The Salt God's Daughter (11 page)

I understood her stories of the moon.

 

MY MOTHER LAY in a hospital bed for eighteen hours, her face as pale as the sheer hospital curtains, her voice only a whisper. Her cold had turned into pneumonia. She now had an oxygen mask on her face and an IV stuck in her arm. Next to her bed, a small monitor blinked and beeped, flashing with red lights and numbers. She could barely open her eyes, and no one but us knew she had already given up. I stayed by her side, counting her every breath. Dolly wandered in and out, preferring to hedge in the doorway or give the silent treatment to the hospital social worker in the waiting room.

When the nurse left for a moment, my mother pushed up her oxygen mask and reached for my hand. “You're my favorite,” she said. She had never spoken so kindly to me. I looked around for Dolly; surely my mother was speaking to her.

“Mom, it's me. It's Ruthie.”

“You're the one with the red hair, right?” she said, forcing a smile.

“We both have red hair,” I said.

“Well, then, it's a win-win.” She was now more lucid than I had seen her in months. “Thirty-six years. It's enough. Your sister, not so tough. Take care of her,” she said, her eyes moving from my face to the bedside table. “You're a good girl, Ruthie. I wanted you to be that way. I'll see you sometime,” she said, drifting off. Her eyelids fluttered, and I bent down to hear her better. I listened to my mother's breathing, a gurgling sound. I watched the fall of her chest, each time doubting another breath would follow. When I called for help, two nurses pushed into the room. They gruffly put the oxygen mask back on my mother's face. The social worker took my hand.

When the doctor walked into the waiting room and motioned to the social worker, I got up from my chair. Standing
in my blue jean shorts and fringed blue tank top, I peed myself. Someone mentioned a do-no-resuscitate order, and Dolly fell on the floor. The social worker said that our next of kin had been called and she was on her way.

The lights flickered. The ribbon of grief caught me around my ankles, making it impossible to walk. The room darkened. I could focus only on the bright globe in the ceiling.

Now, we were the motherless daughters I'd always believed us to be. But this was different. We finally felt her presence. My mother had been here.

 

“WHICH ONE OF you ladies plays the guitar?”

A giant of a nun with bright blue eyes burst into the waiting room. She was wearing a scarf, with a black sweater and slacks. “Is it you, Ruthie? Or maybe you, Dolly? My, the last time we met you were only little things.” Her voice trailed off when she met my eyes. “Ruthie. I'd never forget your red curly hair.”

I had little recollection of this old nun, but as I looked into her eyes, I thought I saw hope there. She put her hand on my shoulder. “It's okay if you don't remember me. I'm Sister Mary. I was a friend of your mother's. Everything is going to be fine now. Let's get you a change of clothes, shall we? We have lots of clothes for girls your age.”

Sister Mary firmly took my hand, and Dolly's, as we turned to leave. Dolly sloughed off Sister's hand on the way out, but my grip remained firm, unwilling to let go. I hardly noticed the eclipse, the threshold that I knew my mother had somehow been waiting for, the in-between place necessary for an escape. How else could she get out of this life and call it a coincidence?

 

T
HE BEAVER MOON signaled a time to set traps to ensure warmth for the coming winter. The story fit well into my mother's formula—which I wouldn't understand until years later—which was to combine deep-seated neglect with stunning moments of maternal protection. It was this dichotomy that she hoped would protect us. It made it confusing for everyone, most of all Dolly and me. Years before, my mother had made sure we'd be cared for in the event that anything happened to her. She had once begged Sister Mary to take us in, knowing that we would need warmth in the winter.

Years before, Sister had given us a medallion of St. Augustine. She had talked to my mother for an hour as Dolly and I waited in the foyer, knees tucked to our chests, staring up at two large golden angels on the gilded mirror. “They're
meshugenah
,” Dolly had whispered.

On an inordinately humid November day, Dolly and I walked through the heavy wooden doors of the Bethesda Home for Young Girls in Long Beach, a privately funded residential home run by three nuns. “Bethesda” meant “house of mercy.” But the secret was that we were the ones offering
mercy. The nuns needed us as much as we needed them. The Home was fenced in by fuchsia bougainvillea bushes with the hugest blossoms I had ever seen. I fixated on the succulent petals, naming them.
Afterglow
, I thought to myself, oddly calm given the weight of loss I felt. I preferred not to feel, instead focusing on how these flowers forced open their petals. I recognized the heavy bloomer with little foliage that climbed thirstily along the fence of this strangely familiar place that would be our new home.

Dolly and I held hands in the foyer, staring at the mirror with the two angels sculpted into the frame. I now recognized archangel Michael, who looked down on us ominously with wings outstretched, waving a sword of protection. And next to him, archangel Gabriel, holding a bouquet of lilies, a symbol of purity, chastity, and innocence.

I remembered these angels from before.

After the shooting at the Twin Palms, our mother had frantically rushed in, thinking this a church, and begged Sister Mary to take us, just temporarily. Though Sister refused—the home was not equipped for little girls—she talked with my mother. It was on that day that my mother wrote up guardianship papers. Sister Mary, when she heard we had no family to speak of, promised to be “next of kin” and to keep us together if anything should happen to my mother. From that day forward, we belonged to a nun we would not meet for the next several years. My mother never updated the papers. Sister Mary never imagined that the overwhelmed young mother with the crazy sea lion story would take her up on an offer made wholly in haste and purely out of sympathy.

“They need serious help,” Dolly whispered.

“Where to begin?” I whispered. Dolly smiled through her tears, sobbing then into her arm. I willed myself not to cry.

This group of three nuns were peculiar-looking, foreign creatures that smiled, lips pursed. Next to Sister Mary, Sister
Zora stood with folded hands, wearing a hand-size leather bag around her neck—a hippie nun. “Welcome,” she said. Sister Elizabeth, who sat in a wheelchair, never smiled. I noticed that the style here seemed to be to smile without ever showing any teeth. Sister Mary waved her fingers as she spoke about the rules of the Home.

“We're Jewish. We can't live in a church,” Dolly said, as Sister Mary led us from room to room.

“This is a home. Our home. God's home. And now your home, too.”

Crucifixes hung askew on every wall on brown flowered wallpaper that peeled up in the corners, revealing chipped patches of color, aqua in some rooms, peach in others.

“Should we tell them about our ancestors?” I asked Dolly. I could picture them rolling over in their graves, all of them, Ruth and Daniel, now my mother. Under the kitchen cabinets, canisters of flour, sugar, and different-shaped macaroni lined the gold-flecked Formica countertop. Amid the crowded mess, there were baskets of bread and crackers, bowls of overripe bananas, strawberries, and mangoes. There were other ingredients I didn't recognize, jars filled with angelica root, crushed lavender, and chunks of brown-red rock called dragon's blood. Labels had been pasted across the glass, with smeared blue handwriting. The kitchen had no garbage disposal, and the windows were so dirty it was hard to see anything through them but blurry shapes.

“How soon before we get out of here?” asked Dolly, hiding a banana and two mangoes in the back of her underwear drawer. Habits from our previous lives on the road remained.

I did my homework, read ahead as many pages as I could, and after dinner, I'd curl up in my twin bed under a pile of quilts, staring out the small glazed window at what I knew to be the full moon, hoping it would finally deem me worthy, despite the fact that I no longer believed. I no longer kept a
stone in my pocket. I wished for the belief I had once had. I wished for an aching memory. I felt nothing. I cared for no one.

The nuns taught us to do the waltz. They made sure we had clean clothes to wear to school and that we kept our hair in tight braids, though we unwound them as soon as we sat down on the bus. Though we were too old for them, we packed our
Partridge Family
lunch boxes full with cans of V8, bananas, hummus with carrots, and turkey-and-bean-sprout sandwiches. The Fritos and TV dinners of our past were gone.

There was one small television in Sister Zora's room. I would see her sneaking in there to watch her favorite programs. I got her hooked on
General Hospital
. Sister Mary warned that nothing good could come of TV, but it was all we wanted. I took Sister Zora to movies, to Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal's
Little Darlings
, about two fifteen-year-old girls who make a bet to see who will lose her virginity first.

Dolly had told her it was just about two girls who go off to camp. Sister Zora nearly died when she saw it. We took her to see
Blue Lagoon
, with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins, a story of two teenagers stranded together on an island. It was a beautiful story of first love. Sister had fallen for the same trick twice, thinking that it was a Disney movie. Our mother had let us run free, and yet here we were being corrupted by those who knew nothing about corruption.

“I miss Mom,” I said to Dolly one morning, as we sat at the table eating cinnamon oatmeal with six other girls. It almost didn't matter. I never spoke to them, unless directed by the nuns to do so. I spoke mostly to Dolly, and usually only in our bedroom at night when the drapes covered the moon, eclipsing the light.

Dolly shook her head no. “Don't you know what ‘do not resuscitate' means? How can you miss a person who didn't even want to be with you?” She flipped her hair back, digging into her oatmeal.

Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night, my sister was not in her bed. I'd get up and look for her. I'd find her curled up on the floor—in the library, in the kitchen, or on the marble floor in the foyer, as though she had been searching for our mother in her sleep. On the night she began menstruating, Dolly locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed, deep sobs that finally let out her grief. It was quick, and it eased my mind. It had been a long time coming.

 

“WE' D LIKE IT very much if you young ladies would cut your hair,” Sister Mary said one day. We stood in her office, bathed in the blue haze of the stained-glass window. “And the swearing has to stop. In Jewish or English.”

“Jewish is not a language. Hebrew is. We don't speak it. But we can swear in Yiddish, from the old country. Our women never cut their hair.” Dolly took my arm and pulled me out of the office.

“I'll cut my hair. I don't care; do you really care this much?”

“Sister Mary is full of shit, Ruthie,” Dolly said later. “Do you trust someone who moves her lips when she prays but never makes a sound? Doesn't she believe what she is saying to God?”

“What are you saying to God?” I asked. “I don't know why you always have to fight everything, anyway.”

“Well, you don't fight for anything. Why do you always give in so quickly? You didn't fight for Mom.”

“What?” I whipped around. “Don't ever say that.”

“Well? What are you going to do?”

“Don't try to make me hate you, Dolly. I can't.” I turned my back to her but didn't move.

 

WE WERE LOSING each other.

Life had been brutal with us. I had learned that the best way to face it was to adopt the strange habit of the bougainvillea, here at the Bethesda, to push into the pain. Hadn't their
blossoms folded up before a rainstorm, and then suddenly, as if in a moment of doubt, opened wide as it all came rushing down on them?

This is what I did with every situation that tested me. I pushed into my life, open-mouthed, arms outstretched, waiting to take on the pain, all of it with eyes wide open, ready to bear it.

Dolly grew her hair in rebellion, her dark red bangs sticking out in all directions, almost covering her eyes. I let mine grow, too, and it fell into a curly mane down my back.

What could the nuns do? We were two Jewish adolescents living in a small, dysfunctional residential home. Suddenly, we had even more freedom than we'd had with our mother. But we were more dangerous now. We had no one's love, and without that, we were vulnerable.

To hold on to each other, we did what we knew. We ran wild at night.

 

SOMETIMES AFTER DINNER, Sister Elizabeth put a cassette in the tape player. Sister Mary pushed the coffee table and chairs to the side of the living room, and Sister Zora rolled up the red Oriental carpet. Then Sister Mary would put her hands on Sister Zora's shoulders, and with a nod, the music began. “One, two, three,” she'd call. “One, two, three. Can-ta-loupe, can-ta-loupe, can-ta-loupe.” We'd chant “cantaloupe” as the music played and the nuns waltzed us across the floor, crossing back and forth in sweeping diagonals as though gliding, their habits puffing out. Sister Zora maintained a solemn expression, though her face flushed whenever she tripped.

We played along, and danced a little.

By this point, we called the shots. We stopped doing the waltz. We started dancing on tables. No one said anything as long as we came home.