The Salt God's Daughter (15 page)

“I'll do a good job,” I told Dr. B.

“Ruthie, I know you will. I have absolutely no doubt about it.” I already knew I didn't want to disappoint her.

I had been anxious to see our old apartment. On my first day of work at Wild Acres, I recognized Mr. Takahashi standing in
the hallway, though he didn't recognize me. Lou, as Dr. B. called him, was bald now. His face was creased, his skin mottled. His dark eyes were the same, and he hunched over and talked too close to my face so that I could smell the coffee and mints on his breath. Dr. B. said he had come here years ago looking for my mother, but we'd been long gone by then. “We get ten calls a day from people looking to place their parents,” she said. “I can't take everybody, and even now I have too many. He was one of the first. I told him he could visit room 21. I've never seen a man break down like he did that day. He didn't want to leave. What could I do when his son asked if we'd take him?” The place where my mother once lived held more meaning for him than the farm he'd built up for decades. “His son runs the farm now. You know, Lou never talks of strawberries. Talks of everything but. Anyhow, of course we always have fresh strawberries. They subsidize us.”

I noticed his wrinkled white shirt, briefly recalling my discomfort at seeing him touch my mother. Despite all her dating, he was the only man I'd ever seen touch my mother in that way. “Mr. Takahashi, do you remember me? We picked strawberries at your farm. You were very kind,” I lied.

“There was that one summer, Diana. We didn't eat or go out much. Where have you put my door?”

I glanced at Dr. B. “I think he remembers you,” she whispered.

“I had to hide who I was. They'd have never let me serve. One day, a great bird flew up from the water, lifting right off the waves. We didn't expect that one or the rest that flew over. Torpedoes. I was supposed to be in my battle station in the radio shack.”

“You were lucky, Lou. You had a lucky angel,” said Dr. B., taking his arm. She turned to me. “We need to paint the doors different colors. They get confused by all the green. Maybe you could start with that, Ruthie. Come inside—see, he likes his brown chair.” I followed her into his apartment.

“I remember you, Ruthie,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “You're a looker, just like your mother.”

“You caught a white croaker off the pier,” said Dr. B., trying to impose a memory to get him off his current track. “The pier was all lit up with lights. A million tiny lights on strings across both sides at night.”

“Not anymore. They shut it down early because of the vagrants.”

“I caught a sand shark and threw it back,” I said, to assert my place.

He nodded, but I could tell he was far away. Dr. B. pointed to his door. “The one with the bells.” She said his hearing was going. She'd wrapped a bell collar around the door handle to alert him when someone was coming in. I asked if I could fluff his pillow. I made a show of it. I wanted to offer something, to begin to become a part of things. “Yes, yes, that would be fine,” he said. “That's my Diana. Her picture is on the wall there. What a beauty.”

I stared at the photograph of my mother, with the signature “For my favorite farmer. Love, Diana.” It had been taken on our day at his strawberry farm in Oxnard. Dolly, dressed in blue shorts, gathered herself in my mother's skirt. My mother stood next to Mr. Takahashi. Dressed in his signature pressed white button-down shirt, he had his arms around my mother's waist and was staring at the camera with a suspicious half smile. Dolly looked so small, her hands on her hips, her knees knobby above high white tube socks striped blue at the top. I remember talking to Felix by the side of the truck when one of the workers took out his camera.

“Did I tell you my son has a boat? What has Fay Green done with my slippers?” Mr. Takahashi asked, turning to Dr. B.

In the future, he would tell me bits and pieces of my mother's life, the reasons she had done what she had. Every life, it seemed, was just a domino stream of past lives, which is why
a person's life was not a predictable curve upward. Life was a jagged line. That's why when you looked back, you'd often think,
That was another life entirely
. Or
I was a different person then
. Because, in fact, you were. Certain cells in the body died every day. More than half of the neurons formed in the embryonic state would die before birth, which possibly meant that you'd had months of memories that you couldn't access. Certain things, like memories, could feel like the only things that linked you to the many selves you had been. If you were like Mr. Takahashi, caught on the Teutonic plates of your past, you might cling to your strongest memory of love to ground yourself.

It was hard to believe my mother had so many other lives. It bothered me to think of her life as so full at one time, and then empty for long after. What had she done to deserve that? Had she just given up? I thought of Mrs. Green. Every Friday night at sundown, we'd sit in the courtyard near the small palm tree that we'd rescued from a demolition site. Mrs. Green would say the prayer over the wine, the kiddush. Dr. B. would say the blessing over the bread, HaMotzi, and tear off a piece of challah and pass it around our makeshift shtetl. Though Dr. B. wouldn't categorize herself and Mrs. Green leaned somewhere between Reform and Conservative, this cobbled-together version of Judaism created a perfect harmony. Making the Sabbath made me incredibly wistful for what I never had, and yet there was the pull of roots and the promise of rest, a time to receive the bride of the Sabbath, the Shekhinah, who would flourish in the ease of kindred spirits, Dr. B. said. Mrs. Green seemed so comfortable leading the prayers; it was hard to reconcile her strength with the shadowy figment that rushed into the waves with a suitcase. The mind, it seemed, was a trolley, its doors opening and closing at different stops, and too easily trapped at some. “Fay, you've outdone yourself again,” Dr. B. would tell her over the dinner that she'd cooked for us, chicken soup with
matzo balls and fresh challah. After, I'd sit on her plastic-covered couch, calmed and reassured as I listened to their voices.

“We used to go to the supper clubs,” said Mr. Takahashi. “It's where I met Diana. She'd lied about her age, but she wasn't too jolly. We'd find oil on the birds some days on the beach, Diana and I. Not anymore. You know Pearl Harbor was a fight over oil? They don't tell you that. I'd swim in a red tide anytime. All these lip flappers crying about hives and headaches. It's just algae,” he said.

In the months that followed, Mr. Takahashi would convince me that I had never really known my mother. She had been running from something, but from what? It made my hands ache to think about all that happened to her, that
we
could have happened to her. “I've given up my life for you girls. I've sacrificed everything,” I remembered her saying. And yet, perhaps her life might have ended up this way, too, even if she hadn't had us. Perhaps the blueprint of a life remained the same even if the place and people were different.

Within weeks, I found myself interjected into the narrative, the comfort section, I called it. “Ruthie is the one who fluffs my favorite pillow and leaves it for me. That's what I like. Every day while I'm on my morning walk. Redhead. Always has a smile. She makes lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches and cuts off the crust. Strong. Can lift my chair. Doesn't flap her lips. Why doesn't a pretty girl like Ruthie have a husband?”

As time passed, I learned Mr. Takahashi's likes and dislikes, as well as those of Mrs. Green. She made wonderful challah on Friday mornings, and she preferred overcast days to sunshine. She loved to paint, loved chicken soup, and soft-boiled eggs with the whites scraped out and mixed with salt. Mr. Takahashi liked his things arranged just so and could get out of sorts if something was moved. He loved ice cream, vanilla, and his navy slippers. I fell into a routine surprisingly easily, grateful to be needed again. I wrapped Mrs. Green's thin gray
hair in warm oil-coated towels to condition it. I massaged Mr. Takahashi's hands. I visited and I chatted. I fished rings from drains and delivered and charted medication, counting out pills. We played Rummikub and took walks, telling stories. Dr. B. had been doing most of the caretaking, and she was tired. She needed to be taken care of, too. I knew a person could starve from lack of touch. There had been times during my marriage when I was so alone, with Dolly in San Diego. I'd go to the Mane Attraction hair salon just to have Theresa, the owner, put her soft hands on me. Theresa would wash my hair and tell me all about her grandchildren. I'd sit in a chair covered in torn red vinyl as if it were a throne and drink Sanka out of a Styrofoam cup as if it were a silver goblet. For forty-five minutes, I would watch
General Hospital
without sound, along with the other women sitting under hair dryers and staring at the black-and-white television bolted in the corner. I would listen to the soft lilt of Theresa's voice as she spoke to me as if I were someone.

Touch was the beginning of life and the cataclysm. I could give someone back a connection to the rest of the world.

“It's an uncommon gift that you have with the aged and infirm,” Dr. B. told me after my first week. “I watch you anchor a spirit into a body when it has other plans. Your mother called it a ‘passion for compassion.' That's what she said about you,” she said.

“She said that?”

“Of course, child. Didn't she ever say it to you?”

The tears that once accumulated inside me had become empathetic pools.

Happiness was like an escaped wheelbarrow rolling down a hill. You needed to control it, to tie it with a rope and to pull it along with you. It was the one thing I knew how to do well, hold on to that rope for people who'd lost their grip. I'd had enough practice.

My ex-husband had tried to tear it from me. In time, I forgot the way he'd stare at me without blinking. Yet I'd always recall how it was all about getting up and walking away. Then, it was just a matter of how many seconds it would take me to reach the open window, to open the cupboard and stick my head in, to take deep breaths in the backyard as I hung laundry. This is how I lived for a year, pressing my mettle between my lips. I became a very still and very quiet person. By the time I was nineteen, I knew how easily a person could falter under a stillborn sky, even when she had once been independent and strong. Yes, that was another life, and I was another person then.

Many times abandoned, I now spent my life trying to hold on to people.

Wild Acres was my transition, my threshold of invisibility. I still donned a baseball cap and sunglasses, my hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, adequate camouflage. I'd gotten so good at disappearing that I thought nothing of spending my days cleaning, taking the residents on walks, helping Dr. B. with paperwork, buying groceries and extra pairs of slippers. In those days, you weren't expected to be more than a shadow if you weren't in love.

I told myself that caretaking could consume me. But the bougainvillea here were wild, spinning hope into my eyes. Within just a short period of time, I'd watched their brilliant pink petals and remembered I'd once been a person with dreams. I had dipped in and out of life's peripheral vision for years. But the residents of Wild Acres changed all that. They needed me. They saw me. They brought me back. They found me.

 

ONE MORNING, MY beeper went off. Mrs. Green had fallen. She grasped my hand as if I were a life preserver as I pulled her up. After I put ointment on her knee, I made her a nest out of the brightly colored afghans she'd knitted. She sat on
the gold couch. Her hands were shaky, her voice tremulous. I made her drink some orange juice and checked her medication. She sighed with relief as I put cream on her hands. Then I combed her hair up in waves, so as to cover the spots that had thinned, just as I did every day. I sprayed hairspray over the whole thing to hold it in place. “Beautiful. Stunning, as usual,” I announced.

“You're good to me, Ruthie. I know you have other things to do.”

“We're friends,” I told her. She smiled, her large brown eyes welling up. I felt like a warrior for good. She took my face in her hands and told me I was her angel. Yet Dolly maintained that it was time for me to fly.

I walked down to the pier after everyone was asleep. I was lucky to be back here, I knew. It was a homecoming. I'd found good work, but still it was hard to be here. Here was where my mother had died. Here was where the sea lion had been shot. Here was where a childhood had been captured, if only to be released. I missed my sister. Even though I felt I was making great strides, there was a loneliness that ate away at me. That is why Dolly insisted that I join her at a bar the next week for New Year's Eve, to celebrate the good things to come. Almost two years had passed, and it was time I stepped out, she said. And that is why I now walked barefoot across the cool wood, all the way to the end of the pier, where I imagined a wedding canopy knit of stars. I wrapped my arms around myself as I stared down at the rough black water, curling my toes over the edge. Under the chuppah, a bride traditionally circled the groom seven times, just as the world was built in seven days. Seven signified wholeness in Judaism, something that neither person in a marriage could attain separately. I wanted it for myself.

Here, I let myself cry. Here, no one would notice. I watched seven of my tears drop like quiet stones into the moonlit water, without causing so much as a ripple.

 

W
HEN I LOOKED at this man for the first time, I knew how our relationship would end. I knew how my sheets would crease with sand in the afternoon, and where he'd want to be touched. I knew what he'd want for his dinner and how he'd roll over in the middle of the night and whisper in my ear. I knew how far he'd push me beyond comfort, and how I'd come to crave the scent of the ocean he'd leave on my skin, on my pillow, on my green curtains. I knew what he'd say when he lied to me about when he was going to return, and I knew the fifty-seven ways he would break my heart.