Tart by Jody Gehrman Page B

yard with sheets and T-shirts flapping this way and that. It was the last moment of the film, and I have to admit it was beautiful. We couldn’t have planned it; it was just the right light and the right wind and the right nightgown, the right laundry in the background. It was just—well—right. Sometimes you get lucky.
    So I edited the film and added credits and sent it to Sundance—more on a whim than from any serious aspirations. Goddamn if it didn’t win second place in the short-film category. Ziv and I were blown away. For years after I enjoyed this unspoken Girl Genius status at UT, and it was more than obvious to me that’s why I got hired at UC Santa Cruz. Meringue, Meringue was an accidental coup, but it earned me more career points than anything I’d ever labored at.
    But I digress. Today, I’m congratulating myself on actually having accomplished number one on my to-do list: buy car. Well, okay, it’s not necessarily sexy, dependable or movie-star quality, and it did cost closer to seven than three, but it seems to run and there are no flames just yet, so I’m feeling fairly smug. Beaming behind the wheel of my very own 1964 acid-green Volvo, I imagine I look very retro and Euro-chic. I bought it off a Swedish architect who had to leave the U.S. abruptly for a new job in Singapore. He also unloaded an ancient laptop, four ferns and a stainless-steel teakettle in the process. Frankly, the whole transaction was highway robbery on my part, but I figured maybe the gods were trying to make up for my first two days back in California. Conflagration, calamari and sizzling sexual exploits aside, my return to California’s been pretty brutal, so far.
    But today is promising. The air is unseasonably cool, having been moistened by morning fog. I’ve got a mocha in a paper cup perched precariously between my thighs, and I’m heading south on Highway 1, letting the wind whip my hair into a hectic bird’s nest. I feel good.
    There’s just one little problem with my buoyant mood: it’s making me cocky. As I get closer and closer to Santa Cruz, I can’t keep my slutty, disobedient brain from making a beeline for Clay Parker. I feel his teeth closing around my bottom lip, hear my sharp intake of breath. I can taste the sweet dribble of peach juice I licked from his thumb at the farmer’s market, smell the incense and hear the insistent racket of hippies playing bongos.
    And now is not the time to be thinking of Clay Parker. Now is starting-new-job-in-six-days-better-get-ass-in-gearand-find-apartment time. Nay, starting new career in six days. Oh, Jesus. Can you order lesson plans from Amazon?
    I turn up the radio louder (okay, there’s no car radio, but I’ve commandeered my father’s petite yet powerful boom box, which is now riding shotgun and blasting Ani Di-Franco—the momentary rebellion of some pierced DJ, no doubt, so sick of the prescribed playlist she’s gone mad). This is when I love California: the sun is too low yet to be treacherous, the sky is a delicate blue, and twists of fog are nestling in the creases between hills. On my right, the ocean is undulating; her vast green expanse sparkles with gold specks, and the waves hit the beige stretches of beach in fits of white foam. The blond grass that covers every surface is giving off a wet, wheaty smell and a bad-girl bisexual has commandeered the airwaves.
    Maybe I really have come home.
    Â 
    Day six of grueling apartment hunting yields results: I find a place I can unapologetically refer to as a flat. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a total Anglophile; I long to say “bloody hell” and “knickers” and “sod it” with all the cool reserve of Helen Bonham Carter, but of course each of these phrases sounds stilted and absurd in my American accent. I have managed, on occasion, to pull off “shag.” It’s one of my favorites, so I just