Tart by Jody Gehrman

Author:Jody Gehrman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Red Dress Ink
Published: 2005-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

WINTER

PART 2

CHAPTER 18

My 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

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