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She outfitted me in a stylish ensemble of a purple leotard, black tights, pink legwarmers, and off the shoulder sweatshirt that said Heartbreaker, and took me to a different, fancier dance teacher across town.
“Behave yourself and do everything Madame Strathmore says,” she told me, smacking my butt on my way out of the car to really send the message home. But on the second visit, when she returned to pick me up, we were stopped as we were leaving. In front of the whole class and all the other mothers, Madame Strathmore said, “She got cut from Dance Fever on Eleventh Avenue for being uncoordinated, so don’t try to trick me into teaching her.”
It turns out those dance class ladies travel in a tight circle.
I had my coat halfway on and my Snoopy backpack still on the hook by the door. Aside from being a little embarrassed, I was unfazed by this turn of events. The surprise ending of my getting kicked out of dance class for being unteachable was an obvious conclusion no matter how you sliced it. What was there to do but shrug and trudge on ahead? My mother hauled me out the door.
“You won’t be seeing us around here again,” she yelled to the teacher. As if it was her decision.
“My backpack!” I reminded her, but it stayed hanging on the hook, my entire scratch-and-sniff sticker collection inside.
When I turned seven, the age my mother told me was the start of being a lady, she and my father paid Valencia to tutor me on dancing, walking, being cute. I remember being put into one of my good dresses and seated at the dining room table after school, waiting for Valencia to come rushing in, rolling her eyes in good natured conspiratorial exasperation with me at the absurdity of our parents, as she dropped her bookbag on the floor and said “Are you ready to do some pliés?” This went on for a few weeks, and throughout it I acted like I hated it also, and rolled my eyes along with her at the silliness of it all, but really, it was great. To have Valencia’s undivided attention, even if it involved money changing hands, was painfully special to me. But Valencia was too busy and by the fourth week, when I sat at the table waiting until it was dark outside and she still had not come home, the whole subject was dropped. “I give up,” said my mother. And she did give up, focusing instead on Valencia and Van for the next five years.
Chapter 5
Adrian and I moved halfway across the country because we wanted to start a new life together. We had to get away from our exes because they both were viciously bitter about being dumped; we each thought the other might end up getting killed. His ex-wife Belinda, in particular, is prone to flying off the handle. We chose Savannah because it’s where he went to school, at Savannah College of Art and Design, or SCAD, years before we met.
When I first got to know Adrian, life was very low for him. He couldn’t sell any of his work, and even with his extra job at Border’s, he and Belinda could hardly pay their bills. He was ten years older than me, spending his evenings helping housewives choose the latest Nora Roberts book. It wasn’t hard to see that he was not at a good place in his life.
Unlike the rest of his family, Adrian is determined to make his own money. Why he cares I couldn’t begin to explain. But then, a year after he and I got together, things changed. Fame can happen very quickly, and money really does change everything. He is an artist, and he’s very good. Movie stars want his work in their homes. He makes huge paintings of very close-up things you might see in a forest. Like the way a pinecone would look to an ant. Therefore, I would think he could better understand my Gulliver fixation.
I never saw myself as the kind of woman who wouldn’t have to work, who would have a man taking care of her and buying her presents, but he has turned me into her. It’s like going from being Amish to living a mainstream life, I imagine. Once you get a taste of Pizza Hut and a feel for blow dryers, there’s just no going back to the farm.
When Adrian and I are in Savannah, I guess you could say we are a little bit famous. We often walk down by the river at night, and now and then I see people point us out to one another. Savannah is a city full of tourists, all the time, usually drunk, often riding in hearses on ghost tours or snapping pictures in the graveyards. Most locals hate the tourists, but I couldn’t imagine Savannah without them. There are usually plenty milling about even in the off-season. It’s rarely the tourists who recognize us though. It’s the residents who read in one of the local papers about Adrian’s latest opening or some painting the governor bought. The locals will point us out to some friend or relative who might be visiting them, and the visitor will nod as if he too could have recognized Adrian. Soon, if things continue the way they have been going, everyone truly will recognize us.
I have had plenty of this secondhand fame before, from being Valencia and Van’s little sister. It feels good at first but leaves you always a little bit cold, like stepping from icy ceramic tiles into a lukewarm bath. You shiver and want the water to be hotter, but you can’t bring yourself to get out of the bathtub. Living off other people’s fame would leave most people very hungry, I imagine. Far hungrier than me. This time I am handling it with a dignified edge and cool detachment that could only come from experience.
In the 1980’s, in Hudson, Wisconsin, Valencia was a little bit famous too. We lived on a cul-de-sac, but that did not stop the teenage boys and occasional middle-aged man from finding countless reasons to turn around there. Even as a small child, I wondered if Valencia knew how impossibly lucky she was to play this role. Did she ever wonder “Why me?” the way the rest of us pondered and mourned being so meaningless? Did she ever consider the unlikeliness of her one, single life holding so much potential? But I think she took it for granted. The admiration, the blatant worship she was pelted with. To her, it felt normal and she lived her life straight through it, doing everyday things like babysitting the neighbors and reading my Choose Your Own Adventure books when she was bored. Like a child born in the peaks of Switzerland becomes as immune to the beautiful view as a child born in a wasteland becomes immune to the ugliness.
One of her biggest fans was our mailman, Ned. Nearly sixty years old with the biggest, thickest glasses ever made. He was a grandfather to fourteen children and a volun
teer phone answerer during public television pledge drives. Once my dad called in to donate ten dollars, all of which was specifically meant to be applied to shows about fishing, and we watched Ned take the call on the air. There was a five second delay and my dad had the hardest time watching Ned while trying to speak to him, and Ned kept saying, “Don’t look at your monitor, Roger. Just talk into the phone.” But my dad couldn’t take his eyes off the television. “This is really happening,” he told us, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand, looking at all of us in disbelief while Ned, on the screen, kept saying, “Roger, Roger, are you there? Just talk into the phone.”
That Ned, he would still be blushing five houses down after a blasé Valencia met him at the door in her green Duran Duran pajamas. This made my mother furious.
“Can’t you just wait until that poor man leaves before you get the mail? Or get dressed first. Do you want to give him a heart attack? And what about your reputation?”
“Mom, these come all the way down to my knees. Relax.”
I was just a little kid but I could recognize jealousy disguised as concern.
“Do you want me to ground you?” my mother would ask her.
“Not really,” Valencia would answer, and smile at our mother as if this was a joke they were in on together. Unlike me, she had an unparalleled charm that got her out of any predicament.
One summer day when I was nine, a carload of high school boys drove up and parked across the street from our house. I didn’t recognize them as friends of my brother or sister. I was sitting on the front steps, designing my new fall line-up of evening gowns in a big unlined notebook I had gotten from the twins for my birthday. What are those high school boys doing? I wrote in magenta beside a strapless mermaid style dress. They were talking and laughing and shoving each other. Their music played loudly. But I knew why they were here: To see Valencia. She was our own personal Corn Palace. I colored the bottom of the dress purple, my peripheral vision telling me they hadn’t left their vehicle.
Finally one of them yelled, “Hey, is Valencia around?”
He pronounced it wrong. Like Valensha instead of Valen-see-a.
I ignored them and started a new dress. This one was a Southern Belle kind of dress, very full and off the shoulder. Only it wasn’t turning out so great because they were distracting me.
“We drove all the way from Wausau! We want to meet Valensha!” yelled another boy. One of his friends covered his mouth with his hand. They were all laughing and looked like total idiots. Valencia didn’t have friends like this.
“If you stay parked there, my dad is going to shoot you,” I yelled back to them. I began coloring in the Southern Belle dress. Light blue. That is the color all Southern Belle dresses should always be. That notebook, if I could find it, if it hadn’t been burned with every other artifact of the past, would prove it.
“Go get her. Go get Valensha,” yelled the boy who was driving. Then all the boys started yelling her name. Yelling it loud and wrong. Valensha! Valensha!
