Tart

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Calistoga’s only about three or four hours from Santa Cruz by car, but by bus it’s a twelve-hour saga. I take the Greyhound to Santa Rosa, then another bus from there, and finally walk the last eight blocks to my father’s house. By the time Medea and I arrive on his doorstep we’re exhausted and snappish, having schlepped across three counties in raunchy-smelling clothes with a full cast of trying characters, including an ancient man in a wheelchair who, having mistaken me for his dead wife, wouldn’t stop trying to hold my hand, and a wiry little elf of a bus driver who threatened to kick us off when he heard Medea mewing.

Over the course of the day I’ve developed a serious obsession with showering. That first blast of cool water on my chest, leaning in to soak my face, then my hair; the gentle massage of liquid needles against my scalp. The whole experience has become my nirvana—a longed-for state I can almost taste but never achieve.

It would have been quicker to go to Mom’s in Mill Valley, but thinking of her latest husband and her spoiled, Britney Spears-clone stepdaughter makes me want to yuke, so I opt for Dad’s.

“Claudia,” my father says, opening the door. “You’re—wow. You’re here.”

“Yeah. Sorry I didn’t call.” We just stand there awkwardly, surveying each other, and for an agonizing second I think he’s not going to ask me in. Then, as if reading my thoughts, he steps back and gestures toward the living room a little too eagerly, like a waiter in an empty restaurant. “Come in, come in,” he gushes. And then, his tone going puzzled again, “You’re really here.”

“Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

He just looks confused. “Oh, you know me—I haven’t really adjusted to all of this technology stuff.”

“Dad, can I let Medea out? She’s been in this stupid box all day.”

“Who?”

But I’m already releasing the poor thing; she circles my legs, blinking into the light, looking a little crazed and disoriented. “My cat,” I say, and sigh. “It’s been a very long day.” I say that a lot, lately.

He squints down at her as she rubs against his shin. “Hello, kitty,” he says doubtfully. “What’s her name?”

“Medea.”

“Oh,” he says, stiffly. “Hello, Maria.”

And then he starts to sneeze. Five times. With increasing volume and violence. Jesus, what is it with men and cats? Clay’s the only guy I ever met who didn’t practically disintegrate in the face of a little cat fur. No. Don’t even think about Clay Parker.

“Ah-ah-ah-allergic,” my father manages to articulate between sneezes.

“Okay. I’m sorry. Um, can I put her in the guest room for now? I’d put her out, but she’s so disoriented I’m afraid she might wander off—”

“Garage,” he says, yanking a handkerchief from his back pocket and sneezing some more. So off she goes, into the garage, mewing in protest until I fetch her a bit of tuna fish and a saucer of milk. I sit there with her for a while, playing absently with her tail and watching her eat, enveloped in the cool, cathedral-like stillness of my father’s garage. As my eyes adjust to the shadows, I gaze around at the meticulously organized shelves and file cabinets, the worktable with tools hanging on hooks, arranged categorically: drills here, saws there. It occurs to me that these may even be alphabetized, which I find more than a little depressing. The air is scented not with the usual grease-and-grime smell of most people’s garages, but with my father’s favorite all-purpose cleaner for twenty years now: Pine-Sol. Parked in its usual place—dead center—is Dad’s 1956 Dodge Plymouth convertible. It gleams with spotless pride in the dark, never having known a dirty day in its life.

I find Dad in the kitchen, cutting up celery. The house, like everything in my father’s life, is so clean you could eat off any surface, including the tops of high cabinets and the icy-white linoleum floor. He bought a tract home soon after I moved to Austin—one of those creepy, cookie-cutter models that scream “No Imagination.”

“So,” he says, handing me a glass of milk with ice in it. I don’t usually drink milk, but I sip politely, anyway. “How long are you here for?”

“You mean, here, at your house? Or…?”

“When do you go back to Texas?”

“Pop, listen. I got a job in Santa Cruz.”

He smiles. He has very white teeth, perfectly straight; my mom says he was still wearing braces when they got married. “You’ve got a Santa Cruz in Texas? Isn’t that funny. I guess all those saints really made the—”

“Santa Cruz. California, Dad. I got a job at the university.”

He stops cutting celery and stares at me a moment through his horn-rimmed glasses. He’s got very light blue eyes and a face that is harder to read than any face I’ve ever encountered. He goes back to slicing. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. Of course I’m serious.” I drink more of my milk and try not to think about the report I read once about cows in America being so mistreated and diseased that they get loads of pus in the product. Eugh. I put the glass down.

“What about your boyfriend? Is he moving here, too?”

“What boyfriend?” I’m unable to stop myself from this perverse response. Something about his calm, measured slicing of celery and his luminous white tile countertops are getting on my nerves. I remember now why I’ve only seen my father five or six times in the past ten years.

“Jason, wasn’t it?”

I shift my weight and look at the ceiling. “Jonathan. We broke up.”

“Oh. I see.” He nods at the celery in a cryptic fashion.

“Anyway,” I say, dumping the rest of my milk in the sink as inconspicuously as I can, “I’m moving to Santa Cruz. I just need to get a car and a place to live.” I stand there, staring at the ice cubes in the sink. I run the water so he won’t see the milk I dumped out, and that makes me remember the bathing fantasy I’ve been fueled by all day. I want to cry with relief when I think of my father’s hotel-sterile bathroom. “Can I take a shower?”

“Oh, sure, honey. Sure.” He’s more enthusiastic about this possibility than anything I’ve told him so far. “Extra towels in the hall closet.” Oh, God. My father’s white, fluffy, dryer-scented towels. I almost throw my arms around him in ecstasy. Then I remember that I don’t have anything to change into, and the thought of putting this wretched outfit on yet again turns my stomach.

“You think I could borrow a T-shirt, maybe some shorts?”

He lets out a snort of awkward laughter. “Honey, where’s your suitcase?”

“It’s a really long story. Just—anything. Sweats, old jeans, whatever you’ve got.”

“Well, okay. I’ll see what I can find. They’ll be in the guest room.”

“Thanks, Pop.” I walk over to him and, before I can get nervous or weird about it, kiss him on the cheek. “I really appreciate being able to come here.”

“Oh,” he says, smiling nervously, never taking his eyes from the celery. “Well.” And then, when I’m walking down the hall to the bathroom, he calls to my back, “You know you’re welcome, sweetie, anytime.” I think he means it, but something about the effort in his voice makes me want to cry.

CHAPTER 9

To do:

1) Buy fantastic, sexy, dependable, movie-star-quality car for under three hundred dollars.

2) Do not think about Clay Parker. If absolutely must think of yurt experience, think of WIFE and add SELF at wrong end of .38 special.

3) Find adorable, sexy, movie-star-quality pad for under five hundred dollars.

4) When did I become a home-wrecker? Argh.

5) Join gym. Go to gym. Thighs look like molded Jell-O.

6) Make friends.

7) DO NOT THINK ABOUT HIM.

8) Transform self from hideous, kinky-haired, irresponsible car-thief home-wrecker into elegant, scarf-wearing professor. (Idea: highlights?)

For several days I use my father’s house as the base of operations while I continuously flip-flop between wild bursts of effort to get my life together and bouts of total despondency, during which I lie flat on my back in the guest room, stuffing my face with Pringles and watching cheesy Hugh Grant videos. This manic-depressive stretch hardly fulfills my hopes of returning triumphantly to California and emerging like a phoenix from my troubled past.

I grew up here, in Calistoga, and coming home is like facing a firing squad of ghosts. I know loads of people are carrying around childhoods more miserable than mine—hell, most of my friends’ horror stories make my family look like the Cleavers—but all the same, I get restless here, enmeshed in the world that formed me.

Luckily, my father doesn’t live in the house I spent my first decade in anymore. Most of my worst associations are stuck there, in the idyllic little Victorian on Swan Street where we lived before my parents divorced. That house is where my parents fought their worst battles, almost always silent ones that went on for weeks at a time. They were both very good at refusing to speak to each other. I often felt like a modern-day sitcom character who finds herself in the midst of a silent film. The easiest way to explain their marriage is by cutting to the chase: they didn’t love each other. Not in the days I can remember, anyway. And though my mother was in every cosmetic way the ideal housewife, she maintained an air of aloofness, an icy edge that, paired with my father’s lack of communication skills, made my growing up years chilly and lonely.

Calistoga isn’t a bad place to grow up, though it’s pretty small and confining when you’re a hormone-crazed teen. It’s wedged between two smallish mountain ranges, one of several little tourist towns in Napa Valley that’s beautiful and pristine and increasingly saddled with this “wine country” label, which attracts the most anal-retentive blue bloods in the country. Unlike a lot of other towns around here, Calistoga always maintains a kind of redneck Riviera not-quite-thereness, though, which I’m secretly glad about. The tourists who settle for our town are the ones who can’t quite afford our posher neighbors, though we do our best to keep up appearances. We’ve got these natural hot springs and more spas than citizens; people flock here from Des Moines and Denver and God Knows Where to sit around in huge tubs of “volcanic ash” and scalding water, imagining that all the toxins they’ve been stuffing themselves with for fifty years will magically evaporate and they’ll emerge like radiant infants. Truth is, half of the time the volcanic ash is really just garden-variety dirt, and once I even witnessed the use of cement.

I know more than I care to about the Calistoga spas—I’ve worked in just about all of them, though in the ten years I’ve been gone they’ve probably shuffled around a bit. When I was fourteen I started raking mud and fetching cucumber water for the needy, red-faced tourists. Within a few years I got some training and moved up to massage therapist; at seventeen I was the only girl I knew making twenty bucks an hour plus tips. It was a good enough gig. People treated you like a cross between a doctor and a prostitute, which I always found amusing.

Even though I was making good money there, Calistoga was destined to spit me out. When I was eighteen I started sleeping with a guy who owned a winery, two restaurants and a spa. Of course, he was married. Actually, his wife owned a winery, two restaurants and a spa, since he was a fading Calvin Klein underwear model who’d long since pissed away any money of his own on fast cars and coke. Anyway, we got caught up in this torrid affair and the whole town knew about it, since we had a terrible habit of driving around in his convertible Fiat, dismally shit-faced and out of sorts, yelling whatever popped into our heads at people on the streets and generally behaving in the most obnoxious and juvenile fashion possible. He should have known better, since he was twice my age, but then again I should have known better, too. My parents were too caught up in their own soap opera to offer me much guidance, which only inspired more recklessness on my part. I guess I thought if I really fucked up, they’d have to act like parents for once. It ended with his wife dragging him through a very brutal and highly public divorce, citing me as the major body of evidence against him. The town was electric with stone-throwing glee; I couldn’t walk down the street without twelve-year-old girls whispering behind their fingers and smug, middle-aged mothers peering over their spectacles at me while their husbands leered. Scarlet Letter city. It was enough to drive a girl to Texas.

Why Texas, you’re wondering? I had vague notions of cowboys and sweet tea and big skies that could shelter me from everyone I’d ever known. When you grow up in a pretentious tourist town you get tired of all the lattes and the carrot juice and the organic aromatherapy candles. Texas seemed like the antithesis of all that. So I drove to Austin, got a job at another spa, moved in with a gay law student I immediately fell in love with, and started taking acting classes at the community college. Before long, I was a full-fledged Texan. The only thing I really missed from back home was the ocean, which was a long, winding drive from Calistoga, anyway, so I told myself there was nothing that could draw me back.

Funny, how home works on a person, though. It stays in you, dormant for periods but still living, like a song you thought you’d forgotten until it springs from your radio one afternoon and fills you with a longing you never even knew was yours.

I’m not saying I’ve come back to California out of homesickness. My life is more random than that. I just found myself depressed and bored and jilted, eating way too many pints of Häagen-Dazs in the brutal Texas heat; I was ready for a change. A friend of a friend told me about a last-minute opening at UC Santa Cruz. I applied, and after a brief phone interview, they took me sight unseen, emphasizing that it was a one-year deal with only the remotest possibility of moving into tenure track. A salary was mentioned; I’d make in one year what I’d lived on for three in grad school. Like most of the things I’ve accomplished thus far, it happened without much effort, almost by accident. And now here I am, about to teach at a university with the giddy, giggle-suppressing nerves of someone who’s been admitted to a private country club using a false ID.

The truth is, no university would have hired me with a paltry M.F.A. in directing (from the University of Texas, no less) if it weren’t for one lucky break that’s been haunting me for years. It was a lark, really. Ziv and I, up late one night and high on his espresso, made a movie. He was a recovering film major, and he still had some really expensive equipment. We just made up a character, Zelda Klein, and I improvised a nervous breakdown in our kitchen while baking a lemon meringue pie. We called it Meringue, Meringue. There’s actually this really great part where I try to shove about twenty pairs of spiked heels down the garbage disposal. (You’re wondering why in God’s name I had twenty pairs of spiked heels on hand? Art project my friend Maxine did; she glued hundreds of spiked heels to this huge wooden cross. Afterward she gave me all the seven and a halfs, though none of them was comfortable enough to wear). We shot it all in black and white, which gave it this pseudodocumentary, grainy touch that accidentally made it really arty and vogue. Like we knew what we were doing.

But the real magic of Meringue, Meringue was this one sequence we shot right at the end, just as the sun was coming up. It was March and there was this storm starting up—a wild, warm Texas storm with wind that made you want to do something you’d later regret. Caught up in the moment, I ran outside, and Ziv followed, dragging his expensive camera equipment awkwardly. I stood on our porch, staring up at the swaying tree branches tinged with gray dawn; the wind caught hold of my cotton nightgown, pressing it flat against one leg and whipping it wildly away from the other, like a flag. There was a clothesline in the neighbor’s yard with sheets and T-shirts flapping this way and that. It was the last moment of the film, and I have to admit it was beautiful. We couldn’t have planned it; it was just the right light and the right wind and the right nightgown, the right laundry in the background. It was just—well—right. Sometimes you get lucky.

So I edited the film and added credits and sent it to Sundance—more on a whim than from any serious aspirations. Goddamn if it didn’t win second place in the short-film category. Ziv and I were blown away. For years after I enjoyed this unspoken Girl Genius status at UT, and it was more than obvious to me that’s why I got hired at UC Santa Cruz. Meringue, Meringue was an accidental coup, but it earned me more career points than anything I’d ever labored at.

But I digress. Today, I’m congratulating myself on actually having accomplished number one on my to-do list: buy car. Well, okay, it’s not necessarily sexy, dependable or movie-star quality, and it did cost closer to seven than three, but it seems to run and there are no flames just yet, so I’m feeling fairly smug. Beaming behind the wheel of my very own 1964 acid-green Volvo, I imagine I look very retro and Euro-chic. I bought it off a Swedish architect who had to leave the U.S. abruptly for a new job in Singapore. He also unloaded an ancient laptop, four ferns and a stainless-steel teakettle in the process. Frankly, the whole transaction was highway robbery on my part, but I figured maybe the gods were trying to make up for my first two days back in California. Conflagration, calamari and sizzling sexual exploits aside, my return to California’s been pretty brutal, so far.

But today is promising. The air is unseasonably cool, having been moistened by morning fog. I’ve got a mocha in a paper cup perched precariously between my thighs, and I’m heading south on Highway 1, letting the wind whip my hair into a hectic bird’s nest. I feel good.

There’s just one little problem with my buoyant mood: it’s making me cocky. As I get closer and closer to Santa Cruz, I can’t keep my slutty, disobedient brain from making a beeline for Clay Parker. I feel his teeth closing around my bottom lip, hear my sharp intake of breath. I can taste the sweet dribble of peach juice I licked from his thumb at the farmer’s market, smell the incense and hear the insistent racket of hippies playing bongos.

And now is not the time to be thinking of Clay Parker. Now is starting-new-job-in-six-days-better-get-ass-in-gearand-find-apartment time. Nay, starting new career in six days. Oh, Jesus. Can you order lesson plans from Amazon?

I turn up the radio louder (okay, there’s no car radio, but I’ve commandeered my father’s petite yet powerful boom box, which is now riding shotgun and blasting Ani Di-Franco—the momentary rebellion of some pierced DJ, no doubt, so sick of the prescribed playlist she’s gone mad). This is when I love California: the sun is too low yet to be treacherous, the sky is a delicate blue, and twists of fog are nestling in the creases between hills. On my right, the ocean is undulating; her vast green expanse sparkles with gold specks, and the waves hit the beige stretches of beach in fits of white foam. The blond grass that covers every surface is giving off a wet, wheaty smell and a bad-girl bisexual has commandeered the airwaves.

Maybe I really have come home.

Day six of grueling apartment hunting yields results: I find a place I can unapologetically refer to as a flat. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a total Anglophile; I long to say “bloody hell” and “knickers” and “sod it” with all the cool reserve of Helen Bonham Carter, but of course each of these phrases sounds stilted and absurd in my American accent. I have managed, on occasion, to pull off “shag.” It’s one of my favorites, so I just can’t resist. It sounds so much hipper than our American options: “screw” is so pedestrian, “bang” is way too aggressive, “hump” is for fourth-graders. God knows, I’d never use the gooey mess of a phrase “make love” without feeling like a cheesy seventies tune. I mean “fuck” has its own poetry, since it’s all hard angles and no backing down, but it has no warmth, and could never have the cozy yet unsentimental, offbeat appeal of “shag.”

Anyway, the little studio I just put a deposit on is definitely a flat, and so this gives me an excuse to become one syllable more British. The rent is almost reasonable—okay, not under five hundred (forgive me, to-do list), but I had to be flexible and double it. I suspect the landlord is fortunately unaware of just how slick and trendy the place is. It’s an upstairs unit in an old brick building downtown. It’s above a hair salon, and the smell of perms does seep through the floorboards, but not in a terribly noxious way. Speaking of floorboards, that was a major selling point: after all the hideous brown shag and orange linoleum I’d looked at for four days, these hardwood floors, freshly buffed and sweetly golden, took my breath away. In short, it is precisely the right place for a bohemian, scarf-wearing professor to dwell. As soon as I become that bohemian, scarf-wearing professor, it’ll be perfect for me.

CHAPTER 10

Things I presently own:

1) Adorable 1964 Volvo. Green.

2) One laptop computer from Swede. Very sleek, but have not yet managed to turn it on.

3) Hand-me-down futon from Dad. Smells like Pine-Sol.

4) One pair of shorts from Goodwill. A little tight. Discard after first paycheck.

5) Three T-shirts borrowed from Dad. Burn horrifying Nascar shirt after first paycheck.

6) Four Swedish ferns. Dying.

7) One stainless-steel teakettle. Perfect.

Thursday afternoon I move my precious possessions into my lovely little flat and survey the results. I tell myself the effect is wonderfully spare and chic, with that glam-Zen minimalism so many urban hair salons strive for. I don’t quite buy this, but I tell myself I do.

As the sun starts to glow orange in my western windows, I make up my mind to go for a walk. For a week now I’ve been so completely consumed with the hunt for a car and a home that I haven’t had much time to stroll around aimlessly. It feels good to get the sidewalk moving beneath me and to breathe in the greasy perfume drifting inland from the burger joint down the street. The heat of the afternoon is giving way to the cool evening chill sliding off the Pacific. A wayward branch from an apple tree is hanging over the sidewalk; I look around, pluck a nice green one and munch as I stroll.

I meander past the shops on Pacific Avenue, peering into each window: a bookstore, used clothing, a surf shop. And God—oh, Jesus, a music store: Viva Vinyl. The glass door is propped into a wide-open position. It’s held in place with a terra-cotta pot filled with cement, sprouting a tall, iron-stemmed LP with the words Come In splashed recklessly across the glossy black surface in red paint.

Come in.

Don’t. Go. In.

Maybe I should go home and change. Except I haven’t got anything to change into, and I won’t until my next paycheck.

It might not be his—I mean, come on, what are the chances?

He said his store was downtown. He specializes in vinyl.

Yeah, but this is Santa Cruz—college town, hipsterville. There must a record store on every block.

Do. Not. Enter.

My feet are real fuckups. They operate independently, like little rogue states, and yet it’s the rest of me who’s got to face the consequences.

The store is deserted. It’s filled with a dusty, warm attic smell. There’s a wall of decorative vintage guitars on display toward the back; I scoot past the rows of records and CDs to stare up at them. They remind me of dead butterflies pinned under glass: beautiful, perfectly preserved, but eerie when they’re so still.

“Can I help you find something?”

I spin around and there he is, barely two feet from me. His question reverbs off the walls of my mind. Can he help me find something? What am I looking for?

Of course I’ve thought about this moment. In a town the size of Santa Cruz, running into him was inevitable—I knew that. I’d planned a cold shoulder: aloof, busy, pleasantly cruel. I wasn’t going to get caught up. Now I bite my lip shyly and say, “I’m just looking, thanks,” with all the coolness of a starry-eyed groupie dying for an autograph.

“Claudia Bloom,” he half whispers. I see him swallow, and he folds his arms across his chest, pins his hands in his armpits. We stand there, staring at each other for a dizzy five seconds, until an astonishingly fat woman and her three kids come barreling through the door in search of The Little Mermaid soundtrack. I gnaw on my apple and flip through the bluegrass section aimlessly, trying not to be nervous.

Why am I nervous? He’s the one with the wife. I flash on a memory of myself digging frantically under his covers, trying to locate my panties amid the tangle of sheets and watching the door for his gun-toting wife at the same time.

After they leave, a thick silence falls over the store like snow.

“I was just about to close,” he says finally.

“Oh, okay—sorry I’ll get—”

“No.” He laughs. “I mean, you know. Do you mind if I lock the door?”

“With me on this side of it?”