The Sweetness of Salt

by Cecilia Galante

  Sophie shrugged. She took a long drag of her cigarette and then tilted her head back, letting it stream out again from between her lips. “I don’t know why I acted like that either. Eddie treated me like a princess. And I just…” She paused as a shiver ran across her shoulders. “I don’t know. I couldn’t stand it. It didn’t feel right, being treated well like that. I didn’t deserve it.”

  “Why?” I was incredulous. “What did you ever do to not deserve being loved?”

  Sophie looked over at me all of a sudden. Her eyes were shiny, the bottoms rimmed with tears. She took another brusque drag of her cigarette and then brushed off the front of her overalls. “Who knows?” Her voice had changed completely. It was callous now, annoyed. “I mean, who knows why people do anything they do, right?”

  You do, I wanted to say.

  You know why, Sophie.

  “Was it because of what happened?” I asked. “With Maggie?”

  Sophie shrugged. “Oh God. You can blame everything on your childhood these days, can’t you? I mean, I don’t know. Maybe a little. Mostly I think I was just an angry, unhappy person about everything back then. And I took it out on everyone else because I didn’t know what to do with it. Poor Eddie got the worst of it.”

  “We did too,” I said softly. “It wasn’t just Eddie you were mean to. It was all of us. At home.”

  Sophie stared at me for a few weighted seconds. Then she blinked. She stood up, took one last drag of her cigarette and threw it in the toilet. I looked straight ahead as she walked out, listened as the heavy thump of her boots against the floor got fainter and fainter down the hallway. Had I actually thought my sister was going to apologize for her behavior back then? Did I want her to? Would it change anything?

  I slid all the way underwater then, staring up at the ceiling through the sheet of warm liquid until I had to come back up for air. I did it once more. And then again. The fourth time I went under, I opened my mouth and let out a yell. Just a little one. Enough so that bubbles came out of my mouth and I could hear the warped sound reverberating in my ears. I came up for air, gasping. And then I took a deep breath and went under once more. This time, I blocked my ears, squeezed my eyes shut, and screamed until I ran out of air.

  chapter

  41

  “What was your mom like?” I was over at Aiden’s again. It was a quiet afternoon, the air cool and windy. He was working on a new piece, something small, almost fully formed.

  Next to Aiden’s eye, a tiny muscle moved. “Well,” he said after a moment. “She was an artist.”

  “Really? A potter, like you?”

  He shook his head. “No, she painted. Watercolors, mostly. Some oils. She had a studio down in Manchester where she sold a lot of her work. We have a few framed ones in the house still. Dad put them up after she died. She’d never let us hang any of her stuff when she was around. She hated looking at her work.”

  “Why?”

  Aiden shrugged. He was up on his feet now, one hand submerged into the cavity of the clay, the other guiding it from the outside. The inside was getting wider and wider by the second. It looked like a vase, but I knew that with just a slight shift of his hand, it could turn into anything.

  “I think a lot of artists are like that,” he said. “My mom had a friend who was an author. Hell of a good writer. I read all his stuff, and I’m not even a reader. Anyway, we had him over for dinner one night and he told us that he’s never read one of his books all the way through. Not one. When I asked him why, he said he just couldn’t bring himself to do it; that he knew he’d find a million spots in the book where he should’ve done this or should’ve said that. It’d drive him crazy to see all the mistakes he’d made, mistakes that he couldn’t do anything about anymore.” He shrugged. “I think Mom was the same way.”

  “Wow,” I said softly. “If I was that good at something, I can’t imagine never wanting to look at it again.”

  “Well, that’s what happens when you’re a perfectionist, I guess,” Aiden said. “Nothing’s ever really good enough. And if nothing’s ever good enough, then what’s the point of looking at it, right?”

  I kept my eyes on the vase—or pot, or whatever it was. The piece was much bigger than I originally thought it would be. Aiden had started off with a lump of clay the size of a fist, but it had transformed into nearly double its size. “She was really fun too,” he said suddenly. “She had this weird kind of laugh—sort of like a giggle that would go up real high and then come back down again. It made you laugh, just hearing it.”

  “Did you guys do things together? Just you and her?”

  He nodded. “She loved the quad. When I was little, she took me all over the place on it. Then when I learned how to drive it, I’d take her. She’d put her arms around me and hold on real tight and say, ‘Take us to the moon, Aiden. Go on, take us to the moon.’”

  “The moon?”

  He smiled. “It was just her way of telling me to go wherever I wanted. As far as I wanted.”

  “Did you ever get lost?”

  He nodded. “God, lots of times. That was the best part.”

  “Why?”

  He sat back down slowly, still angling his fingers along the inside of the piece. “Who wants to know where they’re going all the time? That’s boring. When you get lost, you see things you never knew were there in the first place.”

  The wheel was slowing down. Aiden’s fingers slowed with it, tapping the sides gently until it came to a complete stop. My eyes widened as I stared at the perfect little bowl—no bigger around than an orange. “It’s so cute!” I said. “But what’re you going to eat out of that? It’s so small!”

  “It’s not for eating,” Aiden said. “It’s a different kind of bowl. For something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll see.” He looked at it for a moment, and then leaned in and touched the rim again, very lightly, with the pad of his index finger. “There,” he said. “Perfect.”

  Aiden put the tiny bowl on a shelf next to another bowl and a small vase. “This is where I leave everything to dry,” he explained. “It takes a few days.” He walked over to what looked like a large black canister in the corner of the patio and checked a tiny thermometer attached to one side. “This is the kiln. There’s a vase in there I’m firing.” He picked up a small bowl and dipped his fingers into it. “And now that it’s reached 1660 degrees, I can salt glaze it.”

  “What’s that?”

  Aiden held up the bowl. “Watch.” He pinched a small amount of salt between his fingers and deposited it through a hole at the top of the kiln. There were actually many holes along the rim, tiny rectangular openings, and Aiden moved from one to the next, sprinkling fingerfuls of salt through them. “Salt does amazing things to clay,” he said. “The crystals actually explode when they hit the heat, and then turn into a vapor. It’s the vapor that transforms the look of the clay.”

  “How?” I asked. “What’s it do?”

  “It makes the clay glossy, and the surface gets this sort of orange-peel texture. But the really cool thing about salt glazing is that no two pieces ever look the same. Each one is completely unique, depending on how much or how little salt you use.”

  “Who taught you how to do all this?” I asked.

  Aiden shrugged. “My mom got me lessons when I was about twelve. That was where I learned all the basics.”

  “So…” I paused. “I mean, did they tell you you should be a potter?”

  Aiden looked at me curiously. “Tell me to be a potter?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, did they see that you were good at it and tell you that that’s what you should do?”

  Aiden’s face took on a blank quality. “They encouraged me to do it. But they didn’t tell me that I should be a potter.” He laughed. “Actually, though, I made it easy for them. After I found pottery, I didn’t want to do anything else.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Di
d you ever try anything else?”

  “You mean like accounting?” Aiden grinned.

  I shrugged. “Anything.”

  “No,” he said. “But I didn’t have to. Pottery’s my thing. It’s always been my thing.” He paused. “How about you? You have a thing?”

  School. Being smart. Grades. Or maybe—possibly—drawing.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” he repeated. “It ain’t your thing if you say maybe.”

  How were you supposed to know? Apparently I didn’t possess that gut-feeling thing that Zoe did. So how did it work? Was someone going to show up eventually and tell me? “Julia Anderson, your thing is law.” Or, “Julia Anderson, your thing is sketching.”

  “Okay,” Aiden said. “I’ll bite. What is it?”

  I stared at the orangish blue flames behind the tiny peepholes of the kiln. “Well, I’m majoring in prelaw. In college, I mean.”

  “So law’s your thing, then?”

  “Yeah.” And then, “I mean no. No. It’s not.”

  Aiden looked over at me.

  “No.” My voice was firmer. “No. It’s definitely not.”

  “So you’re doing it because…” Aiden gestured with his hand, indicating that I should go on.

  I looked over Aiden’s head at the trees, raised like a green arch behind him. A large shadow on the right obscured most of the leaves, but on the left, where the sun was bright, I could see them perfectly. Some hung limp and flat; others were curled over slightly, just at the tips, like shy little girls.

  “Julia?” Aiden’s voice was soft.

  “I don’t know.” I lowered my eyes so I was looking at Aiden again. “I honestly don’t know anymore.”

  chapter

  42

  It rained the next two days—a steady, heavy rain that turned most of Main Street into one giant puddle, and saturated the rest of the ground into a muddy, squishy layer. With her repeated trips to the Rutland bank—which took a good amount of time—along with her trip to get roofing tile, and now the rain forcing us to work inside, Sophie was hell-bent on picking up the lag.

  We concentrated on the front room, which was by far the most time-consuming. Most mornings were spent on our hands and knees, sanding ourselves into oblivion. In the afternoons, we spread drop cloths over the floor and got to work painting. Sophie had chosen a pomegranate red for the walls, with cream trim around the edges. The color looked putrid in the can, but as we began to spread swaths of it over the walls, I stood back, surprised. It was gorgeous.

  I was about two-thirds of the way done with my wall when Sophie leaned over and turned down the radio. She had splotches of red paint on her nose and a hole in the knee of her overalls. “I just thought of something,” she said.

  “What?”

  “About Maggie. Well, about Dad, really. Back in Milford. Before you came along.”

  I could feel my shoulders tense slightly as I dipped my brush back into the vat of paint. “Okay.”

  Sophie coated the wall in front of her for a few seconds and then reloaded the roller, working the excess off along the ridges of the paint tray.

  “His practice was struggling,” she said. “And I guess to cope with that, he started drinking. A lot. Beer mostly. He might’ve drunk other stuff, but I don’t know. And it wasn’t a regular thing. The refrigerator might just be a refrigerator for weeks at a time, which meant that things were okay. And then other days when I’d open it, looking for a piece of string cheese or an orange, I’d see the stacks of blue and white cans lined up on the left side, neat as could be. It was always a Friday night when the cans appeared, and they were always, always gone by Monday morning.” She wrinkled her forehead, remembering. “One time, I counted the whole mess of ’em. There were thirty-six.” She shook her head, as if the number still amazed her. “He would drink thirty-six cans in a single weekend. That’s a case and a half of beer.”

  The only cans I had ever seen in the refrigerator growing up were Diet Coke and the occasional Slim-Fast, when Mom was trying to lose a few pounds. There were never any surprises when I opened the refrigerator; the shelves were always filled with hamburger and green grapes, bottled water, eggs, salad greens, and orange juice. Sometimes, if Mom had cooked the night before, there would be leftovers, carefully wrapped in foil, stacked like little pyramids on one side. No blue and white cans. Ever.

  “What was he like when he drank?” I asked.

  “What was he like?” Sophie repeated my question carefully, as if she had to reach back and retrieve the memory from an old, dusty place without disturbing anything else around it. “Drunk, obviously. But not always the same kind of drunk. Sometimes he’d just sleep. Other times he’d sit on the sofa for the whole weekend, without moving, and just stare at the television. He wouldn’t even get dressed. He was there physically, but the rest of him was gone. Completely gone.”

  I’d never once seen Dad inactive. If he wasn’t at work, he was out in the yard or hammering something in the upstairs bathroom or installing a new light fixture above the kitchen sink. He’d built the deck that led out into our backyard one summer, and he had transformed the basement into a finished room, complete with carpeting, new wallpaper, and furniture. At night, if he felt restless, he took a walk. And not just around the block. Sometimes he would be gone for hours, walking for miles, returning only when the sky had darkened and the moon had settled itself in for the night.

  “Mom made herself scarce whenever he got like that,” Sophie continued, “and she’d take Maggie and me with her. We’d go to the mall or the movies, eat lunch at some dumpy restaurant, and then go shopping some more. We’d sometimes be gone the whole day. At night, we’d tiptoe back inside the house as quietly as we could. Mom always slept with me on those nights. Always. I figured things out eventually, but before I did, whenever I’d ask her what was wrong with Dad, she’d just say something like ‘He’s not feeling well. We just need to leave him alone right now.’”

  Sophie turned around again and began to drag the paintbrush over the wall.

  “Sometimes, though, we didn’t leave. Sometimes we stayed home, and the two of them would argue. It’s funny. I never heard or saw them argue about anything else, ever. It was only when the blue cans came into the house.” She paused, leaning back to examine her work. “You know, he hurt her once. During one of those arguments.”

  I lay the paintbrush down on the drop cloth next to my shoe. Tiny pinpoints of heat bloomed along my neck. My hands, which continued to quiver, had turned icy cold. Muscles I did not know I had—in my shoulders, my stomach, my throat—constricted themselves into tiny, tight knots.

  “Hurt her?” I repeated.

  “It was before Maggie came,” Sophie said. “I saw the whole thing, because I used to hide behind the couch when they fought. Part of me really believed that I could jump out and make them stop whenever I wanted to. And another part of me was just scared. They were so fucking loud and they said such horrible things to each other—words I’d never heard of, but could just tell, by the way their faces looked, that they were mean, you know? Hateful.”

  I’d witnessed a few of Mom and Dad’s arguments growing up, but they were so infrequent that I could barely remember them. Once or twice they had bickered at the dinner table, but neither of them had raised their voice, and no one had uttered a curse word. In fact, the only times I’d ever heard them really disagree with one another was when I was in bed and they were in their bedroom—and even then, they made it a point to keep their voices hushed. Strained, but hushed.

  “Anyway,” Sophie continued, “they were in the living room and Mom was following Dad around, bugging him about the blue cans. She kept poking him in the back for some reason, because he wouldn’t turn around, he wouldn’t acknowledge her. And all of a sudden he just turned and shoved her. With both hands. Right in the middle of her chest. Mom flew back—I remember she was actually airborne for a second or two—and then she hit the corner of the cof
fee table in the middle of the room.” Sophie reached up with her fingers and pressed them against her left ear. “She hit the side of her head, right here…”

  I stood up quickly, and then steadied myself as the room began to sway around me. “Jules?” Sophie asked. Her voice was far away.

  “I need some air.” I forced my legs to walk out of the room and concentrated on steadying my hand so I could turn the doorknob. The rain was coming down in sheets, but I stepped out anyway, shutting my eyes against the torrent, taking short, shaky breaths. A loud buzzing noise sounded somewhere inside my head. The cold drops pelting my eyelids and my cheeks stung like pieces of ice, but I lifted my face up and did not turn away.

  Once, in tenth grade, I had come back from studying at the library and heard Mom and Dad talking upstairs. They weren’t yelling, but their voices were loud enough that I stopped in my tracks, listening.

  “If I could take it back, I would, Arlene. You know I would.”

  “I don’t want you to take it back.” Mom was crying. “I want you to make it right!”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Dad’s voice was pleading. “What do you want me to do?”

  Mom cried harder. “I don’t know.”

  I could hear Sophie behind me, somewhere in the roar of the rain. “Jules?” Her arm encircled my shoulders. “Jules? Come back inside. It’s okay. We’ll take a break. Get you dried—”

  “That’s why she wears the hearing aid, isn’t it?”

  Sophie’s arm went limp. “Yes,” she whispered.

  I began to walk. My legs moved heavily inside my soaking pants, and water streamed down the length of my hair.

  “Jules!” Sophie called behind me. “Where are you going?”

  I moved forward, walking faster and faster, propelled by a sudden and unknown urgency.

  “Jules! Come back!”

  But I did not go back.

  I did not look back.

  I just kept going, moving toward something in the distance that I could not see.