Tart

by Jody Gehrman

  Rose creeps up behind me and watches over my shoulder. “What did he say?” she asks in a groggy, amused voice.

  “He said he’s divorced.”

  “Huh. He’s cute, isn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You going to ask him in?” she says, chewing on her hair.

  “You think I should?”

  “I would.”

  “He gets me in a lot of trouble,” I say.

  Medea comes over, leaps onto the windowsill and peers down at Clay blinkingly, looking unimpressed. She lets her tail twitch frenetically, though, giving away her memories of those hands on her fur.

  “Everything fun’s a lot of trouble,” says Rose through a yawn, and goes back to bed.

  “Hold on,” I call out to him. “I’m coming down.”

  “Oh, no,” he says. “Don’t—please, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I stink. My hair’s all—” He gestures vaguely at his head. “I might throw up.” As if to emphasize this point, he stumbles off the sidewalk into a large clump of bamboo, rights himself quickly and stands up very straight, as if nothing’s happened. “Gotta go. Just wanted to tell you.”

  “Clay. You’re not driving, are you?”

  “Y’kidding?” He adds something to this that sounds like “mash sticks.”

  “What?”

  “Not driving,” he says. “Crash at Nick’s. Just wanted to…” And then he shrugs helplessly, as if it’s all too much for him, and starts off down the street, putting one foot in front of the other with self-conscious deliberation, like someone taking a sobriety test.

  “Wait,” I say. “Let me just come down there for a—”

  But he’s already walking away.

  I watch his precious sagging Levi’s for a couple of seconds as he totters off. Then he steps into the shadows, and though I stay at the window for several more minutes, he’s gone.

  WINTER

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 18

  My thirtieth birthday falls on a Monday, which only compounds how depressing it is. Rose tries to convince me that since I’m on winter break and she’s unemployed, this negates its Mondayness, but I disagree. I secretly suspect it’s a sign that the decade ahead will be packed with the spirit of Mondays: drudgery, dread and coffee-guzzling existentialism.

  I don’t want to hate aging. It’s so un-tart to buy antiwrinkle serums and curse the mysterious, insectlike facial hairs that crop up with the years. Somehow, though, in my Tart Manifesto, I never got around to considering myself at thirty, or—Jesus—forty. I was filled with the drunken buoyancy of Me Me Me, which leaves no space for the future. I vaguely imagined I might die at twenty-seven, like Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. I doubted I would ever actually be a rock star, but I figured I could probably manage to die like one.

  Rose is trying to be enthusiastic; she’s dutifully baked me an incredibly dark, intoxicatingly chocolate cake with cream-cheese icing and strawberry trimmings. She also drew me a picture of Rex and Medea, which is slightly fictionalized since she’s portrayed them sitting side by side peacefully, which would never happen. Rex and Medea have a dysfunctional relationship that mostly involves denial of each other’s existence, occasionally disrupted by exciting episodes of goofy pursuit on Rex’s part and violent counterattack by Medea.

  In spite of Rose’s sweet and solicitous birthday smile, I know she’s seething. She’s not mad at me, but at God or fate, whichever is responsible for the whiplash-inducing ride that is her life. Total Eclipse decided last week that their career was stagnating in Santa Cruz, and just like that they moved to L.A., not even bothering to invite Rose along. She and Marco had a terse, clipped goodbye—couldn’t expect much else, given their language barrier—and that was that: budding career and soul mate whisked off together in a dilapidated Volvo.

  I’m a little worried about Rose, to be honest. Vodka continues to evaporate around her, she hasn’t worked since her two-week stint cocktailing at the Catalyst, and though she cooks like a glutton, she eats like a bird. Her once Botticelliesque body is now catwalk-thin, and though she may look extraordinarily good in Levi’s (buttless works for women, too), when she strips down to her underwear she looks a little too concentration camp for my taste. I can’t shake the suspicion that Jade’s death is lurking like a bad dream just under Rose’s skin, forcing her to dart restlessly from one distraction to the next.

  Jade isn’t the only subject she’s silent about. There’s Aunt Jessie, stashed away in some New Mexico prison. Neither Rose nor my mother are inclined to talk about this at all, as if one’s immediate relatives often do time and there’s no point in discussing it. I know Aunt Jessie’s an alcoholic, and yes, Rose has good reason to resent the random, gypsy childhood she endured in the name of Jessie’s freedom, but all the same, shouldn’t someone be doing something? Maybe prison break is out of the question, but one of us could visit, or write? A couple times I’ve started letters to Jessie, but I ended up feeling ridiculous; what’s there to say? Hi, sorry you’re such a boozer, hope prison dries you out for good. By the way, your daughter keeps stealing my Absolut on the sly. Much love…? Besides, it would upset Rose if I wrote; she’s so defensive whenever I raise the subject, like I’m accusing her of abandonment just by mentioning Jessie’s name.

  “Come on,” Rose says as we’re lying around on the couch we scored at a garage sale, moaning about having eaten too much chocolate cake for breakfast. “There must be something you want to do.”

  “There’s only one advantage to having your birthday three days before Christmas,” I say. “You get the two worst holidays out of the way all at once.”

  “You’re being so negative.”

  “I’m not. This is the bright side,” I insist. “If I go out and get really ripped on my birthday, I might just sleep straight through to New Year’s. I’d consider that a good year.”

  “Maybe we should go to the beach?”

  Medea and I regard her with appropriate skepticism. Outside, a torrent of rain lashes against our windows, as it has for days. It’s like living in a car wash. I rather like it, actually. It gives me an excuse for gloom.

  “Okay,” she says. “Maybe not the beach. How’s about we go thrifting? We’ll get really groovy, totally tasteless dresses and wear them out tonight.”

  “Out where?” I ask listlessly. It doesn’t help matters knowing that if we go shopping, it’ll have to be my treat. Ditto for night on the town.

  “Out anywhere.”

  “Rose,” I begin, and then I hesitate, which tells her everything she needs to know.

  “You’re mad cause I don’t have a job,” she says. “You think I’m a parasite. You wish I was dead.”

  I smile. “That’s not exactly the sentiment,” I say. “But we’re both pretty broke. You know I blew most of my paycheck at that stupid salon.”

  Last week, in a mad attempt to achieve the ever-elusive bohemian scarf-wearing professor look, I took Ziv’s suggestion and went to a fancy salon in San Francisco for a complete makeover. Ziv’s ex-boyfriend runs the place, and it’s the sort of joint where they offer you espresso in the delicate, eggshell-thin cups that remind me of Ziv, and everyone looks so glam you feel utterly revolting as soon as they plop you in front of the mirror. When I left there I looked like an albino bushman. The stylist encouraged me to embrace my Afro rather than fight it, bleached it bone-white and ordered the cosmetologist to do my makeup in porcelain geisha-tones. Clownish is, unfortunately, a very apt adjective. I spent three hundred dollars on the makeover and $2.75 on a box of Kleenex for the ride home.

  “Claudia, I suck,” Rose says. “I’ve totally and completely let you down.”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “No, I have,” she says emphatically, sitting up. Medea blinks at her, and Rex comes trotting over, his toenails clicking, sensing the possibility of a walk. “I just realized—the only present I can give you is to go out and get a job.”

  �
�Rose…”

  “It’s true.” She stands up. “I’m going. And I won’t be back until I’m employed.”

  My instinct is to stop her, and I think she wants me to, but the truth is, her sudden resolve is very welcome. Living in Santa Cruz isn’t cheap, and having to support a vodkaswilling housewife has swollen my cost of living to the brink of serious debt. Debt is one of my biggest phobias, right alongside monogamy and venereal warts.

  She stuffs a few things into a big straw bag, grabs her car keys, swipes her lips with Chap Stick and heads for the door. “Later on,” she calls, and with that she and Rex are gone.

  Rose can be surprisingly adept at leaving, when the mood strikes her. Usually she dawdles, like me—changing her clothes five times, braiding and rebraiding her hair, jumping in the shower at the last second because she’s suddenly decided she reeks. When the two of us are headed somewhere, it takes us hours to get out the door. But Rose also possesses this uncanny knack for bolting impulsively every now and then, practically midsentence. Probably the legacy of her drifter childhood. Aunt Jessie often demanded immediate escape; if Rose wasn’t ready, she might get left behind with the bulkier furniture and the stray animals they’d adopted for the month.

  This instinct for ill-planned flight is one strain of the Lavelle blood that’s always disturbed and fascinated me. It’s most pronounced in Aunt Jessie, but Mira’s got a dash of it, herself. How many mothers could surrender custody of their thirteen-year-old daughter, pack up and move to a town they’d barely driven through, shed the moniker of “Mom” and reemerge as Mira Ravenwing? I was showing my Lavelle blood when I went to Austin, led by vague cowboy mirages—and again when I came here, come to think of it. Stealing one’s ex’s bus and promptly incinerating it en route could certainly fall within the bounds of “ill planned.”

  The rain’s stopping, or at least slowing to a drizzle, and the chocolate cake for breakfast is turning to something sludgy and unpleasant in my belly, so I decide I’ll walk to the post office and check my box. If you have to turn thirty, better to start the decade moving, rather than moping prostrate on your tatty old couch, waiting for your thighs to transform into varicose-veined cottage cheese.

  Once I’m outside, the ocean-scented drizzle makes me feel something like happy—or alive, anyway, which I’ll settle for today. The cloud cover is giving way in the south, and I can feel the sun burning through the blue to reach my face.

  My mother once said that her life didn’t really begin until her thirties. Considering that she left me with Dad when she turned thirty-three, I guess it’s obvious why this inspires more bitterness than hope.

  Walking to the post office, though, I try not to fixate on my mother or my rapidly bulking thighs or my thirties. Instead I concentrate on a chain-link fence half consumed by an unruly burst of passionflowers; their exotic, otherworldly centers are dripping with this morning’s rain. Half a block later, there’s a toddler digging in the mud while her mother smokes in her bathrobe. As I pass, the girl offers me a fistful of slime and cries with extreme pleasure, “Eeeee.” I smile without meaning to, and it feels good.

  Claudia’s Thirtieth Birthday Mail Call:

  1) Phone bill. Outrageous due to two-hour emergency conference with Ziv on the Friday morning after Clay’s penny-tossing divorce announcement. Also, tearful hour-long Ziv debriefing post clownish makeover.

  2) Hallmark card from Dad with check for fifty dollars. Card pink (hate pink) featuring daisies and daft-looking cartoon butterfly. Message inside reads: For a special girl, on her special day, who brings great happiness my way. Hate the word special.

  3) Flyer for new pizzeria opening half block from apartment. Wonderful. Fresh new ways to achieve alluring, dimpled-thigh look.

  4) Letter from Aunt Jessie.

  When I first see the return address in her spidery, lefty’s scrawl, I assume it must be for Rosemarie, but there’s my name, smack in the middle of the plain white envelope: Ms. Claudia Bloom. Unable to endure my curiosity for the six-block tour home, I duck into a café and order a mocha. There’s a grim, midmorning need-my-fix working crowd in Café Roma, sharing the quaint little space reluctantly with a few boisterous students who forgot to go home for winter break. I take my mocha to a seat near the window, as far as I can get from the students, and slice open my letter with a butter knife. Unfolding the carefully creased binder paper, I can almost smell the sadness wafting up out of it. I smooth it out on the table and read.

  Dear Claudia,

  I’m hoping this will reach you on or before your birthday. I have ample leisure time now—hours and hours to remember the occasions of joy I’m missing out on. I don’t mean to whine. Unlike everyone else in here (you’d never believe how many “innocent” people are incarcerated—it’s scandalous), I recently realized that I’m here because of my own stupid tendency to magnetize filth and squalor. Every man I ever slept with was the perfect embodiment of this.

  Anyway, on to brighter subjects. I’m studying astral projection. I plan to spend as much time as possible outdoors, and soul travel will save in the end on both sunscreen and gas. This is a life skill that will come in handy long after my release date, so my time here’s not wasted. So far, I’ve managed only a couple of lucid dreams, but from what I’ve read, this is the beginning stage. I hope to quench my lifelong thirst for liberty.

  I have many things I’d like to tell you, but I’m not sure it would be in your best interest.

  I wonder if you know the whereabouts of Rosemarie? I worry about her. Of course, your mother must have told you about Jade’s death. None of us will ever be the same. And Rose is strong in some ways, but delicate in others. She tends to latch on to the wrong people, and lets the right ones breeze past her without a second glance. I fear she inherited my gift for attracting the Scum of the Earth.

  If you see or hear from her, I hope you’ll tell her that I love her. Please look out for her well-being in whatever way you can manage. I’ve sent letters to her old address, but they just come back to me.

  Claudia, you were always the promising one. You’ve got all the grit. Rose is like an ephemeral nymph, only tentatively bound to earth plane. If you’re there for her, I’ll know it in my bones, and sleep easier.

  With love and despair,

  Aunt Jessie

  I lean back in my chair, one hand absently caressing the crease in the paper, the other wrapped around my mocha for warmth. With love and despair, I think. That so perfectly captures Jessie. Full of love, but also so busy trying to jerk free of her own fucked-up web, she’s never really nurtured anyone. Maybe that describes all the Lavelle women. We’re spazzes when it comes to love, too caught up in our own phobias to do anything really well but run.

  “Mind company?” Wouldn’t you know it? Clay Parker. And me barely out of my pajamas.

  “Oh—um—no. Have a seat.” I stuff Jessie’s letter back into its envelope and into my pocket. Clay sits down with two paper cups and smiles uneasily. He’s looking even more attractive than usual in a wool fisherman’s sweater and those trusty Levi’s.

  “Your—hair,” he says haltingly.

  I duck my head instinctively and smooth my hand over my platinum disaster, as if I can make it go away. “Yeah,” I say. “I cried.”

  “No, it’s very…” I want to die as he searches in vain for the adjective. “Bold,” he settles on at last. I appreciate that he doesn’t lie and tell me I look like Cameron Diaz.

  “Drinking for two?” I ask, nodding at his twin beverages, eager to move on to brighter subjects.

  “One’s for Nick.”

  “Oh. How’s he?”

  “Crazy. Yesterday he called this teenage boy a cock-sucking maggot.”

  I smile. “Cock-sucking maggot. That’s a new one. Do you think he meant faggot?”

  “Hard to say. He’s not very linguistically precise. But you know, it could be worse. I could have an employee who spouts all kinds of clichéd bullshit, like ‘have a nice day.’”

>   “Yes,” I say. “That would be tragic.”

  “I feel like an idiot, by the way,” he says. “About the other night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t usually get all drunk and toss pennies at peoples’ windows.”

  “I thought it was kind of seductive, actually.” Bloom, what are you doing?

  “Well, I’m not in the habit of seducing anyone. Obviously, I need practice.”

  “Obviously.” I’m unable to keep from smiling.

  “Ouch.” It comes out barely a whisper; he doesn’t look like he’s in any pain.

  We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, long enough for a tremendous heat to gather force inside me. I think about spontaneous human combustion and wonder if this is how it starts.

  “Well,” he says, standing up and retrieving his paper cups. “I better get back. No telling who Nick’s calling a cunt as we speak.” He hesitates, as if he’d like to say something more, and the gray-tinged sunlight filtering through the plate-glass windows makes his eyes even brighter than usual. “I guess I’ll see you around. Merry Christmas. If you’re into that sort of thing.”

  “Not really,” I say, suddenly awash in loneliness. “But same to you.”

  It’s my birthday, I want to scream. Love me. Ravish me. But thankfully, I’m spared my own version of Tourette’s. I just wave pathetically as he navigates the Monday crowd and vanishes out the door.

  CHAPTER 19

  Christmas puts me in a black, desperate mood. These seasons when families are supposed to go all gooey with affection totally freak me out. Any warmth I have for my parents goes cold under all the pressure. This year, I spend the actual day with my father and the Vegetarian Girlfriend, Didi. We sit together in his tragically sterile tract home and exchange weird, well-intentioned gifts. I get my father a book he already owns and a weed-eater he no longer needs, since he long ago hired a gardener, unbeknown to me. He gets me a gift certificate to a clothing store in Calistoga that specializes in T-shirts featuring hand-painted kittens. Didi and I are even less successful; she gets me the Sound of Music video, and I give her a fantastic bottle of wine, only to learn that she’s active in the local AA.