Tart. Jody Gehrman

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