“My dad’s from New Jersey,” Ty says. “So he’s always pointing out how beautiful California is. It’s like he never wants any of us kids to take it for granted.”
“My dad’s from here,” Zandra says. “But he doesn’t live here anymore. He moved to Lompoc when I was three.”
“New Jersey, man, that’s a freaky state,” Ty says.
“My dad never wants to see me,” Zandra continues. “He’s got another family in Lompoc. It’s like he’s trying again, hoping he’ll get it right the second time since he messed up so bad with me and my mom.” Zandra has never said this aloud to anyone. She feels as if she just removed her heart from within its boned cage and handed it to Ty.
“Sucks,” Ty says.
“Truly does,” Zandra says.
“I’m parched,” Ty says.
“Me, too,” Zandra says.
They stand and slowly make their way to the keg. Ty talks, telling Zandra a story about his famous British uncle who’s gay. Zandra giggles in a way that reminds her of crying. She is in love.
At 2 a.m. Amy and Zandra drive away from the party. Amy is drunk and she has to pee. On the curvy dark road that leads to her house, Amy pulls down her pants, hangs her bare bottom out the open window, and pees as Zandra drives. Zandra laughs so hard that tears roll down her cheeks and she almost loses control of the car. This is why she likes hanging around Amy. Amy will do anything. For a brief moment Zandra wishes she had more friends than Amy, only so she could call them on the phone and snicker into the receiver as she tells them the wacky thing Amy did on the drive home. She decides she will call Ty tomorrow, Saturday, and tell him.
Zandra sleeps at Amy’s house. There is a red, floral couch in Amy’s room—it is covered with clothes, socks, a wetsuit. With one long sweep of her arm, Amy pushes everything onto the floor to clear the couch where she’ll sleep. She doesn’t mind the couch, and Zandra prefers the bed. If Zandra weren’t so large, they’d sleep in the bed together, but it is a water bed, and the rising and falling of the mattress when Zandra rolls over or adjusts her position makes Amy feel seasick, especially if she’s been drinking. At 11 the next morning, the girls wake up. Zandra scoots, sloshing the bed, so she is sitting against the headboard. She picks up the receiver and phones Tom Richter so she can get Ty’s phone number. Amy reads Surfer magazine.
“This is who I want to be,” Amy says. She unfolds a picture of a two-story-high wave with a tiny, fierce surfer cruising its floor.
“Hey.” Zandra speaks into the phone as she nods at Amy’s centerfold.
“C.S.! How’s it goin’?” Tom asks.
“Great. Did you have fun last night?”
“Can’t remember, but I think I did.”
Then Tom pulls the phone away from his face and shouts into a room, “Hey guys, C.S. is on the phone!”
“Crew’s over here,” Tom says. His parents are importers. They travel half the year, leaving Tom and his older brother home alone. His house is what is known as a party house, although Zandra has never been to a party there. They are not the kind of parties where anyone can show up—they’re the kind that show the divisions among people—those who have swum in Tom Richter’s massive swimming pool, and those who have not. Someone picks up another line.
“Hey, C.S.!”
“Hey. Who’s this?”
“Frankie.”
“You guys having fun?”
“Yeah, why don’t you come over and make a few guys happy?”
“No way!” Zandra giggles as if the idea is absurd. A third boy comes onto a third line.
“C.S., my baby!” All three boys laugh.
“Where do you live?” the third boy asks. “I’m coming over to pick you up, ’cause we’re about to have a naked swim party, and you are the guest of honor.”
More laughter abounds.
“Do any of you guys have Ty’s phone number?”
The question throws the boys into hysterics.
“Lucky Ty,” Tom says. “Why him and not us?”
“C’mon,” Zandra says, “do you have his number? I have to tell him something.”
“Come over here and give me a little something, and I’ll give you Ty’s number,” Tom says.
There is a chaos of noise: phones being passed around, people shouting in the background, someone doing a bong hit into one phone, broadcasting the phlegmy gurgle.
And then the chanting starts: “C.S.! C.S.! C.S.!”
Zandra holds the phone away from her ear and out so Amy can hear.
“What the hell are they saying?” Amy asks.
“They’re chanting my name,” Zandra says.
“See us?”
“C.S. It stands for Cute Stuff.”
Amy furrows her brow but says nothing. She puts down the magazine, walks to the phone, and takes it from Zandra.
“You guys are a bunch of insipid assholes!” She hangs up before Zandra can grab the receiver.
“But I never got Ty’s number!”
“Call 411.”
Back at her own house, at four that afternoon, after having hung up on the answering machine approximately 30 times, Zandra gets Ty on the phone.
“Hey, Ty!” Zandra tries to sound cheery and casual—but her voice is much too woodsy for that. (When she becomes thin, people will tell her she has a sexy voice. As a fat girl, they tell her she sounds masculine.)
“Hey. Who’s this?”
“C.S.!”
“Zandra, how’s it goin’?”
Zandra launches into the story of Amy peeing out the side of the car. Then she tells Ty about the day Amy’s surfboard popped up and bashed Amy in the face so that when she emerged from the sea, she looked like a bloody sea animal. She tells him that her uncle, who is also a surfer, felt her up once when she was 12. She tells him that she wanted to smoke cigarettes but one boy, she won’t name the boy, told her that if she smoked, her voice would be so much deeper than it already is that everyone would think she was a transvestite. Finally, she tells him that she read the tide chart in the paper, and if he wants, she could show him that low-tide cave—but they’d have to meet at the beach right now. Before he can answer, she confesses that the boy who said she’d sound like a transvestite if she smoked was Randy Freeport, who, by the way, has the smallest dick she’s ever seen. She asks Ty to promise not to tell anyone about Randy Freeport’s dick because she doesn’t want to spread rumors, and then she asks again, “Do you want to go see the cave?”
“Cave sounds cool,” Ty says. “Let’s go.”
Zandra did not read the tide chart in the paper, as there was no newspaper in her house (there never is) and she didn’t have the energy to go out and buy one. So it is simple dumb luck that it is indeed low tide when she and Ty meet up at the beach. As they walk to the cave, Ty tells Zandra more stories about his family: his grandfather who plays a miniature harmonica with his nose, his cousin who was born without an ear and so has a wax prosthetic ear that once melted and slid down his face during spring break in Florida, his mother who, he claims, should be an interior decorator because she did such a fantastic job decorating their new house—reupholstering every piece of furniture with the exact peach color of the pre-existing carpet. Zandra thinks she has never before met anyone so happy. She hopes that this happiness, this good life that surrounds Ty, will catch onto her somehow—that her life will become like his if she is attached to him.
The cave is dark and narrow. Zandra reaches out and grabs Ty’s hand as if she’s scared. He slides his hand back so they are not palm to palm but fingers to fingers.
“We should have brought a flashlight,” Ty says.
“There’s a big rock at the back,” Zandra says, “it’s like a bench.”
“What do you think, two hours before the tide comes in?” Ty asks.
They reach the rock bench and sit side by side looking out toward the sea. It is as if the ocean is a stage framed by the arc of the cave mouth, and they are in the darkened theater.
Zan
dra leans into Ty, her head tilted back as if to ask for a kiss. Ty doesn’t respond.
“Why don’t you call me C.S.?” Zandra asks. “Everyone else does.”
“I don’t know,” Ty says.
“Don’t you think I’m cute?” Zandra giggles louder than she intended.
“Yeah, you’re cute.”
“So call me C.S. Cute Stuff!”
Again, Zandra places her head in kiss position. Ty obliges, but there is a hesitancy in his body, a resistance, which Zandra senses but chooses to ignore as she plows her hand into Ty’s shorts and pulls out his penis. (Later, Ty will confess to Zandra that no one has ever handled his penis within 30 seconds of lip-lock.) Ty’s penis seems to have a mind of its own, as there is no hesitancy here; it is responding to Zandra as if she were Christie Brinkley herself.
Within minutes Zandra is naked on the wet, muddy sand. Ty is on top of her; he, too, is naked. Zandra’s eyes have adjusted to the light. She studies Ty’s face as he stares at her breasts flowing out below her armpits. Zandra imagines her breasts as exotic sea flowers melting into the sand. Ty shuts his eyes now—the moment has come—he pushes into Zandra with one final, silent thump.
“I’m on the pill,” Zandra says, when Ty opens his eyes.
“Uh…uh, OK.” Ty looks startled. He extracts himself from Zandra and dresses immediately.
“We better get going,” Ty says.
Zandra lolls on the mucky floor. She arches her back and wiggles her bottom as if to make an engraving in the sand with her ass. She feels like a mermaid, although Ty is not responding to her as if she were a mermaid. He looks at her as if she is less human than a mermaid—as if she is fishy. Zandra wedges her hands against the sides of her flowery breasts, a pose she’s seen in Playboy. Still, Ty does not respond. What does he see if not flowers? Hairless sea anemones? Squid without legs? Two blobs of opaque jellyfish?
Zandra sighs and extends a limp, limpetlike hand. Ty takes the hand and pulls her to her feet while turning away as if to check the incoming tide.
“Tide’s coming in,” he says, and he walks to the edge of the cave, where he is ankle-deep in water, while waiting for Zandra to dress.
In the parking lot, they stand at their cars and chat. Ty looks as if he feels like an empty, used sock. A sock that smells like balls and has shiny dirt patches on the heel and toe. But Zandra remains hopeful. It is normal postcoital deflation, she tells herself. He will perk up again within minutes.
It is days before Zandra admits that Ty will never return her calls. It is days before she realizes that he will not eat lunch with her or walk down the halls with her at school. Amy is the only one who sees Zandra cry. She is the only one who knows what happened between Ty and Zandra. Ty tells no one, and Zandra has no one, besides Amy, to tell. The fact that their encounter goes unrecognized (no signals and hoots taunting her with Ty’s name in the hallways at school) makes it seem as if perhaps it didn’t happen. The public denial feeds a personal insistence. Zandra replays the short story of herself and Ty entwined on the ocean floor (like a heap of blanched seaweed) every night in her head. This is her story, she is the only one who wants the rights to it, and so she changes it—adding things here and there, taking away other things—until it is the greatest tragic story of her life.
The woman in front of Alexandra is returning three pairs of shoes and purchasing five pairs. It is a complicated transaction that has prompted the cashier to leave her station and fetch a manager. Number Seven’s items have been rung through. He is holding a pen poised to sign the credit card slip, which is currently printing.
For several years after Ty broke her heart, Zandra had fantasized about being thin, running into Ty, and having sex with him, if only to show him what tricks she’d learned since the day they were together. But now, with her slender body only an aisle away from his, Alexandra is surprised by how little interest she has in reintroducing herself to Ty.
Number Seven lowers his hand and signs the credit card slip. He looks up at Alexandra and pauses, cocks his head—the gesture of a question mark. As he’s walking toward the open glass doors, he turns around and approaches Alexandra.
“You look so familiar,” Number Seven says, same voice as in high school.
I am C.S., Alexandra thinks.
It was a game the boys played: How many versions of Zandra could you come up with using only the letters C.S.? Amy told her about it after a party while helping her, drunk and pantyless (Scott Thurber was wearing them on his head like a turban) into the backseat of Amy’s car, where Zandra eventually vomited a clear stream of vodka. Instead of reeling from the litany (Cock Sucker, Chunky Slut, Craggy Slit, Crusty Scag, Cunty Slop, Cankerous Slit, Canine Slash, Can O’ Suckme, Cunt Sauce, Clit Scrap…), which she insisted Amy recite, Zandra threw her heft against the list. She would be in on the joke, she decided; she would come up with new C.S. names; she would be with as many boys as there were words to describe her.
“Do we know each other?” Seven continues.
“No. Sorry.” Alexandra gives a quick, polite smile, then turns her head away.
This is what’s so great about being grown-up, Alexandra thinks; you don’t have to refuck that guy you knew way back when. You don’t have to find out what he thinks of you now. You don’t even have to say hi.
Reading Guide Questions
1. Do you find Lexie to be a likable character? Why or why not? Are there points when you lose sympathy for her?
2. What strikes you about the power dynamic between Lexie and her lover’s son, Ethan? Does the interaction between them feel realistic?
3. What do you think is driving Lexie’s self-destructive behavior? Love? Addiction? Other factors?
4. Do you think that Lexie will ultimately tell her lover that she slept with his son? Why or why not?
5. Zandra is Zandra in high school and Alexandra as an adult. She is also called many other names in high school (the list of C.S. names). How does the power of naming someone or naming oneself play into this story? Has your life been affected in any way by the names or labels placed on you by someone else?
6. Why do you think Alexandra chooses not to reveal herself to Number Seven in the end? If you ran into someone who had broken your heart 15 years earlier, would you want to talk to him or her?
7. In high school there is great power in beauty. Zandra is not considered beautiful, but she does have sex with many boys. In doing so, is she giving herself power, or is she diminishing what little power she has?
8. How do you think Ty really feels about Zandra? Do you think he was wrong to have sex with her knowing that he wasn't interested in a relationship or in love with her?
9. If you could jump into the story and give Zandra some mothering advice, what would you tell her? What advice would you, as a grown-up, give to your high school self?
About the Author
Jessica Anya Blau’s newest novel, The Wonder Bread Summer, was picked for CNN’s summer reading list, NPR’s summer reading list, and Oprah Book Club’s summer reading list. Her novel Drinking Closer to Home was featured in Target stores as a “Breakout Book” and made many Best Books of the Year lists. Jessica’s first novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, was a national bestseller 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. Jessica cowrote the screenplay for Franny, a film starring Frances Fisher and Steve Howey. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and have won or been nominated for many awards, including the Pushcart Prize. Several of Jessica’s stories and essays have been anthologized in books such as The Prose Reader: Essays for Thinking, Reading and Writing; and Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex.
For more information, visit www.jessicaanyablau.com or follow her on Twitter @jessicaanyablau.
Also by Jessica Anya Blau
The Wonder Bread Summer
Drinking Closer to Home<
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The Summer of Naked Swim Parties
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