Love and Death with the In Crowd

by Jessica Anya Blau

  At the store, I call my brother, Ben, and ask him to pick me up. He shows up within five minutes and never even asks who I was with or what I was doing.

  Ben drops me off at home, then drives off to meet his friends back at the beach. The front door is unlocked, but the house is empty. I walk out to the backyard and wander around looking for someone. I hear one of our neighbors whistling, an amazingly strong whistle that cuts through the clear air and carries across what I know is an acre between our two houses. The sun is so bright it makes me feel see-through. I have a sudden need for darkness, so I go back into the house, change into my karate uniform, and then ride my bike to the studio.

  Master Viktor nods at me when I walk in. He marches over to me, folds his arms behind his back and pulls his head up as if to assess me.

  “You are so beautiful,” he says. “I’m very happy to see you here. Always happy to see a beautiful girl in my studio.”

  I smile and toss my curls back, catching a glimpse of myself in the wall-sized mirror. And I wonder.

  Mute

  1979

  That year, my father became a voluntary mute. He puttered around the house with a spiral-bound notepad and a black pen, frantically scribbling down directives or questions.

  “Tiny,” the note would read. “I’ve gotta work, so get yourself and all your friends out of the house for a while.”

  “OK,” I’d mumble, and then I’d wave to Annie and Jill, my two best friends, the only people I dared bring home during my father’s embarrassing silence. The three of us were usually hanging out in the kitchen, as mine was a house reputed to have exotic foods (stinky cheeses, halvah, and the like), and, unlike me, my friends appreciated those foods.

  It was 1979. I was 16 and I had inherited from my recently deceased older sister, Zoe, a green, dented, sperm-shaped car that I couldn’t legally drive, having failed my driver’s test three times. The car was in frequent use, however, with one of my license-carrying friends behind the wheel. For my father, “work” meant wandering in a circle from his office to the kitchen, past the family room, and into his office again, a manuscript in one hand and a pencil in the other, wearing a tattered blue-gray bathrobe with coiled strings hanging from the hemline like dreadlocks. He was a professor and translated novels from French and Italian. Unlike previous breaks from teaching, his sabbatical that year did not consist of a semester in France or Italy, but a semester at home, his pale, wire-haired legs sticking out below the bathrobe, his near-balding head wild with what few patches of hair he had left. To leave the country would have meant leaving my mother, who, after Zoe’s death, had moved out of the house, although not entirely. She rented a cabin high in the mountains above Pueblo Valley, a 20-minute drive from our house near the beach. (Although most beach houses in our Southern California town were owned by millionaires, my parents had bought theirs in the late 1960s, when someone on a professor’s salary could still pick up a chunk of Pueblo Valley real estate with a little help from his wealthy East Coast in-laws.) After she moved out, Mom still did the grocery shopping and left checks for the monthly cleaning lady and the weekly gardener, and on Sunday nights she would cook dinner and insist that the three of us surviving family members sit down and eat together. Other than that, she had quit our diminished family for a life of independence, abandoning me to Dad in his bathrobe.

  “I love your dad,” Jill said one day, as we were pulling away from the house in my sperm-shaped car, on our way to a destination yet to be decided.

  “Me, too,” Annie said.

  “No,” Jill insisted, “I mean I really love him.”

  “You’re grossing me out,” I said, and I turned up the radio. Jill was driving. She was in control. Sometimes when I was with her, I felt like I was with Zoe; I remained one rank below her, no matter how hard I tried to slip into first place. To make matters worse, if you squinted your eyes and looked at Jill from across a smoky room, she even looked like Zoe: straight black hair, almost stunted nose, eyebrows like chevrons.

  The one place I had outranked Zoe was in life experience. While my friends and I explored drugs and sex, she remained pure. She always resented me for this, yet thrived on it, too, the way an anorexic thrives on the mastery of her own starvation. Every joint I smoked or beer I drank increased the gap between us until I might as well have been a drug addict and she an abstinent Mother Superior.

  Annie scooted up in the backseat and stuck her head between mine and Jill’s.

  “I still can’t believe your parents let you have this car after what happened to Zoe,” Annie said. It had been almost four months; you’d have thought she’d be used to it by then. But Annie was a worrier, a ruminator—it would probably be years before she could ride in Zoe’s car and not think about Zoe’s death.

  “They’re just playing the odds,” Jill said. “The chance of having two kids die in a car crash is so remote that it’s, like, almost safer for Tiny to be in this car.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I should spend my whole frickin’ life in this car; it’s probably the only place I won’t die.”

  And then I heard this choking noise from Annie and saw that she was crying. Her nose was red and her eyes were rimmed with pink. With her curly red hair and flushed face, she looked like a baby rooster.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “It’s just that every time we talk about Zoe, I start thinking about how awful you and your parents must feel. And then I start worrying that one of us is next, like she was the first in a series.”

  “You’re the one who brought her up!” Jill said.

  I turned the radio up even louder and looked out my window. I had done a lot of crying over Zoe, months of it. But I hadn’t cried in weeks. Sometimes, I had this strange feeling that my sister was slipping from my consciousness, as if she’d been flushed away by my tears. When I shut my eyes and thought of Zoe, I often saw Jill, or Jill across a smoky room. I thought about Jill’s feet: dark tan with a white Y where her flip-flops blocked out the sun. What had Zoe’s feet looked like? Was her second toe larger than the first? Did the bone alongside her big toe bow out?

  My mother had always blamed the rift between Zoe and me on puberty. She claimed that Zoe never forgave me for getting breasts first, not to mention my period, which preceded hers by a year. But the truth was, even before that morning when I called my mother and my sister into my bedroom to feel the garbanzo-bean-sized lumps that had suddenly materialized beneath my nipples; even before the day when my yet-to-menstruate older sister meanly scooped up all my sanitary pads and the belt used to fasten them and hid them under the kitchen sink with the scouring powder, we hadn’t been close. In fact, if you had asked me how I felt about Zoe the day before she died, I would have said I hated her.

  That night, I decided to cook dinner for my father. We had fallen into a routine of eating frozen TV dinners. For him, kasha and bow ties, which he bought at a Jewish grocery in Los Angeles, an hour away. For me, macaroni and cheese, with chocolate pudding that would bubble over its corner of the plastic tray into the macaroni trough, leaving a brown smear, like blood.

  I was dropping the pasta into the shiny new pot that my mother had bought us when she moved out (I don’t know why she didn’t leave us the old dented pots with the rust spots and missing lids, and buy new ones for herself) when my father made his hissing sound: not quite a psssst, more of a szzzzt. It was the sound he made when he wanted my attention. I walked over and read the notepad that he was holding up. It said, in slanted, angry capital letters, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

  “I’m making dinner,” I said.

  “WHAT?” he wrote.

  “Spaghetti,” I said.

  Dad just stood there, staring at me, his head tilted and the pad resting in his hand like a closed mouth.

  “Is that OK?” I asked. “Do you mind if I make spaghetti?”

  Dad shook his head and waved his hands, a vague “OK” signal, then made a quick ch-ch sound and pointed to the pot of water, which was about to boil ove
r.

  Our dinner conversation was usually quick, as my father was a fast writer. He might write, “What did you do today?” or “How’s school?” and while I answered, he would already be scribbling out his next question. But that night, Dad didn’t even look my way. We just sat there twirling spaghetti onto our forks and forcing giant noodle-cocoons into our mouths.

  “Did you get a lot of work done today?” I asked.

  Dad shook his head no, picked up the green shaker of grated Parmesan cheese, and sprinkled some onto his food. Earlier that evening, as I was setting the table, I had eyed the cylindrical green can of Comet cleanser. It was awfully similar to the can of Parmesan cheese, and it had occurred to me that, if I wanted to, I could probably put it on the table and watch my distracted father sprinkle the chlorine-smelling powder over his meal. There was a good chance he would never know the difference.

  “Do you like the spaghetti?”

  Dad moved his head in a yes/no sort of way, as if he couldn’t make up his mind.

  “Should I not make spaghetti?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve forgotten: did Zoe always love spaghetti or something?”

  Dad dropped his fork and wrote something on his pad. Then he stood and cleared his plate.

  “Spaghetti’s fine,” the note said. “I’m just not hungry.”

  I could hear Dad scraping the spaghetti into the trash can, then the dull tuk sound of the plastic lid being dropped into place. The faucet began to run, and there was a clanking ruckus as he loaded all the dishes into the dishwasher: my sticky ice-cream bowl from the night before; the runny-cheese-smeared plates from Jill and Annie’s snack. The house was messier without my sister and mother around; they had imposed order.

  I took another bite of spaghetti, and then it came to me: we had been eating spaghetti the night Tom Lane’s father called to say that Zoe and Tom had been in a car accident. I whispered aloud, “No spaghetti, no spaghetti, no spaghetti,” adding it to the mental list of things to avoid in order not to upset my father. My list kept expanding; it seemed that the stain of my sister was everywhere, growing like mold: I couldn’t wear Zoe’s clothes, even though we were the same size. I had to avoid her favorite TV shows, especially M*A*S*H* and WKRP in Cincinnati. And I could never listen to Carly Simon or James Taylor. Zoe had worshiped them, even fantasizing about them amicably divorcing so that she could become Carly’s best friend and James’s girlfriend. It was far-fetched, she knew, but she still talked about it often, as if it were a real possibility.

  I ripped Dad’s note off the pad, scrunched it into a ball, and wrote, “SORRY,” in big black letters on the new page. Then I ran out of the house (leaving my plate on the table), drove around the block (illegally, of course), and parked at Jill’s house (a two-minute walk).

  Jill’s family was eating spaghetti, too.

  “Sit down, Tiny,” her mother said, and Jill’s father stood and pulled another chair to the table.

  “We’re having spaghetti,” she said, as if it weren’t entirely obvious.

  Jill’s family was normal or, at least, as normal as a family could be. The best thing about them was that even though my family was quirky and weird; even though my mother wore long batik dresses, didn’t shave her armpits, and spent less than 30 minutes a week with me; even though my father was a voluntary mute who ate homemade yogurt with odd fruits like kumquat; even though we were the only family in the neighborhood with a dead teenager; despite all of this, Jill’s family always acted as if I were as normal as they were.

  “Do you like meatballs?” Jill’s 13-year-old brother, Jimmy, asked me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said as Jill’s mother delicately tonged two meatballs from the platter onto my plate.

  “I think they look like giant turds,” Jimmy said.

  “Jimmy Lester Young,” Jill’s mother said, “that is not appropriate table talk!”

  Jill and I held in our laughter. Mr. Young was about to crack up, too. “Jimmy,” he said firmly, “you go sit in the kitchen for a few minutes and think about what is and is not appropriate language for the dinner table.”

  Jimmy scooted his chair back and dragged his too-big feet toward the kitchen. Once he was out of sight, Jill leaned forward in her chair and giggled. “He’s always saying things like that,” she said.

  “Now, Tiny,” Mrs. Young said, “how’s your father these days?”

  “Just fine,” I said. “He’s translating some French book about love and death.”

  “God,” Jill sighed, “that’s so romantic.”

  “If you went to France, you wouldn’t think it was so romantic,” Mr. Young said. “The French are like cockroaches: all greasy and dirty and scurrying around.”

  “Gerald!” Mrs. Young said, scolding him in the same jovial way she had Jimmy.

  “Dad,” Jill said, “Tiny says France is fantastic, and she should know; she’s been there more times than you can count.”

  “What you see as a young, impressionable girl is much different than what you see as an adult,” Mr. Young said, winking at me. He liked to inveigh against all things foreign. It was his personal running joke, and I got the feeling that he particularly liked to do it around me.

  After dinner, Jill and I helped Mrs. Young clear the table and do the dishes while Mr. Young played Pong on the television set with Jimmy. The Youngs had been the first people in the neighborhood to own an Atari. Mr. Young and Jimmy each held a small black box with a dial on it. The dial directed a white line, or paddle, up and down the television screen while a white dot bounced between them; it was like tennis, except the player’s physical movements were restricted to the small twitchings of the first finger and the thumb. Each time the “ball” hit a white line, it made a hollow, clear tok.

  “You know,” Jill said, “that sound could just about drive me crazy.”

  We had finished the dishes and were sitting in the family room watching the Pong match with a certain bored fascination. Mrs. Young had slipped off her shoes and tucked her pantyhose-clad feet under her behind, so only the reinforced toes stuck out. The orange nylon blended her toes together in a way that reminded me of the smooth humps between the legs of Barbie and Ken.

  “Do you mind if Tiny and I go out for a while, to Baskin-Robbins or something?” Jill asked.

  “Sure,” her mother said. “You girls go have fun.”

  “Be home by…,” Mr. Young started to say, but then he stopped to focus on his game. “Just don’t stay out late,” he finished. “You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  The Youngs were like that: they kept track of their kids. Jill had to ask to leave the house, and she had to be home at a reasonable, if unspecified, hour. Me, I was like a Pong ball released from the television, bouncing any which way with no one to paddle me back.

  “Should we pick up Annie?” Jill asked, driving my car along the route to Annie’s house.

  “Sure,” I said, “but if she starts crying about Zoe again, I’m going to kill her.”

  Jill pulled into Annie’s driveway and honked three times. A curtain was pushed aside, then fell closed again, too quickly for me to see who had looked out. Within seconds, Annie fled from her house with a sweater, her purse, and what looked like a tampon box.

  “Look what I got,” she said, as she slid into the backseat. She lifted the lid of the blue cardboard box and held it out for us to examine. It was filled with joints.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “My brother started dealing!” she screamed.

  “No way!” Jill said.

  “Way,” Annie said. “He gave this to me as a bribe so I wouldn’t tell Mom and Dad. As if I’d tell them anyway!”

  Annie’s father was the Superior Court judge of Pueblo Valley. Her mother was president of the neighborhood Welcome Wagon, a group of women who delivered baskets stuffed with baked goods, refrigerator magnets with the names of banks on them, and a map of the town, to new homeowners. (Renters weren’t welcomed.) Annie’s parents tried to keep track of
her and her brother, Ben, but they were foolishly ignorant and easily misled, so, essentially, Annie and Ben did whatever they wanted. They’d perfected the art of reflecting back exactly what their parents wished to see and hear.

  Jill turned the car around and headed for the beach, the best place to get high in Pueblo Valley. Anyone who was there after dark was either smoking pot; drinking beer; or having sex in the caves or campsites on the mesa overlooking the beach. It was at Pueblo Valley beach where Annie, who was the first of us three to try sex, lost her virginity last year. She’d described it as a “gritty” experience, but that didn’t keep her from doing it every single day from then on with Matt, who was her first love and her boyfriend for nine months. Matt broke Annie’s heart when she found out he was letting a girl from the tennis club, Karita, give him a blow job in her car every Sunday while Annie was at karate class. Annie claimed she was over Matt only three weeks after they broke up, but we never really believed her. You don’t gain 15 pounds if your heart doesn’t hurt.

  Jill had recently broken up with Tad, the second guy she’d been with since she lost her virginity eight months ago. While they were dating, Jill and Tad had done it in Tad’s car every single weekend and in Jill’s bed every Thursday afternoon while Mrs. Young was out doing her weekly shopping and Jill’s brother Jimmy was at band practice. But since the day Tad smelled bad, like a compost pile in the hot sun, Jill was repulsed by him, and so she ended it without even telling him why. For five days, Tad called her crying every night, and he even showed up at her house with a bouquet of blue carnations. Now Jill claimed she was done with guys our age and alternated between thinking of becoming a nun and pining for some older man she lusted after: our biology teacher; the owner of the local hardware store who had a caterpillar-looking mustache; my father.

  Four months ago, two days before my sister died, I had tried to lose my virginity with my then boyfriend, Mickey. We’d been planning it for days: we’d do it up in the mountains, on a cozy blanket, under a sea of stars. I’d imagined the moment in cinematic slo-mo, Rod Stewart singing “Tonight’s the Night” on the sound track. I was madly in love with Mickey, with his mop of toffee-colored hair, his slightly sinister-looking teeth (the canines were larger than the incisors), and his brown surfer’s body, almost as smooth and hairless as a girl’s. And the fact that he seemed to love me, too, made the time leading up to the big event seem weighted and profound, almost like an engagement before a wedding.