The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  I STILL WORE my plain gray sundress when Dolly dragged me out “to look. Just to look.” My hair grew curlier, lighter, a honeyed shade of red-gold. I cut low bangs across my eyes. I wore my wire-rimmed glasses religiously. According to Dr. B., beauty was in the expression of self-acceptance. Graham had “the eyes of a storm,” she said, and he wasn’t much for small talk. She’d run into him in the hallway the last time he’d left. Not that anybody was interrogating me, but it was all they could do to keep quiet this long.

  ON A FRIDAY night before sundown, we gathered in Mrs. Green’s apartment for Shabbat dinner. We stood under the tallith as she welcomed the Shekhinah, closing her eyes and whispering, “Thank you for all of this. My friends. My sweet Saul is still with me. Life is good.”

  She’d made broiled chicken, the skin buttery and crisp, soaked with paprika. A thick pair of men’s glasses was pushed back in her hair. The glasses were large and square, with big black plastic frames.

  “Is something burning?” I asked.

  “My oven. I’ve cleaned it three times this month, but I can’t get rid of that burnt smell,” she said as she quickly reached up, retrieving the glasses and tucking them into the pocket of her apron, next to two paintbrushes. “Isn’t this silly? I wear Saul’s glasses sometimes. I walk around this apartment wearing them when I can’t remember the sound of his voice. It helps me.”

  It bothered me that she thought she had to explain herself to us. I didn’t want her to. “Understandable, Fay,” Dr. B. said. “How many people survive two more years after being given six months? You’re both brave.”

  “We’re only brave for each other,” Mrs. Green said. Each morning, she’d return to her husband at the nursing home. Then she’d come home in the afternoon to paint her way back into her other world. She had figured out how to live in both worlds.

  As she said the prayers over the wine and the bread, I glanced at my sister, whose hair was pulled back tight in a high ponytail. With no makeup, Dolly looked like a child. She wore my mother’s Jewish star and a plain black shirt with black jeans. Her olive skin appeared tan, healthy.

  “Is your relationship with Graham exclusive, child?” asked Dr. B. over dinner. “Are you his; is he yours? As in, you don’t go with other people?”

  “Let Ruthie get some nourishment first. Before she has to answer all these questions.” Mrs. Green nodded at Dolly and poured herself some Manischewitz.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked Dolly.

  “Welcome to your intervention,” Dolly said, lifting her glass.

  I looked at each of them. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Ruthie, can we invite him for supper one night? Nothing fancy. I used to have eighteen people for dinner on the high holidays. What does Graham like to eat? I’ll make his favorite dish. Dolly, you’ll bring a guest, too.”

  “You’ve never brought someone home, that’s all,” said Dr. B., touching my arm. “We’d like to get to know him, Ruthie.”

  “He’s a fisherman,” I said. I glanced at my sister, and she looked away. Dr. B. asked, “What type of boat?”

  “A fisherman’s boat,” Dolly said, when she saw my hesitation.

  “Nobody is easy,” said Mrs. Green. “Do you understand what I mean when I say I have a good marriage but not an easy marriage?” I nodded, lifting my glass to my lips, though I didn’t understand.

  “We’re glad you met someone. Ruthie. We just hope he’s nice.”

  In that instant I saw in Dr. B.’s eyes what I knew to be true. “I promised your mother a long time ago I’d watch over you.”

  “Ruthie thinks that everyone who loves her is good. It’s not her fault,” Dolly said, meeting my gaze, saving and abandoning me.

  “Why don’t you be quiet?” I asked her.

  “I won’t, Moose. He’ll be with you until there’s another you at the next port.”

  “That’s a cliché,” I said. “No one really does that.”

  Mrs. Green got up from the table. A moment later, she stood near the porch. “Ruthie, could you come here for a minute? While I’m thinking of it, I’ve been meaning to show you this.” Gratefully, I got up. She unrolled a print of a Winslow Homer painting called Jumping Trout. She told me that years after Homer’s death, they had x-rayed his work, trying to dissect his calculations with infrared light. There was much to be unearthed, to uncover all the plotting and thought that had gone into this work. Some artists were scientists, this one in particular. Beneath the fish is one dab of bright red paint, a caster’s fly. A dab of Cadmium Red on top of a mixture of browns that placed the entire painting, she said. The dash located all the angst and fear, the wanting and escape of the hunt, the rapids behind the fish, the speckles and bars on its lower half, its ferocity, all movement and energy in that one single red note, in that perfect as-if-an-afterthought flick of the wrist.

  “It’s time for soup,” Mrs. Green announced, rolling the print back up in the canister. Then she whispered, “Only you know what you have with Graham. No one else has to understand it. But you do,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  Dr. B. would try to assuage me with stories of a failed love affair. Her first love would have been the perfect man if not for the fact of a wife in another place. When she found out, it was like getting hit by lightning, she said. “I fell hard. It was difficult to recover.”

  “Ruthie falls hard for wounded animals,” said Dolly, resting her chin on her palm.

  “Because I am one,” I said.

  Mrs. Green pulled her long gray sweater more tightly around her. “It’s freezing in here. Is anybody else freezing?”

  “You need to know who this man is,” said Dr. B. Dolly nodded.

  Mrs. Green patted my hand. It startled me, as if I had been splashed with cold water.

  ON THE NIGHT of the Grass Moon in May, Graham came back. We sat on my porch, talking about how the Queen Mary was haunted. I recalled the times we’d strolled through the cabins and the restaurants on board and he hadn’t said a word about what he knew. She’d been built in Scotland in the early 1930s, he said now. “In World War II, she was called the Gray Ghost. They painted her like a battleship,” he said. I remembered Sasha and Sam at the Sands Restaurant when I was a child. I remembered her description of the blurry discs that floated over the heads of travelers, that people tried to capture them. I wondered why.

  The next day, I brought Graham to the Sheet Metal Moon Café, where we ate chili and listened to music and the coffee machine, amid the shouts of the children who congregated outside. I never saw Edna, but I always expected to. It always seemed like she should be there, but she never was.

  We drove up and down the coast and cased the beach towns. Venice, Huntington, Laguna. We drifted by the street peddlers’ baskets of jewelry, the silver and turquoise bracelets, coral rings, and copper bangles. We had dinner on the garden porch of a restaurant, where metallic trees sprayed mist across our table to cool us. We talked over mariachi music and sipped cold glasses of syrupy red drinks, chunks of pineapple or cut strawberries on the rim. We filled up on nachos and salsa and let the alcohol go to our heads. We did what other couples did, or what we imagined they did.

  One night, just before dessert, Graham reached into the pocket of his jeans and retrieved a coral ring. He lifted my hand from my glass and placed the ring on my finger. “How about that? It fits perfectly,” he said.

  “I didn’t even see you buy this.”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  I wouldn’t ask what it meant.

  We watched a sidewalk artist sketching a sunset across the cement in colored chalk. When he was finished, the artist plunked his beach chair in the middle of it and sat, put on his sunglasses, folded his arms, and leaned back as if taking in the scenery.

  It was that easy, what you imagined, or had dreamed. Everyone would say you were “brave.” This caused you great worry. You knew you were headed for disaster.

  “YOU’ RE A GOOD woman, Ruthie,” Graham said one da
y.

  When he said he was not a good man, I assumed he was referring to his ability to be a provider or protector. I didn’t need that, as self-sufficient as I was.

  “There’s been danger in the ocean lately,” Graham told me, standing on the deck of the Queen Mary. He looked so at ease here.

  “Are you afraid you won’t make it back?”

  He shook his head no. “Maybe so. Maybe that’s true,” he whispered a moment later, circling his arms around my waist and pulling me close.

  That afternoon, as we walked out of the ship, I saw a young girl sitting cross-legged on a white blanket under a palm tree, her red bandanna tied around her head. I grabbed Graham’s arm. Behind her, there was a cardboard sign that read STORIES FOR A DOLLAR. A woman knelt in front of her, listening.

  “That’s Eddie, the girl I was telling you about,” I said. Edna looked up, catching my eyes as if she’d heard me. She smiled. Then she looked at Graham. She quickly reached for her sign, turning it over.

  THE STRAWBERRY MOON in June could not have come soon enough. The sky was pink, full of possibility. I’d lived through this before. I remembered it from the Home—an oppressively hopeful sky, a sky that made a person think that if she just waited long enough something big would happen. It was a sky that held a person hostage with hope. It was a sky that, like the sentry palm, never changed.

  I’d been missing him. That morning, I packed a picnic basket filled with cold chicken and homemade french fries. I smoothed a new white blanket across the sand. I put the canteen that I’d filled with his whiskey next to me as I stretched my legs out on the blanket, paging through my mother’s 1975 almanac, waiting for Graham. Every so often, between deciphering my mother’s notes, I glanced up at the waves.

  The cool night winds unfolded as if a rope ladder, its top rung lit by ragged stars. Every once in a while, I checked my watch. No Graham. My eyes burned from searching the darkness. Exhausted, hours later, I sighed with relief that he wasn’t there. The sand had cooled beneath my cheek through the blanket. As the first rays of light rose, the sky swelled into a gray-green. The animals had begun to wake up. I had remained, waiting.

  He didn’t come back in June. I was certain he was gone for good.

  ONCE, IN THE gallows of our green station wagon, my mother had spun an orange ribbon into my hair, attempting something complicated, to weave it in a braid. She rarely touched my hair. Hardly able to contain my excitement, I’d made the mistake of a simple “ow,” which made her let go. She’d let the ribbon fall on my shoulder. I’d known it had all been lost just then, by what I’d done. Dolly had braided it back into my hair, and I’d gone skipping off, pretending not to be destroyed. I had wept loudly at the edge of the forest near the campsite, standing in my blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the morning air billowing my purple sundress. I’d howled into the trees. I’d almost caught her, my mother.

  “I THINK BETTER when I paint,” said Mrs. Green. She wore a yellow scarf around her head, and it fluttered up against the air as she waved her paintbrush. I clung to her steadfast predictability.

  “Ruthie, when you are together, does it seem like there’s no one else? As if you have your own world?”

  I nodded, wiping the sweat from my neck. I muddied the image of a child’s yellow plastic duck that had washed up on the brown sand.

  “Are you feeling okay, Ruthie? You don’t seem like yourself.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve got everything under control,” I lied. I knew that things that appeared suddenly could disappear just as suddenly. I hadn’t even said goodbye.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IN TIME, YOU would learn where your light was meant, Dr. B. said. It was meant for here. You would need to take it in so that in times of doubt, you’d remind yourself. You would be able to do this. You knew you were needed here, and that you needed to be here, and that your purpose was meant for this place. You would come to the knowledge by way of your struggle. You needed to know that you were meant to work here, on Earth. It was irrelevant where to land. The purpose was to shine your light. You would do this wherever you were.

  There were angels, some said. They would take the form of people and of animals. Some were already on the Earth.

  LUCK AND GRATITUDE went hand in hand. Rarely would anyone wish for a lucky death, but everyone would be grateful for one: She died doing what she loved. He went quickly without pain, thank God. He died in his sleep, having made peace with his brother after all those years. It was almost as if she knew she would go; she’d tied up loose ends.

  A good death could make everyone feel better about your life.

  WHEN SAUL GREEN died, Mrs. Green tied a light blue ribbon around the thin green trunk of the sentry palm in the courtyard. Those who passed by it would recognize the symbol of a gift, a sign that reminded you to notice the gifts all around you, mostly the ones that faded into the landscape of your life. Mr. Green considered himself exceptionally lucky, and he told his wife that every day. This, she said, was the mark of a good marriage—when both partners considered themselves lucky because of the other. But more, when they acted on the gratitude they felt. This had nothing to do with giving presents. This had everything to do with the gift of awareness. If you could do this, your partner would always feel as if your life together was a gift.

  They’d raised two healthy sons who had done well, and who were happily partnered. They’d survived inflations and recessions, distance and closeness. They’d enjoyed good friends and California, the most beautiful place on Earth. While Mr. Green’s last years were spent either in the hospital or in hospice care in a nursing home, he still recounted a lucky life. Knowing that he had a wife who could go on without him was the gift of a lifetime, he said. This offered him immense relief. This was why she worked so hard at her art, making things meaningful and beautiful.

  When Dr. B. called me from the nursing home on the morning Mr. Green died, she said Mrs. Green wanted me to bring his favorite articles of clothing. She had refused for his body to be taken away like this, insisting that he be clothed first. He hated to be cold. He should have his favorite light blue robe, the one that matched his eyes. His soft blue socks should warm his feet. Everything that was to touch him should be blue. In the final weeks of his life, even a sheet had burned his skin. His Timex watch had scratched his wrist, his skin like tissue paper.

  I let myself into their apartment, feeling like an imposter. I had never been alone in their bedroom before. The air was too musty and warm, not like I’d remembered it during our Shabbat meals.

  Mrs. Green’s painting supplies were in boxes in the living room. Her paintings covered the walls in the bedroom. Every single spot was covered, creating a view of one large sea mosaic. Swirls of blue and crashing waves tipped with white foam. Gold streams of light cascaded over cliffs into the sea. Burnt Sienna and Cadmium Red streaked over Ultramarine Blue, like oil spills that had caught fire in the water.

  In the corners of the dresser mirror, a cluster of old photographs had been pressed under the wooden frame, fixed in place, the images now faded a pale blue. I glanced at one of the Polaroids. Mr. Green is smiling, unencumbered, his arms around a jubilant Mrs. Green in front of the Wailing Wall. It was labeled in the lower white border, “Israel Trip, 1977.” She would tell me of their pilgrimage, the site of the Holy Temple’s remains, which marked the place near the gate of heaven. They’d written down their prayers and wishes on slips of paper and pushed them into the wall’s crevices. One million notes were pushed between the rocks in the wall each year. Somehow her wish had come true.

  His light blue silk robe. His blue socks. His brown moccasins. His blue pin-striped suit with the white lining. That favorite light blue tie, his lucky tie. The one he’d proposed in. The one he’d opened his first store in. The one that had matched his eyes. These were the things I would carry back to her. The threads of a life.

  Reaching into his closet, I noticed the slippery grip of the wool suit. Pushing the row of suits aside, I felt their
weight, heavy, made of steel. Below, the shoes stood like matchsticks, black wingtips with gleaming toes as if freshly polished. I pulled out a suit and placed it on the bed. I cased his closet and his drawers, searching for his light blue robe. I started to panic, knowing that panic would just make me late.

  Where was it? I pushed all the hangers to one side and started again, sifting through them, one by one. Perhaps the robe had been lost in all the shuttling back and forth to and from the hospital.

  I hunted everything else down and put his things in a small suitcase I’d brought. I couldn’t leave without the robe. I’d checked the closet thoroughly. Suddenly, I recalled Mrs. Green wearing his glasses. I delicately opened the door to her closet, noticing the rainbow of silk scarves dripping out of an open drawer. I spotted the robe then, a pale blue pool of silk on the floor in the corner. I set it on the bed, recognizing the scent of an onion, the scent of a life finished. Then I went back into the closet. Here, hidden next to her shoes, was a canvas I hadn’t seen. In the painting, a woman is diving through the ocean. She wears a wetsuit that is open to the waist. She has long red hair that swirls in the currents made by the ten or so sea lions that encircle her. They all look the same, all in pale blue hues, the only divergent colors being the woman’s hair, her parted pink lips, her pale green sea glass eyes. I shut the closet door. I hurried out.

  Dr. B. was waiting for me beside the long rectangular foyer mirror when I rushed in the door. “I managed to get everything,” I said, out of breath.

  “She’s been fixated. Not doing well,” Dr. B. said. “I’m almost done with his arrangements. Why don’t you stay with her. I’d feel better knowing she has you here.” She pointed to a room down the hallway.