The day of the scheduled deflowering, I asked Zoe to take me to Planned Parenthood to get a diaphragm. We hadn’t said a word to each other in weeks, having chosen silence over yelling. I thought that if I let Zoe in on my secret and made her a coconspirator, the driver of the getaway car, she would somehow forgive me, though I wasn’t sure for what. Maybe for the fact that I’d never had to wear braces, while she was on her second set.
I didn’t know at the time that Zoe was still a virgin, even after three years of dating Tom Lane, a poorly proportioned (big head, little legs), acne-ridden boy on the yearbook staff.
“Do I have to wait for you?” she asked sharply.
“If you want,” I said. “Or I could take the bus home.”
“We’ll see,” she said; then she pulled her woven, sack-like purse from the kitchen counter and yelled to our mother, “Mom, I’m taking Tiny to Planned Parenthood to get a diaphragm so she can lose her virginity tonight! We’ll be back in an hour or so!”
There was silence from the family room, where my mother sat talking on the phone. I thought I heard the click of the receiver being hung up.
“Well, let’s go,” Zoe said to me, and I followed her out the door, too stunned to speak.
An hour and a half later, when I walked out of Planned Parenthood with a diaphragm, which reminded me of a miniature rubber Frisbee, my sister was still waiting for me in the car. Her eyes were red and narrowed into little slits.
“You know, Tom and I haven’t done it yet,” she sniffed. “We’re saving ourselves for his 18th birthday.” Then she turned the ignition key, pulled out of the lot, and added, “You are such a slut!”
California was in a drought that year, but on the night of my planned virginity loss, it suddenly poured. So instead of being spread out on a blanket under a sea of stars, I lay across the front seat of Mickey’s truck, one bare foot perched on the steering wheel, my head banging against the window crank and inadvertently inching the window down. Rain was dripping on my face. The radio was blaring Hotel California, an Eagles song about people caught in some eternal loop of having sex and doing drugs with no way to escape any of it. I thought it was a sign from someone (the God of radio waves?) telling me that I was doing the wrong thing and that I better get out while I could. Or maybe the song was just telling me that I was, as my sister had said, a slut. But these thoughts didn’t stop me. I was third in line, Jill and Annie having already done it. And of course, I had promised poor Mickey, who muscled himself against me with a teeth-gritted, jack-o’-lantern look on his face, failing to achieve penetration. His penis seemed too blunt an instrument to pierce the winking-shut eye of my vagina. It was a fate Annie had been worrying about for me ever since I had revealed our plan. (She had suffered similarly the night she first did it on the beach with Matt—although she swore it got easier with time.) At that moment in the truck, my wet hair sticking to my forehead in clumps, I couldn’t help but think that if Annie hadn’t placed the idea of first-time-failure in my mind, things never would have gone down like this.
The guilt and humiliation over my not-quite-lost virginity was only exacerbated later that night, when my mother came into my darkened room while I lay in bed. A flag-shaped beam of light darted across my wall as she opened the door.
“Honey?” she whispered.
“Yup?”
“You up?”
“Yup.”
She sat on the edge of my bed and began to stroke my forearm, as if I were a cat.
“I just want to tell you,” she said, in a too-gentle voice, “that I’m very proud of you for being responsible about birth control.”
“OK,” I said, and I pulled my arm away and rolled onto my side, my back to her.
“I’m not mad,” she said, trying to wedge her way into the conversation like a salesman sticking a foot in a closing door.
“I hate Zoe,” I said. Then I closed my eyes and willed my mother to leave.
Two nights later, the night my sister died in a car driven by her acne-ridden virgin boyfriend, Annie’s curse was lifted and Mickey was finally able to penetrate me. My parents left for the hospital telling me not to worry, that everything would surely be OK. I called Mickey as soon as I heard the car rumble out of the driveway.
“My sister was in a car accident,” I said.
“She OK?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” I said. “Only the good die young, right?”
Mickey laughed, then raced over in his truck while I went to the bathroom and struggled with the diaphragm, which kept slipping from my grip like an oiled rodent. Minutes after his arrival, we were on my twin bed, undressing, grappling, bumping against the wall.
“Doesn’t Zoe have a queen-sized bed?” Mickey asked.
“Uh huh,” I said, and we ran naked from my room to hers.
When it was over, I scooted out from under Mickey and examined Zoe’s patchwork-quilt bedspread. A small, shiny pool had formed on a stitched red square.
“Leave it,” Mickey said, with a wicked smile.
“Yeah,” I said. “She won’t even know what it is.”
Less than 12 hours later, I sat on Zoe’s bed with a wet washcloth slathered in soap. The door was locked with the small steel latch Zoe had put up to keep me out.
“Tiny,” my father called, his voice scrambled with tears, “come out. We need to be together now.”
“In a minute,” I sobbed, as I scrubbed Zoe’s quilt until the wet spot was replaced by a wide, soapy swath.
“I’m freaked out by what we did,” Mickey told me the morning of the funeral. He wiped a tear from his eye using the back of his hand like a paw.
“What?” I whispered.
“That we did it on her bed. I mean, she was probably dead already. She was probably hovering over us, watching.”
I looked over at Tom Lane, with his neck brace and crutches, the weeping survivor.
“Tom is a virgin,” I said to Mickey. “My sister died a virgin.”
The next day, Mickey left a note for me in my mailbox. “Tiny,” it began, “I know this is probably the hardest time in your life for you and your family. I’m going to stay away for a few days to give you the time to heal. I love you, Mickey.”
Two weeks later, when I finally returned to school, everyone looked at me as if I were the one who had died and was walking among them like a ghost. I avoided eye contact and stared at my books; or I focused on Annie and Jill when I was able to catch up with them in the hallways.
And then, in pottery class when I was kneading a lump of ash-colored clay, my arms mucky and wet up to the elbows, Roberta Schnitz sidled up to me and said that she didn’t believe the rumor she had heard.
“What rumor?” I asked.
“That you blamed Mickey for Zoe’s death and told him that you never wanted to see him again, and that’s why he started going with Lacey Vogel.”
“He’s with Lacey Vogel?” I asked, and suddenly I understood the reason Annie and Jill had been so hard to catch up to at school. It wasn’t because they were avoiding the girl tainted by death. It was because they were avoiding telling me about Lacey Vogel.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “I mean, they’re, like, a couple now.”
The funny thing is, when I learned that the boy I loved was now dating the blondest, tannest, skinniest girl in school, a fact my two best friends had been keeping from me for days, I didn’t hate any of them. I just hated Zoe a little bit more.
“I can’t believe your brother’s really dealing,” Jill said. We were sitting on the dry sand staring at the blackness that was the water. The waves droned on, like cars on the freeway.
“I know,” Annie said. “I told him not to tell me anything about it or I’ll stay awake every night worrying that he’ll end up in jail or something.” She pulled a joint from the tampon box and torched it with a red Bic before handing it to Jill.
“You think your father’s ever going to talk again?” Jill asked. She took a hit, then passed it to me.
“Maybe if my mom comes home,” I said, with my lips pursed around the joint. “Or if Zoe comes back from the dead.”
“It’s just so romantic,” Jill said. “I mean, I can’t think of a single father from Pueblo Valley who would suddenly choose to stop talking.”
“Do you think Zoe’s in heaven?” Annie asked.
“I don’t believe in heaven,” I said, and I hissed the smoke out of my mouth. “Don’t start crying, Annie, please.”
“I never cry when I’m high,” she said, and she took the joint from my hand.
“Do you think your mom will ever come home?” Jill asked.
I didn’t answer.
“You know how Zoe wanted to marry Carly Simon and be James Taylor’s best friend?” Jill said.
“She wanted to marry James and be Carly’s best friend,” I corrected her. Annie started laughing.
“Well,” Jill said, “I have fantasies of marrying your dad and being friends with your mom, and then you and I would be, like, sisters.”
Annie laughed harder and then fell into a fit of coughing.
“Why do you tell me these things?” I asked.
“I’m just being honest,” she said.
Annie was still coughing.
“But you’re talking about sex with my dad!”
“I didn’t mention sex. You’re the one who brought up sex.”
Annie finished her coughing fit and started laughing again. “You guys are so gross!” she said.
When the joint was gone, Annie wanted to go to my house to eat.
“Do you have any Nutter Butters?” she asked in the car.
“Lorna Doones,” I said.
“That’s even better,” Annie said.
“If there are Lorna Doones,” Jill said, “there had better be milk.”
Dad was sitting at the dining-room table when we got home. He had out the Lorna Doones and was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“Oh my God!” Jill said. “I swear, we were just fantasizing about Lorna Doones!” She sat beside my father, plucked a cookie from the package, and dipped it into his glass of milk. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, as she bit off half the soggy cookie.
Dad shook his head and smiled.
“She’s not lying,” Annie added. “It’s the honest-to-God truth, we were talking about coming here and eating Lorna Doones.”
“You know what’s even weirder?” I blurted out, my voice echoing in my stoned head. “I made spaghetti tonight, and then I went to Jill’s, and they were having spaghetti, too.” The words issued from my mouth almost slowly enough for me to have trapped them and sent them back. It was as if inadvertent references to Zoe were a habit I just couldn’t break, like nail-biting. Dad picked up another Lorna Doone, his face expressionless, as if I hadn’t even spoken. Then Jill grabbed his pad and playfully wrote him a note, which I didn’t bother to look over her shoulder to read. Annie moved to the other side of Dad and began dipping cookies in his glass, too.
I went to the kitchen to pour fresh milk for myself and my friends.
“Dad,” I called, “are they stealing your milk? Do you need more milk?”
“He said no,” Jill answered.
I filled three glasses, then put the carton back and stared at a picture on the refrigerator door of Zoe and Tom at the Sadie Hawkins dance the year before. Zoe had hung the picture right in the center of the door, pushing aside grocery lists, postcards, my school photo, and other random snapshots, all held up with dozens of those house-shaped rubber magnets—welcoming-basket leftovers Annie’s mom had given my mom. In the picture, Zoe looked only vaguely familiar, like someone I’d seen around school but didn’t really know. I had the strange sensation that if the picture weren’t hanging on the refrigerator in my house, I would have no idea who she was, that girl with the wet, silver-tracked smile, her face pressed against some boy’s spackled-red cheek.
As I entered the dining room with three glasses of milk held waitress-style, Annie and Jill were laughing so hard that they had gone nearly silent. My father was laughing, too, without using his voice box, just a wheezing sputtering as he rocked back and forth, a giant grin spread across his face. It was the first time I’d seen him smile since Zoe died, the first time I’d seen him laugh as a voluntary mute. No one noticed me. They were passing Dad’s notepad, Annie and Jill frantically scribbling and sliding the pad before Dad’s face. There was a rhythm to it: scribble, scribble; pass; ha, ha, ha (or breath, breath, breath for Dad); scribble, scribble; pass; ha, ha, ha. I had no idea what they were laughing about. All I knew was that if I were to enter the circle, the laughter would quickly die out.
Reading Guide Questions
1. In “Beautiful,” the narrator, Annie, seems to dance gingerly around her parents. Why do you think this is? Do you believe it is related to her anxiety or her desire to be good? Why or why not?
2. In “Beautiful,” when Annie loses her virginity on the beach, the experience is anything but romantic. Do you like it better for that reason or less? Does it feel realistic to you? Why or why not?
3. In “Mute,” why do you think Tiny’s father has chosen to express his grief by not speaking? How do you think this affects Tiny?
4. Does Tiny’s relationship with her deceased sister, Zoe, seem credible? Would you expect her to be reacting more strongly?
5. How do you think friendship influences action and plays into the lives of the girls in both “Beautiful” and “Mute”?
About the Author
Jessica Anya Blau’s newest novel, The Wonder Bread Summer, was picked for CNN’s, NPR’s, Vanity Fair’s, and Oprah Book Club’s summer reading lists. It received multiple offers from Hollywood movie studios and was optioned. Her novel Drinking Closer to Home was featured in Target stores as a “Breakout Book” and made many Best Books of the Year lists. Blau’s first novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, was a national best seller and was picked as a Best Summer Book by the Today Show, the New York Post, and New York magazine. The San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers chose it as one of the Best Books of the Year, and the film rights have been optioned. Blau cowrote the screenplay for Franny, a film starring Frances Fisher and Steve Howey. For more information visit Jessicaanyablau.com or follow Blau on Twitter @jessicaanyablau.
Also by Jessica Anya Blau
The Summer of Naked Swim Parties
Drinking Closer to Home
The Wonder Bread Summer
Mating Calls
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