that I was going to be a cheerleader when I got older, but we both knew it was ridiculous. To be a cheerleader, an über-cheerleader-extraordinaire like her anyhow, you had to know how to dance. And I was no dancer.

My mother had tried enrolling me in dance classes when I was four, but the teacher recommended karate for me instead.

“Karate is for boys,” said my mother.

“I would like to do some karate,” I said.

“Shhhh,” said my mother. The teacher laughed, but not the sort of laugh that meant I was cute.

“She’s drastically behind in her motor skills department,” said the teacher. I can recall other children peering over at me curiously. I pictured a motor boat and wondered why I was being compared to a boat.

“I’m not a boat,” I said.

“You’re making this worse for yourself,” said my mother, then turned back to the dance ladies. Getting desperate, she pointed out that Valencia was a great dancer and that we were sisters.

“I think she is slow. She walks like she’s dragging herself around,” said the teacher. Back then, adults could say things like this. It was different than it is today.

“She has the gait of an old man,” added her assistant. I pictured a fat, flat-footed old man wearing overalls, swinging on a gate.

Thus I began walking on my tiptoes in an effort to be more lady-like. Not just in the dance studio, but everywhere I went.

“What are you doing? Where did you learn that? Do you want to drive me to take pills?” my mother asked me.

“Can’t you drive yourself?” I said back. See, I was not slow. That was a good comeback for someone who was not yet five. It got me a slap across the face. Slaps were also a commonplace occurrence back in those days. Everything was rougher and children were not special. Really, it was not so bad.

“Valencia, help me walk like you do,” I told my sister one day, after I had followed her around the house on my toes for an hour.

“Just walk,” she said, looking at me suspiciously. “You know, walk, like anyone does.”

My father, who was sitting at the kitchen table clipping coupons for my mother, had to get up and go for a drive by himself at that point. I knew it was my fault, and I knew that no matter how well I learned to walk, I would never make my parents as happy as Van and Valencia could make them.

When I was five or six, Fame was all the rage. My mother walked around the house with a laundry basket singing along to her huge, 1970’s style headphones.

“Stop it mom,” I told her.

“Sing along with me!” she yelled over the sound of the vacuum cleaner she was pushing, smiling and bopping her head. “Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember, Remember!” Back then, before they were gone, she was sometimes happy.

Along with the torture of watching her sway and jiggle and croon along, Fame reignited my mother’s interest in turning me into a dancer. Several months or a year had gone by and she seemed to think it might not hurt for me to have another go at it.