The Salt God's Daughter (2 page)

We waited for our mother to come back.

“Ruthie, do you miss her?” Dolly asked.

“No,” I lied.

We talked of Cool Whip and ice cream, of warm apple crisp and salty Fritos. We dreamed of flying.

Then my mother came back. We'd crawl into our station wagon at night, trapped by her need for freedom, and then by her soap opera,
General Hospital
, which we watched on her portable television. Afterward, we listened to folk songs and Hebrew prayers as she'd strum a fat-bellied classical, knowing this meant that she was feeling fine, that she had acknowledged she had two little girls, whether she wanted us or not.

We used our fingernails to cut away ticks from our legs, and we cleaned up her empty bottles before she'd wake up. We bit at the skin around our nails, leaving it swollen and red.

If I told you that I ached for a different mother, I'd be lying. I ached for my own, every minute. As motherless daughters do.

She was our child. We didn't know anything different. Everyone knew a mother was a daughter's first love.

When she asked if we thought she was still beautiful, we said yes, because she was. We told the truth about the steely lightness of her eyes, how quickly they changed color with her emotions, from gray to blue, in parts. We lied when she asked if we thought she'd fall in love one day. We said yes.

It was as possible to miss someone who was right in front of you as it was to miss someone who had left. It was also possible to miss someone who had not yet been born. This I had learned. My mother had told us as much. We walked around craving everyone, even before they'd leave. We never thought it would end, our ache. Often, from the windows of
my mother's speeding green Ford Country Squire, we shouted out the words to James Taylor ballads and motioned for truckers to honk on demand by pumping our fists up and down. We grew cocky, forgetting we were people who had been left.

We were already nomadic, and from the most primal of places, we had become hunters, always searching for someone or something we could lay claim to, hook ourselves onto, to quiet our trembling clamorous souls.

As long as she came back for us.

 

I HAVE FEW memories before I was six years old, but waking up hungry is one of them. In the white sky of a January night, under the glow of a Hunger Moon, I remember looking out of the rear compartment window of the wood-paneled station wagon my mother called Big Ugly. We had been kept warm at the campsite all night, body pressed to body, wet leaves under the orange sleeping bag.

We hadn't eaten since the night before. I knew this only because my job was to get rid of the trash. My mother had spent the evening grazing the tiny bottles of liquor on the flipped-down tailgate. Dolly and I had kicked around the canyon, making Jacob's ladder designs out of string and waiting for the portable television's batteries to die, which always brought on my mother's mood swings. Even as Dolly moved the television so as to get the best reception and I adjusted the antennae, my mother drank. She watched us now from the roof of the car as she paged through her Old Farmer's Almanac in search of the moon's clues, her legs tucked beneath her on a plaid blanket that spilled over the car windows, keeping it dark inside for us when we finally went to bed, keeping out the moonlight.

When I woke up, I thought Dolly was crying because of my mother's anger at the batteries, but it was the trees.

The trees were falling off the hillside.

We had never seen anything like it. I watched the blurred brushstrokes, the cascading sweeps of russet and umber tumbling beneath a blue-black sky. I had always clung to land, distrustful of the tide's obedience to an irrational moon. Now, even the land was giving way. Storms from one of the strongest El Niños in years lifted the top layer of earth like a fingernail, flicking it off, along with rocks and branches. Dolly had woken up first, and started screaming. She pointed to the river of mud rushing down the canyon toward us. Only months before, fire brought by the Santa Ana winds had cleared the hillside of most of the trees. Now that there was little to hold the earth in place, the winds ripped the charred remains from their roots, spilling them across our campsite. The roots had released easily, willing to be exposed after having been tugged at and battered for so long. I could not blame them.

“Dammit, where are my keys?” my mother said, climbing into the front seat. She skimmed her hand across the vinyl. “Where are those damn things?” Her hair spun in wild black tangles, along with her rage. Dolly and I scampered around the back, searching. My hunger turned to dust. I could not find my glasses.

“Hurry up, Mom! Will you get us out of here?” Dolly cried, as rain swept across the windshield in blustery sheets, smacking the glass with rocks. Patterns of flesh and green filled the windows. Dolly handed me my glasses. Clarity.

“My keys. What did you girls do with them?” my mother asked, as I climbed in front beside her. The river of mud was coming toward us.

January's Hunger Moon was supposed to keep us fed, or return my mother's lover to her. But it had not done either, so far. The moon was misbehaving, my mother said. Bad unpredictable weather followed the Child Theory of Planetary Creation. The moon was Earth's child, which meant that the moon's materials had originally spun off from the earth. The
Hunger Moon had conspired, teasing the storms toward the Pacific coast of California, bringing heavy rains and torrential winds, not at all following what she had planned.

I kicked a pile of clothes aside and shook out my coat, reaching under the seat, feeling the sharp teeth of the keys.

“I found them!” I cried, certain this would make my mother love me.

She took the keys from me without a flicker of recognition. She pushed them into the ignition, and waited. Nothing. She pumped the gas three times and then flooded the engine. We started moving. “Faster. Keep driving, Mom. Don't stop,” said Dolly.

“Be quiet,” my mother whispered. “Please, just be quiet. If you're not quiet I don't know what I'll do.” We drove off, barely able to see the full moon amid the darkness. This unforeseen storm had her rattled, threatening her mastery. My mother had been playing a trick on the world by surviving on her own with two little girls. Without a man. Without family or friends, to speak of. With only her Farmer's Almanac and the full moons to guide her, she would do it on her own. But this storm had caught her off guard, and to boot there was hunger, which always made her anxious.

I heard howling. I watched the gray Hunger Moon sneaking behind the San Gabriel Mountains. I wondered if it might be willing to help us find a safe place. She had told me such things were possible, and I believed that the reason we were stuck, why the moon hadn't cooperated, had something to do with me, my behavior. Not being good enough, brave enough, like my sister.

“We're not going to die,” I whispered as I turned back to Dolly, noticing her hair, a deeper shade of red than mine, smeared straight across her wet cheeks.

As Big Ugly spun onto the slick highway and skidded to a stop, shattering the air with mud, I wanted to disappear
from the aftermath of her lack of control, which I could feel. Disheveled tree roots, cracked rocks, broken bumpers, and shards of glass littered the road. People were being evacuated. I could sense my mother's anger filling the car as she weaved through fender-bender crashes, drove up beyond the curve of sky, and then, once out of sight, pulled off to the side in a quiet and dark patch of mud. She reached across my lap and pulled the door handle, opening my door. “Get out, Ruthie. Don't make me tell you twice.”

I hesitated, wondering if she would do this to me again. Why was it always me? She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window.

“Out. Get out,” she said, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. I opened the door and got out. Standing in the rain, I watched her drive off, my hands balled into fists. My cheeks flushed, though I refused to cry, letting the rain soak my jean shorts and yellow tank top. I refused to bite my fingernails to the quick again. I looked around in the silence, wiping my glasses with the hem of my shirt. There was nothing but darkness and an occasional flicker of moonlight on the wet pavement. I stopped breathing, if only for a moment. I reached into my pocket and took out one of the smooth stones my mother had given me earlier. It felt warm in my palm. Somehow it anchored me.

There was that howling again.

I shivered, counting my heartbeats as I had learned to do. I wondered what it was about me that made her do this to me but never to Dolly. I stayed there for a minute, certain that my sister, who didn't care about being loved and who could look a person in the eye without flinching and tell them how it was, scared my mother a little. Dolly had said “motherfucker” to a park ranger once, when he ousted us from an illegal camping spot. My mother had pretended not to smile and told her to swear only in Yiddish.

My mother liked it, her courage.

Just keep breathing, I told myself. I imagined the fairies and gnomes that we had been talking about the day before, the ones in our books. The thought of them helped. I guided my breath, and I imagined a huge gnome reaching down to find me. There he was, grasping me with his big hands underneath my armpits. I stood on my tiptoes, my face held to the rain, lifting my arms up, imagining him pulling me up and out of danger. I opened my eyes once, staring into the spray of stars I imagined were there.

 

PEOPLE LIKE US, with no home to speak of, fell into the category of “in-betweeners,” forced to weather the uncertainty of unknown lands, and thus, we were members of the community of eclipsed folk—fairies, gnomes, Finmen, water sprites, waterhorses, and other creatures that made themselves known only in shadows and could be found in our books,
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, and folklore dictionaries, stories she collected.

“There could be gnomes under the bridges of the 405 in Los Angeles,” Dolly liked to tell me.

“That's magical thinking,” I would reply, as if our entire lives weren't already guided by it.

My mother repeatedly adjusted the rearview mirror as we cased the Southern California back roads in search of work. Our Country Squire housed everything we needed—rolls of toilet paper, cans of soda, pieces of fruit, and the last frozen TV dinner, which we'd split, unheated.

Wherever we went, burning down one highway after another, she'd take us to job sites where we were expected to work. Strawberry picker. Housemaid. Envelope stuffer. Bread baker. Personal aide to the sick and infirm.

“There's nothing wrong with a fairy tale or two. Everything is useful. You need to know how to navigate, to see roads before they are built. Be creative. Girls, just keep your eyes open to the possibilities.”

We memorized lines from great writers as my mother drove—Shakespeare, Thoreau, the Brothers Grimm, Judy Blume, Betty Friedan, all from the compartment of the station wagon as the windows filled with dust spun by the Santa Ana winds, or fogged up with morning dew.

There were too many possibilities, I thought, and yet never enough. We had no map. My mother navigated our life along the grid of intersecting weather patterns, moon names, and catastrophic events on
General Hospital
. The eclipsed folk, we speculated, liked to appear in the white spaces of the grids during the shifting times of twilight and daybreak, within the place between life and death, and most often, we would soon find, during the threshold years of adolescence, between child and adult.

It was reasonable to imagine that now and again, to make things bearable, Dolly and I would play our games, calling out fairies on the cliffs near the ocean and climbing in the canyons near the roads. My mother thought us clever when we spoke of gnome families and of waterhorses kneeling under Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier, after they'd swim out from their beds near the pilings. “Brava!” our mother would shout as we narrated the drive. She applauded us for adding some magic to our day and making sure that there was a bit of fun amid it all, our hunger, the moon, and its white empty skies.

 

THE ONLY THING I knew for sure from the backseat of our car was that if I pressed a can of Coke between my knees, I would not dwell on food. If this didn't work, the only thing left was to picture streams of light flashing across the stones where a waterhorse rested, licking the salt from its legs. Sometimes it helped; my mother was right.

“Who else watches the full moon like we do?” Dolly once asked my mother.

“Farmers do. Sailors and fishermen who need to rely on the ocean,” said my mother. She said you had to know that which
could save you, for it could probably also kill you. You had to know it better than anyone else, every inch of it.

 

I STOOD THERE in the rain, my arm muscles trembling under my yellow shirt as I kept my arms lifted high, waiting, promising myself I would stay like this until my mother came back for me.

Out of the ink spot in the distance, I saw two lights.

As they grew bigger, I knew I was being saved. My mother was coming back for me. She always came back eventually. The front lights glowed like two moons. I noticed the goose bumps on my arms for the first time.

“That'll teach you to be so proud,” she said, as she opened the car door. “No, Ruthie. Stop looking at me like that. Do you think I could really forget you?”

The front headlights illuminated the tiny threads of rain that slanted toward what I could now identify as cliffs. My stomach lurched. I climbed inside, and we drove back onto the highway, following the moonlight. I did not dare look at Dolly through my tears, nor she at me, as the wind spun bits of rock from the cliffs and the machinations of young girls into the waves.