The Salt God's Daughter (5 page)

“Would you girls like to pick some flowers?” my mother asked, but by this point I was exhausted. I fell in a heap on the hard cold sand, barely able to keep my eyes open. The stars blurred in the sky, as did the sounds, but I could hear her voice lilting in the cold dark waves of the desert. I knew she was drunk. It had been some time since she'd been this bad. I knew the only thing to do was to be quiet and wait.

The air would be warm soon. The desert never stayed cold for very long.

“A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine,” my mother said, tripping over her feet in the moonlight, reciting a line from Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. She waved her almanac in the air.

I looked up at the waning moon, now a less than perfect circle in the night sky. I felt guilty for my own thoughts, which I was sure I would be punished for. No matter how anyone wanted to sugarcoat it, the fact was that some people were never meant to be mothers.

I buried my head under the orange sleeping bag, imagining the sea lion cutting through a circle of bubbles, its large brown body floating out into the cold dark desert, then taking me with it as it dove beneath the black water.

 

I
F THE HEART were a book, its lovers would be the chapters. A girl's book begins with her mother, who is her real first love. What happens between them will likely determine the direction of words on all of the subsequent pages. Next, she will fall in love with her first best friend, and her first lover will follow, essentially as the third act. Depending on how the heart is tended during these beginning chapters, its capacity will be reached, or never at all. That is the only goal. No one can say for certain whether the heart will wither like petals near seawater, or whether it will be strong, resilient, able to stave off the elements that will likely befall it. We had to go all the way back to my great-grandmother to find a love story that we could all reference. One that we knew we could go back to again and again, as one does the right book. No woman in our family had gotten it right since 1895.

My mother liked to tell this love story sitting on the hood of the car, filling us with hope. Our ancestors were from Grodno. My great-grandmother Ruth and my great-grandfather Daniel grew up together and fell in love when she was just fifteen.
They spoke Yiddish at home. Daniel came to America first, fleeing anti-Semitic rule. Once he saved up enough money, he sent for Ruth, who had flaming red hair and worked in a large tobacco factory, as well as his sister, Rivka. The two young women boarded a steamship in Hamburg at the turn of the century. My mother kept a black-and-white photograph of them, two refugees waiting on the crowded dock in Germany, collecting a final memento of their former lives. Ruth and Rivka are wearing long white dresses with high Edwardian collars; their flowing bodices are pouched, and below, cinched with sashes at the waist. Their wavy hair is swept up to the top of the head, twisted into a knot. They look hopeful and expectant, as though they are leaving for a grand dance.

They were poor. Once on the ship, they crowded into the steerage compartment—below the main deck, used sometimes for cargo. This was the lowest fare. Rarely cleaned, the space was dank and the air thick. Temporary partitions separated the men from the women. Hundreds breathed putrid air from overflowing washrooms. They would try to sleep while the noisy walls vibrated from the steering controls and engines. They would brave their fears of the sea, existing for a time—maybe a month—their nostrils burning from the aroma of orange peels, herring, and disinfectant. They would sing themselves to sleep in narrow bunks, atop canvas mattresses stuffed with seaweed, holding fast to their dream of a new land and the man who would save them in America—a brother to one, a lover to the other.

Ruth and Daniel's marriage lasted seventy years, up until her death at eighty-six. Before her burial, he draped his body across her casket and pleaded, “My partner, my partner.” A tear would fall from my mother's cheek when she retold this part. She had seen it.

“My grandmother Ruth,” my mother said, “your great-grandmother, got it right, somehow, at fifteen years old. What's happened to us since?” She said in those days, life was so
hard, a husband and wife had to be equal partners. “It sounds dreamy, doesn't it? To be like that with a man? That's how it should always be. A partner. Everyone needs a partner. I always dreamed I'd marry a shopkeeper. We'd have a little grocery store together. We'd work all day together, and before closing up shop, we'd dance in the aisles after everyone had gone,” she'd say, staring up at the sky.

After Ruth arrived in America, she and Daniel were never apart for more than a day until she passed. He had a stroke and died six months after she did.

My mother said in those days they called it having a stroke. That's what they said to explain a broken heart.

 

RUTH HAD NEVER lost her love of the land, her connection to tobacco, and her fear of the ocean. She passed it all down through cellular memory. That, my mother said, was the reason I clung to land. I had, it seemed, inherited all that my great-grandmother had felt on that ship, how she both hated and needed the ocean to carry her to the love that awaited. It was the only way to get from here to there, across the sea, and so she had to make peace with it, to know it, to breathe it in and let it become a part of her.

Tobacco calmed me. I liked the burnt scent of it on my fingers. Often, when I'd find a half-smoked cigarette on the ground and if no one was looking, I'd roll it between my thumb and forefinger so that the remaining tobacco spilled out.

My mother said we all came from the earth. She was reclaiming her roots by connecting to her family this way, through her Farmer's Almanacs.

Relationships ruled everything, even in science.

 

DEPENDING ON OUR circumstance, my mother said the moon was the child, the sibling, or the spouse of the earth. If the weather was uncooperative, she said the moon was Earth's
child. When moonlight helped us navigate our path and find extra work, she said the moon and Earth were siblings, formed at the same time out of a whirlpool of swirling materials in the solar system. Whenever there was a spurned lover in my mother's life, or if she had fallen prey to one, she made mention of the Marriage Theory, which asserted that somewhere else in the solar system, the moon was formed, but it was pulled into Earth's atmosphere by Earth's seductive gravity and then captured. The latter was a sexist theory of planetary creation, my mother said, telling us too much and never enough.

She didn't hate men, just what they did sometimes, but also what some women would do to other women.

Since we were all made from the same material, I imagined there was a piece of moon and earth in us. Everything was, in effect, connected to everything else. It followed, then, that men and women, adults and children, were more connected than we realized. I didn't understand why there was always so much distance.

 

ONE NIGHT, AS we set up our campsite, my mother made a discovery. The planets were aligning, according to her almanac. “We can pick all night. Heaps of moonlight,” she said, pointing at the large Hunter's Moon. “I've been thinking. If we can just get a little leg up, I'd like to get us a house.” After the incident at the motel, we had realized we needed to make a new plan. Money was not puddling up from the ground. I was barefoot, noticing the soft dirt under my feet and the holes in Dolly's blue Adidas sneakers, which had come just this way.

Dolly and I dared not look at each other. A real house, the type she often spoke of, never materialized. Oh, to dream of it, though, of running through the bedrooms and down hallways. We could race from room to room. We would make our beds, keep clothes folded in drawers and leave them there, so that we didn't have to grab whatever was on the surface of the mess.
Perhaps one day clothing would be just for wearing, and not for pillows, tables, and seat cushions.

With the whole night in front of us and a full moon to give us extra light, we could just keep driving. She wouldn't say where.

 

DAWN ROSE OVER Los Angeles, radiating streaks of orange and pink light from behind the thick clouds as the moon faded. We drove north into Ventura County, past the sand beaches, the white dunes, the deep wetlands, the sparkling creeks, and the Santa Clara River. I rubbed my eyes, trying to push away my fatigue. In the distance, I could see the strawberry fields my mother always spoke of, with their alluring neatness, a grid of alternating rows of long muddy trenches and puffy green plants dotted with tiny white flowers, extending for miles, it seemed. We were nearing Oxnard. It was October 1975, strawberry season, and my mother was of the mindset that if there was work, we would go and worry about sleep later. Dolly and I were fatigued, but after a breakfast of hash browns and egg sandwiches, we felt more human.

Strawberry picking was hard, our mother had already told us. But we never complained.

The towns near the coast were blessed with fertile soil and mild onshore breezes, perfect for growing the delicate strawberries, whose skin bruised with the slightest wind, whose tiny white flowers could wither from a single raindrop, and whose berries could grow misshapen when touched by a tiny speck of dust. If a berry was marred in any way, it was less desirable, which meant it was worth little.

The Takahashi Strawberry Ranch was located in the western part of the Oxnard Plain and had the best strawberries in California, according to my mother. “
La fruta del Diablo
.”

“What's that?”

“The fruit of the Devil, because they're so hard to grow, and even harder to pick. They ruin the spine.”

We had tried to pick strawberries once before, but an entire crop had been burned in a heat wave.

My mother explained that each strawberry had to be carefully tended, from flower to fruit. Picking strawberries was an art form. If you were good, they'd keep hiring you back. It required delicate handiwork and a strong back. Strawberry plants, at four or five inches tall, required bending at the waist for many hours, for weeks at a time. I just wanted to keep my hands busy, imagining all the things I could buy if the money were as good as my mother said.

I thought about a doll I'd seen on television, a Tiffany Taylor fashion doll with a rotating scalp, whose waist-length hair could be changed from white-blond hair parted in the center to brunette hair with bangs, all by rotating her scalp. She wore a gold lamé swimsuit and green mule clogs, and she could change from being a starlet to a librarian if you put her in the attachable green floor-length skirt. The doll had wide-set eyes, real lashes, and a full face of makeup. Dolly and I had been singing the jingle for weeks: “She's what you want her to be.” It came with a sheet of hairstyle instruction tips.

I was nine years old, and eager for a chance to become someone else entirely. My mother said that we could each make about $20 a day or more.

She knew the farmer, Lou, from a past life. Finding reincarnated lovers was possible, she said. They had worked together at a small cannery one summer when she was young, before she abandoned him for the open road. He was a generous guy who had never gotten over her, she said.

We arrived at 6:00 AM, when the fields were still cool. The green berries would turn from white to red in three days, which is why you had to pick them at just the right time. They wouldn't ripen once they were picked. Hot sun was bad. Cold was bad. There could be high winds that withered the leaves, and a gray mold called
botrytis
that could ruin all the berries in
a basket. There could be spider mites, too. There were so many things that could go wrong with strawberries, it was amazing that any made it into the basket at all.

The Takahashis' ranch grew resilient berries. It was a family business, and my mother said that was important to her, as if it said something about us.

I had long, agile fingers. I could weave a braid in seconds. I knew how to be delicate. Dolly did not. Finally, I thought. A way for me to prove myself and win my mother's favor. She wouldn't leave me if I was indispensible.

 

HER BEAUTY HAD something to do with her navigational system. There was something about my mother and men that I could never place. An entire conversation of innuendo would occur in front of me, but I couldn't understand it. Still, it made things a little easier for my mother. Her resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor may have had something to do with it, I imagined. Because of these conversations, we were able to get into or out of any situation my mother desired. I learned how powerful beauty could be. To be saved from harm or given a break, like the women on
General Hospital
so often were, all one had to do was look pretty and perhaps talk and laugh a little bit “infectiously,” a word I'd just learned that applied to laughter and not illness. Certainly, the character Brooke knew the language, too. She'd married the same man three times.

As we pulled up to the strawberry ranch, my mother stopped next to a silver truck. A tall Japanese man in a white button-down shirt and jeans looked up and waved. He was setting up large fans that would remove the field heat from the filled baskets until they were taken to the market. He had small dark eyes, like Dolly's, and a tanned creased face. Wrinkles shot out from the corners of his eyes when he smiled at my mother. She got out of the car, smoothed her blue jean skirt, and walked toward him in her wedge sandals. I heard her laugh as they
embraced, and for a moment, I felt a pang of jealousy. My mother belonged to the world, not just to me. “If only the little birds didn't swoop down and eat my strawberries,” Lou said, walking toward us. “Remember, you can't stuff berries into a silo like a wheat farmer does. You need to arrange them neatly so customers will think they look good in the basket. Work carefully, most important thing with strawberries.”