The Taste of Salt (6 page)

“I love you, Sarah. I do.” He sighed from the very soles of his feet. “But I know I'm not helping you. I know …” He paused. “I know that I'm drinking too much. You think I felt like a man after last night? No. No, I know I'm not right. And I'm gonna try to get right and do right by you all. I swear I am. I swear it.”

She went to him and embraced him, just like she did the first time they were ever together. She could feel all of him enter into her arms. He picked her up like she was a feather—after having two kids!—and carried her to their room, and they made love and this time it was perfect. It was so so sweet. If she'd known what was to come, she would have treasured it more. She would have held it to her heart like the jewel it was. But she didn't know. How could you know something like that? How could you hold on to something like that? You couldn't.

When I was eight, nine, ten, I was in love with my father. Of course I was. That's what girls do. And despite all the hard times, there are some good days to remember. That's what makes the bad ones harder to accept. I always thought that if I could just do the right thing, if I could just say some magic words I didn't know, that I could make the good days stay, maybe even multiply. That's what people always think. That's what's so hard to let go of.

When I was eight, nine, ten, my world was my block and the few blocks around it. I went to school and sat through reading and perked up at math and came home. I stroked our cat, Purrface, and cleaned out the litter box. I played Barbies with my friend Deena from across the street. I collected leaf samples from our front yard and classified them
by size. I rode bikes with Tick. He had learned to ride when he was four by tilting his tricycle over onto two wheels. He used to spend hours—even at that age—falling and getting up, falling and getting up. And then finally he got up and stayed right and sailed all the way to the corner tilted over like a circus clown. My mother and father were sitting out on the porch when he got the hang of it. I don't think I'd ever seen them laugh so hard. And the next day, my father came home from work with a new red two-wheeler for Tick. We barely ever got him off it after that. As long as there wasn't a foot or two of snow on the ground, he was out furiously riding, riding, riding. Like he was chasing something—or something was chasing him. I could never keep up.

C
LEVELAND DOESN'T HAVE AN
aquarium anymore, but when I was a kid, there was a pretty good-sized one. It was on its last legs during my childhood—it closed in 1986 when I was twelve. But it was there. I don't remember what the outside of the building looked like. It must have been big. I remember only a feeling of size and of coolness and darkness and mystery. It smelled kind of musty but there was a pleasant hum in the air, the sound of all that water being aerated, the shouts of children on field trips and families out together. It was my very favorite place, but I
remember the four of us going there only one time, when I was about nine—all my other visits were on school field trips or with the families of friends.

In retrospect, I imagine that my father was on the wagon that time—he would stop drinking periodically for a few weeks, sometimes even a month or two. My mother's step would lighten and the frown lines on her forehead would fade. Tick and I would fight less, afraid of making the magic disappear and the old Dad reappear. But he always did. I could never really believe that it didn't matter how I behaved. That my father's drinking had nothing to do with me.

The trip to the aquarium had a special kind of holiday feeling to it—it was Father's Day and my father, knowing how much I loved the aquarium (Tick liked it there, too, if not as much), said there was nothing he'd like better than to spend the day with us there. In the car on the way over, he was in an ebullient mood, singing bits of old Chuck Berry songs and putting his hand on the back of my mother's neck. She looked young and pretty, the way I imagine she looked when she first met my father. I had a brief unsettling vision that they had a life that had nothing to do with Tick or me, but I couldn't articulate it, so I picked a fight with Tick instead. Nothing was gonna mess up this day, though. Rather than bellowing and scaring us into quiet,
as he sometimes did, Daddy looked up into the mirror with a gentle “Come on, y'all. We're almost there” that somehow got under our skin. So we stopped fighting.

The parking lot was already full of happy-looking Sunday families—mothers and fathers and varying numbers of children. Tick and I held hands as we walked through the parking lot. I know brothers and sisters never do stuff like that but that's how close we were then. We were each other's best allies—I thought that would never change. The four of us went in through the dark entrance hall. The first tank we saw was the one with the electric eel.

It was huge and gray, twisting quietly through the water. For all that it was enormous, it didn't look particularly menacing, swimming soundlessly, ceaselessly back and forth. It had a gray muscularity, an
ownership
of the water that I found beautiful.

People were gathering in front of the tank—there was a sign saying that there would be an eel demonstration in ten minutes. What was it going to demonstrate? I thought. It just swam around—what other skills could it have? Tick and I asked Daddy if we could stop and wait to see what happened. After a few minutes, a man in an army-green shirt and khaki pants came out—he was wearing a head mic, like Madonna's. I thought that was cool. He waved to the small crowd and explained that the electric eel fed itself
by stunning its prey with up to 650 volts of electricity. He said he had to put on rubber gloves even to reach into the tank, that a shock from the eel could knock him unconscious. The eel eased placidly through the water. I stared, mystified but excited; I could feel Tick breathing beside me. My father's hand was on my shoulder. The keeper dropped some smaller fish into the tank. They swam around briefly and then, one by one, seemed suddenly to fall asleep. The eel inhaled them without ever slowing down its leisurely circuit of the tank. Now the keeper held up a panel of lights with two long clips dangling from it at the end of black cords. He reached into the tank with both hands and lifted the smooth, strong eel out. He laid it on a little platform over the tank. Everyone in front of the tank stood as still as Sunday morning. He put the clips onto the eel. At first flickering, then all at once, the panel of lights turned on. Everyone started laughing and gasping; some people clapped as the keeper released the indifferent eel back into the water. I stared at the eel in wonderment. I could barely breathe. “Daddy, Mom, did you see that!” I finally said after a few minutes.

“Yeah, baby, that was something else,” my father said. His hand was still on my shoulder.

“How do you think he did that?” I said.

“Well, now Josie, I don't know,” Daddy said. “Let's see
if we can figure that out.” As if he had heard us, the man who had done the demonstration came out of an industrial-looking side door. My father took my hand, leaving Tick and Mom standing in front of the tank, and we walked up to him. My father said, “Excuse me, young man?”

“Yes, sir?” He turned around, ready to help.

“My daughter here is very interested in marine life and I wonder if you could tell her a little bit about how that electric eel functions. She's very smart and she wants to know.”

I looked up at Daddy, my heart aching with embarrassment and love. The eel guy grinned and got down on one knee so he could talk directly to me. He launched into a long explanation of how it was mostly made up of organs that generated electricity and how those organs functioned. I absorbed some of it. But what I got most was the sense that my curiosity mattered—that guy on his knee in front of me and Daddy with his hand on my back, both trying to answer my questions. We probably talked for all of three minutes, but it was blissful. I walked back to Tick and Mom in a daze.

Tick was still staring raptly at the tank. After a few minutes, he spoke. “I want him to do it again,” he said.

Daddy and Mom laughed. “Tick, you are something, boy. Soon as you do something you like once, damn if you don't want to do it again just a minute later,” Daddy said.

“That's for sure,” Mom agreed then smiled at me. “Did you get your question answered, miss?”

“Yeah, yeah I did. Thanks, Mom.” She rested her hand on my head briefly and then we headed into the rest of the aquarium together, a family. The air was cool and smelled of salt water and closely packed humans.

We stayed at the aquarium for probably another two hours. We saw a lot of cool stuff but nothing as amazing as that eel. I did love the tropical fish—they didn't scare and thrill me like the eel had but I loved the way their colors asserted themselves. I used some of my allowance money to buy a poster in the gift shop of some Caribbean fish before we left. Tick bought a rubber eel and a little plastic goldfish that squirted water.

It was a warm early summer day, the air resting mildly on our skin, the way it sometimes seems to do before it gets too hot. When we got home, Mom told us to go play and went inside. Tick got a bucket, filled it with a hose, dragged it to the backyard, and threw his eel in. He spent some time lining up his army men around the edge of the bucket. He put two in as scuba divers. “Come on, Josie, play with me,” he said. His eel dived and sloshed through the water as he made sizzling, fizzing sounds. Together we made up an elaborate story about an eel named Reggie who swam the seven seas and performed marvelous feats. No matter how
assiduously Reggie was hunted, he always came battling back to defeat his many enemies. We played for a long time, getting soaking wet in the process. Finally, we took a break and sat side by side on the damp grass.

“That was something, huh, that eel?” I said. “I wish I could swim around with it.”

“You'd get fried up!” Tick laughed.

“Maybe I could wear a special suit or something. You know, like on that old Jacques Cousteau show we saw. People go down there.”

Tick pulled up a tuft of grass. “Yeah. I guess,” he said.

“I wanna go down there.”

“Yeah? I don't think they have eels like that in Lake Erie.”

“No, dummy. I'd have to go where they live. But I wanna go down into the ocean. When I'm grown.”

Tick didn't say anything. I could hear our parents' voices distantly from inside the house, but I couldn't tell what they were saying. The sun was warm on my back. We both sat silent, together, enjoying everything. Daddy didn't smell like beer. We had seen an electric eel. We'd all four had a good day. We sat there for a minute and tried to hold on to it. After a little while, Tick jumped up and said, “Come on. Reggie's back.”

We stuck our hands back into the bucket and disappeared back into our own world. We didn't come in
until Mom called us for dinner. Tick went to bed that night clutching his eel. And just before I fell asleep I said to my silent room, to wherever God was, quiet and fierce, “I am gonna go down there. I am.”

Later, it hurt to remember that day. But I'd had it. We'd had it. It's worth something to have a day like that, a day that an angel comes to call.

My father's fortieth birthday started the same way that many of our Saturdays did: with Tick and me sitting in the upstairs hall near our parents' door, playing together. One of our favorite games involved pretending to be eagles. It was a pretty simple game. We put our blankets on the floor and swirled them up into piles that looked kind of like nests and then we sat there, sometimes for a couple of hours, pretending to be majestic western birds. This mostly consisted of inventing and then telling each other about our various birdlike adventures and activities. Our interest in the stories we made up never waned. After Saturday-morning cartoons went into reruns, we'd even abandon the TV in order to play. I especially liked to play on the landing
near my parents' room, so I could keep an eye on things—I was ever vigilant.

There had been no beer since before our trip to the aquarium a month before. Daddy came home on time every night and had dinner with the family and then read
Sounder
to Tick and me and told us how much it reminded him of his childhood—the grinding poverty and the one-room shack and the white people who were both curiously absent and whose rules dictated almost everything that ever happened. I remember looking at him after that like he was from another country. I couldn't imagine my big, stolid father a barefoot boy chasing after chickens. The night he finished reading it he said, “You see how those folks had nothing, right? That's why I want you both to get a scholarship to a private school. Only way I got out of that was through learning. You can go even farther. Nothing will hold you back if you keep learning.” Then he hugged us both very hard. For that month, Tick and I fell asleep to our parents' soft voices conversing or the silence of them reading together—they didn't even watch much TV. Things were calm, but Tick still came into my bedroom every night and pushed Purrface out of the way and slept there himself, curled up like the cat he'd displaced.

• • •

T
HE MORNING OF MY
father's birthday, Mom came out of the bedroom, tying her robe around her. We looked up from our game the minute she came out.

“What is all this?” she asked.

“We're eagles,” said Tick, grinning. “These are our nests.”

I held up a pink rubber ball that was swaddled in my nest. “This is my egg. It's gonna hatch any day now.” I cawed—a quick, sharp scraggly sound—and Mom laughed. “What was that, Josie?”

“I'm the mother eagle protecting my egg. I gotta look out for it, right?”

“Right.” She rubbed both of our heads. I loved when she was relaxed and affectionate like this. She smiled down at us. “Listen, it's your daddy's birthday so we have a lot to do. Can you two be my helpers today?” We both nodded. “Good,” she said. “Well, little eagles, you need to clean up this mess. Breakfast will be ready pretty soon.”