The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  If you wish it so, you can capture most things, interrupting their cycles. If you watch yourself healing, you may prevent the healing from occurring. How, then, to move on? Everyone you ask will mention the word “forward.” Moons move forward in cycles. They are effortless, as automatic as breathing.

  Each month, when I was growing up, a new full moon always waited. This was my mother’s gift to me. This was the constant I didn’t see. It was the only thing that was still faithful, its rabid changeability still finding me wherever I was and leading me not to a new promised land, but to the land I’d already been promised.

  Sister Zora got to the fire first, dousing it with the garden hose. Sister Mary warned Dolly never to see her boyfriend again. He had, after one of their fights, taken a stack of newspapers and lit it on fire near the front door. The wind had blown it into the tree. Sister made her an amulet of protection to wear around her neck, a wood carving of Lilith, the seductress from the Bible, with swirling hair and a fire between her legs, who refused to be subservient to Adam and was called “demon.”

  MY PREGNANCY WAS confirmed three weeks after the violation.

  The nuns moved me through pregnancy, pressing me not to talk about it with anyone but my sister. Dolly bought me a snow globe with a strawberry inside, so I would think of Felix, a nice memory. She never mentioned my child, as though she didn’t want to cause me pain. I obsessively thought about what the baby would do when it was six months, one year, five years old. I bought baby books and read them in secret. I stayed away from the girls who smoked, forcing clean air into my lungs. I planted a small garden and grew herbs and carrots, things that were easy for me to care for.

  I stared out at the burnt tree in the yard, hoping it would come back to life. I prayed for it.

  One day, I asked Sister Mary if I could become a nun. I meant it.

  She said it was only right, out of respect for my mother and our Jewish ancestry, that I look into something else. At that time they needed nurses in Long Beach, so Sister Mary advised me to become a nurse. “Strawberries are Sister Elizabeth’s favorite food,” she told me. And then she thanked me.

  “So you’ll be able to come back and take care of her and the rest of the nuns when they’re old,” said Dolly. “In fact, why don’t you just stay here forever and become a nun?”

  “I asked.”

  It was because Sister Mary knew that I had been born for caretaking. I had pulled Sister Elizabeth out of a puddle of her own feces the week before. I had been at the Long Beach Swap Meet all day, and when I returned, I found her trapped on the floor in the back bathroom, her blue nylon pants tangled around her ankles. She had remained there, soiled, unable to move, unable or unwilling to call for help, for an entire day. “I’m your friend,” I said, touching her shoulder. There wasn’t a thing anyone could tell me about her that would make me turn away from her. Her eyes pleaded with me. “I’m going to help you. Don’t be embarrassed.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “You have helped me, you know. More than I can say,” I told her.

  She nodded; she trusted me. I bathed her and then helped her slip into a warm flannel nightgown. As I pulled a blanket around her shoulders, she leaned in and kissed me on the mouth. I let her.

  I said nothing. I, like my mother, was for everyone.

  And yet I would have to learn to keep myself.

  That night, I heated up a rice-and-beans dinner the cook had left in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator. I lit two white candles, washed a handful of strawberries, and set out dinner. I spent the evening with Sister, reading to her from her Bible. When I tucked her into bed, I hummed her Shalom Rav. My mother had never sung me a lullaby, but I sang it in a way I imagined a mother would. I sang it as softly as I could, to both Sister Elizabeth and my unborn child. I wondered, could this be the soul that had been waiting for me all this time? I didn’t recognize it, though I struggled to. Sister Mary walked by. She backtracked and slid my mother’s blond guitar over the threshold.

  I sat on the edge of Sister Elizabeth’s bed, letting my fingers find the chords my mother had played. I pressed my fingers into the strings along the bridge, and I picked through the strings as my mother had.

  Sister Elizabeth smiled. Beautiful teeth.

  I tucked her into bed and said goodbye.

  Months later, on a cold May morning, I felt contractions and was whisked off to the hospital. There was little discussion but for a short nominal warning from Sister Mary, who, with the help of a lawyer, had already located a deserving family “in the Midwest” that wanted a healthy white infant.

  Healthy. White. Infant.

  But I would keep my baby. I hadn’t planned on giving it up. Now, loaded up with a healthy potion of anesthesia, along with painkillers afterward, I remembered virtually nothing of what happened during my labor or after. The pregnancy had been an apparition. The whole thing happened as if in a dream. No one spoke of it after my child was taken, just as I was gaining consciousness. The nuns and doctor didn’t want to know how I felt, and so I began to scream. My job had been to grow a healthy baby inside me.

  In all the years I was at the Home, I would watch three other girls do the same. Dolly questioned why the nuns looked away from our tight T-shirts and long bare legs that stretched from under our miniskirts before we’d sneak out to drink beer and meet boys. The nuns handled our wild ways with a strange mix of freedom and admonishment because they were hopeless against us. Against girls like us.

  I was told never to think of that baby as a person, for if I did, I would never be able to move on, Sister Mary said. My life had stopped for six months in the in-between place until I delivered my child prematurely. Only Sister Elizabeth had met me there, for she lived in the threshold. Now I understood.

  I never learned the gender of my child. Some time after the birth, I sat on the porch, listening to the women’s voices rising in a chorus from the bougainvillea. It had begun again, or perhaps the sound was coming from my lips, or from the crowded apartments down the street. I was sore and groggy. Dolly ordered me into bed, but I couldn’t move. I was held there by the singing and crying, and the way those petals appeared such a soft blue in the moonlight; they looked like my baby’s skin. I had caught a glimpse of it the second before it was whisked away. I didn’t hear a single cry, not at first. But a moment later, maybe it was there. Just a small cry, like the sound of a kitten trapped in a tree.

  A beckoning.

  They thought it wouldn’t matter to me anyway whether the baby was a boy or a girl. It was over. When I asked, I was told that if I continued to ask questions, I’d be sent to a foster home far away from my sister. Suddenly, Sister Mary didn’t want to hear my voice. But I continued to ask. I was different now, no longer threatened by abandonment. Sister Zora whispered to me it was time I had a relationship with myself. It was important not to let myself down. I had to know I could be my own protector.

  Dolly overheard one of the other girls say that my child had been stillborn. I had dreamed of flying among blue petals falling everywhere as trees tumbled off the side of a mountain. Above me, there was a red sun. Dolly grabbed me, waking me, catching me before I jumped.

  After the swelling went down, they tried to pretend that it had never happened. A few days later, I snuck off to the local cemetery. I covered myself in wet leaves and mud, beside a small fresh unmarked grave.

  THE SISTERS PRAYED me through the recovery.

  Still sore, I walked across the cold marble foyer and glanced up at archangel Michael, wondering if my life had just begun or if it should end. I dabbed at my bloodshot blue eyes and told myself never to forget. And yet, how could I? I’d wake up twice a night, peeling the thin soaked fabric of my nightgown from my breasts.

  Years later, I’d see a child, big-boned like me, with a shock of bright red hair like mine, and I’d have to keep myself from running after it and tapping it on the shoulder. Of course I was told my medical file was closed, then lost. It was be
st to forget. For a long time, maybe years, I couldn’t forget the pallor of my baby’s skin. I had memorized the sound of my baby’s first cry. A woman never forgets that. All these years later, the gulls that flocked to the beach on Belmont Shore reminded me of that sound, for in their calls I heard an infant crying. Perhaps that’s why I would return, so I wouldn’t forget.

  I LIVED AT the Home for two more years. It was hard for me to be still. I couldn’t bear it.

  There were always more girls waiting. I couldn’t even name them. One would go; another would take her place. Then the same morning ritual, an introduction that everyone would soon forget. Don’t touch my barrettes. That’s my favorite pen. I like to be called by my nickname. Please don’t talk to me in the morning. I like to do my homework while listening to the radio. Sherri, Maria, Madeleine, LaVerne. Hello. Goodbye. Shalom. God forgives you. There but for the grace of God go I, go you. We were interchangeable. I understood that now, as one does with the perspective of time. I succumbed to Dolly. I was bereft.

  I dreamed of the ocean pooling in my footsteps. I dreamed of flying, while in the midst of the flames.

  AFTER SHUTTING OUR bedroom door at night, Dolly and I waited until everyone was asleep before we crept out the back by the kitchen. We snuck into bars with fake IDs that she had made using the laminating machine in Sister Mary’s office. We were hungry, alive again. We jumped on our bikes and pedaled furiously through the rain, burning past glorious sunsets at dusk as the huge white flamingos dipped into the oily ground. When the colored lights glowed across the floating skyscrapers beyond the marina, we cased the bars, where the air was heavy with the scent of beer and Old Spice cologne. We sometimes hurt ourselves, sat in cars with boys we didn’t know, sometimes hated ourselves.

  We suffered under judgmental glares, withstood the word “slut.” I had already ruined my only chance at a first time.

  We drank whiskey and smoked Marlboro Lights and danced on tables. We licked our lips and we shook our hips to “Purple Rain,” and we tried to forget our past, all the people we had been. We fell and got up again. Mostly, we tried to ignore the fact that there was no future waiting for us.

  Dolly had it in her mind that she would become someone, one day. She talked about becoming a social worker so that she could protect girls like us. In the midst of self-destruction, she was thinking about protection, much like our mother had. The dichotomy.

  Each time Dolly traveled across the border to “take care of things,” she swore she’d stay away from men. She never did. She told me I was smarter than she was, and to think about college, too. But by this point, I had become too anxious to sit in a classroom all day. Work was the only thing that settled me. Helping people was the only time I could feel my own presence in the world, and I knew that space had to be walked through before I could safely become a part of everything. Maybe I didn’t want to. Not yet.

  Memories crept back and asserted themselves into my life without warning, reminding me I was once a person who was raised by books. Thoreau. Shakespeare. Even the Farmer’s Almanac. I looked at the moon and asked my mother to tell me her stories. As far as I knew, the box of old almanacs was still in the storage room at the Twin Palms. We hadn’t retrieved it before we left. Bits and pieces of those pages fell across my eyes, images I put together. I could decode them one day.

  I preferred to keep moving because I didn’t have to think. Besides, Dolly and I had no money and no guidance, and neither of us knew what we could become.

  The nuns could not bother with girls once they left for good. It wasn’t their fault. Too many girls needed a place. A herd of young women waited by the fence of bougainvillea, craving everything, needing as much as we did.

  The nuns could not risk the whole for one girl. That’s why Sister Mary slipped a bus ticket into Dolly’s hand along with a pile of $20 bills. She had found Dolly’s boyfriend’s note threatening to burn down the Home unless Dolly spoke to him.

  Sister Mary told Dolly not to look back, not even at me.

  Heads bowed. Hands folded in laps after the decision had been made. “You’ll see it’s better this way. You girls need time away from each other. How will you each discover who you really are?” Sister Mary asked me.

  Dolly called me a few days later.

  “I’m in San Diego. I’ll send you a bus ticket as soon as I can. I promise. Remember, outlaws. I love you, Moose.”

  “I’m not your responsibility.” I blew her a kiss after hanging up the phone.

  AT EIGHTEEN, I left the nuns and forgot all I knew, and I married a man who didn’t know me. A district attorney, sitting by a pond in a park. To him, I was a trophy, a collection of body parts that looked good together despite being disparate pieces. He told me I was beautiful. I had grown to my full five-foot-eleven, and my hair reached to my waist. On my wedding day, the day on which I was to marry the man I thought would give me a new life, I poured my body into a tight white chenille dress I had purchased at a thrift shop during a Halloween sale, pinned up my hair in a bun, threaded some baby’s breath through my curls, and slipped on flat leather sandals so I wouldn’t be taller than my groom. I looked forward to a waltz. But there would be no waltz, my betrothed told me on that day. I bit back the tears, trying not to ruin my eye makeup, a thin blue line blurring beneath my eyelashes, where Dolly brushed her thumb.

  “Poor Ruthie. It must be hard being so damn ugly,” Dolly laughed, trying to cheer me up, her cream-colored pantsuit illuminating her olive skin. She did make me laugh, just for a moment. I noticed how her newly dyed black hair glistened and that her eyes were painted with bright lavender eye shadow that matched her fingernails. A foot shorter than I was, she was now so busty she appeared as if she might tip forward. “You sure you’re ready, Moose?” she asked. She grabbed my hand and ran it through her hair, messing it into tangles.

  My only relative stood up for me. It had been a quick courtship, and it was an even quicker marriage. My shiny new husband with his impressive job would have been our late mother’s pride and joy had he not come home sobbing for his clients and, after a few drinks, toppled the apartment.

  He broke all the kitchen plates, our front door. He said he could beat “the pretty” out of me. According to him, it had never done me a lick of good anyway. What did I ever have to say that was of any value? Was I contributing to society in any meaningful way?

  Standing at the front door after the last time, I drew in my breath. I was nineteen now, and I knew that if I didn’t act, I would end up like Sister Elizabeth, in a wheelchair with a mouth hammered into silence.

  That is why I held a pan of boiling oil in my hands.

  That was the last time he threatened me.

  I put the pan down and turned around. I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt and walked across Artesia Boulevard, through the pouring rain, with $55 in my pocket. I crossed the grass, headed up the main drag to Broadway as water rushed around my ankles. I didn’t look back, even after the storm.

  I MADE A promise to myself on the night I left him. If I ever had a daughter I would raise her to be strong, smart, self-protective. If she wanted to hurry things up, I would make her wait, even though she might not want to or think she needed to. I didn’t care if I had to lock her in her room. I would be strong enough to let her hate me. Even if she shouted and kicked holes in the walls, I would stand firm. I would brace my back against the door. I would push up against the door as each full moon beckoned her, and I’d wait for minutes, hours, days, years, knowing that her mind needed more time to catch up with her body before she let herself get lost.

  I would do all this. This was precisely how crazy I would be.

  I would wave burning bundles of sage around the corners of her bedroom to protect her. I would cover her head with a scarf, hiding her hair.

  Because if she suffered a bad loss, if she was harmed or even harmed herself unintentionally, it could create a condition of colliding events worse than any El Niño. It would create a series of catastroph
es in her life. She could become a woman with empty eyes, a woman who allowed herself to be stolen, again and again, who never protected herself because she had never learned her worth, a woman for whom the ground beneath her feet would easily slip away wherever she stood, leaving her terminally unsure, paralyzed as to where to go next. With no place to call home, she’d always feel lost at sea. She might even become a mother accidentally, if only for a second, one split second.

  It was not too late for me. Nothing was. I still had the promise of my Naida. I knew she was coming. Soon.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eleven

  1986

  IT WASN’T A home that you’d fall in love with. Homes, despite their ability to seep up the spiritual essence of lives, and their tendency to absorb and contain the energy of joy and grief, were just glass, brick, wood, and mortar. They were constructions, welded with nails and glue, like muscle and bone knit together with sinewy straps, according to a plan. No, you didn’t fall in love with a home. You fell in love with the stories you told yourself about what had happened there and what you imagined could happen. Any good realtor would tell you that. Just like any good matchmaker would tell you the same about a soul mate—you didn’t fall in love with him. You fell in love with the stories of who you imagined you’d be when you were with him. The feeling of having dreamed of him long before you met him was like invisible ink written on your skin.

  It was a leap of faith to try and ascertain what good things might be coming into your future if you zigged in X or zagged with Y. Most people trusted “the feeling” they got about certain places, just as they sensed things when they met certain people. Everyday people with no particular inclination toward spiritual things noticed the signs that seemed to thrash across the ether before a big decision was made. Wherever you were, most everyone could agree on the bad omen of a bird flying into a window, breaking its wing.