The Salt God's Daughter (17 page)

He could see I was a person who could get carried away by stories.

Almost a year. That's how long Graham eclipsed my world and reintroduced me to the glow of the full moons. He had little interest in practical things, and most things that measured and gauged time. He brought gifts—shells, starfish, and tiny seahorses. He could not have cared less where things were put away until he needed them, at which point he needed me. Things like an ironing board, a lightbulb, even a needle and thread.

Each time he came to visit, he'd toss his wetsuit onto the porch, spreading it to dry over the white patio chair beside the baskets of bougainvillea.

That first night, he walked over to the bookshelf and picked up one of my old encyclopedias. When he opened it up, the dried rose from my violation fell onto the gray carpet.

“This is your past, yes?” he said. I nodded, trying to appear calm.

But he remained quiet. He was removed from meaning. This was a breath of fresh air for me because I was born a person who was empathetic and superstitious, and who assigned meaning to everything, and because of it, I probably suffered more than I should have. The rose petals dissolved when he picked up the stem. I watched the dust tuft into the air.

“DO YOU THINK the divine comes to whiskey-addled mothers in green station wagons who drag around two little girls and teach them to obsessively watch the moon?” Dolly asked.

She'd come to a prayer group at Wild Acres. On Wednesday nights, I attended a small prayer circle led by Dr. B. and Mrs. Green. Though some wouldn't use a tallith at night, Mrs. Green wore her husband's long white woolen tallith over her shoulders, its corners tied with specially knotted fringes. She carried it with her wherever she went, back and forth to the hospital and later to hospice to be with him.

We met in the lobby after-hours, our notebooks open on our laps, our pens scrawling words and pictures as we talked. Mrs. Green would kiss the prayer shawl and fling it up and around her shoulders like a cape. Then with arms extended, she'd let it drape over us to create a spiritual canopy as we gathered underneath it, a safe space that announced we were crossing the threshold of the divine, preserving a holy place where our prayers would be magnified. We'd offer prayers of love, trying to elevate ourselves and our thoughts. We'd welcome the Shekhinah, the female essence of God, the divinity that dwelled in the space of connection, dropping down onto the earth when called by certain prayers, by music or art, by a husband speaking lovingly to a wife, by the harmony that filled a home on the Sabbath, by those who were sick or suffering. This was a whole other sort of Judaism than the backseat version I had grown up on, and yet it spoke to me.

Pulling on her long black sweater, Dr. B. told us to imagine a female God reaching down to illuminate ordinary things that humans could do, little things that could create boundless peace, drawing soul mates together, filling a home with warmth when a wife promised fidelity in loving whispers and
meant it. And perhaps that is what my mother meant when she said, “Blessed be the moon.”

The full moon represented the reappearance of the Shekhinah, I learned.

“Some say whoever recites the blessing over the new moon welcomes the Shekhinah,” Dr. B. said. “And yes, Ruthie. Your mother knew that, too.” I recalled how they'd talk on the porch, how they spoke of the men who cheated and the daughters who would one day run the country. My mother wanted to keep the promise of the Shekhinah alive for us, to stand in, as if an apology, like a piece of pink ribbon wound around our ankles, a reminder that the divine flourished among those who were lost, which we so often were, and those who practiced mitzvoth, good deeds, which we so often did. A reminder of redemption, it fled when there were actions harmful to others. A karmic rubber band would not always snap back immediately, but the time would come. There were wrongs done when people abused the power they had. “There's magic for that, too. But that's a discussion for later,” said Dr. B. The Shekhinah came, also, to lovers in kisses. Kisses were the beginning of all love. Binding attachments.

I'd been looking at Dr. B.'s books in her massive office library. The divine had been pictured as a stone with wings, as a great eagle, as a mother, a pregnant woman with a glow, a daughter. She'd been represented through time as a healer and a warrior. The dividing line between men and women, believers and nonbelievers, and the separation between people of all walks and beliefs, created all the ills of the world. Mrs. Green would pray about this, insisting on life when she went to sit by her husband's bedside most mornings. Graham would teach me to claim it as my own, the separation, before we could heal it.

 

TREES FLASHED BY. Puddles caught fire. The stars lit the way as I pedaled to the Bougainvillea Castle. I saw the single
rose stem. I was dreaming of that night. Graham had covered me with my blue afghan and was staring at me when I opened my eyes. I pulled my knees in to my chest, just as I always did when I'd grapple with what had happened, going over and over it in my mind, forcing myself to assign blame. I needed to figure it out, to pull it apart like strands of yarn, to examine each separate piece. I needed to know where I stood.

I told Graham the story of my ravaged virginity. I knew I could tell it with the distance and authority of a news reporter. “I was called a slut,” I said, letting the dark word pierce the air, vulgar and hungry, its wings frayed. “Some said I got what was coming because I wore blue eyeliner.” I looked away. He reached out and brushed my cheek.

“You were a kid, Ruthie. Just a kid.”

“You should probably run like hell,” I said. “I would if it were me.”

“No, Ruthie, you wouldn't.” Graham pulled off his white shirt, turning slightly so I could see his back. It was covered with a road map of deep scars. Illuminated in the moonlight, pale pink, brown, and silvery grubs had melded torn flesh. Scars were my first language, stories that pulled me in with their history. A battle fought, won or lost. Scars drew my eyes like black ice, or the glow of blue-capped waves.

“Girls used to call me Sea Monster. I grew the beard to hide the acne marks on my face,” he said. My ache for him was visceral.

I sank onto my knees. These were tangible things I could put my hands on. “It's just skin. Not good or bad. Just skin,” I told him. He took off the silver chain with its gleaming dragon pendant and placed it around my neck.

My throat tightened as my tears began to spill across his back. My fingers instinctively knew what to do. I circled the scars with my hands, moving my fingers up each vertebra, one by one. As the rain pummeled the uncovered patio furniture,
I pictured the bougainvillea opening up wide, as though swallowing all of it. My grief was somehow deeper, or perhaps I was just feeling the depths of it. I pushed my thumbs between his muscles, moving them in and out. Outside, the wind swept across the windows. Ruthless weather. I leaned down and pressed my cheek against his back and listened to the rise and fall of his breath, trying to memorize the drumbeat.

He turned over and pulled me down onto him, keeping his hands pressed on the small of my back. At once, our lips met perfectly. Graham held me on the carpet, his fingers weaving across my body.

“Do you always ask for the opposite of what you want?” he said. I touched his lips. Then I drew back my fingers. He took my hand and placed it over his pants, and I cupped my hand over him. Then he slipped his hand between my thighs. Graham untied the straps of my dress and pulled them down off my shoulders. He kissed my breasts, and moved to my stomach, and then down around my belly. He pushed his face between my legs.

“Wait,” I said, sitting up.

“I'll go slow,” he whispered, peering into my eyes. “You can say stop.”

I nodded. Slowly, I eased back, keeping watch. I felt his shoulders bumping against my inner thighs and the warmth of his mouth as he kissed me. I felt myself taken by the sky. The whole expanse of it, mine. Before, I didn't have words for what this was, the colors of lost virginities, the gold-green hunger, the pale blue expectation, the burnt-orange fear, the blistering red desire, the white of forgetting—now the colors swirled above me, braided together in one long rope held by the Shekhinah, as she held out her arms, letting the rope untwine and escape through her fingers into a burgeoning fire, rimming me in flames. I'd never felt this. I wanted to name it, to call it something corporeal—lust, bright and intense—but it wasn't only that. Not bad, not
damaged. Life-giving. Let me be damned for experiencing this body. Graham felt me as I held on to him. Then, slowly, as I curled away, trembling, he gathered me in his arms on the carpet. I shivered against his warmth, his beard scratching my cheeks as he kissed me.

 

WHEN I WOKE up, I moved his legs off me. Flesh was so much heavier in the morning than at night, I thought. I folded his jeans and white shirt and made a pot of coffee. I heard the waves lapping at the shoreline as I listened to him breathing. I sat at my small butcher-block table and watched him from across the room, trying to burn the image into my memory, the trail of water his long brown hair left on the carpet, the movement of his hand opening and closing into a fist, capturing and releasing. I was already letting him go.

As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, I wiped away the smudge of blue eyeliner and let the mirror reveal me. Pale, freckled. Big-boned. I had put on weight. My once small breasts were spilling out of my bra. My hips were fuller. I had gray-blue circles under my eyes. My lips looked raw, bitten. My red hair appeared a pale gold, hollow like straw. I had brought a stranger home on the first day of the year, something I never did.

“Morning, Ruthie-Ruth,” Graham said, leaning up against the doorway.

I startled. I grabbed my glasses from the vanity. “I have to go to work. I'm glad we met,” I said. I offered him coffee, but he said he had to go. Suddenly in the light we were strangers.

After he dressed and gathered his wetsuit in a drawstring net, he pointed at the window. I glanced at the rainbow as I untangled my curls with my fingers. He picked up his net and told me about an old Scottish superstition, about rainbows and how they were celebrated on certain occasions. A rainbow was a sign that a baby was about to be born. The rainbow would end at the home of the birth. “
There's abrig fur a beuy barin
.”

“What does that mean, exactly?” I asked, watching him in the mirror.

“There's a bridge for a boy child.”

I put on my glasses. “Happy New Year.”

 

THAT NIGHT, AFTER he'd gone, I fished Mrs. Green's house key from the drain. Then I walked down to the ocean with an orange pail in my hands, my heart pounding. As the water ebbed around my ankles, I bent down and ran my fingers through the waves. My dragon pendant reflected the moonlight across the water. Water had memory, held the shape of every place it had ever been. Love, like grief, could travel within its crystalline molecules, filling every new shape, making it appear as if it had come just for you. I scooped ocean water into the orange pail to pour it into my bath. I was beginning to need the ocean.

For nights after, I would dream of Graham walking toward me through the burgundy hallways. In a state of half-wake, I'd get up and run through my apartment in my dark blue nightshirt, thinking I heard his knock. But there would be no one at the door, no sound but the gulls, diving for bits of plastic toys that washed up on the beach.

Perhaps his fear of birds kept him away, I told myself. I'd wake suddenly, and I'd move over in the bed to make space for his body.

That single rose appeared in the patterns of my drapes whenever the moonlight crept through. The vines outside crawled over everything and opened up—to me, in what would soon be my newly in-love state. They would reek of the whispers of bodies in heat, of sweating bodies tumbling over one another in motion, and of the abundance that somehow appeared in my life. To the residents they would mark tangled memories. The bushes relished humidity, but more, it was the way they'd climb across the sides of certain houses in Belmont Shore and not others, the way they'd shimmy up and over certain rooftops,
ruthless, all-consuming, sometimes even climbing over cars that had not been driven. It was clear what they spoke of.

Chaos. The blossoms fed on what was whirling inside and the vibrations in the air all around. It was the perfect place for me.

 

 

D
R. B. TOLD Dolly and me a story once, after we'd returned to the Twin Palms for good when we were kids. It was called “The People Who Would Hide in the Skins of Animals.” They were a distant tribe. They lived in a faraway place in the ocean and would come to you in secret. They would rise out of the water, shedding their animal skin, and become human. They could make you fall in love with them. They'd make you think you'd never loved anything or anyone before. You'd never know where they went when they left you. Only that they had escaped your love again. Only that unlike you, they lived in two worlds. Sometimes if you had their child, they'd return and bring the child a skin that held the magical powers of the ocean.