The Salt God's Daughter (8 page)

“No one calls my daughter a pond licker,” my mother said. She had returned, disheveled in her paisley minidress and boots but bolstered by her anger.

“Please accept my apologies, Dana. It's been hard for Tiffany since the divorce,” he said to my mother.

“Diana,” she said. “My name is Diana.”

We drove away with three months' salary, a paid apology for Tiffany's behavior. I remember feeling relieved upon our release from indentured servitude. Years later I would bristle whenever someone called me Firecracker. As we burned down the highway, headed for nowhere, Dolly tried to make me feel better. “It's good we got outta that place. I hated it there. Ruthie did good.”

I froze. Damn Dolly for drawing attention to me. The car began to sputter.

“No. This can't happen. Someone stole our gas?” said my mother as the car rolled into the breakdown lane and stopped. “I just put gas in this car last week,” she said, banging her fist on the dashboard as we climbed out.

No one had stolen it. We'd been driving for days, right into November.

My mother got out and looked around. There was nothing but desert for miles, and one Joshua tree. We were in a place surrounded by huge looming boulders, prehistoric debris. She leaned back against the car door, raking her fingers through her hair. She looked up at the sky. “Hey up there, does anybody give a lick about my life?”

My mother fell to her knees, wrapped her arms around herself, and rocked, her face now streaked with black mascara. “Everything was fine. I don't know what happened so suddenly.”

Dolly put her arms around my mother. “Don't worry, Mom. You have us,” I said.

My mother laughed through her tears. “If you only knew. You kids have absolutely ruined my life,” she whispered. She
pushed Dolly away and sat there for an hour, talking to herself. It scared me. Even Dolly looked nervous. Dolly brought her the bottle of whiskey from under the seat. We walked away, across the sand, pretending to be interested in the cacti and the Joshua trees. Finally, my mother got up and grabbed her almanac. She paced while she read. Dolly handed her a pen from the glove compartment, and my mother scribbled a note. She drew her finger across the right-hand page and landed on something. The moon and sun had conspired to create a solar eclipse, which we'd wait for. This was something spiritual. “Someone does give a lick about my life,” she said.

A few minutes later, we watched the moon blot out the sun's blinding rays, darkening the daylight for a few minutes. My mother stood up suddenly. “Someone get me my lipstick. I want everything perfect when I tell you where we're going next.”

I ran to the car and rifled through the glove compartment. I found the silver medallion of St. Augustine, pictured with a flaming heart. I had shoved it in there months earlier after a nun put it in my hand. I would later learn that St. Augustine was the patron saint of brewers, and this medallion was sometimes given to folks struggling with addiction.

We watched my mother gulp down the last of the whiskey. “I don't know if Jews are supposed to wear patron-saint medallions,” she said. Still, I hooked the silver chain around her neck. It dangled beneath her Jewish-star pendant.

“He's the saint of a good-luck life,” Dolly lied.

My mother peered into the side mirror and applied a layer of bright red lipstick. Beauty—it was her greatest vice.

She gazed out at the sprawling desert. “Do I look okay?”
For what
, I wondered. We were all drenched in sweat. “No one's gonna steal my husband from me again. Ruthie, run back and get my guitar. I don't want to leave it in the sun.”

I ran back and grabbed my mother's guitar. Sometimes she called it “the husband” because she liked to curl up with it at night.

“Well,” said Dolly, hands on her hips, “there's no one on this
farkakte
road, so we can't hitch.”

“You girls,” my mother said, passing us with her guitar case, her pink muumuu billowing in the heat.

That afternoon we walked for ten miles, until we hit a gas station. As we passed by the cacti, dirt, and rocks, I imagined a hillside of burning Joshua trees.

Our beautiful mother met a mensch. We had watched his wife get out of their red Camaro, stamping off to the side of the gas station to smoke a cigarette. She had kicked off her black high heels and leaned her back against the wall. She blew her cigarette smoke out in a long straight line. My mother said it was a hot day to be wearing that heavy red suit. And in heels, no less. “She not happy. I'm going to talk to her.”

She was an angel, my mother.

I could see the woman running her fingers through her straight brown hair. I ran over to my mother, who had bummed a cigarette.

“It's not that we can't afford that car. He got a deal—he says—from a friend. You know, he doesn't make squat as a health inspector. It's just that he spent all our vacation money on that car but he can't scrape together two nickels to take me out to a proper lunch. One vacation, that's all I wanted, and he takes me to In-N-Out Burger for a Double-Double. It's all the way in Baldwin Park, the flagship store with two drive-thrus. I said, ‘Take me to the Sands Restaurant, for the love of God. I want to sit in a nice dining room with cloth napkins and look out at the ocean!' Is that so much to ask?”

My mother's ears perked up. “Health inspector, what a fascinating job.”

“I wouldn't want to do it. By the way, my name is Sasha.” She shrugged and took a long drag of her cigarette. “I'm sorry. I just unloaded all this on you, poor thing. You go on. I'm going
to smoke another cigarette and figure out where I want to go for my vacation.”

“No, no. I completely understand. My husband is the same way. Hamburger joints. Fancy cars. Men, you know? Anyhow, I've got to get back to my girls. He owes you that vacation. Don't forget it.”

My mother brushed the hair from my eyes. “What am I going to do with those bangs?” she said, as we walked back to the car.

My mother smiled at the woman's husband.

“Gorgeous,” she said. “A 1970 Chevy. I've never seen one with a convertible top like this,” she said. Her pink muumuu was now drenched under her arms. I could see her bra was wet, too, and the outline of her nipples showed through the thin cloth. She looked vulnerable and weak.

He nodded. “That's because they don't make them like this anymore.”

“Oh, the convertible roof, I mean. It's really something. Must have cost you a fortune, I imagine, for a custom job like that?”

He glanced at his wife, rifling through her purse for another cigarette.

“Convertibles are standard for Camaros. Not so special,” he said.

“Funny, they stopped making Camaro convertibles a few years back; 1969 was the last. Yours is second-generation. Round taillights, right? Which means this convertible roof was made special for this car. That, my friend, must have cost you a pretty penny. By the way, your wife needs a vacation.”

“You wouldn't tell her about this.”

“No, of course not. But I would love your number. Work phone is fine. I like to have friends around town.”

He glanced at his wife as he pulled a business card out of his wallet. “Sure, lady. You just call me if you need a favor.”

My mother shooed us away and we sat on the curb, eating a bag of Fritos and drinking Coke as we stared at the oily pools
in the dusty ground. I never knew what they talked about after, or how my mother got people to do what she wanted. But within half an hour, we were riding in a red Camaro with Sam and Sasha, back down the highway to our station wagon. He filled the gas tank and told us to take care. “You keep this nice lady happy. I'll call you for lunch, Sasha,” my mother said. My mother gathered her hair into a bun on top of her head. She grabbed her almanac from the dashboard and paged through the charts in the calendar section. She scribbled something across the side of the right-hand page. When she was satisfied, she kissed the cover. Then she propped it back up, and we were off.

“Where are we going now, Mom?” I asked.

“Oh, Ruthie. We're going home, sweetie. We're finally going home.”

We were headed back to the only place my mother was sure would have us.

It ended up being the perfect place for us.

M
Y MOTHER SAYS that when she was pregnant with me, she used to swim every day. There was a colony of sea lions at the tip of the peninsula in those days. One morning, while she was swimming alone, a sea lion swam right up beside her, so close that she could see its shiny black eyes and its flared nostrils. “It was huge,” she said. “Like a large bear under the sea. I looked right into its eyes. It was a rogue male, I was certain. It just raised its head and then dove back underwater, disappearing. I swam like crazy back to shore. The ocean is their terrain. Best to keep a safe distance,” she said. Though sea lions are massive, they can slip in and out of view as if they were simply apparitions, diving silently into the deep without so much as a splash, making you wonder if you had seen anything at all, she explained.

Some folks will tell you that although Long Beach has had its share of illusory changes, certain things will always rise to the surface. Before the digging of oil even began here, before one of the largest pools of oil in the country was discovered here and systematically siphoned from the earth, marine life and birds would show up, dying, on the shores, covered in the
dark liquid. Children who grew up in the area used to take them home and try to revive them. Dagmar Brownstein said she couldn't even count the number of animals she found while walking down the beach with her daughter, Sasha. The oil had already been leaking out on its own, flowing everywhere it shouldn't have. Some folks say that once the oil rigs were built and the siphoning began, no more oil-soaked animals were found along the beach.

Today, if you are standing on the shore in Long Beach and gazing out at the sparkling Pacific at night, you might see floating cities, a mass of white skyscrapers, appearing on the waves. Hues of red, green, and yellow fan up from the water, bathing the buildings in an array of colors. These lights fall upon the deafening forty-five-foot waterfalls nestled between the scrapers and palm trees. If you look more closely, these islands appear to be part of a tropical resort filled with fig trees, irrigation systems, and wildlife.

But all this is just an illusion, still, a trick of urban camouflage, a by-product of theatrical design meeting genius engineering. The skyscrapers are actually skins that cover massive 175-foot oil derricks. Painted white with green and blue faux balconies, they are part of a plan, carefully constructed in the 1960s by the creators of Disney's Tomorrowland, to allow the oil industry to flourish while preserving the scenic California coastline. They disguised the oil drilling activity with man-made waterfalls that buried the noise of the pumping and digging, and they brought in hundreds of palm trees to give it a tropical ambience. Huge boulders quarried from Catalina Island were positioned around the edges of each artificial island to keep the soil in place.

Today, the man-made drilling platforms are known as the THUMS Islands, named for the original field contractors: Texaco, Humble (which became Exxon), Union, Mobil, and Shell.

The natural world absorbed the artificial in a show of dominance. The islands, along with several free-standing oil rigs, became artificial reefs—home to a plethora of marine mammals and thousands of fish and birds, including herons, falcons, and even parrots.

An illusion, as pleasing to the eye as a carnival, which was the point.

Beneath the surface of these rigs, sea lions could be found diving through the silvery bubbles created by millions of swirling fish, spinning turrets beneath the blue-green water. If you are swimming or kayaking off the coast, chances are, you might run into one of the cows or bulls. Though gentle by nature, they are territorial here. The drilling platforms are their home, the reefs their turf.

Throughout the city, massive prehistoric flamingos appear to rise out of the ground, dipping their beaks in. These are well pumps that siphon oil from the earth, in plain sight. Once the oil industry began to flourish, revitalizing the Long Beach coast, oil executives would sometimes throw lavish parties to keep their workers entertained. One year, a teenage boy who had been swimming in one of the canals discovered the body of a young woman floating in the water, clothed in a fancy dress and still wearing her high heels. She had been a guest at one of the parties, had gotten drunk, and had fallen into the ocean, people said. No one had followed her.

 

WHEN DAGMAR BROWNSTEIN opened the Twin Palms Motel in the heart of Belmont Shore back in the late '60s, she never dreamed that her entire life would be governed by things she could not see, oil as well as millions of animals.

Dagmar said that nearby, there had been a factory that crushed oyster shells for road cover, before asphalt was the preferred material. She loved the history of the quaint neighborhood with its Spanish-style buildings and beach bungalows.
Built in the 1920s and '30s, these were modest homes made for workers in the area, the train conductors for Pacific Electric, the school librarians, and the folks that worked in the oil industry. The houses had small garages—no one really needed a car back then, given that most people traveled by Red Cars, which were part of the railway system.

To look at Belmont Shore now, you'd never know that the area was once all underwater, but the past can never be completely hidden away. Now and again, when the tide is high, a locker room in the Belmont Shore Athletic Club will fill up with water. This is the result of an oversight by workers, who tossed rocks and concrete into the rivulets. The one they missed reminded people of what went on before.