Just a little bit of housekeeping: Ariel’s on vacation for a few weeks, so it’s gonna be a little bit BBGT lite. This week is just going to be this post wrapping up the penultimate Calendar Girl, then next week will be all Beautiful Sacrifice on Monday and Friday, then we’ll be back to our regular schedule.
Previously, Mia and Maddy rushed off to the hospital in Las Vegas where their dad finally woke up from the coma he’s been in the whole series, and Wes and Matt rushed into the hospital room to make out with their fiancés in front of their dad who just woke up from said coma, and Gin did something racist.
Calendar Girl (November): Chapter 10
The chapter opens with Mia in the hospital with her dad, where Calendar Girl scrambles like a motherfucker to figure out how to make the character whose personal flaws and actions kicked off the events of this entire story into an actual character now. I mentioned this is the penultimate book, right? In a twelve-book series? Yeah, it’s crazy. It’d be like if Ross didn’t show up until the ninth season of Friends, but none of the Ross-and-Rachel storyline changed somehow.
Calendar Girl tests the limits of “better late than never”.
Pops nodded solemnly. I couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling, knowing that almost a year of his life passed him by.
“What happened, Pops? How did it get so bad with Blaine?” […]
He shrugged. “I didn’t care a-anymore. About m-my life, about m-my d-debt, about a-anything but the emptiness.” Each word was said with a strange foreboding
Whoa, good thing Calendar Girl pointed it was foreboding that someone said they didn’t care about their life anymore. I almost missed that.
In my mind, I went back to the conversation where Ginelle suggested he’d tried suicide by way of overextending his line of credit with a psychotic loan shark.
He shook his head. “I w-was so t-tired. Done with w-wondering w-why she left. Done with b-being a d-drunk. Done with b-being the w-worst thing for you g-girls. Just d-done. So I didn’t care that I owed Blaine all that m-money and n-no w-way to pay it b-back.”
Gosh, Pops is about to get some real bad news about that whole “I was done with being the worst thing for you girls” thing. Like, eleven books of bad news.
“I knew he’d take care of me, and that w-would be that. I-Insurance w-would cover you.”
So… sips tea
“You have no idea what I’ve given up for you all these months to pay your debts!”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. “What? The debt is p-paid?” […]
“Blaine [came after] Maddy and me [for] ‘survivors’ debt.’ You didn’t think he’d let you get off with being killed without some way of getting his money, did you?”
Pops eyes widened on his sunken in face making them look darker, more hollow. “No.” He shook his head. “They never said t-that. I…I just…”
“You what?” I roared. “Figured you’d offer up yourself and all would be forgiven?”
His gaze shot to where I’d started pacing. “Yes, exactly.”
Ready for shit to get cringey?
“Unbelievable.” I shook all over […] “I went to work for Millie as an escort to pay off your debt!” […]
All the blood seemed to leave my father’s face, making him ghostly pale. “You w-whored yourself out f-for m-me?” A tear slipped down his cheek […] “God, no. No. Not my g-girl.”
Hi. Who the fuck is this man?
I don’t mean this as doubt that someone can struggle with addiction but also care about the loved ones whose lives he’s ruining. I mean why, why, a thousand times why was this character completely absent from this story that he bears responsibility for? All he can do by this point is have the same reactions about Mia’s situation that the reader had a whole eleven books ago. All this reunion scene can do is lip service to the idea of forgiveness as these two people who we’ve never seen interact with each other go through the motions of caring.
“God, I’m s-sorry for s-so much. I’ll never be able to make it up to y-you and y-your sister. Never.” […]
“You can start by being alive. Being our dad again.”
He held me for a long time, whispering apologies into my hair, telling me how proud of me he was, how much he loved me. In the end, that’s really all I ever wanted from my dad. His love, acceptance, and pride. I realized, in that moment, I did have all that.
By the strictest possible definition, since the only thing making this moment different from any other moment in these books is that he’s awake for this one.
It’s just really hard to buy into this stilted scene, and making it more difficult, Mia is finally faced with the man whose actions forced her into sex work, yet she still doesn’t recognize it as such.
“Pops, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t have to sleep with them. I just had to be what they needed for a month.”
I mean, it’s not like this isn’t true. Calendar Girl has been nothing if not a so-safe-it’s-unrecognizable sex-work fantasy where Mia’s forced into sex work, but only with hot dudes with hearts of gold with whom she still has agency over consenting to sex.
I’ve been reading Andi Zeisler’s We Were Feminists Once and couldn’t help but find this part applicable to Calendar Girl:
in discourses and debates around sex as both an activity and a commodity, “empowerment” has become a sort of shorthand that might mean “I’m proud of doing this thing,” but also might mean “This thing is not the ideal thing, but it’s a lot better than some of the alternatives.” Feeling empowered by stripping, for instance, was a big theme among moonlighting academics or otherwise privileged young women in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and you can find countless memoirs about what they discovered about themselves in the world of the sexual marketplace; the same is true of prostitution […]
The crucial thing these often incredibly absorbing and well-written books had in common? All were written by young, white, and no-longer-hustling sex workers. […] we see thousands of pop culture products in which women are empowered by a sex industry that does not have their empowerment in mind, but far fewer in which they are empowered to make sexual choices on their own terms, outside of a status quo in which women’s bodies are commodities to be bought and sold.
That last part is especially interesting to me, because Calendar Girl tries so hard to give Mia choice throughout this series, but she never really has any. Sure, she can choose to consent to sex, but she never gets a choice about her line of work (until a man shows up to pay another man’s debt to yet another man). It’s beyond weird to read a book about the thrill of being forced into sex work where all your wildest dreams come true, which also can’t see beyond the Madonna-whore complex as its main character keeps asserting to everyone that she ain’t no whore.
(Long sigh) Anyway, Mia gets a phone call, and Mia’s dad still isn’t totally up to speed on the events of the past eleven books he was in a coma for.
“Who was that?” Pops asked.
“My brother, Max,” I said automatically, completely forgetting that my father had not been awake the past year. He didn’t know about Maxwell Cunningham or about Maddy and the truth of her paternity. “Shit,” I whispered, staring at his confused face.
“What brother?”
The wildest part of this story to me is that her natural impulse was to casually specify that Max was her brother.
Maddy shows up as Mia brings him up to speed.
“Always suspected your mom was p-playing around on m-me. There were times where I thought I’d seen her s-standing too close to t-this tall blond c-cowboy-looking f-fella.”
What a specific vague memory!
They all talk about how they’re still a family and some shit that I can’t even pretend is worth recapping. The dad isn’t a real character. Sorry not sorry.
The chapter skips ahead and Mia gets her new assignment from Dr. Hoffman’s assistant, Shandi. Mia describes how much she hates Shandi. Somehow Mia and Shandi have a more firmly established dynamic than Mia and her dad whose mistakes forced her into sex work. Somehow. Calendar Girl is fucking wild.
“Ms. Saunders, this is Shandi, Dr. Hoffman’s assistant.”
She always did that. Announced herself as Dr. Hoffman’s assistant, as though I didn’t already know that, having worked with him the last two months.
“Yes, Shandi. Hello. What can I do for you?”
“Dr. Hoffman has your next assignment.”
I crinkled my eyes. “Oh? Usually I pick the subject matter.”
Hasn’t Mia been working there for, like, three months? Jesus, even Mia’s ego is more of a character than her dad is.
Mia gets an assignment to go to Aspen because a rich dude offered the show a ton of money to do a segment on his wife and her wildlife art. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but good lord I hope Calendar Girl has some crazy twist planned for this last book in the series.
We skip ahead to Mia and Wes discussing their plans for the assignment. I mean, technically the book skips ahead to a sex scene between Mia and Wes and then skips ahead to their planning, but we are going to skip straight to the planning.
“My folks own a cabin [in Aspen].”
“Do you think your family would consider doing Christmas in Colorado for a few days? We could have Jeananna and her husband, Peter, come out, Max and his clan, Maddy, Matt, and his parents, and Ginelle?”
SEE? SHE’S ALREADY FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT HER DAD. Fucking Gin is on this shortlist, but Mia spends half a chapter away from her dad and it’s already “dad who?” Merry Christmas!
The books ends with Mia reflecting on how she “finally had it all”.
Bring it on, world.
I finally had it all. Happiness. Family. Friends. My sister was taken care of.
I nominate “was taken care of” as the least comforting way to say “got engaged”.
My father was on the path to recovery
and a man who adored me and wanted to spend the rest of his life proving it. I planned on spending the rest of my life proving it right back.
And zero of the rest of her life giving back her newfound wealth to the socioeconomically underprivileged, like she was a year ago when she was forced into sex work that she’s still too traumatized to refer to as such. Finally, she has it all!