I
I am fourteen. I am depressed. My doctor puts me on Zoloft, which decreases sex drives in adults, and prevents me from developing a sex drive in the first place. My fatal flaw is that I do not know this. Instead, I believe I am holy.
II
I am in fourth grade. My mom and her friends start a girl’s group for me and my friends. We meet every other Wednesday and sit around a kitchen table while Ruth’s mom tells us how to be a woman. Here is what I learn:
A woman is modest (She shows us a perfume ad in a magazine. A naked woman is curled around a glass bottle, her bare back and legs on display. “She is shamelessly objectifying herself,” Ruth’s mom tells us. I nod my head and do not think to ask about the photographer).
A woman is polite (This manifests in proper dinner etiquette, which we learn. This fork for salad. This fork for the entrée. This fork for stabbing yourself if you get it wrong.).
A woman is considerate (She gestures to the skirt that hangs past her knees, to the button-up that covers her from hip to collarbone. She asserts that boys want sex. Boys want shoulders, boys want the backs of our knees and the insides of our elbows and the napes of our necks. Boys want and want and we have to be untouchable, propped up and pretty and tucked neatly away until they’re allowed to touch. All they want, she tells us, is to touch us before they’re allowed. My older brother is a boy; I ask him what he wants. “The Lego Death Star set,” he tells me.).
III
I am fifteen. My new psychiatrist recommends a switch from Zoloft to Lexapro. He doesn’t think he needs to tell the timid sophomore with a crippling fear of intimacy that this medication will decrease her sex drive as well. At school the next day, my best friend Elise tells me she gave someone head for the first time. I listen and nod and, with resigned gratification, feel nothing at all. I still believe I am holy.
IV
I am in eighth grade, and my friends and I have all been dumped in the empty summer halls of St. Agnes High School for Catholic Retreat Weekend. We listen to soft Christian rock played by a volunteer high school band; we sit through Jesuit sermons and hours of Adoration. On Sunday, there is an anonymous Q&A session.
“Everyone can write a question and we’ll pick the best ones to answer,” says a volunteer, most likely someone’s mom. I write down my question on a scrap of paper and throw it in the basket with everyone else’s. Victoria asks why dogs don’t go to heaven; Mary asks why she can’t show her shoulders in church. I won’t tell you what my question is, only that they don’t answer it.
There is a dream sequence where the poor woman running the session unfolds that scrap of paper as she’s choosing which questions to answer. It flutters out of her hand, her mouth falling open in shock. The misguided, innocent horror of my question makes her stand from her seat, chair legs screeching, as she confronts the terrifying notions she was taught as a girl, the notions she’s passing onto us. She begins weeping for her daughters, for her sisters, for herself, before she’s hurriedly shooed out of the gymnasium.
Cut back to reality: she deems it inappropriate, throws it away, and answers the easy questions. Like why Veronica’s dog isn’t in heaven.
When the session ends and I don’t have my answer, I decide it’s because the answer is obvious: everyone knows a dead virgin is better than a living whore.
V
I am sixteen. In an act of misplaced, newly-learned defiance, I stop taking my meds cold turkey. Now, when Elise talks about the boy she met up with the night before, I ask her for more details—where, when, what about his hands, his mouth? That night I learn how to open a private window on my Chromebook. What I watch is brutal, and I love it. I reach to love it with more than my eyes. “Cut off the hand that sins!” my Bible screams from across my bedroom. I shut the Chromebook and try. I swear that I try.
I wake the next morning a sinner. I start taking my meds again.
Two months later, Elise spends Homecoming night with a senior. When she tells me about it, the feelings she describes are unfamiliar again, but each word makes me more familiar with the shame rising up in my gut. There is no shame in her voice. Somewhere in Act III, someone—a classmate or a teacher or a friend—mentioned the term slut shaming in thoughtless passing. Elise tells me about her senior and when my shoulders start to curl in disgust and my mouth opens, I recall that term. I close my mouth. She is smiling at me as she talks, and I realize that I love her.
In the exposition, I was taught to define holy as worthy of love. Love from my family, from my friends, from my future husband, from my God and King. And because of the way I feel about that supposedly unlovable girl who sits beside me in Chemistry, I begin the long process of redefining that word.
VI
I am in twelfth grade. I go to the doctor on my own for the first time. “Are you sexually active?” “No.” I expect praise for my answer; I receive the next question on her sheet. When she asks if I know how to have sex safely, I answer with words that are starting to taste a little less like shame.
She gives me an informational packet on the HPV vaccine. My mother sees it on the kitchen counter that night and asks me, “Do you know how else you can avoid getting HPV?” I do know. The next year, I make an appointment to get the vaccine at my university clinic. It’s for my health, of course. But as I wait in the lobby of the health center, something like spite has my legs pushing up from the chair when the nurse calls my name.
VII
I am twenty. I’m in my childhood bedroom, sleeping in while my parent’s go to church without me. When I wake to a silent house, I break a pill in half and swallow it dry. My doctor gave me the go ahead to start easing off Lexapro. I move about the empty shell of the house; I pass beneath the crucifix hanging above the threshold to the kitchen; I eat breakfast in the dining room beneath an oil portrait of Our Lady. Eventually, I’ll go back to school, and I’ll move into an apartment, then a house I can call my own.
And when my hand starts to sin, I don’t cut it off. I know now that I was raised in various shades of deprivation, in shifting hues of brutality. My fatal flaw is revealed and resolved. To the surprise of Ruth’s mom, I am still a woman, and Elise always was. In this final act, I teach myself ten years’ worth of sin. And for the first time in my life, I know what it means to be holy.
***
Mikayla Schutte is a Cincinnati-based writer, earning her BA in English from Northern Kentucky University, where she is the fiction editor for the undergraduate creative writing journal, Loch Norse Magazine. She is a recipient of the R.M. Miller Award for Outstanding Fiction Writing, and her work is published or forthcoming in The Penn Review, Flare Journal, and more.
Kathy Bruce’s collages explore archetypal female and mythological forms within the context of poetry, literature and the natural environment. She received an M.F.A from Yale University School of Art and a certificate from The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts USA. Ms. Bruce is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Fulbright Hayes Senior Scholarship Grant for Lecturing and Research in Puno Peru 2012 and 1983, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in the US, UK and internationally including Senegal, Taiwan, France, Denmark, Peru and Canada.