The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  Homes, like certain people, would be blamed, too: That place was bad luck; I’d never live in a townhouse again; I had to move and change my life.

  Some places were so magnetic and full of energies that they drew the same people back, again and again. What you had in common with these people, you could rarely put into words, but you knew you shared something: inescapability. If you were like Dolly and me, who’d lived on the road for stretches at a time, you might think of your first real home as the beginning of your real life. That’s why I returned to the old motel on the beach, despite my lingering fears. I remembered it as a safe house, a communal space, a spiderweb by the sea that trapped wanderers for their own good. Somehow I knew it would still be there. And then, there it was.

  With no one around, I tipped my head back and opened my mouth, letting the rain wash over my face, staring up at the dark blue and then at the bright blue door. The weathered salmon stucco still had clusters of bougainvillea spilling across its walls. The vines, I would soon see, hid the loneliness, the monotony, and the ache of the aged with their lush petals as they climbed across the rooftops, across buildings and telephone wires. Gulls still flocked to the beach, and in their calls I still heard an infant crying, a parachute of sound floating above everything. A signal of my return. I’d been running for years.

  Dr. Brownstein threw her arms around me when I walked into the lobby. I hadn’t expected such an outpouring of emotion. I forced myself to relax in the scent of her Charlie perfume. This was the way a mother would welcome a daughter. I wanted to drink in every last bit of maternal love that I’d missed. I closed my eyes in the soft pillow of her embrace.

  THE TWIN PALMS had become a retirement home, now called Wild Acres. I got to know each one of the residents: Mr. Takahashi, whom I’d met a long time ago, and Mrs. Green. Dr. B., as I now called Dr. Brownstein, began to call me “kinder.” Her hands trembled, but her eyes were hooded with the same powdery blue eye shadow. The night I’d arrived, she’d opened the snack machine in the lobby, telling me to take whatever I wanted. “Come, child. Tell me everything.” She’d smiled and then pretended not to notice how quickly I ate. Her tanned skin. Her leathery hands. Her failing eyesight. The smell of her perfume. The moonstone in her hand as she handed it to me. All were familiar.

  “If you’re like your mother, you have a unique combination of skills,” she said. I could fix a leaky faucet in seconds flat. I had large, stony hands. My mother had shown me everything. This would prepare me for her residents, the likes of which I had never seen. She wiped her eyes with a lace handkerchief when she told me her daughter, Sasha, had divorced Sam. All Sasha wanted was a nice vacation, my mother had said.

  By the time we moved permanently to the Twin Palms, Sasha and Sam had moved to Rochester to work for Xerox.

  “She liked your mother an awful lot. Said your mother was the reason she got to go to Hawaii. But that’s a story for another time. She blessed me, your mother did. Hard worker. There’s been no one that I could trust as much as her. I only ever gave her a key. Do you know that? In all this time, only your mother.”

  She now had a new parakeet, Tick Tock, the third. But this bird could swear in Yiddish, bleating out, “Kush mir in tuchas” at random times, making everyone smile. She kept him in the lobby, next to a couch and coffee table, where the residents could be entertained, often falling asleep watching the bird.

  Wild Acres was true to its new name, full of mood swings. The residents suffered from varying degrees of dementia and aching bodies. Dr. B. provided a safe home for them, for their memories shifted like Teutonic plates underneath the surface of daily life. This was a dwelling built for transitory things—memories, spirits, last chances caught in the threshold of this plane and the next. For Mrs. Green, the sight of a fishing net washed up on the beach invoked an image of a rash on a screaming baby’s chest, the sandpaper burn of scarlet fever under the child’s arms. For Mr. Takahashi, the sadness of a good book ending could recall the heavy rains that wiped out an entire field of strawberries in minutes, or the memory of Pearl Harbor, when he happened to go onto shore for a date, unknowing that his ship and all eighty-one men in his division would be lost within hours.

  I would come to understand trembling hands that reached over balconies as if to catch lost lovers from falling. I would find tissue paper covered in lipstick kisses and blown over the sand, or handwritten notes on napkins placed in Coke bottles and buried. I would rehang drapes that were tugged down daily to be washed with sunlight.

  The first paragraph of a letter would be repeated three times, and we’d find half-eaten sandwiches, a birdcage left open, a faucet running, the wrong pair of shoes, no shoes. I adored Dr. B. for taking people in. But it wasn’t just charity. She felt this was her purpose. Lives must be driven by something, she said. My mother had rewarded Dr. B.’s goodness with friendship and a reprieve so that she could spend time with Sasha.

  “Be forewarned,” Dr. B. told me. “They like to travel.” On many nights throughout the halls of Wild Acres, I might find residents in the corridors, disturbed by the full moons, collecting blankets and leaving them in different sections of the hallway and on the fire escape. Their only wish: to be told, “You exist. Go back to sleep.” Sometimes being in the wrong place was the only place people would see you.

  Mr. Takahashi would appear in the crook of the magnolia trees, in the back of the ice cream truck, discovered and driven back home by Paulo, the ice cream man. He’d show up on the side of the highway five miles away. No one ever saw him leave. I’d find him most of the time. And the others, too. Some, like Mrs. Green, had to be caught as if by a net. I would find her racing into the waves with a suitcase in hand, calling to her husband who was dying of cancer and had just been moved to a nearby hospice, though Dr. B. took her there each morning, when he was most lucid. In her mind, she was always late to meet him. When I spoke to her, she listened. She trusted me. There might be value here, I thought. In me. They valued me.

  “Everybody wants to be found,” Dr. B. said when I asked whether Mr. Takahashi was really trying to escape.

  But of all the things they had lost and found, their slippers meant the most. Outside of each green door, there was a dark rubber mat for slippers—faux-fur pink slip-ons, slipper boots with soft lining you could wear outside the house, knit slipper socks with leather soles sewn in, soft moccasins with beads. Slippers were coveted by gift-toting guests, by relatives looking to exchange guilt for comfort. Cold arthritic feet could ruin Mrs. Green’s day, could make it impossible for her to stand at her easel and paint, or to rake the gray shag carpeting so that all the piles fell in the same direction. Tying a shoe could ruin Dr. B.’s back for weeks. Despite the traction of rubber grips, steps were still misplaced. People fell on the sidewalk. Tripped in the kitchen. There were broken hips, bandaged foreheads, pieces of bloodstained gauze that flitted amid the crushed shells in the parking lot, caught up in the chaos by the winds that followed the ambulances back to the emergency room at any time of day or night.

  “I’ll do a good job,” I told Dr. B.

  “Ruthie, I know you will. I have absolutely no doubt about it.” I already knew I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  I had been anxious to see our old apartment. On my first day of work at Wild Acres, I recognized Mr. Takahashi standing in the hallway, though he didn’t recognize me. Lou, as Dr. B. called him, was bald now. His face was creased, his skin mottled. His dark eyes were the same, and he hunched over and talked too close to my face so that I could smell the coffee and mints on his breath. Dr. B. said he had come here years ago looking for my mother, but we’d been long gone by then. “We get ten calls a day from people looking to place their parents,” she said. “I can’t take everybody, and even now I have too many. He was one of the first. I told him he could visit room 21. I’ve never seen a man break down like he did that day. He didn’t want to leave. What could I do when his son asked if we’d take him?” The place where my mother once lived he
ld more meaning for him than the farm he’d built up for decades. “His son runs the farm now. You know, Lou never talks of strawberries. Talks of everything but. Anyhow, of course we always have fresh strawberries. They subsidize us.”

  I noticed his wrinkled white shirt, briefly recalling my discomfort at seeing him touch my mother. Despite all her dating, he was the only man I’d ever seen touch my mother in that way. “Mr. Takahashi, do you remember me? We picked strawberries at your farm. You were very kind,” I lied.

  “There was that one summer, Diana. We didn’t eat or go out much. Where have you put my door?”

  I glanced at Dr. B. “I think he remembers you,” she whispered.

  “I had to hide who I was. They’d have never let me serve. One day, a great bird flew up from the water, lifting right off the waves. We didn’t expect that one or the rest that flew over. Torpedoes. I was supposed to be in my battle station in the radio shack.”

  “You were lucky, Lou. You had a lucky angel,” said Dr. B., taking his arm. She turned to me. “We need to paint the doors different colors. They get confused by all the green. Maybe you could start with that, Ruthie. Come inside—see, he likes his brown chair.” I followed her into his apartment.

  “I remember you, Ruthie,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “You’re a looker, just like your mother.”

  “You caught a white croaker off the pier,” said Dr. B., trying to impose a memory to get him off his current track. “The pier was all lit up with lights. A million tiny lights on strings across both sides at night.”

  “Not anymore. They shut it down early because of the vagrants.”

  “I caught a sand shark and threw it back,” I said, to assert my place.

  He nodded, but I could tell he was far away. Dr. B. pointed to his door. “The one with the bells.” She said his hearing was going. She’d wrapped a bell collar around the door handle to alert him when someone was coming in. I asked if I could fluff his pillow. I made a show of it. I wanted to offer something, to begin to become a part of things. “Yes, yes, that would be fine,” he said. “That’s my Diana. Her picture is on the wall there. What a beauty.”

  I stared at the photograph of my mother, with the signature “For my favorite farmer. Love, Diana.” It had been taken on our day at his strawberry farm in Oxnard. Dolly, dressed in blue shorts, gathered herself in my mother’s skirt. My mother stood next to Mr. Takahashi. Dressed in his signature pressed white button-down shirt, he had his arms around my mother’s waist and was staring at the camera with a suspicious half smile. Dolly looked so small, her hands on her hips, her knees knobby above high white tube socks striped blue at the top. I remember talking to Felix by the side of the truck when one of the workers took out his camera.

  “Did I tell you my son has a boat? What has Fay Green done with my slippers?” Mr. Takahashi asked, turning to Dr. B.

  In the future, he would tell me bits and pieces of my mother’s life, the reasons she had done what she had. Every life, it seemed, was just a domino stream of past lives, which is why a person’s life was not a predictable curve upward. Life was a jagged line. That’s why when you looked back, you’d often think, That was another life entirely. Or I was a different person then. Because, in fact, you were. Certain cells in the body died every day. More than half of the neurons formed in the embryonic state would die before birth, which possibly meant that you’d had months of memories that you couldn’t access. Certain things, like memories, could feel like the only things that linked you to the many selves you had been. If you were like Mr. Takahashi, caught on the Teutonic plates of your past, you might cling to your strongest memory of love to ground yourself.

  It was hard to believe my mother had so many other lives. It bothered me to think of her life as so full at one time, and then empty for long after. What had she done to deserve that? Had she just given up? I thought of Mrs. Green. Every Friday night at sundown, we’d sit in the courtyard near the small palm tree that we’d rescued from a demolition site. Mrs. Green would say the prayer over the wine, the kiddush. Dr. B. would say the blessing over the bread, HaMotzi, and tear off a piece of challah and pass it around our makeshift shtetl. Though Dr. B. wouldn’t categorize herself and Mrs. Green leaned somewhere between Reform and Conservative, this cobbled-together version of Judaism created a perfect harmony. Making the Sabbath made me incredibly wistful for what I never had, and yet there was the pull of roots and the promise of rest, a time to receive the bride of the Sabbath, the Shekhinah, who would flourish in the ease of kindred spirits, Dr. B. said. Mrs. Green seemed so comfortable leading the prayers; it was hard to reconcile her strength with the shadowy figment that rushed into the waves with a suitcase. The mind, it seemed, was a trolley, its doors opening and closing at different stops, and too easily trapped at some. “Fay, you’ve outdone yourself again,” Dr. B. would tell her over the dinner that she’d cooked for us, chicken soup with matzo balls and fresh challah. After, I’d sit on her plastic-covered couch, calmed and reassured as I listened to their voices.

  “We used to go to the supper clubs,” said Mr. Takahashi. “It’s where I met Diana. She’d lied about her age, but she wasn’t too jolly. We’d find oil on the birds some days on the beach, Diana and I. Not anymore. You know Pearl Harbor was a fight over oil? They don’t tell you that. I’d swim in a red tide anytime. All these lip flappers crying about hives and headaches. It’s just algae,” he said.

  In the months that followed, Mr. Takahashi would convince me that I had never really known my mother. She had been running from something, but from what? It made my hands ache to think about all that happened to her, that we could have happened to her. “I’ve given up my life for you girls. I’ve sacrificed everything,” I remembered her saying. And yet, perhaps her life might have ended up this way, too, even if she hadn’t had us. Perhaps the blueprint of a life remained the same even if the place and people were different.

  Within weeks, I found myself interjected into the narrative, the comfort section, I called it. “Ruthie is the one who fluffs my favorite pillow and leaves it for me. That’s what I like. Every day while I’m on my morning walk. Redhead. Always has a smile. She makes lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches and cuts off the crust. Strong. Can lift my chair. Doesn’t flap her lips. Why doesn’t a pretty girl like Ruthie have a husband?”

  As time passed, I learned Mr. Takahashi’s likes and dislikes, as well as those of Mrs. Green. She made wonderful challah on Friday mornings, and she preferred overcast days to sunshine. She loved to paint, loved chicken soup, and soft-boiled eggs with the whites scraped out and mixed with salt. Mr. Takahashi liked his things arranged just so and could get out of sorts if something was moved. He loved ice cream, vanilla, and his navy slippers. I fell into a routine surprisingly easily, grateful to be needed again. I wrapped Mrs. Green’s thin gray hair in warm oil-coated towels to condition it. I massaged Mr. Takahashi’s hands. I visited and I chatted. I fished rings from drains and delivered and charted medication, counting out pills. We played Rummikub and took walks, telling stories. Dr. B. had been doing most of the caretaking, and she was tired. She needed to be taken care of, too. I knew a person could starve from lack of touch. There had been times during my marriage when I was so alone, with Dolly in San Diego. I’d go to the Mane Attraction hair salon just to have Theresa, the owner, put her soft hands on me. Theresa would wash my hair and tell me all about her grandchildren. I’d sit in a chair covered in torn red vinyl as if it were a throne and drink Sanka out of a Styrofoam cup as if it were a silver goblet. For forty-five minutes, I would watch General Hospital without sound, along with the other women sitting under hair dryers and staring at the black-and-white television bolted in the corner. I would listen to the soft lilt of Theresa’s voice as she spoke to me as if I were someone.

  Touch was the beginning of life and the cataclysm. I could give someone back a connection to the rest of the world.

  “It’s an uncommon gift that you have with the aged and infirm,” Dr. B. told me afte
r my first week. “I watch you anchor a spirit into a body when it has other plans. Your mother called it a ‘passion for compassion.’ That’s what she said about you,” she said.

  “She said that?”

  “Of course, child. Didn’t she ever say it to you?”

  The tears that once accumulated inside me had become empathetic pools.

  Happiness was like an escaped wheelbarrow rolling down a hill. You needed to control it, to tie it with a rope and to pull it along with you. It was the one thing I knew how to do well, hold on to that rope for people who’d lost their grip. I’d had enough practice.

  My ex-husband had tried to tear it from me. In time, I forgot the way he’d stare at me without blinking. Yet I’d always recall how it was all about getting up and walking away. Then, it was just a matter of how many seconds it would take me to reach the open window, to open the cupboard and stick my head in, to take deep breaths in the backyard as I hung laundry. This is how I lived for a year, pressing my mettle between my lips. I became a very still and very quiet person. By the time I was nineteen, I knew how easily a person could falter under a stillborn sky, even when she had once been independent and strong. Yes, that was another life, and I was another person then.

  Many times abandoned, I now spent my life trying to hold on to people.

  Wild Acres was my transition, my threshold of invisibility. I still donned a baseball cap and sunglasses, my hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, adequate camouflage. I’d gotten so good at disappearing that I thought nothing of spending my days cleaning, taking the residents on walks, helping Dr. B. with paperwork, buying groceries and extra pairs of slippers. In those days, you weren’t expected to be more than a shadow if you weren’t in love.