The Salt God's Daughter (10 page)

We were called “latchkey kids,” for the strand of colored yarn we wore around our necks that held a house key. We arrived home at 3:00 PM, just in time for
General Hospital
. After school, while our mother worked at the front desk, kept the books, welcomed new guests, and did the laundry, Dolly and I watched the lives of the people in Port Charles unfold, keeping alive our mother's ritual.

We wanted to help her, but she wouldn't let us, now intent on giving us a childhood filled only with schoolwork and beaches. She had lost interest in soap operas, claiming her own life was full enough. Ours, however, was not.

October 1979 marked a time on the show unlike anything we had seen before. Dolly and I raced home to watch the romance between Luke and Laura play out. Luke Spencer was a bad boy who owned the Campus Disco, where Laura worked. Luke had blond curly hair and wore pants that pulled at the groin and flared at the bottom. He was from the wrong side of the tracks but was easily soft-spoken; plus, he owned the coolest dance spot in town. Dolly was bewitched.

I much preferred the shaggy Scotty Baldwin to Luke, even though they both were in love with Laura. We sat, transfixed, in front of the television each day, eating popcorn and drinking Dr Pepper. There was a problem brewing between Luke and Laura. He'd had a crush on her for a while now. But she wasn't having it. She was in love with Scotty.

But Luke would have her. We watched the red strobe lights flicker as he pulled her down.

By the time my mother returned that night of the Hunter's Moon, we were half asleep on the pullout couch, wrapped in each other's arms. I woke up in the middle of the night panicked, not remembering who I was.

“Dolly, will we always be together?” I asked.

She patted my back. “The moon is right there in the window. You can see my face in it, can't you? Count your heartbeats backward from one hundred and go to sleep.”

As Dolly counted backward, I squinted into the dark corners of the room, heavy with guilt for a reason I could not name, and full of sadness for all of us—Laura, myself, and Dolly, at the same time.

 

MONTHS PASSED AND we were happy, watching the lovers stroll down the pier, arm in arm. Dolly and I always celebrated our birthdays with Dr. Brownstein and my mother. Though I still had not learned to swim, I grew accustomed to the sights and smells of the beach, absorbing it all just as I imagined my great-grandmother had done. Belmont Shore in the '70s had been rife with activity. We learned to skateboard, to do tricks on our bicycles, and to play the drums on tin cans. We roamed around in terry-cloth jumpers and flip-flops. At night, we'd bike down to Second Street, where we'd get pizza and ice cream, with as many toppings as we wanted. We'd sit on a bench on the sidewalk and watch the lovers walk by, and we'd talk about how lucky we were to be living in such a wonderful place.

We spent afternoons kicking around in the sand, picking through the seaweed for shells, making headdresses of washed-up fishing ropes and hats from Styrofoam cups. Beach rats, we were called. We stopped brushing our hair, and it hung in tangles spun by the salt air. We sprayed Sun-In across our heads and let it turn our hair orange in patches. Our skin peeled, and we didn't much care. We woke up to the feel of sand in our sheets. We covered ourselves in baby oil and iodine and let the sun bake our skin. We smelled like Love's Baby Soft perfume, like summer all year long. We were tanned, with freckles across our noses. I still carried a moonstone in my pocket. My hair streaked with blond. Dolly's breasts grew, seemingly overnight.

DOLLY AND I had time on our hands to fantasize and create, to conjure and compose, to experiment and dramatize, to create a world experienced wholly in the imagination. We'd frequent the pier, our bare feet slapping the wood slats as we played chasing games we were far too old for, while anglers let droplights fall into the water, plugged into the electrical outlets on the pier's overhead lights, in order to capture the attention of small fish that swarmed near the top, led to their destruction by their need for the bright light.

When I returned to Belmont Shore years later, the outlets had been removed. They encouraged fires, I learned, set by itinerant campers who had no other choice when trying to stay warm. I would always look for those who were homeless, boundless, and in chains. There would always be a piece of me there.

One evening at dusk, Dolly and I were walking through the hexagonal midpoint of Veterans Memorial Pier, aiming for the canteen at the T-shaped end. Dolly, who wasn't afraid to talk to anybody, was spotted by a fisherman sitting on an overturned bucket, watching us girls. She had begun to draw male attention, I noticed, already wearing a bra and possessing a sort of approachable dreaminess. Her features had become more defined, making her appear older than even her fast-talking mouth did.

“Can you girls help me try this out?” the fisherman asked. Dolly nodded courageously. He let her share his light and use his fishing wire, and she caught a small white croaker within minutes.

Afterward, he took us to dinner, pepperoni pizza at Salento's. He asked if we'd like to see the new movie people were talking about,
Saturday Night Fever
. We loved the Bee Gees, and the song “Stayin' Alive” played on the radio constantly. Dolly and I knew we shouldn't be going to an R-rated movie. But we went anyway, thrilled by the promise of buttered popcorn and the excitement of rebellion, no matter how trivial.

There we were, sitting next to a fisherman whose name we didn't know, watching a movie that we'd only ever heard about. We watched John Travolta, Tony, try to fool around with the woman he liked, Stephanie. Why was he so pushy with her? Luke had done the same with Laura, only Tony let his love interest go. We watched Annette, the woman who liked Tony, get so drugged up that she did things with two men. When she realized what was happening, she started screaming. It reminded me of Dolly when she'd woken up to the mudslide years before.

As we drove home, I noticed the glowing blue-capped waves. The stranger told me that the bioluminescence was a trick caused by poison blooms. When we got back that night, my mother was on the balcony, smoking a Winston Light, paging through her almanac.

“Where were you girls?” she asked in a rare moment of maternal angst, tapping a crinkled cigarette pack with her foot.

“Getting ice cream,” Dolly lied. “Down on Second Street.”

“Just remember,” said my mother, “I was worried. Next time, why don't you invite me? I'll buy you a cone. Maybe we could spend more time together.”

 

I WAS ALREADY far away from her. On weekends, my mother slept or worked. Dolly and I made our way across the sand to the shops near the marina, passing the women in bikinis, who danced backward on roller skates. They looked so carefree, like the world followed their every spin, a world that Dolly and I were only beginning to dream of.

 

DOLLY AND I grew more daring. We'd walk along the beach all the way to the
Queen Mary
, but we'd never go in. We couldn't be satisfied with safety, though. Our favorite activity was bicycling in the dark.

My mother had met a nice guy; an old boyfriend from another past life had come back to town. She met up with him
almost every night throughout her summer of love, 1980. We didn't meet him. We didn't miss her anymore.

I had dreamed of flying. But now I was doing it.

We loved the way our hair would blow in the wind as we sailed down the streets under a moonlit sky. I loved the feeling of flying, the only danger being the errant piles of sand that could appear on the sidewalks, especially at the turns. We'd lift our feet and sail over the bumps in the road. We'd ride through the streets of Belmont Shore at dusk, when the eclipsed things might have come out. Perhaps we were one of them, I thought. No one ever stopped us or crashed into us. It was because we had become invisible, hanging out in the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Maybe we had always been. People faded away from us, Dr. Brownstein among them. She was traveling, my mother said, enjoying her life on a pleasure cruise. Or visiting her daughter. That was what one did when one earned the right to enjoy life.

As always, we ran home from school to catch Luke and Laura, who had run off on an adventure to save the world. We lived vicariously through them. At this point, I was thirteen and Dolly fifteen. They were almost the only thing we knew of love.

We never met my mother's new-old boyfriend. By the time we asked, they were over. She went to see him one last time. She didn't return.

Early the next morning, as we were getting ready for school, Dolly spotted her. We had been up most of the night waiting and worrying. “She's back!” Dolly cried. I tore through the sand. My mother was sitting in the surf without shoes, her long black hair strewn across her shoulders, her face pale, streaked with mascara. Her low-cut Danskin dress was torn at the shoulder, soaked. She seemed lost, unable to move, letting the waves foam up around her, her hands fluttering at her sides like tiny fins.

She had a bruise on her neck, which made her wince when I tried to reach for her. “Mom! It's us!” Dolly cried, holding her face. She looked at us with bleary eyes. As the waves splashed up foam, pooling in tiny circles, we lifted her. We walked her back inside, her feet scraping along the sand. I asked what had happened, but she just shook her head, and I grew quiet, noticing the mustard-green edge of morning beyond the palms. She just needed to sleep, she said. I kissed her on the cheek, and she wished me a good day and slipped underneath a pile of blankets, shivering. She had been swimming in the ocean for hours, she confessed.

We stayed by her side that next afternoon, noticing she had not moved. We skipped school the next day and tried to nurse her back to health. But she didn't get better. The last guest had checked out of the motel. We had already turned the sign to FULL OCCUPANCY so no one would bother us.

“What should we do?” asked Dolly.

“Don't make her mad,” I said. There was no one we could go to. Dr. Brownstein was gone, and my mother was incredibly secretive and didn't want anyone to know what was going on, for fear they would take us away from her. Dolly and I took turns running to the corner to buy her Canada Dry ginger ale and saltines. I played the guitar at her bedside, singing Shalom Rav and songs from
Fiddler on the Roof
, as Dolly held my mother's feet and gave her a massage.

My mother refused any calls from her admirers. We didn't hear from the new-old boyfriend. She trembled in her bed, fighting bouts of fever. I changed her sheets, listening to her labored breathing and the rattle of the ocean inside her lungs. Outside the wind spun turrets across the waves and howled so loudly it filled the apartment with an empty sound that made me shiver.

“What if she dies?” I asked Dolly the next night, sitting on the carpet, my back pressed up to the bathroom door. Dolly
was inside, silent. She had been pulling her hair out in secret but leaving it everywhere. A tiny bald patch had appeared at the back of her head.

“Don't talk like that! It's bad luck. Go away!” she yelled through the door.

When Dolly came out, I pulled a blanket over my knees.

“You're blocking me. Will you move out of the way?”

“Not until you do something.”

“She's not sick from the red tide, dummy. It's called withdrawal from whiskey.”

I no longer noticed the smell of it on her breath, I had become so used to it. I looked down at Dolly's feet, noticing her purple painted toenails. There was dark red hair on the bathroom floor separated from a pile of red nail polish peels. I tried not to stare and moved out of the way.

The next morning, several Belmont Shore residents, while putting out their trash, saw a green station wagon driving itself out of the Twin Palms Motel parking lot, no one at the wheel. They watched the car wavering to the right and the left, stopping abruptly in front of Ripples Dance Club for no apparent reason, before it eventually turned left on E. Ocean Boulevard, then right, and then disappeared. I was at the wheel, set on a pilgrimage to get our mother Robitussin, Triaminic syrup, and a box of Benadryl that we assumed would restore her to health.

“You'll be fine, right?” I asked my mother.

“Of course,” she whispered. “I'm an outlaw.”

I grabbed her almanac, which I had brought in from the car. “What page?”

“What's the moon doing?” she said, barely able to keep her eyes open. “What's it say?”

I opened the almanac and began to read. “It says this month is the Health Moon.”

“Apple doesn't fall far. You're a liar just like your mother,” she
said. “Now you'll understand why I lied to you girls all these years. It was always for a good reason.”