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“You look just like a rock star! You look like Cyndi Lauper!” They went running to the bathroom to look. I followed them, sick to my stomach over my new eye shadow’s speedy turn from pristine to ruined.
“Doesn’t she look exactly like Cyndi Lauper?” Jenny squealed. No, she did not at all look like Cyndi Lauper. The very comparison made my nostrils flare in disgust. Big boned Heather with her crooked teeth and hairy little mustache on her upper lip. I shrugged. This was the point where I could either go along with them and watch all my new makeup be destroyed, or save the makeup and have them think I was boring, as usual.
“I don’t really feel like playing this. Should we keep watching Mr. Mom?” I asked.
“Do my lips in purple!” said Heather, ignoring me. Jenny ran back into the TV room and scooped up the rest of my birthday gifts. She returned to the bathroom, grinning, and carelessly tore open my purple sparkl
y Cover Girl lipstick, letting the cardboard backing float down and land in the toilet bowl. I just watched. I hated them and I hated myself.
I grabbed the raspberry crème blush, the one article she had missed in her haste, and headed upstairs to my bedroom. The party was in full swing, spilling over from inside to outside and room to room. I caught a glimpse of Valencia’s friend Naomi Shelton, looking woozy and sitting on my Uncle Ted’s lap. Gross. Somehow through the din of it all, I heard my mother’s shrieking laughter.
Some little girls from down the street were in my bedroom, sitting on my bed, playing with my Barbies. They could not have reached the Barbies, or even known they were up on my closet shelf, unless some awful grown-up had helped them find them. Which meant my mom had taken the Barbies down, on purpose, without asking me. From pure frustration I started to cry.
“Those are mine and I didn’t say you could play with them.” I said. The three little girls stopped playing and sized me up.
“Your mom said it was okay,” said one of them. Her blue, icy eyes met mine like a dare.
“But I said you couldn’t.” I wiped at my tears, noticing a popped off Barbie head stuck upon one of the girl’s fingertips.
“We’re going to tell on you if you don’t let them play with us,” said the Barbie killer in a squeaky voice, wiggling her Barbie head finger in my face. Her friends giggled menacingly.
I looked around my room. It was worse than I had initially realized. I saw that my dresser drawers were opened and the top drawer of my desk had been snooped through. A whole sheet of stickers were now decorating the back of my desk chair. I found myself both horrified and impressed at their gutsiness. They couldn’t have been older than seven.
“Fine. Fine. I don’t care. But you can’t play with them in here.” I picked up the box that held the Barbies and set it in the hallway outside my door. “I have a headache and I need to lie down right now.”
My eleventh birthday was the day I first put into use the favorite excuse of grown-ups: I’m sick. Case closed. It’s the one point no one ever argues. Everyone knows it’s a lie, but it works anyway. I had been watching Jenny use it for years. She was born knowing about it. It was how my own mother had survived the holidays for as long as I could remember, a warm rag on her forehead while my grandma served the food.
The girls glared at me but gathered up the Barbies and outfits around them and left. I locked my door and smoothed the bedspread where they had wrinkled it. I closed my dresser drawers and carefully peeled the stickers off the back of my chair. Outside, a volleyball game was in action. Valencia and Van’s friends were everywhere, filling picnic tables we had borrowed from neighbors, stretched out in lawn chairs and hanging around by the barbeque grill. My aunts and uncles drank wine coolers and talked with the other adults.
I pushed aside my line of Trixie Belden books on my windowsill and kneeled on the carpet with my chin propped in my hands, watching as a brown station wagon slowly made its approach. Uh oh. It was Jenny’s mom’s car. The last thing I needed was for my mom to notice and come looking for me to see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have worried. The car pulled up along the curb and Jenny and Heather ran out to it and jumped in. In a moment they were gone and the party went on as if nothing had happened. Then I was hit by a new worry: Had they opened all the makeup? I needed to get to it before these little neighbor girls went downstairs and found it. I cracked open my bedroom door and saw that they were now down the hall on my parents’ bed playing with the Barbies. Ha!
I raced downstairs to the little bathroom off the T.V. room and there I found all my new makeup, out of its packaging and much too destroyed for the damage to have been accidental. I made a little hammock with the front of my shirt and slid the smeared and broken cosmetics into the sling. Back upstairs, back to my room I went, finding that it thankfully was still vacant. I closed and re-locked the door. Then I opened the drawer of my bedside table and plunked my birthday gifts inside, slamming it shut so I wouldn’t have to look at them.
That was the first day of being eleven. Eleven turned out to be a very hard year.
Chapter 9
Because of the photos, I was a little uncomfortable with Alexa staying at our house. They were still hidden in the book, and in no way did I think she would have any interest in a “Shabby Chic” decorating book, but I was afraid of what might happen if something else showed up. Because things had been happening.
A few weeks ago on a Saturday, Adrian and I were coming home from a trip to the coffee shop just as the mail was arriving. I saw the letter – it looked just like the other one from what I could catch in that quick glance -- and my stomach tightened up. We were both wearing sunglasses so at least he could not see the way my eyes shot open. He shuffled through the mail and swiftly tucked that familiar envelope with its typed address into one of his art magazines. Then he handed me a clothing catalog and a postcard from his parents.
“Look. They’re in Delaware,” he scoffed. I guess the joke was, Who would send a postcard from a place like Delaware? He was just trying to be distracting. So this meant he had intersected one or more of these letters already. I suppose I shouldn’t say intersected; after all, it was his mail. But if he had never seen one before and did not know what to expect, he simply would have torn it open. So that one slippery move said quite a bit. And there was something else I learned too: He was far smoother than I realized. There was no hint of discomfort or fear about him. He slid the letter into his magazine, passed me the postcard, cracked a joke, unlocked the front door with our going-for-a-walk key. He didn’t miss a beat, didn’t crack a sweat, all aspects of his behavior a choreographed dance of benign casualness.
That was my chance to confront him but I didn’t take it. In fact, I even made things easy for him. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, leaving him there to do what he would like with his letter.
Chapter 10
My parents decided that we needed to go on a family vacation during the summer of 1986. It was our last summer together as a family before Valencia and Van went off to college. So in mid-June we took the camper and headed to Glacier National Park. My dad was really excited and talked more than I remember him talking before or since. He was like a brand-new person, sharing trivia with us non-stop the whole way there.
“Do you know that the glaciers are disappearing? They are drying right up. You’ll all be lucky if there are any left by the time you bring your own kids here so take a hell of a lot of pictures! Your mother and me came here back when you were babies, Valencia and Van. You probably don’t even remember that, do you? We had a good time, right, Patricia?”
When he wasn’t talking, he was playing a cassette tape of old music with a horrid song on it called Patricia, singing along, trying to make my mother smile.
That was a funny summer. Funny strange, I mean. There were times I saw my family, my parents especially, in a way I hadn’t before and never would again. They seemed like a T.V. family. Like the Keatons from Family Ties, maybe. It’s funny how even then as a child I looked at our family in terms of they instead of we, how I saw myself as an insignificant filler character, like the way the little blonde sister fit in beside Alex and Mallory.
What I did not know then was that my mother had just ended a nine-year affair with a neighbor. She and my father had been about to call it quits, but she changed her mind and decided to try to work things out with him. And he was so happy that summer because of this glimmer of hope of my mom loving him again. Now it all makes sense. But at the time I thought he was just happy to be with all of us and to be in that camper going to look at glaciers.
I wasn’t even sure what a glacier was and was having a really hard time picturing it.
