The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  No one knew it was me.

  They would ward off storms and danger with their flashing dark eyes. They’d watch me as I carried clean sheets and fresh towels from room to room, as I’d climb up and down stairs. Each day, I’d pull sheets from the clothesline strung across the courtyard, peeling nightgowns from the salty air and tucking shirttails into drawers. The residents would check their reflections in the freshly washed windows when they forgot themselves—I gathered the reflections of my people and the Sisters, both at the same time.

  I was not afraid of hard work. I patched holes in the cracked cream-colored walls, steamed the wall-to-wall gray shag in all the apartments. The Sisters grew frenzied when Wild Acres became a revolving door. Too many new people, pieces of furniture, stacks of books, framed photographs, and old records tossed around. The residents—with knotted fingers pressed to their thin white lips—had become my family. I knew them well. I would fill in their words for them when they forgot what they were saying, like sand into canals. They could not get enough of me, even when I wanted to disappear. Each time one of the nighttime “travelers” escaped, they’d trip the new alarm system Dr. B. had installed, which would call me out from hiding. I’d race out at night to capture them.

  They said I was their lucky angel.

  I took Mrs. Green for long walks, her large white hat and sunglasses warding off sunlight. The Sisters retreated into the foam when I set up Mrs. Green’s easel on the beach, watching the swoop and arc of her sable brush across the waves, her gold bangles sliding down her wrists. The Sisters would look up suddenly, as if called by an inaudible voice alerting them to escape. They came and went, always without warning, attuned to their own drumbeats.

  I painted each door a different color so the residents could find their places. Just as she’d done before, Dr. B. put a moonstone in my pocket whenever she thought of it, telling me it was for protection. I never asked against what. I never knew I could paint. I never knew I could stand next to the ocean without wanting to run, without thinking of the desert.

  “Ruthie, you can do anything you can imagine yourself doing,” Dolly told me over the phone.

  “You sound like Mom,” I said, and yet I was grateful.

  With a paintbrush in my hands, I could make things up. I gave Dr. B. a yellow-gold door because she held the lasso that kept people from getting lost. Mr. Takahashi’s door was painted white, to help him sleep. Regal purple for Mrs. Green, because she could forget all she was.

  “Ruthie, I’ve never seen you as happy. Do you know you sing when you paint?” Mrs. Green stood a few feet away as I knelt on a drop cloth in the hallway, clutching a wide thick brush covered with blue paint. “I have a surprise,” she said, the gray feathers of her hair wrapped in a flowing pink scarf. She hooked her arm in mine as we walked out to the beach, her scarf whipping crisply in the wind. My eyes focused forward, concentrating on the gift in front of me.

  Two easels stood, side by side. “Let me have my joy,” she said.

  My cheeks grew flushed. “I don’t even know how to paint.”

  “It’s another language, Ruthie. A fine one, if you can learn it.”

  “What if I’m no good at it?”

  “You have a good teacher,” she said. She would teach me to trust the currents of my own imagination, to navigate my thoughts. She’d teach me to paint wet on wet and wet on dry, both ways of interacting with the paint. When you understood a thing, it gave back to you, could bring you energy though you believed you were expending energy to do it. The paint would fight you unless you understood it, just like the weather. Just like people.

  She’d teach me that the old master painters made calculations about light and shadow. Mathematical. Precise. They added and subtracted depth, she explained.

  “See here, the hairs of these brushes should be stiff and snap back into place,” she said. She had brushes and palette knives in cups. Flats would create sharp edges, and filberts, rounded strokes. Her “favorites” were two size 12’s, two 6’s, and two size 2 small ones. “Do you like it?”

  I nodded. “No one has ever given me anything like this,” I whispered.

  In no time, my kitchen was filled with boxes of paint supplies—rags and turpentine, gesso, and tools. I became a collector of colors—Ultramarine, Viridian, Cadmium Red. Each had a temperament and would take to the canvas differently.

  No matter what, you had to know at what point the paint would refuse you. I worked on my canvases, splashing dabs of crimson, desire; white that kept my secrets; and blue, which deepened into sudden careful thought. I liked a shade of soft lavender that wanted both to be seen and to remain quiet.

  Mrs. Green showed me how to scrape away paint with the end of the brush when the colors would mix, turning to brown. “Slow down, Ruthie. You can’t learn everything at once. Take your time. You’re still just a baby.”

  “Twenty-one,” I said.

  I sat alone with the paints at night, learning which colors liked each other and which would create a sharp hedge. What would my mother say about all this, I wondered, about the ladders I drew in the waves, making them reach into the clouds? I imagined her leaning up against the car in the hot desert sun, smoking a cigarette and staring at the heavens.

  Mrs. Green called me her protégé as our relationship deepened during afternoons of painting together. We were living parallel lives, both of us waiting and not waiting for someone to return from a distant world.

  My car broke down by the side of the road, a white Honda that Dolly called Little Ugly. I was almost grateful to be free of it. While it was in the shop, I traveled by bicycle. My own muscles would carry me, making me aware of my strength. Each evening, I biked beyond Belmont Shore into downtown Long Beach, to a noisy little haven called Sheet Metal Moon Café, named for the metal furniture with its scoured patina. There, the tall palm trees with their feathery fronds reached over the buildings as the oil well pumps lifted toward the bright stars. Beneath the steel and cement forest, the Teutonic plates shifted, and a green waterhorse raced through emerald labyrinths, roiling the earth with its tail like a wheel, I’d tell Dolly.

  THE SHEET METAL Moon Café became my home away from Wild Acres, a painted-gold respite. At any time of day or night, a group of children gathered outside on their bicycles. Maybe they liked the huge picture window that was always strung with Christmas lights, or the round metal tables that made tinny sounds when drummed. I’d sit at the same table, sipping coffee and reading from my mother’s almanacs, which I’d recovered from the storage room. The calendar pages contained charts for each month, long narrow columns filled with planetary symbols, times of high tide, rising and setting suns and moons, full-moon names, and other astronomical and planetary data. My mother had marked up the pages with notes and hand-drawn pictures. Her scribbles streamed across the columns. I deciphered her notes, trying to correlate them with my memories of my past. Had I finally captured her? Beyond what I saw as a child, beyond what had appeared so random to me?

  There were fifteen almanacs in all, the first, 1965, skipping 1966—the year of my birth—then from 1967 through 1980, the year of her death. The more I read, the more I saw certain scribbles repeated in several months and through different years. These included but were not limited to:

  Good moon-Bad man. Or the converse: Bad moon-Good man. And then: Good moon-Good man.

  In her 1972 almanac, she’d drawn two palm trees and written El Niño storm—Twin Palms-Sea Lion.

  Her 1975 almanac was the most marked up. She’d drawn a strawberry at the top of October’s page, circled and x’d out—Lou’s farm. Following that, she’d written a list, marking what I gathered were her feelings about the divorced almost-husband, when we lived in the in-law apartment. She wrote:

  A list of what my Name is Not: Dana, Dara, Danna . . . MY NAME IS DIANA. In the November pages, she’d drawn little Joshua trees, and a note: Lost in desert. Where is my True North?

  And then, Joshua Tree.

  If the almana
c’s covers reflected historical events, my mother wove them into her story. She was resourceful. The “1976 Bicentennial Issue” correlated to a man whom she called The Wanderer. REVOLUTION—The Wanderer—Do not go back to him.

  In 1979, when we were given our one-bedroom apartment, she wrote: A Room of Her Own, with a smiling sun.

  In 1980: The Wanderer Returns. She’d made a fancy in-love W inside a heart. What had happened to turn things around? I wondered.

  Then, her tiny scribbled note: “Heads,” he leaves again. “Tails,” he leaves again.

  Followed by: Good date! When will I see him again? with tally marks adding up to eighty-nine days, right up to her death that October. The Wanderer was also mentioned in her 1970 almanac, with the words “Santa Monica Pier” and her drawings of music notes over the symbol for water, three scalloped lines, one beneath another, all in a heart. It appeared she’d been riding the waves of a long, tumultuous love affair.

  “Did she keep almanacs from the year I was born?” I asked Dr. B. She said she didn’t know; 1966 had probably been lost or destroyed.

  I LIKED HOW the stiff yellow covers featured wood-engraved black illustrations and lettering. In 1968, it read: Price 50 Cents and Weather Forecasts for All of the USA. It had a circusy feel, as if designed by Barnum & Bailey. The font was balloonish. There was a small portrait of Benjamin Franklin and, on the right, a portrait of Robert B. Thomas, listed as the almanac’s founder.

  The main cover design was an oval surrounded by a cornucopia of plants—fruits, grains, grapes, pumpkins, and other foods, along with a farmer’s tools. The page was bordered by sheaths of wheat and curling leaves. The title page illustration featured an engraving of Father Time, with angel wings and holding a scythe.

  Written along the right-hand side of the 1968 almanac: Planting Tables, Zodiac Secrets, Recipes, Etc. Fifty cents was a small price to pay for a map of the universe, I thought. My mother’s circled words, arrows, and wrinkled, marked-up, and worn pages told me more than I had ever thought possible. The full moons—their dates and names—created the map of our lives.

  Tonight, there was the Snow Moon.

  Parking my bike against the palm tree, I looked around and then wrapped my chain lock through the back wheel and the frame and around the gray trunk.

  “Hey, lady,” I heard someone say. There was nothing but the wind in the nearby alley. White feathers scattered across the sidewalk.

  I locked up my bike and started to head inside, reaching for my mother’s almanac in my purse.

  “Lady. Buy a story for a dollar?” said the voice.

  A young girl stepped out of the shadows, wearing a red bandanna around her head. Hands planted on her hips, she was no more than twelve, small for her age, with wide brown eyes and glistening dark skin. She wore a tan trench coat, dirty across the sleeves, her sneakers unlaced. I’d seen her before, hanging out at the pier just as Dolly and I had done.

  “Call me Eddie, or Edna. What kind of story do you like? I have all kinds—mysteries, fairy tales, anything,” she said, tapping her chin. She smiled, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. A swarm of children on bicycles crowded us. Their black leather jackets reeked of sea air and car exhaust, of nights tucked into the breeze on the beach. They wore necklaces woven with seaweed and copper wire. They held the same sort of fierce determination in their eyes, glazed as if by smoke, by the sort of tumult that seemed too adult and contagious. They’d seen too much of their own futures. Not quite beach rats, not quite city slickers.

  Edna sidled up to me, close enough while remaining distant. She leaned in, whispering, “I can stop those kids. You can get me some chili.” I nodded. Edna waved her hand, and the children backed away from us, from my bicycle. She lifted her chin, as if we shared some secret language or were on the same team, connected. Old friends. My mother would have liked her, would have called her an in-betweener. I wondered if she disappeared from school and reappeared two months later, two inches taller, with the same too-tight pants, with the same forced-up shoulders. “It’s safe. Don’t worry,” Edna assured me about my bicycle. She held open the thick metal door and followed me into the café, into a cacophony of piped-in music, the grill of voices amped up over the espresso machine. She joined me at my usual table near the window, sitting down heavily on the red velvet seat as I ordered us bowls of chili.

  I kept my eyes on the children, their blond hair spun in dreadlocks, their black hair in Afros, their brown hair in stringy brown straw, in auburn curls tufting from underneath bandannas. I could hear the excitement in their voices from all the way in here, over the sound of grinding beans. Laughing and hollering too loud, they kicked up energy everywhere. They broke windows, bones, chain locks on bicycles. They broke away from everything, the sooty beach and the sunlit city streets, their two worlds. I knew they were always hungry. They’d scramble into the street for lit cigarette butts and fill up on smoke, forgetting about food. They slept on the sand and knew the secrets—where the sand still bubbled up with oil, where the blood had been hosed off from the sidewalk, what was said, and what nobody did about it. They started rumors as if setting wildfires. They knew the borders. They could chart the signs in the sky, and they knew about the flurry of white feathers that lifted off the sidewalk, I’d learn. They crowded the sentry palm near the empty lot as if it were a mother hen, its trunk slashed three times with red paint, a symbol of home.

  “They’re always hunting,” Edna said, her eyes stony, reminding me of Dolly and me and the suspiciousness of childhood—what happens to the eyes at around eight, when the trusting baby becomes the little old person. We’d been thieves, too. Of sneakers, bags of chips, water, love, and whatever else we could find.

  She told me first of her parents, how she was their American dream. Edna was the good daughter, she said. Her parents told her she was lucky and smart, and so she grew up lucky and smart. A lucky girl, she’d never believed anything different was possible. She said she once jumped like a cat into a garbage can during a drive-by shooting in front of her house, which her mother said was quick, clever thinking. Born lucky, her mother said. All she had to do was not do something stupid and ruin her goddamn life.

  She had a knack for adding things up—people, knowing what they wanted. She could also add up stacks of bills that poured into her mother’s life—receipts, and numbers written and rewritten over miles and miles of paper bags. Adding things up was her hobby, she said.

  “I already got you figured out. You want a story? One dollar.”

  I placed the money on the table and picked up my mother’s almanac, wondering how long Edna would stay. She noticed the cover and her expression changed. Quickly, I put the almanac in my lap under the table and sipped my coffee, watching her relief as she wolfed down her chili. I wondered what Edna would say, and whether her story would have an ending. I remembered how Dolly used to fall asleep with the ripped spiderwebs of stories on her lips. We always fell asleep before the ending came.

  Pressing my palms together, I glanced out the window. They tracked a circle around the tree, wolflike. “Those kids. I can’t concentrate,” Edna said.

  She got up, her coat fluttering open, revealing the lining of stitched pockets that held feathers, army knives, stones. She turned and walked outside with one hand in the air, shooing the children away. She was their leader, she’d tell me after. “You’d better get a better bike lock,” she said, sliding back into her seat. “You ready for your story?”

  I nodded. “Go ahead. I have time.”

  “Once upon a time, there was a lady who lived by the sea. She was lonely and cried seven tears into the waves. This made a sea animal take notice. The animal came from an island far, far away. He already knew the way here, to Long Beach. He liked the oil islands, him and the rest of his tribe. They would get confused by all the colored lights,” she said, nodding at the window, as if at the THUMS Islands. “It looked like the colored lights in the sky where he grew up. The animal peeled off his magic
skin and came onto land, becoming a man. The lady fell in love with him. But he always went back to his home in the ocean. It made the woman sad. He was gone, but she had his baby and that made her happy again. Just like always, years passed. Then one day the man came back with a new magic skin for the child. He wanted to take his child away forever to a home in the sea. The child was like him, lived in two worlds though she didn’t know it.” Edna sat back, satisfied. “How do you like my story so far?”

  I was on the edge of my seat. “What was their home like in the sea?”

  “An island way up north,” she said, holding up her plate. She gestured above it. “There are no trees. It’s rocky, and there’s a cold wind there. You feel like you’re holding an ice cube in your mouth too long.”

  “Do they all have magic skins up there?” I asked, stirring my chili.

  She leaned in, holding the plate in front of her chest and gesturing below it. “Only some. Not the birds. Not the fish.”

  “Does he come back?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Only on the full moon. Only for a few days at a time. Then he has to wait. He might have to wait a month to come back. Maybe a year.”

  “But you said he would always come back,” I said, shifting in my seat.

  “Yeah. For his kid. To take it away.”

  I drew in my breath.

  “But the lady fought him every which way to Sunday. A mother will always fight for her kid. He finally went away. Back to the sea. The end.”

  “A happy-sad ending.”

  She nodded, rubbing her eyes. “I have all kinds of stories.”

  I recognized some of the details of Edna’s story as being similar to Dr. B.’s story, or what Dolly said about the people who hide in the skins of animals. I wondered if this was an ocean version of an urban myth, a story passed around by word of mouth.

  “I need to get home, Edna. Your story was worth the price.”