The Taste of Salt

by Martha Southgate

  The night he told Sarah this story was the first night they ever made love. After he finished this story, she just looked at him. She seemed to have lost her powers of speech. But she put her hand over his. They were silent. After a while she said, “Why don’t we go to your apartment?”

  Ray’s apartment wasn’t much, though it was a step up from the nasty little room he rented when he first got to Cleveland. This place had doors and a separate bedroom, at least. They didn’t talk much on the way there. But they did hold hands.

  Once they were inside, they both looked a little frightened. There was so much feeling between them. Ray wished he’d had one more drink before they came up. (Was that when it started? Was that when?) He had opened the door and let Sarah walk in ahead of him. He shut the door and she turned to him and opened her arms and took him in. He’d never been taken in like that before. She enfolded him absolutely. She gave him every inch of herself and he did the same.

  THEY DID WHAT PEOPLE do—nothing special, nothing new. But they took their time. They kept looking at each other and touching each other everywhere. They weren’t shy or afraid. She wasn’t shy or afraid. She showed him what she liked. She showed him what was right. Much, much later, after it was all gone, Ray would sometimes think, “If only I had kept listening to her.”

  Four

  My parents married in 1970, when they were in their late twenties. My mother was finishing up nursing school and Daddy was dreaming of getting off the assembly line. All things seemed possible to them. My mother loved her work and she loved her husband. My father? He loved his wife. He put up with his job. He had to. What else was he going to do? He put his energy into loving her and reading everything he could get his hands on. On the weekends, he tried to write a novel, sitting down at the typewriter Saturday mornings, a cup of coffee in hand. He slid a clean sheet of paper under the platen and rolled it in. Almost instantly, his mind would go blank. He would sit there, staring at the blank page nervously for a little while—then get up to refill his coffee cup or take a walk or something. Sometimes he wrote a sentence or two. They never sounded very good to him, though. He couldn’t imagine how Ralph Ellison had found the will to stick to the ideas and images and story until they came out clear, like raindrops on a gray day.

  My mother loved to see him sitting at the keyboard. She believed something beautiful would come out of it someday. She believed that he’d find a way off the assembly line eventually. She wasn’t sure how but she was sure that he would. Everybody at his job called him Professor, Prof for short. Both he and Sarah loved that.

  Sarah didn’t like to admit to herself that she felt a little odd about having married someone who worked on an assembly line. She had been raised to marry a college man—someone from Howard or Hampton. And a small corner of her still wanted that. She knew when he finished that book that he would show everyone what she already knew; he’d show the world how smart he was, how special. She loved that he was trying, that he was willing to try. She loved that he didn’t seem to need her to take care of him—in fact, he liked to take care of her. He gave her back rubs and foot rubs, indulgences that she’d never had from anyone. He made her laugh harder than anyone she’d ever known. And he was as bright as the day was long, despite his mind-deadening job. How she loved to watch him sit with a book in the evenings, while she knitted or read something else, the light spilling over his shoulder as he read. She loved how he had made himself. She loved that he had made himself. She loved that he had come from nothing and made himself an educated man.

  One night, after they had been married for three years and she was heavily pregnant with me, they were sitting and reading, the way they often did. Ray didn’t read aloud often, but this evening, he looked up and said to her, “Hey, doll. Listen to this.” Then he read these words:

  Wave of sorrow

  Do not drown me now.

  I see the island

  Still ahead somehow.

  I see the island

  And its sands are fair.

  Wave of sorrow

  Take me there.

  The last words echoed in the room. After a long silence she said, “That’s beautiful. Who wrote that?”

  Ray smiled. “It’s called ‘Island.’ It’s by Langston Hughes. He used to live around here, you know. He went to Central High.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sarah reached her hand out. “Can I see the book?”

  He handed it to her. She read the poem over and over. And in the days to come, she found herself murmuring the words under her breath. She said it to herself so many times that after a few weeks, she knew she’d never forget it, that the poem beat through her blood now. There were times, later on, when those words that Langston and Ray had given her were all she had to hold on to. But the day she learned that poem, a wave of sorrow seemed very far away.

  SHE LOVED HER JOB then. She had finished school and was working at Mount Sinai, not far from home. She loved the rhythm of her days. She was a surgical nurse—there weren’t too many black women doing that. The black women who did the work she did were just starting to band together—she had been at the first meeting of the National Black Nurses Association, which was founded right downtown. She stayed active in it for a long time, licking stamps and making phone calls. She liked feeling a part of something bigger than herself. She loved the precision of her job—helping, handing the doctor the right instrument at just the right time, getting to know the bloody order that resides in each human. She loved the taking-care part of her job, too—consoling sobbing wives, holding the hand of a frightened stranger. She often felt that she was born to take care of people this way, born to stand by holding someone’s hand as they suffered. Maybe that’s why she stayed with my father as long as she did.

  She quit working just a few weeks before I was born. The different shifts and the constant on-her-feet time just got to be too much—Ray couldn’t rub it away after a while. There was no flextime back then, no way to work anything out. If you got pregnant, you left your job. Period.

  She decided to quit one Friday night after a ten-hour shift. She sat on the sofa, her feet in Ray’s strong hands. He rubbed intently, looking at them, sometimes offering a playful kiss to one of her toes. Suddenly, she started crying.

  “Hey, hey, doll, what is it?”

  “Ray, I can’t keep working like this. I know we need the money and I really love the work. But my back hurts all the time and I come home and just feel like I’m gonna die. The doctor said I might have to stop when I got this far along. I was hoping I’d be different.”

  He never stopped rubbing during this whole speech. When she wiped her eyes and stopped crying, he said quietly, “We’ll be fine. You go on and give your notice. You gotta take care of yourself and the baby.”

  My mother looked at him with wonder. He rested one of her feet in his lap and picked up his beer to take a sip. She leaned over to kiss him, hard, not even minding the beeriness. “Thanks.”

  FIRST ME AND THEN Tick, barely two years apart, into everything. They hadn’t meant to have the children so close together. But one night they’d finally gotten me to sleep. They started kissing and just got carried away. Carried away with that night was life as the parents of an only child. I was only eighteen months old when she found out that Tick was coming. Ray tried to put a good face on it when she told him but she knew. She felt the same way. It was just too soon for another baby. They were stretched so thin already.

  And Tick was a difficult baby. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. He was a perfect brown butterball, dimpled and angelic looking. Until the evening, when the colic came on him and she and Ray would have to take turns walking and walking and walking and walking while Tick screamed himself into a sleep that was more like unconsciousness. It went on for hours. It went on for days into weeks into months. At first she asked her friends about it, but then their fussy babies stopped fussing and they could offer no more counsel. He cried for four hours e
very night for four months. At first Ray helped her, but then he told her that he was so tired at work that he was afraid of making mistakes that would cost him his job, so then she took over.

  Ray was reading less and getting up from the typewriter faster on Saturday mornings, if he sat down at all, and somewhere in Sarah’s exhausted mind, out of the corner of her half-asleep, bloodshot eye, she could see that the beer he’d always enjoyed was becoming a little more omnipresent. It crept up so slowly and her life was such a blur of diapering and wiping and walking and strolling and cooking and cleaning that she couldn’t be sure. But every now and then she would look at him, and he would be sitting in front of the television, a beer in his hand, and she’d realize that this was happening almost every evening.

  This next part is a little weird for me to imagine—what child, even once grown, likes to imagine her parents’ most intimate lives? But if I’m going to tell it, I want to tell it all. Some of this I guess at, some of this I put together from hints, clues, asides that my mother shared with me. She was so lonely a lot of the time, especially when I was younger. Sometimes, I was the only person she had, I think. So. Anyway. Here’s what I think might have happened:

  She didn’t know what to do. She still loved him. And he was in the house. He was working and bringing home his paycheck. He didn’t hit her. He didn’t yell or curse at her or the children. He still spoke to her; he wasn’t out in some bar. She didn’t know what to think.

  One year passed, then two, then three. She got in the habit of going to bed before Ray did. She was so tired, doing all the work to take care of the babies and the house and everything else. He didn’t lift a finger—that was another thing that had changed. They used to do chores together and have a good time doing them. He’d do the dishes while she swept or something like that, and they’d joke around. But somehow he had just stopped helping with all that. She didn’t have the nerve to ask him about it. It seemed too petty to talk about. He was tired from work. He had to do a lot of overtime now that she wasn’t bringing anything in, and with the two kids, it was a lot to ask. It made perfect sense that he would do less around the house. Things had to be divided up somehow. Still, she wished he would notice how hard she was working to keep things nice. How hard she was working to raise good, smart, kind, polite children.

  A winter night. She was lying in bed, Tick and me finally asleep. She had her hand on her stomach, under her nightgown. Not as tight as it used to be, but not bad, considering. She was thinking about how he used to touch her. There hadn’t been much of that recently either. The time when they had spent hours, days, visiting each other’s bodies like favorite countries was long gone.

  Much of the time, she didn’t even want to be touched. She was often worn out herself. She rarely thought of making love to him anymore. But this night she did. She was still awake when he came in. He sat on the edge of the bed, and it sagged under his weight as he lay down. He was wearing only boxers and a T-shirt. He lay on his back, breathing evenly. He smelled of beer and fatigue. She rolled over toward him and reached for him. And he turned toward her—sweet surprise—and started kissing her. But it wasn’t like it used to be. He seemed distracted, like he was kissing her to forget something else that was bothering him. Despite this, she felt herself responding. She didn’t want to stop so she moved her head down to kiss his chest and his stomach. She tried—they both did. But nothing happened. Finally, he pulled away from her and rolled over without a word. “Ray?” she said, moving up so he could hear her. “It’s all right, Ray. I don’t—”

  “It’s not all right. Nothing is all right, damn it. Why can’t you see that, woman?” He hit the mattress in front of him so hard that she could feel it vibrate. She pulled back a little, though she knew in her bones that he would never hit her. “Why can’t you see that? Damn it.”

  She didn’t say anything. It seemed that she would never have anything to say again. The room was shrouded in silence. It was very late by the time she finally fell asleep.

  THE NEXT DAY, THEY didn’t talk about what had happened. Just got up and she fixed him breakfast and he went to work and came home. But this time, without a six-pack. Her heart leapt at the sight of his empty hands. He played with me and Tick while she fixed dinner, another change. He ate an elaborate pretend meal that I fixed for him in my play kitchen (I don’t remember this, but I like to think it happened), and he helped Tick build with his LEGOS, his voice low and patient. She was afraid to breathe. But finally, once she got us down to sleep, she went into the living room and sat next to him on the sofa. He didn’t look at her. “Ray?”

  He still didn’t look at her.

  “Ray, I’m glad you came home the way you did tonight and played with the kids and all. But will you talk to me?”

  He still didn’t look at her. He used to gaze at her so hard she thought he was trying to see her soul. He used to gaze at her so hard that she sometimes had to turn her head away; she couldn’t stand it. Being loved that much. It made her blush. It made her nervous. It made her so happy. And now he wouldn’t look at her at all. She got up and turned off the television and stood in front of him. “Ray, please, please talk to me. I see how you’re trying. I don’t care, I don’t care about what happened last night. I don’t think any less of you, but I gotta know that we’re in this together. I gotta know that you’re still my husband.” She paused. “That you still love me.”

  “I love you, Sarah. I do.” He sighed from the very soles of his feet. “But I know I’m not helping you. I know …” He paused. “I know that I’m drinking too much. You think I felt like a man after last night? No. No, I know I’m not right. And I’m gonna try to get right and do right by you all. I swear I am. I swear it.”

  She went to him and embraced him, just like she did the first time they were ever together. She could feel all of him enter into her arms. He picked her up like she was a feather—after having two kids!—and carried her to their room, and they made love and this time it was perfect. It was so so sweet. If she’d known what was to come, she would have treasured it more. She would have held it to her heart like the jewel it was. But she didn’t know. How could you know something like that? How could you hold on to something like that? You couldn’t.

  Five

  When I was eight, nine, ten, I was in love with my father. Of course I was. That’s what girls do. And despite all the hard times, there are some good days to remember. That’s what makes the bad ones harder to accept. I always thought that if I could just do the right thing, if I could just say some magic words I didn’t know, that I could make the good days stay, maybe even multiply. That’s what people always think. That’s what’s so hard to let go of.

  When I was eight, nine, ten, my world was my block and the few blocks around it. I went to school and sat through reading and perked up at math and came home. I stroked our cat, Purrface, and cleaned out the litter box. I played Barbies with my friend Deena from across the street. I collected leaf samples from our front yard and classified them by size. I rode bikes with Tick. He had learned to ride when he was four by tilting his tricycle over onto two wheels. He used to spend hours—even at that age—falling and getting up, falling and getting up. And then finally he got up and stayed right and sailed all the way to the corner tilted over like a circus clown. My mother and father were sitting out on the porch when he got the hang of it. I don’t think I’d ever seen them laugh so hard. And the next day, my father came home from work with a new red two-wheeler for Tick. We barely ever got him off it after that. As long as there wasn’t a foot or two of snow on the ground, he was out furiously riding, riding, riding. Like he was chasing something—or something was chasing him. I could never keep up.

  CLEVELAND DOESN’T HAVE AN aquarium anymore, but when I was a kid, there was a pretty good-sized one. It was on its last legs during my childhood—it closed in 1986 when I was twelve. But it was there. I don’t remember what the outside of the building looked like. It must have been big. I remember only
a feeling of size and of coolness and darkness and mystery. It smelled kind of musty but there was a pleasant hum in the air, the sound of all that water being aerated, the shouts of children on field trips and families out together. It was my very favorite place, but I remember the four of us going there only one time, when I was about nine—all my other visits were on school field trips or with the families of friends.

  In retrospect, I imagine that my father was on the wagon that time—he would stop drinking periodically for a few weeks, sometimes even a month or two. My mother’s step would lighten and the frown lines on her forehead would fade. Tick and I would fight less, afraid of making the magic disappear and the old Dad reappear. But he always did. I could never really believe that it didn’t matter how I behaved. That my father’s drinking had nothing to do with me.

  The trip to the aquarium had a special kind of holiday feeling to it—it was Father’s Day and my father, knowing how much I loved the aquarium (Tick liked it there, too, if not as much), said there was nothing he’d like better than to spend the day with us there. In the car on the way over, he was in an ebullient mood, singing bits of old Chuck Berry songs and putting his hand on the back of my mother’s neck. She looked young and pretty, the way I imagine she looked when she first met my father. I had a brief unsettling vision that they had a life that had nothing to do with Tick or me, but I couldn’t articulate it, so I picked a fight with Tick instead. Nothing was gonna mess up this day, though. Rather than bellowing and scaring us into quiet, as he sometimes did, Daddy looked up into the mirror with a gentle “Come on, y’all. We’re almost there” that somehow got under our skin. So we stopped fighting.