Surviving Valencia

“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.

Chapter 23

When Adrian and I got back to Madison from Hudson, I started packing to go home to Savannah. Suspiciously needing privacy from me, Adrian had called Alexa while I went in to use a bathroom at a gas station on our drive back and she had booked a flight leaving the next day. I wondered what he had said that had made her evacuate in such a hurry. Normally, we allowed our visits to overlap on one end or the other for a day or two so the three of us could catch up.

“Is Alexa upset to be getting kicked out of our house with so little notice?” I asked as we sat by the window in her foyer, waiting for the taxi to take us to the airport.

“No. She’s fine with it.”

“What did you tell her that made her rush off?”

He raised his eyebrows at me. “Rush off?”

“Don’t be sensitive.”

“I’m not. I didn’t tell her anything except that you had just visited your family and were acting a little weird. I said you needed to go home to your own house. We’ve been at each other’s houses for almost two weeks, it wasn’t like she was surprised that we wanted to come home.”

“Why did you call her when I was in the gas station?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Because… it was something to do while I waited for you to use the bathroom? Am I in trouble?”

“No.”

“Well it was beginning to feel like I was.”

“Did she have trouble switching her ticket?” I asked.

“I’m sure it wasn’t a problem,” he said, turning from me and removing a book from the side pocket of his carry-on bag. He found where he had left off and started to read. I hate it when he gets suddenly absorbed in something like his art, or a book, just to end a conversation.

We sat there in silence.