Tart by Jody Gehrman

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. Thetourists 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 caughtup 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