The Mark of ‘Z’
Eve Marx
Word Count 521
When your last name begins with the letter ‘Z’, you get used to being at the end. It all starts in elementary school where you are always at the end of the line. Eventually, I began to think of myself as something last, something less, an afterthought, the dregs.
There are serious real-life consequences to being pereptually last. Take, for example, high school graduation. Each student is summoned to the stage in alphabetical order to receive their diploma, but by the time they get to the W’s, the audience is very weary. Enthusiasm, truth be told, begins to wane after the letter N. By the time the program gets around to the W’s, there’s hardly anyone left in the room to clap because they’ve all left the auditorium.
Weighed down by this burden, I selected boyfriends partially based on their last names. (Just in case one of them turned out to be my future husband, you understand.) I preferred men whose last name started with a B or a C, but nothing after J. It’s no wonder things didn’t exactly work out with J.P. or G.S., my college boyfriend, and certainly not my most outrageous boyfriend, the infamous T.T.
People think I’m joking about the trials of growing up attached to the end. In the naming department, I felt like I got double crossed, my first name being Eve. You can’t imagine the idiocy I endured having people constantly ask, “Where’s Adam?” But none of that compared to the darker aspects of achieving adulthood saddled with the Z surname. I suffered feelings of inferiority and unwantedness. I really believed I was the last. These sorrowful emotions contributed to lifelong low expectations including a high tolerance for not getting paid or being paid late; imposter syndrome; paranoia, and other maladies best left for discussion with a licensed therapist.
When my mother married my father, she fell in love with her new last name and spent countless hours cultivating her signature, writing her Z’s with a large flourish. Z is undeniably a fun letter to play with and is attached to some other great words like “zebra” and “zephyr” and “zombie,” and then of course, there’s Zorro. Zorro saved me. I just didn’t worship Zorro; I wanted to be him. I wanted his tightly fitting black clothes, his boots, his cape; the black mask he wore to shield his identity. Even though I was six years old, my emotions were almost erotic. And then there was his horse. I wanted him, too. I spent a lot of time riding my broomstick horse named Tornado on the winter beach just outside our apartment building, drawing big Z’s in the sand with my rapier, a long and pointy stick I’d picked up in the dunes.
When I married in my thirties, I eagerly took my husband’s last name. At the last moment, however, filling out a pile of legal forms, I decided to not totally abandon my Z. I turned it into my middle name. To this day I have no idea why I did this except to honor my inner Zorro.
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Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
