The Salt God's Daughter (16 page)

Still, I shook his hand, feeling the strength of his thick callused fingers grasping mine like a soft plum.

“Graham. Scottish,” he said. In the flicker of the disco ball, his lips were pewter, his skin a placid dove gray. Shifting his weight, he seemed the slightest bit nervous, which I appreciated. I watched his dark hair fall in finger-pulled clumps down his back as he let go of my hand and turned to reach across the bar for his glass.

“I'm Ruthie. Ruth, biblical,” I said.

“I'm the blasphemous sister,” Dolly said.

He laughed, emptying his glass, his pale green eyes fixed on mine. They were tinged with the color of the sea during a red tide, I noticed. Dolly kicked me under the table. Hours earlier, she'd said love was coming. The small bag of jasmine that she carried in her waist wallet had spun things all around, and couldn't I sense it in the wind? For two weeks, she had been casting love spells from a book. She said our dreams of being wives and mothers were already written in the book of destiny. It would happen one day. But in the meantime, stop falling in love with the wrong men. Stop confusing love with pity.

This is why I wore the necklace of rose quartz that Dolly had just given to me.

I couldn't even swim when I met the father of my child, Naida. Not at first.

 

HOURS EARLIER, DOLLY watched me pulling a towel through my wet hair and then draw on blue eyeliner. She said she felt love in her bones.

“You know you don't need to do that,” she said, when I put on my wire-rimmed glasses as if to take all the air out of things, apprehension and possibility.

“Leave them off, Moose,” she said. “You look Amish.”

No. I kept them on. Dolly put on a white tank top and miniskirt. I slipped on the plainest and most comfortable thing I owned, a black cotton sundress, long to the ankles, my calm belied by rivulets of sweat rolling across my freckled chest and down my sides, dampening my dress in splotches.

When we arrived at the bar, she leaned up against me. I could tell she'd been missing me. The more clipped her speech, the more she hurt. We had been used to physical closeness. Now, even when in a large room, we took up no more than a cubic foot of space, as if we were still back in that station wagon. It hastened the ease with which we settled into a new experience or moment.

I grabbed her hand in the flash of the red strobe light and pulled her onto the dance floor. “No, Moose. What are you thinking?” she called. Whirling our bodies with abandon, our long hair streaked with light, we danced to rap music. We faced each other, holding hands crossed at the wrists, and leaned back. We spun around as fast as we could, pulling against each other's weight to keep from falling, our feet moving fast, our hair whipping through the smoky bar as faces blurred by. Dolly had always been my counterbalance. I looked at my sister with her lovely dark eyes and her fast-talking ways. I wanted to hug her, all the vulnerable and forgotten parts of her. I circled Dolly seven times and told her I'd never leave her. As we danced, we flung our hair back to remember the girls we had been.

We kicked our cowboy boots up on the empty chairs, confident there was nothing to be saved from. We were doing well, both of us working, I at Wild Acres and Dolly as a bartender at night while in school for social work in San Diego, never having the time to visit me enough. We were not holding our breath, hoping to be found. We had climbed out from under the weight of our childhood. We had already won.

We wanted to be not like some girls. We wanted to be all girls, all those who would come after us, and all those who had come before. We wanted the questions asked by women generation after generation. We wanted to hold the labels in our hands, to turn them around, to take them apart. The need to label was the need to diminish. Supplicant. Seductress. Slut. You could only be one thing. That was the rule. You had to choose. Or it would choose for you. We'd been raised with the need to know where we stood. We wanted to draw lines, and yet our spirits bucked at the thought. We craved what dwelled inside the circle, and we craved the circle itself, to cross it, and to be that lovely curved line that found itself where it had begun. We ached to capture the essence that was ours, to run like mad with it, holding it like a kite with
colored tails in the air. We wanted to feel the light of youth under our feet as we ran.

They were probably thinking us loose girls, with our blue eyeliner and damp red hair, the women at the table next to us, the ones with the long hard stares.

That burning tree. That apple orchard. That strawberry field. That stone with wings. That girl. The one you sneered at. The one you judged. The one that might be you.

 

MOONLIGHT SHIMMIED UP the craggy rocks, escaping across the docks near Alamitos Bay. I glanced at the foggy window, following Graham's silhouette. Despite myself, I wondered if he'd come back. I had seen it before, the way a distancing silhouette could shimmer with a silvery hue, making it appear abrupt and close. Now, as schools of tiny fish darted around the concrete pilings beneath the pier, frenzied by the lights spilling on the surface as if kicked from an open paint can, the beat of drums thumped with finality beneath the docks. I fixed my eyes on the light, noticing the way it defined the shape of the past and illuminated the present. Life would plow forward, regardless of whether you refused to move on. There were shouts and whoops. People partied on their boats. I'd seen some swimming out to the oil rigs while pushing floating thermoses filled with wine, casting out the sea lions from their home. I'd imagined the sea lions would wait in the water, watching.

There were people finding each other right now, coming together, making love on the docks, some who would later stare up at the sky perhaps with regret, praying the new year would come fast, bringing them a clean slate. Or perhaps not, perhaps they'd be amazed they'd found each other just in the nick of time on a night when last-minute mistakes could be made without worry, when strangers could arrive and disappear almost unnoticed. And yet somehow they'd captured something quiet and permanent.

“May we always find truth in books,” I said, pulling my mother's 1979 almanac out of my bag, pressing its worn yellow cover and wrinkled dog-eared pages to my chest in the smoky bar.

“Oh, Moose. I haven't seen that in years. Read what it says about today?”

I closed my eyes. “What do you think Mom would say about the moon tonight?”

“She'd say the red tide and the Blue Moon were conspiring to help us. That the blue represented the past sadness and the red represented the fire that would bring us renewal, just as the forest fires brought new brush. Something along those lines.”

“Perfect,” I told her, slipping the book back into my bag.

Our mother always had a story after she'd disappeared, one that brought us back to life. People would always try to hold on to you, to keep you in myriad ways. They'd walk across the oceans and stand watch in the trees.

I watched Dolly down her shot of whiskey, swearing 1988 would be the best year yet. When the countdown began and the patrons cheered, Graham reappeared; I dropped my glass. Streamers cut through the air in the frenzy of confetti and bleating horns. People kissed. Strangers hugged. Graham knelt, trying to gather the shards in his hands. Callused hands from life on a fishing boat, he would tell me.

“Let me,” I said. I dropped a cloth napkin over it. He moved out of the way.

I handed him the covered fist of broken glass and followed him out onto the patio to see what he was doing. He was a fisherman, his arms stained with salt marks. He was an eagle who now flew across the sand, silvery, holding the glass in his talons. I waited, watching him standing by the ocean. He whipped the napkin back, scattering pieces of glass, capturing light like the flash of fishtails against the darkness.

Maybe this was never broken glass at all.

The Blue Moon was a time for reversals. It created an open seam in the universe and allowed in things that existed in a state of unrest. Mistakes could be undone. In-betweeners—the girls, the boys, and certain animals that had wandered into unknown places, confused by storms and the changes in the earth's magnetization—could find their rightful path home. And the moon, too. The moon had been made smaller by God so it would not rival the sun, because God thought that two queens could not share a crown, Dr. B. had said. One day God would return the moon to its rightful size.

Dolly looked flushed when I returned with Graham. Graham pulled up a chair and ordered another drink. “You littered the beach,” Dolly told him.

“Glass turns back to sand,” Graham said.

“Oh, please,” she said, and then a stranger reached around and started kissing her, tugging on her necklace. It made me mad that she was smiling. She drifted across the room like a ribbon in his arms, and I didn't see her again all night.

I brought Graham home that night, filled with the anticipation of impossible things, floating skyscrapers, and white strawberries that never ripened. I had called my sister, who said she'd left with the guy she'd met. She was at his apartment, and they were going for a night swim. I said I was worried about her. She said I should worry about myself; she was fine.

Graham's eyes were rimmed with red. I gave him the ninety-nine-cent tour of my apartment on the beach, the Murphy bed that pulled out of the wall, the walk-in closet that housed my guitar and a futon for Dolly's rare visits, and the pink-tiled bathroom with its glorious claw-foot bathtub like the one my mother had loved so well.

We sat on my porch. He crossed his long legs, his black boots resting on the railing. Hands folded behind his head, he leaned back and glanced at the sky. I'd never ever seen such a pomegranate of stars. He was from an island off the northern coast
of Scotland, loved the ocean, everything about it. Loved to fish. Love to swim. Had never married. Had come close twice, and didn't regret anything. Was friends with his exes. Feared birds, but didn't know why. This seemed backwards to me.

“Are you a good swimmer?” he asked.

“Not in real life. Is that important to you?” I asked, and imagined taillights receding into the darkness. He held my gaze, his green eyes warming. I felt my cheeks flush and had to look away. He reached out, his hand resting for a moment on my thigh.

“I'm not going to sleep with you,” I said.

“I didn't ask.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Loneliness,” he said, looking straight at me.

 

GRAHAM WANDERED THROUGH my apartment on that first night, touching everything, my guitar, the snow globe of the strawberry that Dolly had given me, and my palm tree curtains, the last memento of the old motel. In the lunar glow of the full moon, his skin was pale, glistening, would always be moist and warm, and smooth, his body covered by a layer of downy hair, I would discover, but for the whiskers on his face. Something was different about him, different from other men I'd known. I could feel it even then. As I listened to his stories, I became keenly aware of what I had always known, that a woman could love herself into anything. She could tell herself to see things from a new angle, to get a fresh perspective, to step away from the situation, but it was just a reprieve from what she knew in her gut. That first night and after, Graham's world reached into the darkest, deepest parts of my mind. If he spent most of his time out there in the ocean, wouldn't it make sense that some of the fury and roar of that ocean would return with him and pour into me? His body was large, his shoulders wide, and his stance wider. Yet he moved with precision. I watched as he
peered at the one photograph on my wall, a black-and-white of my mother. He took an extraordinary amount of time examining it, tracing its outline with his fingers.

I kept my walls intentionally bare but for that one image. Somehow it seemed right that it would be only her. In the picture, she is sitting on top of our car with her almanac in her lap and her guitar at her feet. She had signed her name, fancy, in red pen, “For Ruthie, from your favorite mother.”

I told him the story of The Most Beautiful Lady in the World, about the little boy who had lost and found her. Why else would my mother have told me this story other than to teach me how to see her?

“All mothers will fail their daughters.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because a mother is her daughter's first love,” he said.

 

HE ASKED IF he could teach me to swim. I didn't answer, and I appreciated that he let this go. Graham was tender with me in his own way, in a way I needed and in a way that no one else understood. He was always unshaven, but that was part of the attraction, too. I stared at him from the other end of the couch, my legs tucked underneath me, the afghan around my shoulders.

“Do you like me?” he whispered, tugging on the blue fringe.

“I've never brought a man home from a bar before,” I told him.

“Well, how is it so far?” He could always make me smile.

I leaned over and kissed him. He pulled me on top of him, and we continued to kiss. It was in brushstrokes, mostly, in whispers, our lips drifting together and apart, over and around the shape of shadows, just that way for hours. We slept and woke easily, lying there on the carpeting. He transported me with descriptions of old Viking ships off the coast of Scotland, deserted stone beaches, frigid gray waters, tall
Stone Age monuments that reached into blue skies. I imagined the lush green hills, craggy rocks, and resplendent stone cathedrals that rose up from the mountains he spoke of. A box of colored pencils, which I sometimes used while Mrs. Green painted, spilled from his hands. In blues and greens, he sketched a scene of waterhorses that haunted the coast of Scotland, ridden by the Finmen, territorial creatures that cut the fishing lines of mortal fishermen and rowed invisible boats from Orkney to Norway in just seven strokes. I taped it to the refrigerator.