The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  They were poor. Once on the ship, they crowded into the steerage compartment—below the main deck, used sometimes for cargo. This was the lowest fare. Rarely cleaned, the space was dank and the air thick. Temporary partitions separated the men from the women. Hundreds breathed putrid air from overflowing washrooms. They would try to sleep while the noisy walls vibrated from the steering controls and engines. They would brave their fears of the sea, existing for a time—maybe a month—their nostrils burning from the aroma of orange peels, herring, and disinfectant. They would sing themselves to sleep in narrow bunks, atop canvas mattresses stuffed with seaweed, holding fast to their dream of a new land and the man who would save them in America—a brother to one, a lover to the other.

  Ruth and Daniel’s marriage lasted seventy years, up until her death at eighty-six. Before her burial, he draped his body across her casket and pleaded, “My partner, my partner.” A tear would fall from my mother’s cheek when she retold this part. She had seen it.

  “My grandmother Ruth,” my mother said, “your great-grandmother, got it right, somehow, at fifteen years old. What’s happened to us since?” She said in those days, life was so hard, a husband and wife had to be equal partners. “It sounds dreamy, doesn’t it? To be like that with a man? That’s how it should always be. A partner. Everyone needs a partner. I always dreamed I’d marry a shopkeeper. We’d have a little grocery store together. We’d work all day together, and before closing up shop, we’d dance in the aisles after everyone had gone,” she’d say, staring up at the sky.

  After Ruth arrived in America, she and Daniel were never apart for more than a day until she passed. He had a stroke and died six months after she did.

  My mother said in those days they called it having a stroke. That’s what they said to explain a broken heart.

  RUTH HAD NEVER lost her love of the land, her connection to tobacco, and her fear of the ocean. She passed it all down through cellular memory. That, my mother said, was the reason I clung to land. I had, it seemed, inherited all that my great-grandmother had felt on that ship, how she both hated and needed the ocean to carry her to the love that awaited. It was the only way to get from here to there, across the sea, and so she had to make peace with it, to know it, to breathe it in and let it become a part of her.

  Tobacco calmed me. I liked the burnt scent of it on my fingers. Often, when I’d find a half-smoked cigarette on the ground and if no one was looking, I’d roll it between my thumb and forefinger so that the remaining tobacco spilled out.

  My mother said we all came from the earth. She was reclaiming her roots by connecting to her family this way, through her Farmer’s Almanacs.

  Relationships ruled everything, even in science.

  DEPENDING ON OUR circumstance, my mother said the moon was the child, the sibling, or the spouse of the earth. If the weather was uncooperative, she said the moon was Earth’s child. When moonlight helped us navigate our path and find extra work, she said the moon and Earth were siblings, formed at the same time out of a whirlpool of swirling materials in the solar system. Whenever there was a spurned lover in my mother’s life, or if she had fallen prey to one, she made mention of the Marriage Theory, which asserted that somewhere else in the solar system, the moon was formed, but it was pulled into Earth’s atmosphere by Earth’s seductive gravity and then captured. The latter was a sexist theory of planetary creation, my mother said, telling us too much and never enough.

  She didn’t hate men, just what they did sometimes, but also what some women would do to other women.

  Since we were all made from the same material, I imagined there was a piece of moon and earth in us. Everything was, in effect, connected to everything else. It followed, then, that men and women, adults and children, were more connected than we realized. I didn’t understand why there was always so much distance.

  ONE NIGHT, AS we set up our campsite, my mother made a discovery. The planets were aligning, according to her almanac. “We can pick all night. Heaps of moonlight,” she said, pointing at the large Hunter’s Moon. “I’ve been thinking. If we can just get a little leg up, I’d like to get us a house.” After the incident at the motel, we had realized we needed to make a new plan. Money was not puddling up from the ground. I was barefoot, noticing the soft dirt under my feet and the holes in Dolly’s blue Adidas sneakers, which had come just this way.

  Dolly and I dared not look at each other. A real house, the type she often spoke of, never materialized. Oh, to dream of it, though, of running through the bedrooms and down hallways. We could race from room to room. We would make our beds, keep clothes folded in drawers and leave them there, so that we didn’t have to grab whatever was on the surface of the mess. Perhaps one day clothing would be just for wearing, and not for pillows, tables, and seat cushions.

  With the whole night in front of us and a full moon to give us extra light, we could just keep driving. She wouldn’t say where.

  DAWN ROSE OVER Los Angeles, radiating streaks of orange and pink light from behind the thick clouds as the moon faded. We drove north into Ventura County, past the sand beaches, the white dunes, the deep wetlands, the sparkling creeks, and the Santa Clara River. I rubbed my eyes, trying to push away my fatigue. In the distance, I could see the strawberry fields my mother always spoke of, with their alluring neatness, a grid of alternating rows of long muddy trenches and puffy green plants dotted with tiny white flowers, extending for miles, it seemed. We were nearing Oxnard. It was October 1975, strawberry season, and my mother was of the mindset that if there was work, we would go and worry about sleep later. Dolly and I were fatigued, but after a breakfast of hash browns and egg sandwiches, we felt more human.

  Strawberry picking was hard, our mother had already told us. But we never complained.

  The towns near the coast were blessed with fertile soil and mild onshore breezes, perfect for growing the delicate strawberries, whose skin bruised with the slightest wind, whose tiny white flowers could wither from a single raindrop, and whose berries could grow misshapen when touched by a tiny speck of dust. If a berry was marred in any way, it was less desirable, which meant it was worth little.

  The Takahashi Strawberry Ranch was located in the western part of the Oxnard Plain and had the best strawberries in California, according to my mother. “La fruta del Diablo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The fruit of the Devil, because they’re so hard to grow, and even harder to pick. They ruin the spine.”

  We had tried to pick strawberries once before, but an entire crop had been burned in a heat wave.

  My mother explained that each strawberry had to be carefully tended, from flower to fruit. Picking strawberries was an art form. If you were good, they’d keep hiring you back. It required delicate handiwork and a strong back. Strawberry plants, at four or five inches tall, required bending at the waist for many hours, for weeks at a time. I just wanted to keep my hands busy, imagining all the things I could buy if the money were as good as my mother said.

  I thought about a doll I’d seen on television, a Tiffany Taylor fashion doll with a rotating scalp, whose waist-length hair could be changed from white-blond hair parted in the center to brunette hair with bangs, all by rotating her scalp. She wore a gold lamé swimsuit and green mule clogs, and she could change from being a starlet to a librarian if you put her in the attachable green floor-length skirt. The doll had wide-set eyes, real lashes, and a full face of makeup. Dolly and I had been singing the jingle for weeks: “She’s what you want her to be.” It came with a sheet of hairstyle instruction tips.

  I was nine years old, and eager for a chance to become someone else entirely. My mother said that we could each make about $20 a day or more.

  She knew the farmer, Lou, from a past life. Finding reincarnated lovers was possible, she said. They had worked together at a small cannery one summer when she was young, before she abandoned him for the open road. He was a generous guy who had never gotten over her, she said.

&n
bsp; We arrived at 6:00 AM, when the fields were still cool. The green berries would turn from white to red in three days, which is why you had to pick them at just the right time. They wouldn’t ripen once they were picked. Hot sun was bad. Cold was bad. There could be high winds that withered the leaves, and a gray mold called botrytis that could ruin all the berries in a basket. There could be spider mites, too. There were so many things that could go wrong with strawberries, it was amazing that any made it into the basket at all.

  The Takahashis’ ranch grew resilient berries. It was a family business, and my mother said that was important to her, as if it said something about us.

  I had long, agile fingers. I could weave a braid in seconds. I knew how to be delicate. Dolly did not. Finally, I thought. A way for me to prove myself and win my mother’s favor. She wouldn’t leave me if I was indispensible.

  HER BEAUTY HAD something to do with her navigational system. There was something about my mother and men that I could never place. An entire conversation of innuendo would occur in front of me, but I couldn’t understand it. Still, it made things a little easier for my mother. Her resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor may have had something to do with it, I imagined. Because of these conversations, we were able to get into or out of any situation my mother desired. I learned how powerful beauty could be. To be saved from harm or given a break, like the women on General Hospital so often were, all one had to do was look pretty and perhaps talk and laugh a little bit “infectiously,” a word I’d just learned that applied to laughter and not illness. Certainly, the character Brooke knew the language, too. She’d married the same man three times.

  As we pulled up to the strawberry ranch, my mother stopped next to a silver truck. A tall Japanese man in a white button-down shirt and jeans looked up and waved. He was setting up large fans that would remove the field heat from the filled baskets until they were taken to the market. He had small dark eyes, like Dolly’s, and a tanned creased face. Wrinkles shot out from the corners of his eyes when he smiled at my mother. She got out of the car, smoothed her blue jean skirt, and walked toward him in her wedge sandals. I heard her laugh as they embraced, and for a moment, I felt a pang of jealousy. My mother belonged to the world, not just to me. “If only the little birds didn’t swoop down and eat my strawberries,” Lou said, walking toward us. “Remember, you can’t stuff berries into a silo like a wheat farmer does. You need to arrange them neatly so customers will think they look good in the basket. Work carefully, most important thing with strawberries.”

  He looked at Dolly.

  “You, little girl, look like you know all about this. Want to scare away the birds today?” Dolly shook her head no. She’d rather pick berries, she told him. He stared at her, hesitating.

  “She doesn’t mean no,” my mother said, quickly. “Dolly’s my obstinate child. Don’t know where she gets it from. Don’t worry, she’s a team player. She’ll do whatever you want her to do. Won’t you, Dolly?” Dolly nodded. My mother smiled. I noticed how Lou shifted his weight onto his right leg, just as Dolly did.

  He turned his gaze to me. “Look at you. A big, healthy girl. You grow pretty girls, Diana. I always knew you would.”

  “Well, it’s genetic,” my mother said, putting her arm around Dolly’s shoulders protectively.

  “The girls know about the berries? No berries with white or green tips.” We nodded. We were picking for market today, and people cared about the color and shape of the berry. Satisfied, Lou gave my mother a squeeze around her waist, in a way that made me uncomfortable.

  The good thing about farm work, I was coming to see, was that people didn’t ask questions. It wasn’t just single mothers who wanted a job. Men in button-down shirts and cowboy hats gathered near the truck, waiting for picking cards. There were families living alongside the farms in shanties, or sleeping in their cars, like us, ready to work on a second’s notice. Their children ran wild in rumpled, torn clothing, just as we did, and they worked alongside their parents, too. Finally, we were with people like us. Finally, we could stop pretending.

  “That’s what it feels like when you are home. You can stop pretending,” my mother said once.

  A young boy in a ripped green shirt rolled a ball at my foot. He looked about my age. I caught a flicker of fear in his eyes. But I could be trusted.

  “I’m Ruthie,” I said, handing him his ball. I noticed that it had a decal with a picture of Jaws, the shark movie I had wanted to see. My mother had said I was too young for such horror. My sister and I usually ran around with our backpacks, pretending we had been at school all day, and nobody questioned us. It wasn’t the case with Felix. My mother later told me he and his parents were sin papeles, “without papers.”

  “I belong to them,” he said, nodding toward his family, now gathered against a small blue car with missing taillights. A large German shepherd came bounding up to him. Felix smiled, seemingly eager for a playmate. “He’s friendly. Mira—you can pet him.”

  “She’s afraid,” my mother said quickly, putting her arm around me. “That’s okay, honey. You just wait for me here. You’ve had enough problems with animals lately.”

  While my mother followed Mr. Takahashi to the truck for our picking cards, we talked. “Do you even like strawberries?” Felix asked, holding his hand out. He had a large, bright strawberry in his palm. “Go ahead, you should know what you’re picking, how to tell the good ones from the bad.”

  Dolly nudged me. “Take it. Don’t be rude.”

  I picked up the strawberry and bit into it. My tongue curved around the sweet meat, its juice escaping down my chin. Felix and I both laughed.

  “Other strawberries are picked for canneries. They’re watery, or like straw. These are good ones,” he said. I pictured myself dipping strawberries in chocolate, which I’d seen on television once. A man was feeding them to a woman, while picnicking along a river.

  “Your hair, it’s called strawberry blond?” He had a wide face. His black hair was wavy, if not a little long. I imagined us friends. We were so very much alike, I could tell already. I would not have to explain anything to him. Something about him made me relax, even if I did tower over him by a few inches. And he seemed much more interested in being friends with me than with Dolly, which made me a little happy and Dolly a little irritated.

  “She’s only nine, okay?” Dolly whispered loudly to him.

  “I’m nine, too,” said Felix. Dolly put her hands on her hips. He walked away, leaving Dolly and me to gather our picking carts.

  “What did you do that for?” I asked.

  “His parents, I think, are worried about getting caught,” Dolly whispered, as she turned me around. “Lets just hope they have a good day.” Felix had said that the farmer was paying at a piece rate today, which meant that fast, careful workers could make more money by filling as many boxes as possible with the best berries, rather than just getting paid for the number of hours spent picking. “Be careful and you’ll make money,” Felix had said.

  The first thing I thought of was Dolly. We were at that competitive age, both on the brink of adolescence. An air of anxiety hung over the field, as if the morning dew were heavier here than anywhere else on Earth. The workers were anxious to get started, shifting their weight as they eyed the plants like cats stalking their prey. Would there be enough of the best berries to make money? Would Dolly and I each have enough? Enough strawberries, enough kindness, enough of my mother’s favor? How long would the picking last before the skies turned dark and the rain came, turning the field to mud? A storm was coming; I could feel it in my bones.

  I could see Felix on the other side of the field. More children straggled behind his mother, grasping at the hem of her brightly colored skirt. My mother didn’t like the word “illegals,” which she announced when Mr. Takahashi called them that. “Well, my grandparents were Russian Jews. My grandmother hid under the deck of a boat to get here,” she lied. “She arrived in this great country of ours upside down. Home is where you
live, not only where you’re from.”

  I reached up and took her hand, trying to quiet her.

  Mr. Takahashi looked annoyed. He stopped shuffling his pile of picking cards. He could hire and fire workers without explanation. He handed us each a picking card and walked away.

  “Well, shall we, girls?” We joined the rest of the in-betweeners, those for whom this strawberry field was both a haven and a purgatory, the place between homes where some could never leave.

  My palms were sweating. My neck itched underneath the collar of my red sweatshirt. I looked down at the mud. Something jumped up from a leaf, and a perfect ripe strawberry fell out. I decided it had been a frog. If my mother had the moon to conspire with, then I would have the help of my imaginary friends, too. I gazed at the long furrows, at the lines of workers in dark blue shirts and pants, bent over their picking carts, so low that their blue caps almost touched the ground. They looked like gnomes, moving up and down, pulling shoots and runners, tossing rotting strawberries to the side. There were people everywhere. This was good, because I so often felt alone.

  “Hurry,” Dolly announced, standing in the furrow next to mine. She adjusted the green basket.