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And the pictures stayed between the pages of Shabby Chic for Modern Homes where I occasionally visited them when I was alone.
Chapter 7
The great thing about Valencia was that she was an excellent braider. She could French braid my hair into two tight pigtails in under three minutes. She knew tricky braids too. Fishtail braids and braids using four strands. Braids that curled around my head and supposedly made me look Swedish. Princess Leia donut braids and sideways braids that ended in a ponytail behind one ear.
She had a brush with a faux tortoise handle she started with, brushing my hair until it was perfectly smooth. It never hurt when she brushed it. Now I sometimes try to make Adrian brush my hair, but it’s not the same.
I liked the Pippi Longstocking braids best, and she would do them in the morning at the breakfast table, while I sat on the stepstool my mother used to get things off the upper cupboard shelves.
“Do you two have to do this at the kitchen table?” my mother always said.
“My hair is clean,” I would say.
“That’s not the point.”
“I don’t mind some hair on my toast,” Valencia would say.
After my hair was brushed, she would lightly draw a line from the top of my head down to my neck, with her fingernail, making two equal sections. She said it looked better to not have a too-perfect line. “You can’t seem like you’re trying too hard,” she told me. She did the left side then the right, her fingers flying.
“There you go, Nellie Oleson!” She would say when the second hair band snapped into place. I don’t look anything like Nellie Oleson; Nellie Oleson had curls, not braids. But I loved it.
“Do it again,” I would tell her, pulling the rubber bands out and shaking my hair loose on mornings when I wasn’t about to miss the school bus.
“Don’t shake your head out at the table. You’re getting hair everywhere,” my mom would say. This genuinely stressed her out. I was so much braver with my sister there, because she made everyone slightly more normal than we were without her.
“No, no, no! Leave it in place!” Valencia would tell me.
“Too late. You have to do it again. Pleasssse.”
“One more time. Then I have to go.”
“Okay. Okay. Maybe this time just one braid. It will look more grown up.”
“You look like you’re in a wind tunnel when you have just one braid,” my mom would helpfully tell me.
“She does not,” Valencia would say. And she would do what I asked, adding, “You look cute either way, though I don’t know why you always shake it out and make me start over.”
“I don’t know,” I would say, wanting to push my luck and try for a third time. The bands would snap into place and my school bus would be waiting, or she’d be out the door to cheerleading practice or some other fantastic destination before I had the chance to try.
Chapter 8
I turned eleven in May of 1986. My mother lumped my birthday party together with Valencia and Van’s graduation party. There were two large cakes with lions for the graduates, and a small cake with Tweety Bird on it for me. Had most of the guests realized the Tweety cake was for me, I might have been embarrassed.
My two best friends were my entire guest list. They were as unpopular as I was and were unfazed by Tweety and the lack of planning on my behalf. I opened my presents from them: Makeup. It was all I wanted. Just lots and lots of makeup. Eye shadow and lip-gloss, mascara I was too squeamish to bring near my eyes, and bright pink crème rouge that destroyed my chances of having a decent school picture for the following two years. I tried to show my mother the colorful array of tubes, compacts, and click-shut shadows, but she was busy dishing out generous hunks of purple frosted cake to our neighbors and relatives. So my friends and I disappeared into the downstairs TV room and ate the Tweety Bird cake while we watched Mr. Mom.
My friends’ names were Heather and Jenny and they were better friends with each other than either was with me. They lived next door to one another and their moms were far-off cousins. I could feel them getting bored, and I needed to do something to keep them from wanting to leave. I had been through this before: Jenny would start looking at Heather from the corner of her eye and say she was “sick.” Then Heather would get ridiculously worried (but it was fake, I could tell) and one of them would call a mom so they could leave me and hang out together.
“Do you want more cake?” I asked.
“No,” said Heather.
“No,” echoed Jenny. She put her hand on her stomach and scrunched her face into a grimace. “My tummy hurts,” she murmured.
“Should we try out the makeup?” I asked. It was the last thing I wanted to do, to open it all and share it with them, but I was desperate.
Jenny perked up a little at that. “Sure.” Without hesitating she reached right into the stash I had arranged in front of me on the floor and grabbed a package of Cover Girl eye shadow. She tore it open and dug the fresh little pad of the applicator into the sparkly, chalky blue compartment of shadow.
“Heather, come here,” she said, pulling her true friend down from the recliner. She filled in the area from Heather’s eyelashes to eyebrows with a thick smear of blue. I watched as she dipped the applicator again, this time into the sable brown, and made up Heather’s other eye.
