Excavation: A Memoir

by Wendy C. Ortiz

  “Secret-keeping. It’s what you know, what you’ve become used to, starting with your family,” my analyst told me. “It’s your inheritance.”

  Sometimes I still have to find my way out of the smoke, to touch what is real, to confirm what is illusion.

  I want to relinquish this inheritance.

  1990

  1990

  I approached seventeen with a job at a drugstore, a job that offered full-time hours in summer, which I negotiated into four ten-hour days for the sake of long weekends where I wouldn’t have to dress in the scratchy brown polyester uniform. I scooped runny mounds of rocky road ice cream in sugar cones, rang up hemorrhoid cream, baking soda, or tire cleaner at the register, accepted film developing orders, and screened papers cut from prescription pads from all manner of people as the pharmacist filled orders. Smoking pot was tempered by my weekly shifts at Thrifty’s Drugstore, and my free time seemed to contract to the size of a pinhole that I filled with Nicholas and our hobbies: drinking, going to rock concerts, having sex in his bedroom.

  Internally, I fought constantly with the word love.

  I’d been using it freely for some time, whispering it in Nicholas’s ear, writing it in letters that he unfolded and read standing up in his bedroom, a slight smile on his face. Sitting in his friend’s apartment or another friend’s backyard, I smoldered with resentment when I took the backseat to cases of beer, talk of muscle cars, or band practice that always sounded lousy anyway. As the band played their version of the Rolling Stones song “Bitch,” I got up and left, as I always did, without a word, love slipping from my grasp, bitterness replacing it.

  Senior year began and my days shortened at school. Working more hours, confined in the brown polyester uniform, I thought of Jeff intermittently, like when an older man came in to fill a prescription for Zantac. I remembered Jeff tossing the pills into his hand and throwing them back with water or a beer. I never understood what he took them for. At the pharmacy I rang up boxes of condoms for women in their twenties, and considered Jeff and his disdain for condoms. When my male co-workers looked through the thick photo envelopes belonging to attractive young female customers, I thought of Jeff. We hadn’t made contact in months, and from our last phone call, I knew he was sharing an apartment now, with an older female landlord he proclaimed to hate.

  One night, my phone rang and Nicholas announced himself. He was at a friend’s house, wasted, and wanted to know if I could come out to pick him up.

  “Nope,” I answered, stretching out on my makeshift bed. The mattress and bed frame had long been replaced by the foldable cushion I slept on. I liked this cushion, because it felt portable, simple, and close to the floor, where I liked to sit or stretch. I hung up the phone.

  Minutes later the phone rang again and I picked it up, my eyes rolling in disgust. It was Jeff. His speech was slurred. I imagined empty beer cans and the scent of bong water.

  “So are you and Nicholas still a thing?” he asked. “Am I still on your list?”

  My free hand tightened into a fist.

  “You know,” I began, “I don’t like the fact that you only call me, drunk no less, to ask me questions like that.” My thumb rubbed my knuckles, and my forehead tensed.

  “When I do see you, you dance around the issue of you and me, but when you’re drunk, you think nothing of calling me and confronting me in a gross way.” My fist relaxed, my palm hot. I set it gently on my belly.

  “First of all,” Jeff hissed, “for your information, I’m not drunk. It’s the medication I’m on. Second of all, your accusations are insulting. I don’t really give a fuck how Nicholas is doing, but it’s something to say. It’s called a nicety.

  “I don’t hear from you for a fuck of a long time, and when I call, you lay into me, assuming I can only be drunk to dial your number, and you doubt me from the moment I start talking. What the fuck kind of friendship is that?” he bellowed.

  I was silent as he hammered the same point over and over, seeming to get increasingly excited by the sheer ludicrousness of this situation he found himself in and my alleged overreaction.

  The tears dried on my face. I breathed into the phone as he continued. A numbness I was long used to overwhelmed my body.

  “I love you, Wendy Ortiz. I, Jeff Ivers, of Van Nuys, California, love you, and all you can do is lay into me for calling you drunk, which I’m not,” he said emphatically into my ear. “I’m not dating anyone, I’m not chasing any women around because I don’t want that other shit, I want you.”

  “I have loved you from the moment I first talked to you. Do you believe that? Think I’m lying, that I’m just drunk? Well, fuck you. I dug you from the moment I saw you. What’s wrong with me seeing a future for us? You may not know this, you may write me off as a drunk old man, but I’d marry you tomorrow if I could. Tomorrow.”

  A powerful nausea crept into my gut and I was no longer numb. My body was still, immobile with uncertainty.

  I kept listening as he detailed the old fantasies of he and I, the dredged-up images of some kind of future together. I listened with a tired heart. I listened with an ear that felt like fire, my hands busy flexing, trying to grasp something, anything that might make sense.

  1991

  SUMMER

  1991

  We didn’t speak again until I was eighteen, a month graduated from high school.

  I was a young woman of legal age, the age we had always talked about, imagined.

  I stood in his living room, a different house across the valley, the furthest away Jeff ever lived from me since we’d started seeing each other.

  He greeted me jovially, introduced me to his cousin from whom he was renting a room. He ushered me into his bedroom, where a wrapped gift sat in the middle of the bed, along with a card hidden in an envelope.

  “You look great,” Jeff said. “What’s it been? Six months?”

  “Mmhm,” I answered, sitting awkwardly on the edge of his bed. His eyes scanned my white jeans, my form-fitting white shirt, the black belt with its peace sign buckle. I crossed one leg over the other and wondered where he had been during my graduation. I knew not to ask.

  “Here,” he said, leaning close to me. He picked up the gift and the envelope and placed them in my lap. I laughed, anxious, and bit my bottom lip.

  The card was peppered with his small, messy writing. I looked closely and discovered that he had transcribed the lyrics of a song into the body of the card. I read the words quickly, skin goosebumping as he stared at me.

  “Wow,” I said, looking up at him. He smiled and sat down next to me.

  “‘Fortress Around My Heart.’ I think of you every time I hear it.” He looked down at the wrapped gift in my lap. “Go ahead,” he said.

  I unwrapped the gift, discovering a box underneath the paper. I pried it open and gingerly pulled out the contents.

  “It’s a Tiffany,” Jeff said as I held up the stained glass. The scene was of a river, rolling hills, blue sky. “We’re those rivers, remember, the way they meet the sea.”

  A lump in my throat formed and I put the stained glass back in the box.

  “Can I hug you?” I said.

  “You bet,” he answered. We stood and hugged.

  “One more thing,” he said, reaching into his back pocket. He handed me two tickets.

  The tickets were for the blues show he’d told me about that happened every summer. I threw myself at him joyfully, letting my body press into his momentarily before pulling away. We sat down again and made plans to go to the show in his new car the following weekend. I left soon after, the stained glass on the floor of the bus as I drove Roscoe Boulevard from one end of the valley to the other, my hands tapping the steering wheel excitedly.

  ✵

  My knees were bent, elbows resting on them as I stared out at the stage.

  There w
as a grassy incline, at least fifty rows of seats and some cement between me and the bass that was being plucked, the voice stretched like silk across all the bodies until it reached my ears.

  I rubbed the undersides of my thighs where the grass had crept and stuck to my skin. My periwinkle blue and white jumper only reached mid-thigh, and I considered retrieving my sweater from the rumpled backpack at my side. I glanced over at Jeff. He was lying on his side, drifting in and out of the current of music, watching me. We couldn’t stop smiling at each other. I looked back at the stage. I conjured up Nicholas in my head, how he expected me to be home that evening after the day-long blues festival, how he didn’t know which friend I had gone with, how we had tentative plans to hang out in Louise Park alone for once, without the annoyance of his friends ruining the evening.

  I had already heard Jeff squawk at the fact that I made a date for after the show; when I looked away from him and sighed, he understood it was a moot point.

  I laughed and shrieked excitedly on the drive to the amphitheater. Jeff’s new car reminded me of the cars I watched out for in the streets of the Valley, the ones we presumed were undercover cops. I sat in the spacious passenger seat and bounced under my seat belt, looking this way and that, pleased to be riding with him to the blues show.

  We went through a drive-through and got back on the main road with a tray of nachos and a bag of soft tacos. We found a free spot in a sea of cars in the enormous venue parking lot. The afternoon sun was still high and we rolled down our windows. I tuned the radio and we opened up the bags and picked at the square-shaped box of nachos hungrily.

  “What a perfect day,” Jeff said, wiping away red sauce from his mouth. I followed his eyes out past the windshield. A group of women, by all appearances in their thirties, walked by carrying foldable chairs and a small cooler. I noted how his eyes scanned their legs, their asses, the reaches of hair falling down their backs. I snapped my fingers by his ear and laughed. His head jumped back with exaggeration.

  “Caught you,” I said. He proclaimed his innocence and I turned in my seat to face him, laughing between accusations.

  “You were totally looking at their asses, Jeff,” I said, dipping a chip into a small plastic tray of cheese. “I saw it all.” I was not the headliner anymore and I could watch him watch women and not feel a thing, except that he was a chauvinist and probably wouldn’t change. I laughed out loud.

  “Yeah. Like my eyes could stray far from your little outfit,” he said, taking another bite of his taco. My knee jerked and the tray of nachos spilled over, little gobs of cheese transplanted to his new car upholstery. I shrieked and dove for napkins in the fast-food bag.

  ✵

  It was cool and relaxed on the lawn at the blues show. Everyone was friendly and smiling and Jeff shared a joint he brought with me and a man and woman nearby. They were sitting on a pastel-colored blanket and sipping at wine coolers bought from the concession stands. Jeff nodded at one.

  “Want me to go get you one?”

  I nodded and my eyes followed him as he bent a knee against the grass, pushed himself up, and stood over me.

  “Don’t run away now,” he joked, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. I knew that he noticed every man who had turned in my direction. His response was to lean closer to me or look me in the eye and shake his head like he couldn’t believe their rudeness.

  My eyes followed the crowd, the bobbing heads, the walking forms of people who were safely in their adulthood. I swallowed and willed myself to take deep breaths, aware that I was young here, alone. I figured it would be awhile before Jeff got back to our safe patch of grass.

  I was alone in a sea of adults who presumably loved the blues. I knew we were waiting patiently for the finale, the genius of B.B. King to take the stage.

  This was the umpteenth concert of my young life, and light years different from what I was used to at concerts. Everyone had a semblance of calm and happiness, a contentment that felt like milk over hot skin, soothing and exciting at once. My thighs felt cold, and I remembered that that morning I hated the flesh, wished my thighs smaller. I tapped a bare foot against the grass and watched the sinking sun.

  Before I made it to Nicholas’s that evening, I endured countless pinpricks of innuendo that Jeff shot, beginning with his eyes on me, his mouthing of words, I want you, and his belief, stated several times, that a successful blues concert experience must end in passionate lovemaking at his place. I hid my every response under a semblance of amusement even as I imagined what the night might hold.

  I tilted my head at him as we sat in his car, waiting for the long line of brake lights to let up and coast away slowly. His mouth was slightly open, anticipating an opening in the line of vehicles and I thought of his teeth, the feel of my tongue in the gap between them. I felt a strange sense of endearment, a bizarre and new feeling of wanting to protect him.

  I covered my legs with my backpack and lay my head against the tan headrest. He let me smoke a cigarette with the window rolled down and I wondered, suddenly, how we would say goodbye.

  FALL

  1991

  Two months after the blues concert, I leaned against the wooden frame of an abandoned lifeguard post. Jeff and I had climbed onto one of the platforms. My body felt strange around him now, our visits becoming rarer. Every time I saw him it was necessary to ease back into our relationship, over and over.

  An airplane blipped across the sky and the stars struggled to be seen. I turned to look behind us. Across the Pacific Coast Highway and up, houses sat, seemingly safe on their foundations. Each home was well-lit, warm-looking. I shivered and leaned back into the wood.

  Jeff saw me looking at the houses.

  “Wouldn’t it be great? Living up there?”

  I nodded, watching the waves softly thrash the sand. I felt mute, unsure of what was safe to express and what was not. My calves ached from standing on my feet all day at work. I had dropped plans with Nicholas to come out to the ocean with Jeff. Something about the invitation felt final, last ditch.

  I met him at his house and he drove us in his car through the canyons, down to the coastal highway. We parked and talked, walked out onto the sand, and found our way to the lifeguard post.

  “I can imagine us in a place like that,” Jeff began. I sighed and looked him in the eye.

  He put his hand on mine. My mind flashed on Nicholas.

  “I’m not sure you are ever going to get just how I love you.” His hand moved up my arm and suddenly my body responded, inching closer to his, until his arms were around me, and my arms circled his neck, his shoulder. We held each other in silence and I felt my heart beating through my chest, as if it wanted to live outside my body.

  After one kiss, I sat back and set my eyes on the waves again. The water lapped away from the sand as if in fast motion reverse. I wished for a way to reverse so many things, to push a button and rewind. Jeff left an arm around my shoulder and I pressed into it, leaning my head back to look into the sky. The crescent moon sat mute.

  On my way home from Jeff’s house, I stopped at Nicholas’s. He let me in after I rapped my knuckles on his window. His face showed signs of sleep.

  I wanted this thing with Jeff to be over, truly over. I wanted to have one less secret, to have a regular relationship with someone, to see what might happen to the regular relationship I was already in with Nicholas. To punctuate the decision, I decided to come clean about where I had been that night, how it was the last time.

  Nicholas had known about Jeff, not from my telling, but secondhand, years before, from Abigail. It had been the cause of one of our many break-ups. And then he had assumed, with my assurance, that the relationship had not continued.

  To Nicholas, my revelation was like a footnote to an old story.

  He held me. I smelled his flannel shirt and wondered about what I had just done.

  “I un
derstand,” he whispered into my hair. “I still love you. You did what you needed to do.”

  Waves of guilt, resignation, fear, and love, washed through me as I clutched his flannel, wanting to be sure of this person who could love and forgive, who could scare me with his understanding. I was telling him what I could not tell so many others. My closest friends had known the gist, and one had even questioned Jeff and his motivations, but I’d shrugged it off, stopped talking about it. Now here I was with Nicholas, waiting for a break-up but receiving, instead, understanding.

  I sat on his bed for a long time after, watching him as he slept, his eyelids fluttering softly, his blonde curls on the pillow. I picked up my keys from his night table, clenched them to keep from making noise, and stole away from his house to head home.

  LATE FALL

  1991

  Another three months passed before I saw Jeff again.

  The leaves had fallen from the trees, brown and crackled under my shoes. I was enrolled at community college, watching films in darkened classrooms and reading film theory, struggling through college algebra, producing weekly essays I received steady A’s for in English composition.

  We met near Ventura Boulevard one night and I parked my car on the street. The meters were switched off. A chilly wind swept a plastic bag down the sidewalk as I approached Jeff’s car. He leaned over to unlock the door for me and I got in.

  “Why’re you in the station wagon?” he asked, looking through the rearview mirror.

  “Why do you think? That fucking bus…”

  Soon he was turning the steering wheel this way and that through the hills demarcating Hollywood from the Valley. I tried to follow his navigation, as I had started driving the hills over to Hollywood every Sunday night to dance at Club 1970. I lost track of the turns he took off the main road. We came to a stop on a dusty, dead end street.