Tart

by Jody Gehrman

  Rose’s face goes from vulnerable to hard so fast, it’s scary. “You’re laughing at me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.” She shoots to her feet, and suddenly she’s towering over me and Rex, her face stony with anger. “You don’t know what it’s like. Everything works out for you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is. Ever since we were little. You got the refrigerator that made ice cubes and the VCR, and I got my stupid mom who couldn’t stay in one place for five minutes. You’ve got your fancy job and your master’s degree, and what have I got? A dying dog. That’s what I’ve got.”

  “Rose, he’s not dying.” I try to sound empathetic, but it comes out irritated instead. I try to compensate by halfheartedly patting Rex’s head. He follows my hand with his eyes suspiciously.

  “You think I’m delusional, don’t you? You’ll send me to the bin, like Mom did.” Her hair is bristling and her fists are clenched. Her rage is electric.

  “She was probably worried about—”

  “Mom should worry about herself—alcoholic bitch.” After so many years of Rose gently tolerating Jessie, it’s foreign and disorienting to hear the venom in her voice.

  “Maybe if you just gave her another chance…” I suggest tentatively.

  “Give her another chance?” She places bitter emphasis on each syllable. “You have no idea. You had it easy, okay? You should just count your blessings.”

  “I’m only saying, maybe if you get in touch with her, you could work things out.”

  She laughs. It’s a weird, hysterical sound and I feel suddenly cold. “Why don’t you work it out with her, Claudia? Let’s see you try to make peace.”

  “But she’s not my mother,” I blurt out.

  She narrows her eyes at me. “Yes, she is.”

  For a second I feel dizzy. The walls swim unsteadily and the floor dips like a carnival ride. “What?” I whisper.

  “Jessie is your mother. Mira only took over because Jessie was too fucking irresponsible to deal. And if you ask me, you got the good end of the deal. At least you got the VCR.”

  “What are you talking about?” I pull my knees in to my chest, and Rex sniffs sympathetically at my ear.

  “Mom told me when she was drunk. They made me promise not to tell. Mira never wanted you to know.”

  “You’re crazy,” I say, pushing Rex away and standing up.

  She only turns away and shrugs.

  “That’s insane!” I’m yelling now. “You’re lying!”

  “Ask Mira,” she says coldly, still not looking me in the eye. “See if she has the guts to deny it.”

  CHAPTER 31

  I’m driving past the Boardwalk, and the streets are crawling with tourists of every variety: portly families with cotton candy, Harley dudes in head-to-toe leather, Japanese teenagers in platform shoes. They’re all determined to be hit by me; I keep slamming on my brakes as they dart or stumble into my path, drunk on the freedom of June.

  Jessie’s my mom? What the fuck?

  I’m entangled in a maze of one-way streets and dead ends. Every time I try to turn in a direction that will lead me away from this vortex, I’m faced with Do Not Enter signs or chain-link fences. I can’t even park—the sidewalks are packed with tourist buses belching black clouds of exhaust, station wagons and minivans unloading more tourists. I just circle, directionless, my heart beating faster and faster with claustrophobic rage.

  “Get out of the way, freak!” I’m horrified to hear my own voice screaming out the window with glass-shattering volume. The woman looks at me over the hood of my car without blinking. Her hair is as matted and crusty as beached seaweed. She’s got a scarf around her neck tied tightly, like a child bundled too thoroughly by her mother. Her green eyes are sad, but with detachment, as if she’s remembering something that happened long ago. She reminds me of Jessie.

  I want to get out and apologize profusely, drive her somewhere, buy her won ton soup or coffee or something. But already she’s moving on, one foot in front of the other, making slow, deliberate progress toward the opposite sidewalk.

  Shit. Now I verbally abuse the homeless, too. A couple of middle-aged women frown at me, and I squint at them threateningly. They scurry down the sidewalk.

  Mira, I think. I’ll go to Mira, and she’ll tell me how wrong Rose is. Maybe she’ll even go pro on me and hypnotize me with psychobabble until my fight with Rose is as distant and impotent as a half-remembered dream.

  As soon as this thought occurs to me, I turn left, and the road leads me smoothly away from the carnival music and the stench of waffle cones, toward my mother.

  My mother, I remind myself, weaving through the traffic. Mom.

  I sit facing Mira in her new-age living room, hugging my knees on her organic cotton couch. She’s in the ergonomically designed meditation chair, with a Quan Yin-adorned fountain burbling in the corner behind her. I notice for the first time an enormous statue of a laughing Buddha on a shelf, and a large glass pyramid on the coffee table. My eyes keep darting from one object to the next in a desperate attempt not to take in the look on Mira’s face.

  “I never wanted you to know,” she’s saying. “I didn’t think it would…” She stops, midsentence, and starts again. “You’ve always been a sensitive girl. I thought it could damage you.”

  “Damage me,” I repeat, my voice hollow and soft.

  “And there was the question of when—after we’d gone so many years under the assumption.”

  “Yes,” I say. “The assumption…”

  “I was afraid you’d hate me for keeping it a secret.” She pauses to wipe some tears with the back of her hand. “But Jessie’s become obsessed with the idea, lately. She’s got nothing to do now but stew in regrets. She hates that she wasn’t together enough when you were born to…” Again she stops herself.

  I stare at a title on the bookshelf, One Hundred Ways to Awaken the Heart Chakra. “How did it happen?”

  She sighs and recites the tale in a distant, uncertain voice, like she’s reading from cue cards she can’t quite make out. “Jessie was eighteen when you were born. I was twenty-six. I’d been married to Simon for five years. Your nanna had just died and Jessie was out all the time with this guy. He was an actor, or so he said—he’d done some radio stuff. He was much older than us, in his early forties, I think. Jessie was crazy about him—she thought he hung the moon.” I’m surprised at this turn of phrase. Mira Ravenwing never uses old-lady expressions. “Anyway, she got pregnant, but the man—Ray—died before you were born.”

  “He was my father?”

  She nods.

  “How did he die?”

  Her lower lip trembles slightly, and she bites it, then murmurs, “His liver. He drank.”

  For a fraction of a second I’m stupidly gratified. So I’m not the spawn of Simon, with his blinding white socks and his Pine-Sol. My father was a radio star, a boozer—it’s so much seedier and more glamorous than the shop-teacher story. I think of poor Simon, struggling to keep our lives alphabetized after Mira left us for the nirvana of Mill Valley. He always looked so perplexed and unsure, like he just woke up one day and found he was a neurotic single dad, with no idea how he’d gotten there.

  “When you were about two months old, Jessie left town with a roadie. She started moving around all the time, and she never really stopped. When Rose was born, she asked if we’d take her, but you were two and—well, we had our hands full.”

  “Why’d you take me? Why not just put me up for adoption?”

  She shrugs and stares out the window. The sunset has turned the stretch of sky above Gary’s bonsais a bruised purple. “I couldn’t have kids. We’d been trying for five years. I saw you as—I don’t know—my one chance, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you take Rose, too, if you wanted kids so much?”

  She stares at her lap. “I was young. You were a difficult baby, could have been Jessie’s drinking—I don’t know.” Great. I’m
brain-damaged, on top of everything else. “Anyway, motherhood wasn’t really what I’d pictured.” She makes a weird sound—half giggle, half snort—and looks at me helplessly. Tears stream down her face and her nose is running. “I guess that’s a terrible thing to admit. I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me for saying that.”

  I feel numb. I wish for tears, for hysterical rage, for anything but this pretzel of disbelief in my stomach. I want to pick up the ridiculous coffee table pyramid and shatter it against the wall, roll around in the shards just to see my own blood and know that I’m not dead or dreaming.

  “Do you think you’ll ever forgive me?” she asks.

  I look at her blankly. “For what?” Impersonating my mother? Ditching me when I hit puberty? Making my life a lie? Which one, I wonder, does Mira Ravenwing imagine is forgivable?

  “For all of it,” she says.

  I think about this for a long couple of minutes in silence. I know it’s cruel, but I find myself actually enjoying the tension that mounts in the room, making Quan Yin’s gentle bubbling sound ominous rather than soothing. “I don’t know,” I say, finally. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “You’re probably in shock,” she says. “Do you want some tea? Valerian root, maybe? Or a bong hit? Might take the edge off.”

  “No,” I say, unfolding my legs and standing. “Thanks, anyway.” I start for the door.

  “Where are you going?” she asks, her eyes on the carpet. It’s hypoallergenic. Gary breaks out in hives around anything synthetic.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drive. You could sleep here tonight.”

  I shrug. “I’ll be okay.”

  She concedes a little too readily, and I know she doesn’t really want me to stay. Upstairs somewhere, Molly starts to cry, and I hear footsteps above us, then Emily cooing baby talk and pacing in circles as Molly wails louder.

  I wish I could cry like that. Her lungs must fill like little balloons, taking up half her body; I can hear her pausing for breath before a fresh shriek pierces the air. Babies cry like they’re dying. When do we forget how to do that?

  I walk stiffly to the door. One foot in front of the other. I don’t look back at Mira as I make my way down the stone steps.

  “Call me,” she says to my back.

  I get in my car without answering and drive away.

  CHAPTER 32

  The constant blast of wind on my face is fragrant with sage. The Mojave is still kissed with the cool of night, but I can sense a suffocating heat getting ready to pounce. I’ve got all my windows rolled down, and my hair’s Afroed so thoroughly I look truly demented. I’m beyond caring. The road’s been disappearing beneath my wheels for seven hours; it’s now almost five in the morning, and the sun’s thinking about coming up over the scorched hills.

  I’ve stopped four times for gas, cheap coffee, obligatory visits to repulsive bathrooms, but never for sleep. In this surreal, half-dreaming state, I don’t have to think about much. When memories threaten to ambush my placid world of dashboard, yellow lines and headlights, I just turn up the radio on my boom box louder. I keep it tuned to whatever emerges from the static—mostly Top Forty country, the perfect distraction. I moan in disgust at the crappy, sentimental slow songs and sing aloud with the honky-tonk anthems, especially the ones that involve drinking oneself into a stupor.

  At Barstow, I head east on 40. The sun comes up around Needles, just as I’m crossing the Colorado River. The sky is a brilliant pink, and the sun splashes yellow brilliance across my windshield. A sign reads: Welcome to Arizona.

  My mother’s in prison, I think by accident.

  She didn’t want me.

  I concentrate harder on the girl wearing tight jeans in the song. She’s at a bar, telling the bartender to pour her another shot of whiskey. Good, I tell her. Drink more. Forget everything.

  Drive home drunk and then do it again and again. Sit in a New Mexico prison and write letters to the people who are ashamed of you.

  No, wait. Find some Orson Welles-wannabe stranger with a starved look in his eye and get him to shell out the fifty bucks for some run-down, anonymous hotel. Squeeze his hips with your thighs and ride him like a stallion. Ride him like a fast train to oblivion.

  Then wake up pregnant, with your Orson Welles motionless beside you, a big bottle of Jack Daniel’s flung haphazardly onto the sad shag carpet, the smell of stale vomit in the air.

  No. Don’t do that, either.

  Stay at the bar. Keep feeding the jukebox and dance until you’re dripping with sweat. When the sun comes up, drive and drive. Just keep your hands on the wheel and the road will swallow your thoughts. Soon you’ll be a hollow girl in tight jeans with one cowboy boot on the gas, and as long as you never stop driving, nothing can get you.

  In Flagstaff I stop to pee and nearly run over a fat old woman walking a pit bull, so I decide I’d better sleep soon if I want to live. I pull into the shady corner of a McDonald’s parking lot and fall asleep to the smell of French fry grease and the sound of semis moaning on the interstate. I dream I’m in Texas, wandering along a highway, looking for a baby that fell out of my car. I’m sure it’ll be a pulpy mess when I find it, and I’m sick with anxiety.

  I wake to sharp, irritated knuckles rapping on my window. The car’s so hot it’s unreal. I sit up and see a stocky, red-faced man in a brown uniform and a visor; he’s smoking a cigarette and peering in at me with a stern, unfriendly look creasing the corners of his mouth. When I roll down the window, he tells me I can’t sleep here. I mumble, “Fuck you,” under my breath and start the car.

  Apparently, in addition to oral sex, sleeping in one’s car is now illegal in most states. I feel a bland, unfocused hatred for the world at large.

  Los Lunas. The moons. I wonder how this Albuquerque suburb got such an exotic name. It’s the plural that adds such intrigue—invites visions of Galileo eyeing Jupiter with a primitive telescope, laughing joyfully at the multiple orbs circling the planet slowly. When I check into a Motel 6, though, the sweet-faced Mexican boy in glasses responds to my query about the name with a smile and a shrug. As I start for the glass door with my plastic key in hand, an old woman pushing a cleaning cart says abruptly, “Los Lunas. You asking about Los Lunas?”

  “Yes,” I say, turning to her.

  “It’s a family name. Old family here. They got a big house—you can go see, if you want.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” She starts away from me with her cart, and I blurt out, “I’m actually here to visit the prison.”

  The elderly couple with the RV taking up four spaces outside frown and inch closer to each other. The boy behind the desk goes on smiling sweetly. The cleaning lady squints at me; her face is withered and brown, like a rotting apple. Her eyes twinkle darkly from the folds of skin. “Why you want to…?” she begins, but then she glances at the nosy old couple in their matching plaids straining to eavesdrop and jerks her head toward the door. I hold it open for her and we cross the parking lot to sit down on a pink adobe bench in the shade of a tree that’s already shed most of its yellow flowers. She pulls a small wooden pipe from her pocket, stuffs it full of stringy brown tobacco and lights it. I watch her old, puckered lips suck hungrily at the stem and feel suddenly thrilled to be here.

  “Why you want to go out there?”

  “My—” I hesitate a second but plunge on bravely, “My mother’s out there.”

  She cocks her head at me like a bird. “She work there?”

  “No. She’s an inmate.”

  The woman only nods her head slowly and smokes some more, apparently thinking this over. “My nephew out there,” she says grimly. “But he get out soon.”

  “Oh. I thought it was a women’s—”

  “What?”

  “I assumed it was only women.”

  “They got both,” she mumbles, the corner of her mouth still clamped on the pipe. “Men, women. Some people out there very bad—killers, thieves. But they got not-so-bad,
too. Just a little messed up. Like my nephew.” She winks at me. “And your mama.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  “Luz Alvarez,” she says, her tone suddenly formal. “You?”

  “I’m Claudia Bloom,” I say, sticking out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  She wipes her palm on her apron quickly and grips my hand with surprising warmth and force. It’s probably because I’ve been trapped in my car for two days, delirious with desert heat and sleep deprivation, living on mini-mart coffee and Corn Nuts, but the feel of her fingers in mine floods me with a jolt of sweet relief. When she smiles, her teeth are yellow-brown and jagged as a jack-o-lantern’s; her eyes nearly disappear in all that skin. She’s quite beautiful.

  She tells me how to get to the prison. When she’s sure I understand her directions, she goes on about a place the locals call Mystery Mountain, where there’s a rock with ancient Hebrew writing on it. Then a clap of thunder makes my throat vibrate and a dark gray rain cloud opens up like a faucet, instantly soaking us both. She swears good naturedly in Spanish, laughing, and moves toward the lobby. We wave goodbye in the parking lot; then I run to my room, and she ambles back to her cart filled with Windex, paper-wrapped soaps and fresh towels.

  I wake at 3:46 in the morning to a nuclear war. I cower under the cheap, synthetic covers for ten minutes before mustering enough courage to rise, roll myself a cigarette, free a glass from its paper doily and pour a couple fingers of vodka with a shaking hand. I figure, if this is the end, I want to go out with a buzz. I creep outside onto the balcony that overlooks a leaf-strewn pool and wait for the world to end.