Tart (15 page)

M
y 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.

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.

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.