The Salt God's Daughter (39 page)

Perhaps all this gravity was unnatural. Maybe things were meant to exist in a permanent state of falling. Why else would people have so much trouble staying put? Perhaps some souls existed long before that thunderous boom of creation ever occurred. Perhaps they'd waited patiently, floating like tiny jellyfish through the galaxy, waiting for
the planets to just get on with things already and take form. When certain souls were drawn to Earth, some fell together. You would see it as a meteor shower, as a cluster of tiny stones with wings.

Those people would be your family, those you were meant to come into this life with. Others would become your friends, people you traveled through this lifetime with.

You would appear to be falling. At first, it would seem that way. But you would land gently on Earth as if on the waves. You would touch down only for a lifetime, just a millisecond. Not any longer. Then you would lift off.

If you were a person who'd been left, you would always be surprised when the world rose up to meet you like all those crystalline molecules of water rushing in to fill an empty space. In time, you would thank your lucky stars that somehow, despite your trials, you felt mostly buoyed up, that you were driven by purpose, that somehow, despite the darkness, you could always pull light in, holding it with your fists.

Years later, while walking to the boardwalk with my mother, my arm hooked in hers, I'd gasp at the empty outline of a man lying under a tree. In my mind, I'd picture an upturned baseball cap and soiled clothing. Once, Paulo walked by, holding his small granddaughter on his shoulders, dressed in the blue flannel shirt I'd once picked out for him. That little girl wore such a smile on her face, proud of her grandfather for any number of reasons I could think of. He was the universe.

In time, I would learn about art. I would learn that a painter could capture a leaping trout with a single dash of red paint—a caster's fly.

And yet.

Sometimes a caster's fly was only just paint. Sometimes it did not illuminate everything else, creating a story. A thing, less important than its relativity, most importantly wanted to be seen just for what it was. It was almost impossible to do
this. Sometimes if you closed your eyes you could do it. Or if you looked underwater, sometimes you could also do it.

And yet.

The disruptive and surprising placement of color, the place where value and form converged to place an entire ocean—you did not need to be godlike to capture it. You needed only to be an ordinary girl. You needed only to draw one blue line beneath each eye and go about living your life. The trick had always been in knowing when a dash was just a dash and when it was something more. Would it ever mean what you thought? You would make meaning from things, from symbols and signs. This form would be in languages. In sculptures. In brushstrokes. In words. If you were looking at a young girl especially, you needed to be most gentle about your calculations.

Sometimes that girl with blue eyeliner was just a girl with a crayon, sitting in her bathroom one night, bored, playing with color. She simply liked the way it made the color of her eyes look. She simply thought it was pretty. Everything that tumbled into your mind, all the meaning you made from it, what you thought you knew about her because of it, would be a mistake. My mother had a right to be shocked by what happened to her when she was fifteen. I swore that would not happen to me. I was lucky.

Because of this, my mother had endured too many judgments. Bullied, as I have been. Because of this people said it was fine that things were stolen from her. She was just a girl with a reputation like me. Reputation, the atmosphere around a thing. The ability to see it for what it was, not to derive meaning from it, was critical. It was easy for me to see why my father appealed to her. He didn't judge her. For him that red dash in that painting would have meant only that. It was red. It was triangular. It was flat. Placed in the middle of brown. It meant nothing. Neither did a line of blue.

 

WHAT I SOUGHT was what I was capable of. In time, I'd see that. Just as birds would learn that they would not remain in a permanent state of falling, you didn't have to hide in the skins of animals. No one could steal you. Not you. No matter what you imagined they took. No matter what they had wanted, they wouldn't have you. You were endless, could never be destroyed. You and the ocean, you were the same. This, what was called the Salt God Theory of Creation.

The time you came here was the time you were meant to be here. My place, my time, was now, no matter what my bullies would want me to believe about how I was made, about skin, about what I would become.

 

I REMEMBER STANDING outside Wild Acres a few nights after I'd found out about my father. Three women sat on a blanket by the sea. Dr. B. listened as my mother told a story, my aunt beside her, her legs tucked under her as the waves crashed and the meteor shower silently tore dreams across the night sky. My mother looked up as if she heard something, but it was only the wind spinning glimmers of the last light of day over the waves, taking the bougainvillea petals with it. I remember how the waves unfolded under the pull of the new moon. I remember the sound of her stories—the roar of the ocean, the collision of wind on waves, the hollow strum of a guitar.

It was then I truly saw the future.

The bougainvillea would always come back with abandon.

 

I
NEVER WANTED SECOND sight. It could make me chase my tail. Leave me blind to what was right in front of me. It could capture me. I tried to make sense of things that couldn't be understood, as if trying to weave threads that could not be separated, as if my fingers had become the threads themselves. Never enough dexterity with my fingers. They were raw, clumsy. You can see I was good at saying what I didn't want.

Let me tell you what I did want. I wanted my daughters.

I wanted their freedom.

In the beginning there was music. Ruthie's father taught me to play my first guitar—he gave me his. I called him The Wanderer because he came from a far-off place, a place I could never go. The dust he kicked up because he didn't want to be tied down carried me back and forth across the night skies, across deserts and across the ocean. Certainly this clouded my own emotions, my own gifts, whether anybody saw them or not. That's what I wanted. I was running from it, what stormed inside me like the ocean. Under that moon on the beach, where I first met him, the waves glowed as I took his guitar and felt my first note of peace. I peeled the peace sign from its belly
and stuck it on his forehead. He laughed, though he'd meant I should keep it.

If I told you I was not afraid of the quiet, I'd be lying. I was not used to it. But I wanted very much not to be caught in the storm. I was used to things much more ethereal than love. Love was not my first language. It wasn't elusive, rather the opposite. It was something I didn't see—a thing too tangible, concrete. But I learned it. A thing real, not imagined. Step by step. Bone by bone. Rock by rock. Ladder by ladder. Child by child. I learned its form.

Dalia had come first, from a farmer, a man of the earth who could reach into the soil and grow fruit. Then Ruth, from this Wanderer, a creature of the sea. A man who'd always escape back into the ocean.

And yet, not just a man.

When I tired of running, when I was ready to face my mistakes, I went back there to the place on the beach, finally to see what was there. All I was. And all I was not. I had to recover what we'd left. Sticks, shells, bones to show where the path had been broken.

And that is where The Wanderer found me again.

I wanted to look him in the eye, to stare down his escapabil-ity. To walk it down, as if a curse, an illness, a rogue animal cast out. Begin again, Dagmar told me. Work. Eat. Sleep. I needed to build a life for my girls. A bed they could wake up in. A table they could sit down at. A window they could open. And close. Depending.

We would make curtains. Bread. This, to me, felt like a miracle.

Things would still carry me away. But not as much. No, not as much as they once had.

The Wanderer climbed out of the water, pushing me aside for the last time, his eyes on the old motel covered in vines where I'd made our home. This time he'd brought a skin for my child,
his child. He wanted to take her back to the place I could not go, back to his home in the sea. Over his shoulder I saw the bougainvillea wrestling the moon as the clouds and the sea mist flooded across the rooftops where my little girls slept safely.

He didn't stop. We fought out there in the sea. We fought with fists. With words. We fought with shouts, though no one heard us.

If you ask why I didn't see this coming, I will ask you to imagine looking up at the sky and not being able to see the moon because you are standing on it. I will tell you not to fear the silence—silence is not the absence of noise; it is simply the state of hearing too many stories at once. It must be waited out, so each story can be parceled out, heard. I didn't see things on my own course. For a time I needed a map, books. I tried to make sense of what would always slip away.

On that last night of my life, I wanted to see the flash of my own fire on the waves, to recapture myself from that ocean and its moon, to take back all of my stories and for it to leave me, for once, in peace. Nothing should be kept in cages, and yet people built their own. I had built mine, and it gave me something to put my hands on. Cages made you demand your freedom. Until you didn't need that kind of thing anymore to be free.

When the Salt God let go of me, the moonlight whipped back like a tail flashing against the night sky. It disappeared into the waves, taking the moon and all its stories with it.

Back to the place of the animals. To the place before even them, when there were only stars.

Dagmar and I had promised each other that my girls wouldn't know about my mistakes, my choices, my gift, what I did for love. That was the pact we made. There is strength in numbers. If you are part of a tribe, you band together. My girls would stay together. I never wanted them to know my sacrifice. That was not theirs to carry. I didn't want them to know their difference, either. I loved them the same.

Yes, I loved them, imperfectly.

My girls found me near daybreak sitting in a pocket of shallow water. My body was broken, but I felt enormous strength. I had wanted to simply bask in the silvery sky, to watch the full yellow moon sink into the blue-black, and to know that I'd fought for another person, and had won. My last fight had been for love, something real, not imagined. In the end, The Wanderer, Ruth's father, would go. The moon and its stories would fade. My girls would wake up together, and would remain together, side by side, their language one of stories. I used to tell them that nothing in life would ever be as permanent as the words on the page, certainly not the moon, which always changed, certainly not human beings, with their shifting thoughts and their swirling feelings, with their smoke signals, their stories, and their threats of silence and their secrets. Then, I knew I was wrong. I'd become recognizable. When I stopped running.

I made Ruth promise me she would be a better mother than I was. I saw that a child teaches its mother what no one else can. I think this was what we were all doing here together to begin with.

Dagmar would call this the Mother Theory of Creation.

I had given Ruth back her freedom. Devotion, she already knew. Devotion and freedom, they could coexist. But I never had to teach Ruth that. For her, that was instinct.

That morning, as I rested in the waves, I looked out at the sky.
I was here
, I thought.
No more stories
.

Like the waves, my girls came.

A girl. Just a girl. Then, another.

M
Y GRATITUDE FIRST to my family—to my husband and my three children, without whose love and support it simply wouldn't have been possible to write this book.

My thanks to some extraordinary people: Caroline Leavitt, Joyce Maynard, Louisa Paushter, Marlene Lang, and a fabulous librarian called Retro Doll. For their expertise, thank you to Judi Feldman; Julie Glovin, LICSW; Jessie Pelton, MS, PA-C; and Nancy Kaplan of Temple Kerem Shalom. Lifelong friend and Belmont Shore resident Suzanne Shaheen made California feel like home all over again. To Tracy Winn, Emily Rubin, and the Concord Women Writers, all my thanks for the friendship and wisdom. For research matters related to syndactyly, thanks to Dr. Joseph Upton, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston. I appreciate the Long Beach Fire Department, the Long Beach Marine Institute, and the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault for their research and support.

There are some decisions in life that you just know are right. Not long ago, I put this book in the hands of my talented editor, Dan Smetanka, and never looked back. My thanks to Dan and
the fine folks at Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press for their enthusiasm and support of me and this book. And to Sally Wofford-Girand, as always.

Finally, thank you to my wonderful father, Raymond Ruby, for the lucky angel.

The Salt God's Daughter
copyright © 2012 Ilie Ruby

 

All rights reserved
under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

 

eISBN : 978-1-593-76490-6

 

 

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