Tart by Jody Gehrman Page A

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 wasa 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