Tart (4 page)

You won't remember the half-open door, or the train that won't even stop there anymore, for you.

D
awn. Sky is a crazy electric blue. Slivers of it appear when the grass-scented breeze lifts the airy curtains and reveals the morning in triangular slices. I flip over and notice for the first time the circular skylight. Human beings are made for yurts, I think. “Stars make things taste saltier and sweeter.”
You won't remember the half-open door.
Clay is positioned in a slightly diagonal tilt; one leg is draped over mine, lips slightly parted as he snores a soft, wheezing prayer to the sleep gods. Medea's here, curled up close to my head on the foreign pillow, and Dog—what's her name? Cindy? no, Sandy—is curled up at our feet. Medea opens one eye, checks out proximity of Dog, goes back to sleep. I should be shocked at abruptly finding myself in this tranquil, domestic tableau.

Nothing has ever seemed more natural.

I follow Medea's lead and collapse back into dreams.

 

Knock knock knock. Knock knock knock.

Who's drumming? Jesus, California hippies for you. Always beating their bongos…

Knock knock knock. Knock knock.

“Clay? You awake?” A woman's voice. Edgy. Irritated.

My eyes pop open. Friend? Has Friend come to visit?

“Clay? Come on, you there? I need your help.” Softer now, asking, “Can I come in?”

I look over at Clay, who is still in the position I saw him in last: stretched corner to corner across the bed, mouth open, snoring. I poke his arm urgently. No response.

“Listen, I know you must be in there, hon.”

Hon?

“I know I said I'd respect your privacy, but the car won't start and I have a dentist appointment.” Pause. I can hear her swearing softly. “Clay.” Another pause, and then a decision: the doorknob turns. “I'm coming in, okay?”

Oh, God. Paralyzed, clutching sheets to my naked chest. I want to shake snoring Clay awake but I can't move as the door swings open, followed by a door-frame-shaped blast of sunlight and Woman.

We're both perfectly still as we stare at each other. She's so backlit, I can barely make out her features. I can tell only that she's petite, dark-haired, tightly wound, the type I'd cast as Hedda Gabler: intense, compact, ready for a fight. This is all the data I'm able to gather, blinking into the sunlight, before a whispered “shit” escapes her lips and she backs out the door, slamming it behind her. I hear her footsteps rapidly retreating.

Wanton Tart and Cat Shot by Furious Gabler. Man Says Both Just Friends.

I fall back against my pillow (not my pillow—my pillow is cremated) and close my eyes for a couple of seconds, willing the previous scene to rewind and erase. No use. Instead the scene is in a perpetual loop, playing over and over across my closed lids.

“Clay?”

More snores.

“Hey. Clay?” I'm getting louder, now, shaking him gently but firmly.

“Dad?” he asks, his eyes popping open in alarm. Again, that bizarre, maternal urge stirs in me—some eerie, foreign desire to say “Shh, it's okay” and kiss him back to sleep. I make a conscious effort to strangle this urge. There will be no shushing or kisses this morning.

All the same, I can't keep a tiny bit of warmth from my voice. “No, it's me.”

A little-boy smile takes over his face. “Oh. Ms. Claudia, I presume?” He wraps his arms around me, pulling me down against his chest, and for a second or two I'm so intoxicated by the hot-skin smell of this embrace I nearly forget that his better half is currently rifling through her sock drawer for a .38 special.
Resist,
Claudia.
Resist.

“Listen,” I say, extricating myself from his arms. “There's been a little incident this morning.”

“Did we wet the bed?”

“Not that kind of incident. An angry-woman-bursts-into-room sort of incident.”

He looks stunned. “Shit. Really?”

“Would I make this up?”

“How do I know?” he counters. “I hardly know you.”

“Yes, well, ditto,” I say. “And obviously, there's a few things I should have asked. Like, say, ‘Are you married?'” I'm sitting up now, hugging my knees.

“Claudia,” he reaches out to touch my wild nest of hair. “Shit. I'm really sorry.” Not the oh-that-was-just-my-crazy-kid-sister explanation I was praying for.

I stare at him incredulously. “So you are, then? Married, I mean?”

“Well, divorced.” He pauses. “Practically.”

“What does
practically
divorced mean?”

“We're legally separated.”

“Is she the Friend in the cottage?” He hesitates before nodding. “Jesus, Clay, you had like nine hours of candid con
versation to come clean with me, at least let me know what I'm getting—”

“You never asked.”

Indeed. What can I say? I never asked.

I
t's foggy and I'm shivering when Clay drops me and Medea at the Greyhound station downtown. His truck was warm and smelled like cocoa butter. I wanted nothing more than to curl up there before his heater and never leave, but my pride forced me to refuse his offers of a sweatshirt and breakfast. On the drive here, our conversation was limited but revealing.

So here I am, sitting at the Greyhound station with two homeless guys bundled into blankets, one of them reading
GQ.
Suddenly I'm living the lyrics of every old-timey down-and-out blues number. I'm still wearing this positively crusty-with-human-grime ensemble: orange sundress, sweat-drenched bra, bloodstained underwear, and I've little hope of changing into something “fresher” (as my mother would say) anytime soon, seeing as I now own no other clothing. In fact, I now own absolutely nothing.

Oh, God. My favorite Levi's, reduced to ash. Sea-green cashmere sweater: ditto. Everything—no—I mean
everything
I ever called my own is now dwelling on another plane of existence.

I plod toward the ticket booth and realize I have no idea where I'm going. My original plan was to camp in the bus until I found a place to live—hopefully before school started. Now the bus is, for obvious reasons, not a reliable dwelling. So I've got to figure out where to crash until I can rent my own little shelter from the world. I tell myself this is all very Zen, very neo-Dharma bum and therefore cool (except I keep lugging my cat everywhere—did Kerouac do that?), but when I approach the glassed-in face of the ticket vendor and I look into her kind blue eyes, I find myself fighting off tears. I fumble for some dollars, pulling them from my bra, but they're so wrinkled and wilted I can't force them into any semblance of order.

“Morning,” she says. “Where would you like to go?”

“Um.”

She smiles. “Let's start with the basics—north, south, east or west?”

I manage a weak chuckle. “Give me a second,” I say. “I'll be right back.”

I sit down on one of the benches and mop at my tears with the back of my hand. I close my eyes and try to breathe. Medea squirms in her box. I open the flaps a crack. Her eyes are glow-in-the-dark as they peer up at me from within her shadowy little cardboard cage. “Shh,” I say. “I'll get you a nice treat when we get home.” Home.

“Excuse me,” I say to the ticket lady. “Do you have any buses that go to Calistoga?”

She consults a thick directory. “Santa Rosa,” she says. “Is that close enough?”

“I guess it'll have to be.”

“One way or round trip?”

“One way, please.”

“That'll be eleven dollars.”

I hand her a limp twenty and she counts me out my change.

“You going to check out those mud baths?”

“God, no,” I say. “Just going home.”

 

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 ex
perience 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.