The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  “Where were you girls?” she asked in a rare moment of maternal angst, tapping a crinkled cigarette pack with her foot.

  “Getting ice cream,” Dolly lied. “Down on Second Street.”

  “Just remember,” said my mother, “I was worried. Next time, why don’t you invite me? I’ll buy you a cone. Maybe we could spend more time together.”

  I WAS ALREADY far away from her. On weekends, my mother slept or worked. Dolly and I made our way across the sand to the shops near the marina, passing the women in bikinis, who danced backward on roller skates. They looked so carefree, like the world followed their every spin, a world that Dolly and I were only beginning to dream of.

  DOLLY AND I grew more daring. We’d walk along the beach all the way to the Queen Mary, but we’d never go in. We couldn’t be satisfied with safety, though. Our favorite activity was bicycling in the dark.

  My mother had met a nice guy; an old boyfriend from another past life had come back to town. She met up with him almost every night throughout her summer of love, 1980. We didn’t meet him. We didn’t miss her anymore.

  I had dreamed of flying. But now I was doing it.

  We loved the way our hair would blow in the wind as we sailed down the streets under a moonlit sky. I loved the feeling of flying, the only danger being the errant piles of sand that could appear on the sidewalks, especially at the turns. We’d lift our feet and sail over the bumps in the road. We’d ride through the streets of Belmont Shore at dusk, when the eclipsed things might have come out. Perhaps we were one of them, I thought. No one ever stopped us or crashed into us. It was because we had become invisible, hanging out in the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Maybe we had always been. People faded away from us, Dr. Brownstein among them. She was traveling, my mother said, enjoying her life on a pleasure cruise. Or visiting her daughter. That was what one did when one earned the right to enjoy life.

  As always, we ran home from school to catch Luke and Laura, who had run off on an adventure to save the world. We lived vicariously through them. At this point, I was thirteen and Dolly fifteen. They were almost the only thing we knew of love.

  We never met my mother’s new-old boyfriend. By the time we asked, they were over. She went to see him one last time. She didn’t return.

  Early the next morning, as we were getting ready for school, Dolly spotted her. We had been up most of the night waiting and worrying. “She’s back!” Dolly cried. I tore through the sand. My mother was sitting in the surf without shoes, her long black hair strewn across her shoulders, her face pale, streaked with mascara. Her low-cut Danskin dress was torn at the shoulder, soaked. She seemed lost, unable to move, letting the waves foam up around her, her hands fluttering at her sides like tiny fins.

  She had a bruise on her neck, which made her wince when I tried to reach for her. “Mom! It’s us!” Dolly cried, holding her face. She looked at us with bleary eyes. As the waves splashed up foam, pooling in tiny circles, we lifted her. We walked her back inside, her feet scraping along the sand. I asked what had happened, but she just shook her head, and I grew quiet, noticing the mustard-green edge of morning beyond the palms. She just needed to sleep, she said. I kissed her on the cheek, and she wished me a good day and slipped underneath a pile of blankets, shivering. She had been swimming in the ocean for hours, she confessed.

  We stayed by her side that next afternoon, noticing she had not moved. We skipped school the next day and tried to nurse her back to health. But she didn’t get better. The last guest had checked out of the motel. We had already turned the sign to FULL OCCUPANCY so no one would bother us.

  “What should we do?” asked Dolly.

  “Don’t make her mad,” I said. There was no one we could go to. Dr. Brownstein was gone, and my mother was incredibly secretive and didn’t want anyone to know what was going on, for fear they would take us away from her. Dolly and I took turns running to the corner to buy her Canada Dry ginger ale and saltines. I played the guitar at her bedside, singing Shalom Rav and songs from Fiddler on the Roof, as Dolly held my mother’s feet and gave her a massage.

  My mother refused any calls from her admirers. We didn’t hear from the new-old boyfriend. She trembled in her bed, fighting bouts of fever. I changed her sheets, listening to her labored breathing and the rattle of the ocean inside her lungs. Outside the wind spun turrets across the waves and howled so loudly it filled the apartment with an empty sound that made me shiver.

  “What if she dies?” I asked Dolly the next night, sitting on the carpet, my back pressed up to the bathroom door. Dolly was inside, silent. She had been pulling her hair out in secret but leaving it everywhere. A tiny bald patch had appeared at the back of her head.

  “Don’t talk like that! It’s bad luck. Go away!” she yelled through the door.

  When Dolly came out, I pulled a blanket over my knees.

  “You’re blocking me. Will you move out of the way?”

  “Not until you do something.”

  “She’s not sick from the red tide, dummy. It’s called withdrawal from whiskey.”

  I no longer noticed the smell of it on her breath, I had become so used to it. I looked down at Dolly’s feet, noticing her purple painted toenails. There was dark red hair on the bathroom floor separated from a pile of red nail polish peels. I tried not to stare and moved out of the way.

  The next morning, several Belmont Shore residents, while putting out their trash, saw a green station wagon driving itself out of the Twin Palms Motel parking lot, no one at the wheel. They watched the car wavering to the right and the left, stopping abruptly in front of Ripples Dance Club for no apparent reason, before it eventually turned left on E. Ocean Boulevard, then right, and then disappeared. I was at the wheel, set on a pilgrimage to get our mother Robitussin, Triaminic syrup, and a box of Benadryl that we assumed would restore her to health.

  “You’ll be fine, right?” I asked my mother.

  “Of course,” she whispered. “I’m an outlaw.”

  I grabbed her almanac, which I had brought in from the car. “What page?”

  “What’s the moon doing?” she said, barely able to keep her eyes open. “What’s it say?”

  I opened the almanac and began to read. “It says this month is the Health Moon.”

  “Apple doesn’t fall far. You’re a liar just like your mother,” she said. “Now you’ll understand why I lied to you girls all these years. It was always for a good reason.”

  I understood her stories of the moon.

  MY MOTHER LAY in a hospital bed for eighteen hours, her face as pale as the sheer hospital curtains, her voice only a whisper. Her cold had turned into pneumonia. She now had an oxygen mask on her face and an IV stuck in her arm. Next to her bed, a small monitor blinked and beeped, flashing with red lights and numbers. She could barely open her eyes, and no one but us knew she had already given up. I stayed by her side, counting her every breath. Dolly wandered in and out, preferring to hedge in the doorway or give the silent treatment to the hospital social worker in the waiting room.

  When the nurse left for a moment, my mother pushed up her oxygen mask and reached for my hand. “You’re my favorite,” she said. She had never spoken so kindly to me. I looked around for Dolly; surely my mother was speaking to her.

  “Mom, it’s me. It’s Ruthie.”

  “You’re the one with the red hair, right?” she said, forcing a smile.

  “We both have red hair,” I said.

  “Well, then, it’s a win-win.” She was now more lucid than I had seen her in months. “Thirty-six years. It’s enough. Your sister, not so tough. Take care of her,” she said, her eyes moving from my face to the bedside table. “You’re a good girl, Ruthie. I wanted you to be that way. I’ll see you sometime,” she said, drifting off. Her eyelids fluttered, and I bent down to hear her better. I listened to my mother’s breathing, a gurgling sound. I watched the fall of her chest, each time doubting another breath would follow. When I called for help, two nurs
es pushed into the room. They gruffly put the oxygen mask back on my mother’s face. The social worker took my hand.

  When the doctor walked into the waiting room and motioned to the social worker, I got up from my chair. Standing in my blue jean shorts and fringed blue tank top, I peed myself. Someone mentioned a do-no-resuscitate order, and Dolly fell on the floor. The social worker said that our next of kin had been called and she was on her way.

  The lights flickered. The ribbon of grief caught me around my ankles, making it impossible to walk. The room darkened. I could focus only on the bright globe in the ceiling.

  Now, we were the motherless daughters I’d always believed us to be. But this was different. We finally felt her presence. My mother had been here.

  “WHICH ONE OF you ladies plays the guitar?”

  A giant of a nun with bright blue eyes burst into the waiting room. She was wearing a scarf, with a black sweater and slacks. “Is it you, Ruthie? Or maybe you, Dolly? My, the last time we met you were only little things.” Her voice trailed off when she met my eyes. “Ruthie. I’d never forget your red curly hair.”

  I had little recollection of this old nun, but as I looked into her eyes, I thought I saw hope there. She put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay if you don’t remember me. I’m Sister Mary. I was a friend of your mother’s. Everything is going to be fine now. Let’s get you a change of clothes, shall we? We have lots of clothes for girls your age.”

  Sister Mary firmly took my hand, and Dolly’s, as we turned to leave. Dolly sloughed off Sister’s hand on the way out, but my grip remained firm, unwilling to let go. I hardly noticed the eclipse, the threshold that I knew my mother had somehow been waiting for, the in-between place necessary for an escape. How else could she get out of this life and call it a coincidence?

  Chapter Eight

  November 1980

  THE BEAVER MOON signaled a time to set traps to ensure warmth for the coming winter. The story fit well into my mother’s formula—which I wouldn’t understand until years later—which was to combine deep-seated neglect with stunning moments of maternal protection. It was this dichotomy that she hoped would protect us. It made it confusing for everyone, most of all Dolly and me. Years before, my mother had made sure we’d be cared for in the event that anything happened to her. She had once begged Sister Mary to take us in, knowing that we would need warmth in the winter.

  Years before, Sister had given us a medallion of St. Augustine. She had talked to my mother for an hour as Dolly and I waited in the foyer, knees tucked to our chests, staring up at two large golden angels on the gilded mirror. “They’re meshugenah,” Dolly had whispered.

  On an inordinately humid November day, Dolly and I walked through the heavy wooden doors of the Bethesda Home for Young Girls in Long Beach, a privately funded residential home run by three nuns. “Bethesda” meant “house of mercy.” But the secret was that we were the ones offering mercy. The nuns needed us as much as we needed them. The Home was fenced in by fuchsia bougainvillea bushes with the hugest blossoms I had ever seen. I fixated on the succulent petals, naming them. Afterglow, I thought to myself, oddly calm given the weight of loss I felt. I preferred not to feel, instead focusing on how these flowers forced open their petals. I recognized the heavy bloomer with little foliage that climbed thirstily along the fence of this strangely familiar place that would be our new home.

  Dolly and I held hands in the foyer, staring at the mirror with the two angels sculpted into the frame. I now recognized archangel Michael, who looked down on us ominously with wings outstretched, waving a sword of protection. And next to him, archangel Gabriel, holding a bouquet of lilies, a symbol of purity, chastity, and innocence.

  I remembered these angels from before.

  After the shooting at the Twin Palms, our mother had frantically rushed in, thinking this a church, and begged Sister Mary to take us, just temporarily. Though Sister refused—the home was not equipped for little girls—she talked with my mother. It was on that day that my mother wrote up guardianship papers. Sister Mary, when she heard we had no family to speak of, promised to be “next of kin” and to keep us together if anything should happen to my mother. From that day forward, we belonged to a nun we would not meet for the next several years. My mother never updated the papers. Sister Mary never imagined that the overwhelmed young mother with the crazy sea lion story would take her up on an offer made wholly in haste and purely out of sympathy.

  “They need serious help,” Dolly whispered.

  “Where to begin?” I whispered. Dolly smiled through her tears, sobbing then into her arm. I willed myself not to cry.

  This group of three nuns were peculiar-looking, foreign creatures that smiled, lips pursed. Next to Sister Mary, Sister Zora stood with folded hands, wearing a hand-size leather bag around her neck—a hippie nun. “Welcome,” she said. Sister Elizabeth, who sat in a wheelchair, never smiled. I noticed that the style here seemed to be to smile without ever showing any teeth. Sister Mary waved her fingers as she spoke about the rules of the Home.

  “We’re Jewish. We can’t live in a church,” Dolly said, as Sister Mary led us from room to room.

  “This is a home. Our home. God’s home. And now your home, too.”

  Crucifixes hung askew on every wall on brown flowered wallpaper that peeled up in the corners, revealing chipped patches of color, aqua in some rooms, peach in others.

  “Should we tell them about our ancestors?” I asked Dolly. I could picture them rolling over in their graves, all of them, Ruth and Daniel, now my mother. Under the kitchen cabinets, canisters of flour, sugar, and different-shaped macaroni lined the gold-flecked Formica countertop. Amid the crowded mess, there were baskets of bread and crackers, bowls of overripe bananas, strawberries, and mangoes. There were other ingredients I didn’t recognize, jars filled with angelica root, crushed lavender, and chunks of brown-red rock called dragon’s blood. Labels had been pasted across the glass, with smeared blue handwriting. The kitchen had no garbage disposal, and the windows were so dirty it was hard to see anything through them but blurry shapes.

  “How soon before we get out of here?” asked Dolly, hiding a banana and two mangoes in the back of her underwear drawer. Habits from our previous lives on the road remained.

  I did my homework, read ahead as many pages as I could, and after dinner, I’d curl up in my twin bed under a pile of quilts, staring out the small glazed window at what I knew to be the full moon, hoping it would finally deem me worthy, despite the fact that I no longer believed. I no longer kept a stone in my pocket. I wished for the belief I had once had. I wished for an aching memory. I felt nothing. I cared for no one.

  The nuns taught us to do the waltz. They made sure we had clean clothes to wear to school and that we kept our hair in tight braids, though we unwound them as soon as we sat down on the bus. Though we were too old for them, we packed our Partridge Family lunch boxes full with cans of V8, bananas, hummus with carrots, and turkey-and-bean-sprout sandwiches. The Fritos and TV dinners of our past were gone.

  There was one small television in Sister Zora’s room. I would see her sneaking in there to watch her favorite programs. I got her hooked on General Hospital. Sister Mary warned that nothing good could come of TV, but it was all we wanted. I took Sister Zora to movies, to Kristy McNichol and Tatum O’Neal’s Little Darlings, about two fifteen-year-old girls who make a bet to see who will lose her virginity first.

  Dolly had told her it was just about two girls who go off to camp. Sister Zora nearly died when she saw it. We took her to see Blue Lagoon, with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins, a story of two teenagers stranded together on an island. It was a beautiful story of first love. Sister had fallen for the same trick twice, thinking that it was a Disney movie. Our mother had let us run free, and yet here we were being corrupted by those who knew nothing about corruption.

  “I miss Mom,” I said to Dolly one morning, as we sat at the table eating cinnamon oatmeal with six other girls.
It almost didn’t matter. I never spoke to them, unless directed by the nuns to do so. I spoke mostly to Dolly, and usually only in our bedroom at night when the drapes covered the moon, eclipsing the light.

  Dolly shook her head no. “Don’t you know what ‘do not resuscitate’ means? How can you miss a person who didn’t even want to be with you?” She flipped her hair back, digging into her oatmeal.

  Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night, my sister was not in her bed. I’d get up and look for her. I’d find her curled up on the floor—in the library, in the kitchen, or on the marble floor in the foyer, as though she had been searching for our mother in her sleep. On the night she began menstruating, Dolly locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed, deep sobs that finally let out her grief. It was quick, and it eased my mind. It had been a long time coming.

  “WE’ D LIKE IT very much if you young ladies would cut your hair,” Sister Mary said one day. We stood in her office, bathed in the blue haze of the stained-glass window. “And the swearing has to stop. In Jewish or English.”

  “Jewish is not a language. Hebrew is. We don’t speak it. But we can swear in Yiddish, from the old country. Our women never cut their hair.” Dolly took my arm and pulled me out of the office.

  “I’ll cut my hair. I don’t care; do you really care this much?”

  “Sister Mary is full of shit, Ruthie,” Dolly said later. “Do you trust someone who moves her lips when she prays but never makes a sound? Doesn’t she believe what she is saying to God?”

  “What are you saying to God?” I asked. “I don’t know why you always have to fight everything, anyway.”

  “Well, you don’t fight for anything. Why do you always give in so quickly? You didn’t fight for Mom.”