Excavation: A Memoir

by Wendy C. Ortiz

  “I’d been planning to tie you up and rape you,” Jeff continued on the phone with a sensuous drawl in his voice. “Would you have fought back?”

  I listened, my eyebrows furrowed. I felt clueless and tired, unsure of innuendo, confused by fantasy and reality. “No,” I said quietly.

  “Ah, Wendy,” Jeff boomed into the phone, like I had ruined a good joke, “you take the fun out of everything!”

  ✵

  Every other visit to Jeff’s house seemed drenched in unspoken melodrama. His friends made it known that my presence was suspect, while at the same time, desired. Jeff passed on notes they made about my appearance, and there was a hint that everyone wondered just who I was sleeping with.

  The word slut seemed to be transfixed in the air above my head: Nicholas had already broken up with me once, suggesting my identity as a slut as the reason. I listened to stories Jeff told of the sleep-around behavior of his friends. I wondered what made them not sluts.

  And then there was the matter that sometimes after a loud, raucous session in his bedroom, Jeff would forget to call me. For days.

  I applied ice to the reddish violet bruise-kisses on my skin and took the daily pink pill, peach pill, white pill into my mouth to prevent pregnancy. I answered the phone when Nicholas called and stepped out of my house with a secret smile when he arrived in his car to pick me up, the vehicle weighted down with amps, guitars, cords, beer. I slid back easily into teenage girl mode as easily as I slid into Nicholas’s car as he tore away from my mother’s house.

  EARLY JUNE

  1989

  I imagined I was a woman relaxing by a pool.

  Actually, I was a girl, coming down from an afternoon of strawberry and apple Boone’s Farm, sitting at the edge of the half-pipe in Nicholas’s backyard, watching him skate up and down in a fascinating arc.

  I was reading the L.A. Weekly when my eyes weren’t closed. I felt vulnerable to the Santa Ana winds in my favorite orange flowered breezy sleeveless shirt and my holey-kneed jeans. My sunglasses made me look older, or so I was told.

  I was constantly being told, by varying sources, that I could not possibly be sixteen.

  According to these sources, I was “ageless” and also “ancient.” I took these as compliments. Depending on what their motives were, the sources also used my agelessness to their advantage; the assuaging of their guilt, for instance. I preferred not to think about it too hard and just baked in the sun and focused on the sound of wheels on wood as they arced, receded, got louder again.

  ✵

  Lounging on the grass, I imagined I was a model, waiting to be discovered.

  I remembered I was not a model when Jeff’s eyes scanned other people in the park, reminding us that we needed to be on the lookout.

  I was a girl, lying on the fluffy grass of a park in Van Nuys, Jeff next to me. I was almost contorted in my reclining position so that he would see, remember the way my body looked, the way it bent and posed.

  That day he was not thinking about sex, though. He was pondering “us.”

  I found it unnerving that this thirty-one year-old man wanted to wonder whether or not what we have been doing for almost three years was “wrong.” All I could think is that “wrong” was just something in quotation marks. I said this, and he sighed, shook his head. I realized that was maybe the sixteen-year-old thing to say. I was often guilty of this.

  With my eyes closed, I felt the sun beating down on me. It felt cleansing. I listened to the ice cream truck take its time passing the nearby playground. I remembered the dark places of the stone castle that inhabited a large part of the playground, because this was where we often came for class field trips when I was in elementary school. The upper level of the castle was a maze that smelled like piss. I used to like to linger there, scaring myself and screeching in delight when someone happened by.

  I knew that I would no longer be able to go to that play castle. That soon I wouldn’t be able to even physically fit into its small entranceways. Jeff took no notice of the deep breath I took. He had no interest in my past. I wondered if I even had any interest in what was past anymore.

  I sat up, grasped my arms around my legs, rocked in the sun, let the moment pass.

  Jeff and I made small talk that said: No sex until the guilt is over. Sitting up, I could already see the way I looked moments before, lying on the grass, posed. Shame snaked out of me, like a stain spreading underneath me onto the innocent grass.

  I realized, for a second, that Jeff could not have, never did, “discover” me and my potential as a girl, a woman, a person who could call herself a writer. And he remembered me, my poses and contortions, only when it suited him.

  I realized this, for one sun-drenched, tickling grass, Van Nuys second, and then it escaped me.

  When I lay back on the grass again, my mother’s car keys fell out of my pocket. I heard them fall and instead concentrated on my ability to maintain Jeff’s attention.

  EARLY SUMMER

  1989

  My eighth grade class held a class reunion in the summer after my sophomore year of high school.

  I relished getting together with this group of students, even though many of them went to my high school, were even in some of my current classes. The party seemed to be an opportunity to show off burgeoning adulthood: many of us would be arriving in cars that we drove, wearing clothes not chosen for us by our parents or our high school, and I myself planned on eating a pot-laced brownie before arriving, for the novelty of it.

  The photographs from that evening are like a situational comedy caught on stills.

  My face takes up most of the frame in many of the pictures: I am sunburned, and my hair is long, dark and wavy. My mouth is open and I look as though I’ve never stopped laughing. In various frames, I am standing with Tammy, or Curtis, or Veronica, and I’m holding a prop of some sort and staring at it in mock fascination for effect. The group pictures feature everyone open-mouthed, laughing, someone’s two fingers behind another’s head, one person looking at someone out of frame in confusion.

  Then there is the sole picture of the teachers. Mr. Connell and Mr. Ivers, as we still called them, are seated by the hostess’s swimming pool. I trained my mouth ahead of time to form the words again and again: Mr. Ivers, Mr. Ivers, I said into the mirror in my bedroom before the party.

  Jeff wore black shorts and a white t-shirt that read “Mammoth Times.” His baseball cap was askew and his beard was nearly grown in but sloppy, slightly unkempt. In the photo, his outstretched arm is holding a Budweiser and he’s grinning. Mr. Connell looks relaxed, leaning into the poolside chair, a can of Coca Cola at his side.

  “Mr. Ivers, Mr. Connell?” I had asked. “Can I take your picture?” I let my eyes linger on Jeff’s face for a second more before I snapped the photo.

  We made plans to meet after the party, at his house, at half past midnight. I pushed away thoughts of my curfew, my mother’s wrath should she be awake and sober when I arrived home. “I have a couple of things I want to say,” I started. I sat on the loveseat while Jeff sprawled on his couch. The television was on, the lights out, no one else was home, and there was an emptiness in the air that made it hard for me to breathe. He listened in silence.

  “I just wonder, all the time, what our relationship means,” I said, trying to keep my tone level, adult. “I don’t want our friendship to be just about sex, but sometimes I wonder if it is.”

  There was a moment of silence, and he sighed.

  “You just can’t keep perspective.” His eyes looked closed as he peered at me from his reclined position. The blue light from the television lit the room.

  My thighs were pressed together, tense. I knew that if tears fell, it would be too dark for him to see them. I knew, too, that he might not respond. The night had been a blur of laughter that felt contrived, pulled deep from my insides, as I stoo
d around my peers with Jeff somewhere in the background. My ears had been tuned to him, my eyes flashing and glancing around so that I could spot him casually and track his movements. I questioned every nuance of conversation he made with my female friends, and I carried these images in my pocket to inspect later for innuendo I might have missed. The energy to act normal, happy, seemed to come from a well inside me that gushed and roiled until it drained out when it was clear that Jeff was ignoring me. I was confused by what I wanted: his attention at a party? His professed love in private? “Lovemaking” instead of fucking?

  He interrupted my thoughts with a cold, flat voice.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have sex anymore. I don’t want it to be the only thing that holds us together, and you seem to always have some questions around that.”

  “Yes,” I agreed quickly, my eyes filling up with water, my chest feeling hollow.

  “We can get together and shoot the shit, whatever, without sex,” he continued intoning from the couch. His lips seemed not to move. He looked exhausted in a way I had never witnessed. “Maybe then we’ll—no,” he paused, “you’ll be able to decide whether we’re still capable of having fun together, being friends.”

  “Okay,” I said. I stood up resolutely and wondered silently if I could still ask for a kiss.

  “Bye,” I finally said softly. He lifted a hand to me from the couch. I let my keys jingle in my hand as I opened the screen door and let myself out into the night.

  ✵

  The chugging, whirring noises of my bus mimicked what I imagined to be my own internal hum.

  This hum was charged with hope, challenged by the experiences that drugs gave (mind-expanders, I believed), the motor fueled by desire that ran underground but kept me alert, wanting.

  The bus, however, broke down numerous times from the moment it was purchased off the used car lot, its sticker price washed off the windshield. The summer that stretched out ahead of me seemed to putt-putt into an unexpected ending whenever the engine died.

  My exasperation was lifted when Jeff offered to help fix it, and I watched him as he toiled in my mother’s garage. I wondered about this new friendship: was it something we were reinvoking, or concocting?

  My mother brought out iced soft drinks and watched Jeff as he inspected the engine. After some small talk, which he answered in his signature charming way, she stood in silence. Her patience thin as always, she returned to the house, calling after me to follow her.

  In the muggy air of the enclosed patio, she whispered to me urgently.

  “Why does he want to help you so much?”

  I looked at her thick skin, her red face from being out in the heat of the garage. I stood over her, inches taller, my hands in my back jeans pockets. I shrugged.

  “He’s a nice person. He’s my friend now that he’s not my teacher. Lots of students get advice from him, and he’s…” I ran out of adjectives.

  “Okay,” my mom said slowly, enunciating each syllable. Her lips were red with a skinny line of moist lipstick, her forehead perspiring. “Are you planning on offering him money?”

  “We’ll see,” I said by way of answer and moved away from her, back to the garage. I let the patio door slam shut. I sighed with relief and a light went on in my head and disappeared just as fast.

  Could she suspect?

  When I returned to the garage, Jeff had rolled the bus onto the sloping driveway and pulled the emergency brake.

  “I needed more air,” he said. “And light.” His dirty arm motioned to the sky. The sun was just starting to go down and an electric guitar blared on the radio. An airplane flew overhead. I kneeled down next to him, my bare feet pressed into the rocky blacktop.

  “Now you know that I wouldn’t just do this for anyone,” he grunted as he used a huge wrench inside the guts of the bus.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking down at the ground.

  “That’s why,” he said between short exhales of breath, twisting the piece of metal, checking his work, “it makes me so—” twist, “fucking mad that you would even—” twist, “insinuate that we are not friends first and foremost.” He backed away from the bus and threw the wrench down on the ground. It landed near my feet and I stepped back.

  “I care, Wendy, which is why I come over in the fucking heat on a gorgeous day to help you out with your bus,” he said, his hazel eyes fixed on my face. I nodded and looked at my legs. I felt like I couldn’t speak, a feeling I was more than used to with Jeff.

  “Get me a beer, would you?” he asked, exhaling. I stood up and pulled open the door of my bus and retrieved a can from the paper bag. It was still cold from the trip he had made to Chief Auto Parts and the liquor store.

  When Jeff finished his beer, he produced a baggie and we poked a pinhole into the spent beer can with a paperclip I found on the floor of the bus. He sprinkled a thumbnail-sized amount of pot onto the hole and we each took a long, clean hit from the mouth of the can, sinking the ash into the hole.

  ✵

  “I have a graduation to go to tonight,” Jeff said a few days later.

  “Let’s see,” he checked the clock, “it’s noon now, and my housemate has to borrow my car to get to work tonight,” he considered aloud.

  I waited, rubbed some lingering sweat from my forehead, the sides of my face. I wiped my hand on my cut-off jeans.

  “Can you drive me over to this girl’s graduation I have going on later?” Jeff asked. His glasses were slipping off his nose, his face shiny in the heat.

  “Yeah,” I said, eager, my body feeling lighter as he outlined his plan. “Then what?”

  “Maybe you could just drive me there and drop me off, wait nearby, then pick me up.” He glanced at the clock again. “Let’s hit it. I need to figure out where this thing is exactly.”

  Beverly Hills?” I asked petulantly when he started describing the itinerary. Jeff rushed around the house in slacks and an unbuttoned dress shirt, intermittently stopping to spit the chew from his mouth into the sink. I grimaced.

  “Wha’?” Jeff asked when he saw my face. He still had to shave and he couldn’t find his socks. I wasn’t sure if I was reacting to the chewing tobacco, or to the prospect of Beverly Hills. A seed of fear settled in my stomach, imagining driving around Beverly Hills, where I had never been.

  I collapsed dramatically onto the couch. “Oh my god, this is gonna be a long, long drive,” I said. “And this heat…”

  “Look, do you wanna help me out or not?” Jeff said, pulling on the found socks and his shiny shoes with a grunt.

  “Yes,” I groaned. This felt like something you do for friends. The arguments, the annoyances, suddenly had less to do with skin or desire and more to do with the everyday, the mundane. I like this, I thought, as I let my sandals slip off my feet.

  “Alright then,” Jeff said, spitting a brown mess into the sink and turning the faucet on. He buttoned his shirt and disappeared into his bedroom to find a tie. I sighed loudly.

  Half an hour later he was maneuvering my bus onto the freeway. The seed of fear gave birth to something new, an anticipation for whatever was going to happen next. As I relaxed into my seat and pushed my blue-tinted sunglasses up on my nose, Jeff cried out.

  “Did you bring the directions?”

  “No, didn’t you?” I said, shooting from my seat, the strap of the seatbelt resisting against me.

  “Okay. Forget this. This isn’t happening,” Jeff said, checking the rearview mirror, looking to get off at the next exit.

  “What? You’re not going to go now? You got all dressed up for nothing?” His attitude suddenly struck me as ridiculous. “Just go home and get the directions.”

  “We’re totally late already,” Jeff moaned. His right eye twitched. A calm came over me.

  “Look, will this girl know you’re late?” I asked. I imagined an auditorium, faces beaming on a stage as ju
nior high diplomas were handed out. “She probably won’t notice,” I continued, thinking this would probably end a lot sooner than he thought, and we might be heading back to the Valley before nightfall.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Jeff said. He flipped the turn signal and I settled back into my seat.

  We sped back to his house. Directions in hand, we started off again. Jeff talked frantically, chewing away, using an old Gatorade bottle as his spittoon. He told me about Laurie, the student who was graduating, and how she had once been a student of his but transferred out. “She’s a fucking genius,” he said, his eyes scanning the lanes of the freeway. I took the opportunity to stare at him as he talked, letting him know that I might be slightly suspicious, possibly jealous. His face didn’t change.

  “She writes poetry and stuff, like you do, but totally not like you at all. But she sort of reminds me of you,” he said, taking his eyes off the road to look at me with a kind smile. I looked back at the road, the line of cars in front of us, the brown hills on either side of us.

  As we pulled off the freeway into the streets, I looked at the houses in silence. We passed through neighborhoods with coffee shops and outdoor tables with umbrellas on them. People were sitting outside, drinking out of wine glasses or petite demitasse cups with saucers, laughing under the palm trees. I became conscious of my cut-off jeans with patches on them, my tie-dye t-shirt. As Jeff pulled into the parking lot of the junior high school, I sat limply, wondering what I would do while Jeff ventured inside and acted the part of teacher.

  “Just come in,” Jeff said after he stepped out of the bus. He swished the remaining chew in his mouth out with water from a plastic bottle I kept in the bus and spit onto the asphalt.

  I followed him, his legs moving long and fast to enter the hushed auditorium. It felt like a cool, dark cave. We quietly entered and found seats in the back. I relaxed in the darkness, until the ceremony ended. Our legs had been touching, and this had felt centering, even as I felt the uncertainty of what would happen next.