Surviving Valencia

Any woman would want him.

I knew that much was true.

The next day we signed up Frisky for school.

“I can get him into this class in Mechanicsville today!” Adrian told me, setting down the phone and holding up the paper to show me the advertisement.

“That sounds perfect for Frisky,” I told him.

The second they left, my cell phone rang. Having never taken the time to assign ring tones, I assumed it was Adrian. I feared he was getting attacked by Frisky, and I flipped it open without even looking.

“Hi Baby, what’s up?” I said.

“It’s me. Jeb,” said a raspy voice.

“Oh Jeb. Sorry. I thought you were my husband. How are you?”

“We need to get together.”

The problem with the Golden Dragon is that after you go there you need to take a shower. With its garlicky shrimp aroma, it is not the best place for a discreet rendezvous.

“What have you got for me?” I asked.

“I’d rather talk in person.”

“Could we meet someplace else?” I asked.

There was a long pause. “No,” he said.

“Fine. See you in fifteen.”

Chapter 40

I will always associate eighth grade with pottery. I had signed up for ceramics for no reason other than it seemed like it would be easy. By luck, I had a study hall immediately following it, which allowed me to spend almost three hours straight working on my pots and vases. The teacher, not unlike most art teachers, was one of those ladies whose only ambition in life was to seem wacky. We called her Nancy and as far as I recall, we never did learn her last name. She wore huge, dangly earrings made of polished gems she’d mined on trips in her rusty Airstream. She and her partner Willie once sold oranges they picked in Florida and distributed across the continent, going door-to-door and making thousands of dollars that they used to start a shelter for ferrets.

Nancy and her over-the-top stories made eighth grade bearable. She had a bottomless bag of adventures from her cross-country citrus selling days. Who could resist the one about her three-legged cat named Jesus Christ? Or the side-splitter about her dentures falling into the Grand Canyon?

While all the other kids tired of her stories, I wanted to hear more. She told me about her life in a way that I could imagine perfectly. Her stories took root in my brain like old Polaroid pictures, and never left. They became the bedrock of my own dreams and fantasies, redefining what I thought I needed out of life. I realized I wanted to have adventures like she’d had. And I wanted someone to be adventurous with me. Before hearing Nancy’s enthusiasm for Willie, I hadn’t been sure if people might not be better off alone, but she made me doublethink that.

Maybe one day, like her, I would walk down a dusty road, carrying a gas can, with the man I loved beside me, whistling a little song. Perhaps it would start to rain. Maybe, if we were lucky, we’d run through a field and hide in an old barn. If the stars were aligned, just right, the gas can would have a little bit of gas left inside of it and it would spill, and then later when we lit up some cigarettes we’d start the barn on fire. We’d get out of there before anyone caught us and we’d laugh about it forever.

Just like Nancy and Willie.

She didn’t tell this story to everyone. But when she told it, she cackled and cackled, and then always got very serious at the end adding, “No animals were harmed.”

If Nancy could have a life like this, filled with one fun surprise after another, so could I. Heck, if Nancy could do it, anybody could.

She showed us kids that there were different ways to go about life than the formula all our parents seemed to be following. Nancy was living proof that being a loser was not a recipe for a sad, lonely life. Willie, whose photo was tacked to her bulletin board, may not have been much to look at it, but he loved her. And her job did not pay well, or carry with it much respect or prestige, but it seemed to make her happy. And she was well traveled! I admired

that. Now along with Valencia and Kennedy’s mom Sharon, I had Nancy as a role model.

Day after day my vases and pots became taller, rounder, and lighter. I painted them with elaborate scenes, my favorites being farm life, spaceships, and cute little monkeys swinging from trees. She did not object as I went through blocks of clay. I began skipping lunch and German class to go to the ceramics room, some days passing four or five hours in there. Nancy and Frau Schoenmeister each turned a blind eye to this, since I was still the girl who had been through so much. By the end of eighth grade, I had created seven eight-piece dinner settings. The plates were the hardest to make look nice. I made these sets with a mindless, therapeutic focus, never suspecting they would serve me for the rest of my life.

On one of my last days of eighth grade, before I went off to high school and never saw Nancy again, I asked her to choose a set of dishes to keep. She chose one that was nice, but politely stayed away from my two absolute favorites. The set she picked had cows and pigs standing before cheery red barns. A lesser teacher, or person for that matter, would have said, “No, no, I can’t. You put so much effort into these,” but Nancy enthusiastically accepted the set and carefully wrapped each piece in newspaper to take home to Willie and her pets.

“We’re having corn on the cob and artichokes for dinner, and they’re going to taste good on these plates,” she said. I can remember waiting, a knot in my stomach, for her to ask me to join them. She didn’t.

I hope she still has those dishes. Sometimes when I am in Hudson I consider stopping by her old classroom, but she couldn’t possibly still be there. She was old even back then.