The Salt God's Daughter (14 page)

I preferred to keep moving because I didn't have to think. Besides, Dolly and I had no money and no guidance, and neither of us knew what we could become.

The nuns could not bother with girls once they left for good. It wasn't their fault. Too many girls needed a place. A herd of young women waited by the fence of bougainvillea, craving everything, needing as much as we did.

The nuns could not risk the whole for one girl. That's why Sister Mary slipped a bus ticket into Dolly's hand along with a pile of $20 bills. She had found Dolly's boyfriend's note threatening to burn down the Home unless Dolly spoke to him.

Sister Mary told Dolly not to look back, not even at me.

Heads bowed. Hands folded in laps after the decision had been made. “You'll see it's better this way. You girls need time away from each other. How will you each discover who you really are?” Sister Mary asked me.

Dolly called me a few days later.

“I'm in San Diego. I'll send you a bus ticket as soon as I can. I promise. Remember, outlaws. I love you, Moose.”

“I'm not your responsibility.” I blew her a kiss after hanging up the phone.

 

AT EIGHTEEN, I left the nuns and forgot all I knew, and I married a man who didn't know me. A district attorney, sitting by a
pond in a park. To him, I was a trophy, a collection of body parts that looked good together despite being disparate pieces. He told me I was beautiful. I had grown to my full five-foot-eleven, and my hair reached to my waist. On my wedding day, the day on which I was to marry the man I thought would give me a new life, I poured my body into a tight white chenille dress I had purchased at a thrift shop during a Halloween sale, pinned up my hair in a bun, threaded some baby's breath through my curls, and slipped on flat leather sandals so I wouldn't be taller than my groom. I looked forward to a waltz. But there would be no waltz, my betrothed told me on that day. I bit back the tears, trying not to ruin my eye makeup, a thin blue line blurring beneath my eyelashes, where Dolly brushed her thumb.

“Poor Ruthie. It must be hard being so damn ugly,” Dolly laughed, trying to cheer me up, her cream-colored pantsuit illuminating her olive skin. She did make me laugh, just for a moment. I noticed how her newly dyed black hair glistened and that her eyes were painted with bright lavender eye shadow that matched her fingernails. A foot shorter than I was, she was now so busty she appeared as if she might tip forward. “You sure you're ready, Moose?” she asked. She grabbed my hand and ran it through her hair, messing it into tangles.

My only relative stood up for me. It had been a quick courtship, and it was an even quicker marriage. My shiny new husband with his impressive job would have been our late mother's pride and joy had he not come home sobbing for his clients and, after a few drinks, toppled the apartment.

He broke all the kitchen plates, our front door. He said he could beat “the pretty” out of me. According to him, it had never done me a lick of good anyway. What did I ever have to say that was of any value? Was I contributing to society in any meaningful way?

Standing at the front door after the last time, I drew in my breath. I was nineteen now, and I knew that if I didn't act,
I would end up like Sister Elizabeth, in a wheelchair with a mouth hammered into silence.

That is why I held a pan of boiling oil in my hands.

That was the last time he threatened me.

I put the pan down and turned around. I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and walked across Artesia Boulevard, through the pouring rain, with $55 in my pocket. I crossed the grass, headed up the main drag to Broadway as water rushed around my ankles. I didn't look back, even after the storm.

 

I MADE A promise to myself on the night I left him. If I ever had a daughter I would raise her to be strong, smart, self-protective. If she wanted to hurry things up, I would make her wait, even though she might not want to or think she needed to. I didn't care if I had to lock her in her room. I would be strong enough to let her hate me. Even if she shouted and kicked holes in the walls, I would stand firm. I would brace my back against the door. I would push up against the door as each full moon beckoned her, and I'd wait for minutes, hours, days, years, knowing that her mind needed more time to catch up with her body before she let herself get lost.

I would do all this. This was precisely how crazy I would be.

I would wave burning bundles of sage around the corners of her bedroom to protect her. I would cover her head with a scarf, hiding her hair.

Because if she suffered a bad loss, if she was harmed or even harmed herself unintentionally, it could create a condition of colliding events worse than any El Niño. It would create a series of catastrophes in her life. She could become a woman with empty eyes, a woman who allowed herself to be stolen, again and again, who never protected herself because she had never learned her worth, a woman for whom the ground beneath her feet would easily slip away wherever she stood, leaving her terminally unsure, paralyzed as to where to go next. With no
place to call home, she'd always feel lost at sea. She might even become a mother accidentally, if only for a second, one split second.

It was not too late for me. Nothing was. I still had the promise of my Naida. I knew she was coming. Soon.

 

I
T WASN'T A home that you'd fall in love with. Homes, despite their ability to seep up the spiritual essence of lives, and their tendency to absorb and contain the energy of joy and grief, were just glass, brick, wood, and mortar. They were constructions, welded with nails and glue, like muscle and bone knit together with sinewy straps, according to a plan. No, you didn't fall in love with a home. You fell in love with the stories you told yourself about what had happened there and what you imagined could happen. Any good realtor would tell you that. Just like any good matchmaker would tell you the same about a soul mate—you didn't fall in love with him. You fell in love with the stories of who you imagined you'd be when you were with him. The feeling of having dreamed of him long before you met him was like invisible ink written on your skin.

It was a leap of faith to try and ascertain what good things might be coming into your future if you zigged in X or zagged with Y. Most people trusted “the feeling” they got about certain places, just as they sensed things when they met certain people. Everyday people with no particular inclination toward spiritual things noticed the signs that seemed to thrash across
the ether before a big decision was made. Wherever you were, most everyone could agree on the bad omen of a bird flying into a window, breaking its wing.

Homes, like certain people, would be blamed, too: That place was bad luck; I'd never live in a townhouse again; I had to move and change my life.

Some places were so magnetic and full of energies that they drew the same people back, again and again. What you had in common with these people, you could rarely put into words, but you knew you shared something: inescapability. If you were like Dolly and me, who'd lived on the road for stretches at a time, you might think of your first real home as the beginning of your real life. That's why I returned to the old motel on the beach, despite my lingering fears. I remembered it as a safe house, a communal space, a spiderweb by the sea that trapped wanderers for their own good. Somehow I knew it would still be there. And then, there it was.

With no one around, I tipped my head back and opened my mouth, letting the rain wash over my face, staring up at the dark blue and then at the bright blue door. The weathered salmon stucco still had clusters of bougainvillea spilling across its walls. The vines, I would soon see, hid the loneliness, the monotony, and the ache of the aged with their lush petals as they climbed across the rooftops, across buildings and telephone wires. Gulls still flocked to the beach, and in their calls I still heard an infant crying, a parachute of sound floating above everything. A signal of my return. I'd been running for years.

Dr. Brownstein threw her arms around me when I walked into the lobby. I hadn't expected such an outpouring of emotion. I forced myself to relax in the scent of her Charlie perfume. This was the way a mother would welcome a daughter. I wanted to drink in every last bit of maternal love that I'd missed. I closed my eyes in the soft pillow of her embrace.

 

THE TWIN PALMS had become a retirement home, now called Wild Acres. I got to know each one of the residents: Mr. Takahashi, whom I'd met a long time ago, and Mrs. Green. Dr. B., as I now called Dr. Brownstein, began to call me “kinder.” Her hands trembled, but her eyes were hooded with the same powdery blue eye shadow. The night I'd arrived, she'd opened the snack machine in the lobby, telling me to take whatever I wanted. “Come, child. Tell me everything.” She'd smiled and then pretended not to notice how quickly I ate. Her tanned skin. Her leathery hands. Her failing eyesight. The smell of her perfume. The moonstone in her hand as she handed it to me. All were familiar.

“If you're like your mother, you have a unique combination of skills,” she said. I could fix a leaky faucet in seconds flat. I had large, stony hands. My mother had shown me everything. This would prepare me for her residents, the likes of which I had never seen. She wiped her eyes with a lace handkerchief when she told me her daughter, Sasha, had divorced Sam. All Sasha wanted was a nice vacation, my mother had said.

By the time we moved permanently to the Twin Palms, Sasha and Sam had moved to Rochester to work for Xerox.

“She liked your mother an awful lot. Said your mother was the reason she got to go to Hawaii. But that's a story for another time. She blessed me, your mother did. Hard worker. There's been no one that I could trust as much as her. I only ever gave her a key. Do you know that? In all this time, only your mother.”

She now had a new parakeet, Tick Tock, the third. But this bird could swear in Yiddish, bleating out, “
Kush mir in tuchas
” at random times, making everyone smile. She kept him in the lobby, next to a couch and coffee table, where the residents could be entertained, often falling asleep watching the bird.

Wild Acres was true to its new name, full of mood swings. The residents suffered from varying degrees of dementia and
aching bodies. Dr. B. provided a safe home for them, for their memories shifted like Teutonic plates underneath the surface of daily life. This was a dwelling built for transitory things—memories, spirits, last chances caught in the threshold of this plane and the next. For Mrs. Green, the sight of a fishing net washed up on the beach invoked an image of a rash on a screaming baby's chest, the sandpaper burn of scarlet fever under the child's arms. For Mr. Takahashi, the sadness of a good book ending could recall the heavy rains that wiped out an entire field of strawberries in minutes, or the memory of Pearl Harbor, when he happened to go onto shore for a date, unknowing that his ship and all eighty-one men in his division would be lost within hours.

I would come to understand trembling hands that reached over balconies as if to catch lost lovers from falling. I would find tissue paper covered in lipstick kisses and blown over the sand, or handwritten notes on napkins placed in Coke bottles and buried. I would rehang drapes that were tugged down daily to be washed with sunlight.

The first paragraph of a letter would be repeated three times, and we'd find half-eaten sandwiches, a birdcage left open, a faucet running, the wrong pair of shoes, no shoes. I adored Dr. B. for taking people in. But it wasn't just charity. She felt this was her purpose. Lives must be driven by something, she said. My mother had rewarded Dr. B.'s goodness with friendship and a reprieve so that she could spend time with Sasha.

“Be forewarned,” Dr. B. told me. “They like to travel.” On many nights throughout the halls of Wild Acres, I might find residents in the corridors, disturbed by the full moons, collecting blankets and leaving them in different sections of the hallway and on the fire escape. Their only wish: to be told, “You exist. Go back to sleep.” Sometimes being in the wrong place was the only place people would see you.

Mr. Takahashi would appear in the crook of the magnolia trees, in the back of the ice cream truck, discovered and driven
back home by Paulo, the ice cream man. He'd show up on the side of the highway five miles away. No one ever saw him leave. I'd find him most of the time. And the others, too. Some, like Mrs. Green, had to be caught as if by a net. I would find her racing into the waves with a suitcase in hand, calling to her husband who was dying of cancer and had just been moved to a nearby hospice, though Dr. B. took her there each morning, when he was most lucid. In her mind, she was always late to meet him. When I spoke to her, she listened. She trusted me. There might be value here, I thought. In me. They valued me.

“Everybody wants to be found,” Dr. B. said when I asked whether Mr. Takahashi was really trying to escape.

But of all the things they had lost and found, their slippers meant the most. Outside of each green door, there was a dark rubber mat for slippers—faux-fur pink slip-ons, slipper boots with soft lining you could wear outside the house, knit slipper socks with leather soles sewn in, soft moccasins with beads. Slippers were coveted by gift-toting guests, by relatives looking to exchange guilt for comfort. Cold arthritic feet could ruin Mrs. Green's day, could make it impossible for her to stand at her easel and paint, or to rake the gray shag carpeting so that all the piles fell in the same direction. Tying a shoe could ruin Dr. B.'s back for weeks. Despite the traction of rubber grips, steps were still misplaced. People fell on the sidewalk. Tripped in the kitchen. There were broken hips, bandaged foreheads, pieces of bloodstained gauze that flitted amid the crushed shells in the parking lot, caught up in the chaos by the winds that followed the ambulances back to the emergency room at any time of day or night.