The Salt God's Daughter (19 page)

In her 1972 almanac, she'd drawn two palm trees and written
El Niño storm—Twin Palms-Sea Lion
.

Her 1975 almanac was the most marked up. She'd drawn a strawberry at the top of October's page, circled and
x'd
out—
Lou's farm
. Following that, she'd written a list, marking what I gathered were her feelings about the divorced almost-husband, when we lived in the in-law apartment. She wrote:

A list of what my Name is Not: Dana, Dara, Danna
. . .
MY NAME IS DIANA
. In the November pages, she'd drawn little Joshua trees, and a note:
Lost in desert. Where is my True North?

And then,
Joshua Tree
.

If the almanac's covers reflected historical events, my mother wove them into her story. She was resourceful. The “1976 Bicentennial Issue” correlated to a man whom she called The Wanderer.
REVOLUTION—The Wanderer—Do not go back to him
.

In 1979, when we were given our one-bedroom apartment, she wrote:
A Room of Her Own
, with a smiling sun.

In 1980:
The Wanderer Returns
. She'd made a fancy in-love
W
inside a heart. What had happened to turn things around? I wondered.

Then, her tiny scribbled note:
“Heads,” he leaves again. “Tails,” he leaves again
.

Followed by:
Good date! When will I see him again
? with tally marks adding up to eighty-nine days, right up to her death that October. The Wanderer was also mentioned in her 1970 almanac, with the words “Santa Monica Pier” and her
drawings of music notes over the symbol for water, three scalloped lines, one beneath another, all in a heart. It appeared she'd been riding the waves of a long, tumultuous love affair.

“Did she keep almanacs from the year I was born?” I asked Dr. B. She said she didn't know; 1966 had probably been lost or destroyed.

 

I LIKED HOW the stiff yellow covers featured wood-engraved black illustrations and lettering. In 1968, it read:
Price 50 Cents
and
Weather Forecasts for All of the USA
. It had a circusy feel, as if designed by Barnum & Bailey. The font was balloonish. There was a small portrait of Benjamin Franklin and, on the right, a portrait of Robert B. Thomas, listed as the almanac's founder.

The main cover design was an oval surrounded by a cornucopia of plants—fruits, grains, grapes, pumpkins, and other foods, along with a farmer's tools. The page was bordered by sheaths of wheat and curling leaves. The title page illustration featured an engraving of Father Time, with angel wings and holding a scythe.

Written along the right-hand side of the 1968 almanac:
Planting Tables, Zodiac Secrets
,
Recipes
,
Etc
. Fifty cents was a small price to pay for a map of the universe, I thought. My mother's circled words, arrows, and wrinkled, marked-up, and worn pages told me more than I had ever thought possible. The full moons—their dates and names—created the map of our lives.

Tonight, there was the Snow Moon.

Parking my bike against the palm tree, I looked around and then wrapped my chain lock through the back wheel and the frame and around the gray trunk.

“Hey, lady,” I heard someone say. There was nothing but the wind in the nearby alley. White feathers scattered across the sidewalk.

I locked up my bike and started to head inside, reaching for my mother's almanac in my purse.

“Lady. Buy a story for a dollar?” said the voice.

A young girl stepped out of the shadows, wearing a red bandanna around her head. Hands planted on her hips, she was no more than twelve, small for her age, with wide brown eyes and glistening dark skin. She wore a tan trench coat, dirty across the sleeves, her sneakers unlaced. I'd seen her before, hanging out at the pier just as Dolly and I had done.

“Call me Eddie, or Edna. What kind of story do you like? I have all kinds—mysteries, fairy tales, anything,” she said, tapping her chin. She smiled, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. A swarm of children on bicycles crowded us. Their black leather jackets reeked of sea air and car exhaust, of nights tucked into the breeze on the beach. They wore necklaces woven with seaweed and copper wire. They held the same sort of fierce determination in their eyes, glazed as if by smoke, by the sort of tumult that seemed too adult and contagious. They'd seen too much of their own futures. Not quite beach rats, not quite city slickers.

Edna sidled up to me, close enough while remaining distant. She leaned in, whispering, “I can stop those kids. You can get me some chili.” I nodded. Edna waved her hand, and the children backed away from us, from my bicycle. She lifted her chin, as if we shared some secret language or were on the same team, connected. Old friends. My mother would have liked her, would have called her an in-betweener. I wondered if she disappeared from school and reappeared two months later, two inches taller, with the same too-tight pants, with the same forced-up shoulders. “It's safe. Don't worry,” Edna assured me about my bicycle. She held open the thick metal door and followed me into the café, into a cacophony of piped-in music, the grill of voices amped up over the espresso machine. She joined me at my usual table near the window,
sitting down heavily on the red velvet seat as I ordered us bowls of chili.

I kept my eyes on the children, their blond hair spun in dreadlocks, their black hair in Afros, their brown hair in stringy brown straw, in auburn curls tufting from underneath bandannas. I could hear the excitement in their voices from all the way in here, over the sound of grinding beans. Laughing and hollering too loud, they kicked up energy everywhere. They broke windows, bones, chain locks on bicycles. They broke away from everything, the sooty beach and the sunlit city streets, their two worlds. I knew they were always hungry. They'd scramble into the street for lit cigarette butts and fill up on smoke, forgetting about food. They slept on the sand and knew the secrets—where the sand still bubbled up with oil, where the blood had been hosed off from the sidewalk, what was said, and what nobody did about it. They started rumors as if setting wildfires. They knew the borders. They could chart the signs in the sky, and they knew about the flurry of white feathers that lifted off the sidewalk, I'd learn. They crowded the sentry palm near the empty lot as if it were a mother hen, its trunk slashed three times with red paint, a symbol of home.

“They're always hunting,” Edna said, her eyes stony, reminding me of Dolly and me and the suspiciousness of childhood—what happens to the eyes at around eight, when the trusting baby becomes the little old person. We'd been thieves, too. Of sneakers, bags of chips, water, love, and whatever else we could find.

She told me first of her parents, how she was their American dream. Edna was the good daughter, she said. Her parents told her she was lucky and smart, and so she grew up lucky and smart. A lucky girl, she'd never believed anything different was possible. She said she once jumped like a cat into a garbage can during a drive-by shooting in front of her house, which her mother said was quick, clever thinking. Born lucky, her mother
said. All she had to do was not do something stupid and ruin her goddamn life.

She had a knack for adding things up—people, knowing what they wanted. She could also add up stacks of bills that poured into her mother's life—receipts, and numbers written and rewritten over miles and miles of paper bags. Adding things up was her hobby, she said.

“I already got you figured out. You want a story? One dollar.”

I placed the money on the table and picked up my mother's almanac, wondering how long Edna would stay. She noticed the cover and her expression changed. Quickly, I put the almanac in my lap under the table and sipped my coffee, watching her relief as she wolfed down her chili. I wondered what Edna would say, and whether her story would have an ending. I remembered how Dolly used to fall asleep with the ripped spiderwebs of stories on her lips. We always fell asleep before the ending came.

Pressing my palms together, I glanced out the window. They tracked a circle around the tree, wolflike. “Those kids. I can't concentrate,” Edna said.

She got up, her coat fluttering open, revealing the lining of stitched pockets that held feathers, army knives, stones. She turned and walked outside with one hand in the air, shooing the children away. She was their leader, she'd tell me after. “You'd better get a better bike lock,” she said, sliding back into her seat. “You ready for your story?”

I nodded. “Go ahead. I have time.”

“Once upon a time, there was a lady who lived by the sea. She was lonely and cried seven tears into the waves. This made a sea animal take notice. The animal came from an island far, far away. He already knew the way here, to Long Beach. He liked the oil islands, him and the rest of his tribe. They would get confused by all the colored lights,” she said, nodding at the window, as if at the THUMS Islands. “It looked like the colored lights in
the sky where he grew up. The animal peeled off his magic skin and came onto land, becoming a man. The lady fell in love with him. But he always went back to his home in the ocean. It made the woman sad. He was gone, but she had his baby and that made her happy again. Just like always, years passed. Then one day the man came back with a new magic skin for the child. He wanted to take his child away forever to a home in the sea. The child was like him, lived in two worlds though she didn't know it.” Edna sat back, satisfied. “How do you like my story so far?”

I was on the edge of my seat. “What was their home like in the sea?”

“An island way up north,” she said, holding up her plate. She gestured above it. “There are no trees. It's rocky, and there's a cold wind there. You feel like you're holding an ice cube in your mouth too long.”

“Do they all have magic skins up there?” I asked, stirring my chili.

She leaned in, holding the plate in front of her chest and gesturing below it. “Only some. Not the birds. Not the fish.”

“Does he come back?” I asked.

She nodded. “Only on the full moon. Only for a few days at a time. Then he has to wait. He might have to wait a month to come back. Maybe a year.”

“But you said he would always come back,” I said, shifting in my seat.

“Yeah. For his kid. To take it away.”

I drew in my breath.

“But the lady fought him every which way to Sunday. A mother will always fight for her kid. He finally went away. Back to the sea. The end.”

“A happy-sad ending.”

She nodded, rubbing her eyes. “I have all kinds of stories.”

I recognized some of the details of Edna's story as being similar to Dr. B.'s story, or what Dolly said about the people who
hide in the skins of animals. I wondered if this was an ocean version of an urban myth, a story passed around by word of mouth.

“I need to get home, Edna. Your story was worth the price.”

As I stood up to leave, the ground shifted.

My coffee spilled across my lap, staining the pages of November 1979, blurring my mother's notes. The floor tipped; everyone started screaming and rushing around. I caught the shock in Edna's eyes, then her fingers gripping the table. Plates clattered to the floor. I grabbed the back of my chair and sat down, covering my head, peeking out beneath my arm. The glass window quivered like a sheet on a clothesline. The string of Christmas lights knocked against the glass. Stacks of cups bumped against the walls behind the coffee machine, toppling over. Edna crouched under the table, along with the others.

Then it all stopped, just as suddenly.

Slowly, Edna climbed back onto her seat. “What a little tease,” she said. She lifted her chin at the window, at the moon behind it, now creeping up behind the palm fronds in the sky as if it, too, had been crouched low. In Edna's yellow-brown eyes, I saw a strange twist of humor, an awareness of her own intelligence, her circumstances, and her desire to play with it, to make something good from it.

“Get a lock that's too much trouble to break,” Edna called after me as my feet kicked a tuft of feathers on my way out. When I got undressed that night, I found a blue moonstone in my jacket pocket.

 

THE NEXT DAY, Mrs. Green told me the trick to seascapes. You had to be disobedient with the clouds. First, you had to learn form and order, but then you could attack. You could thin them with linseed oil, spin those clouds off cliffs. You could forget lines, even forget symbols. Then you could speak
in terms of what really mattered. You could turn those clouds into animals, into buildings, if you wanted.

Nothing was as it appeared. You could meet a thief who wanted to be a storyteller. A sea lion could fall upward into the night just like a young girl, leaving a bunch of drifting feathers.

“I saw him go. Your friend. He's tall. Must be six and a half feet, at least,” Mrs. Green said, catching me off guard. “There was sand in the hallway. I cleaned it up. It was no trouble at all. Boots trap sand in the tread.”

“That won't happen again. He's not coming back,” I said.

“If it's meant to be, it will work itself out. You never can predict love.”

Here she was, assuming love. I could make someone love me, she believed. But what was
meant
to be was a story. This sense of
Right
and
Not Right
was supposed to make you feel better, relieving you of your problem, hopefulness. No one would insist on something that was
Not Right
, as much as they wanted what they wanted.

Mrs. Green was right, though, about what she said.