Surviving Valencia

“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 aro

und 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.”