The Taste of Salt (7 page)

“Aw, Mom, five more minutes? It's Saturday. Come on.” This came from Tick with his sweetest smile. I was already resigned to (and sometimes grateful for) Tick's ability to get around my mother. To get around most people really. There was just something about him—that angelic pout, his quick wit, his liveliness—that made you willing to do what he wanted. Sometimes his powers were used to the advantage of us both—that's when I was grateful. But when he was
getting some privilege that I couldn't manage to wheedle? Oh, it made me furious.

“Okay, five more minutes. But then you need to come when I call.”

“Okay, Mom.”

We went back to our game. Daddy came out shortly afterward dressed for work; he was getting in some overtime, as he often did on Saturdays. “What the devil are you two doing?” He smiled. It wasn't the same as with Mom, perhaps because it was rarer and that made it more precious. We told him about the game and he said, “You know, the national bird was supposed to be the turkey, not the eagle.” When he was in good spirits, he offered up odd little facts like this, the slight showing-off of a self-educated man.

“Yeah, Daddy?” Tick said, seizing the moment of connection. “That'd be pretty funny, eating the national bird for Thanksgiving.” Daddy laughed and rubbed his head and went down to breakfast. We didn't say anything to each other, didn't acknowledge the good feeling. But it was on us like sunshine. Our mother didn't call us down for at least twenty minutes, too, so we got to play more.

When we came thundering down the stairs, Daddy and Mom were sitting at the table, silent. The air was a little still between them. We sat down and Mom gave us some slightly cold eggs and they continued to eat, not speaking
to each other. Tick pressed his leg into mine, briefly. We ate fast. Then I thought that maybe Daddy was angry because we hadn't mentioned his birthday. “Happy birthday, Daddy!” I said and jumped up to hug him. “Yeah, Daddy, happy birthday,” said Tick. My mother's back relaxed a bit and she said softly, “Happy birthday, Ray.”

He smiled at us. “Y'all got something planned for me later?”

“We might. We might.” This from Mom.

“Well, good. I'll be home early—round five or so.” He stood up, pulled on his cap (one of those flat Kangol-style ones—very snappy), kissed each of us, and left. The air in the kitchen lightened suddenly. We were dismissed to go get dressed and come back down to help.

W
E WORKED HARD THAT
day. We baked a beautiful vanilla cake with white icing and helped Mom clean up the house and carefully wrapped the bottle of Old Spice we had bought him. (He never wore aftershave, but we loved to buy it for him. I used it for bath oil for my Barbies after he'd made his one-time-to-be-gracious use of it.) Mom cooked his favorite, smothered pork chops and string beans. She put on a beautiful pink dress—the color my father liked her best in—and put a little perfume behind her ears. And then we sat down in the living room to
wait. He was supposed to be home in about half an hour. We sat. And sat. And sat. Five-thirty. Six. Six-thirty. Tick and I played old maid for a while but then we started to throw the cards at each other and yell for justice. Mom kept telling us to hush up. She sat by the window, looking out it as if she could will him home. The cake turned soggy under its warming frosting and the fat congealed on the gravy-covered pork chops and she looked out the window. At around seven-fifteen I couldn't stand it anymore. I said in a small voice, a smaller voice than I thought I possessed, “Mom, I'm hungry. Can we go ahead and eat?”

I couldn't read the look Mom gave me. My stomach rumbled and Tick and I looked at her, hardly able to breathe. Finally she sighed and said, “Yes, baby. Why don't we go on and eat. I don't know what could be keeping your father.” So we sat and ate the cold pork chops and the greasy beans and I thought I might choke from everything we weren't saying and then it was seven-thirty and then it was eight and that's when he came in the door.

His eyes were red. He smelled like a brewery. He was weaving, just a tiny little bit. He was the only thing in the room that moved. He leaned on the doorframe. “Hey, y'all. Sarah, Josie, Tick. Listen. I had to work late and then Oscar and them wanted to go out for a drink and I
said
to them just one and …” Mom raised her hand.

“Josie and Tick, you better go on to your rooms.” We got up and scooted up the stairs; Tick took my hand and held it very tightly. When we got to the landing where they couldn't see us, Tick refused to take another step.

“Come on, Tick, Mom said to go upstairs.”

“We are upstairs.”

“You know what I mean. All the way upstairs.”

Tick's jaw set. “This is far enough. I ain't going up to my room. What if something happens?”

What if something happens. What would happen? How did he know the question that pressed under my skin every day, the question that never quite left? I stopped and led him by the hand to the edge of the landing so we could bear witness.

“Ray, what the hell am I supposed to think? You come in here on your own birthday three hours later than you said you would, drunk as hell. You stink.” Mom was crying. “We worked so hard. The kids and I worked so hard to give you a nice birthday.”

Daddy kept leaning on the doorframe. “Well, nobody
asked
you to do all this. I didn't have any birthday parties growing up. Didn't anybody care what year it was or how old I was.”

“Well, now you do have people who care, Ray. We care so much. You should have seen those kids today. They worked
so hard. They so want to make things nice for you. And you …” As she said the next words, she turned and swept the cake off the table and onto the floor. “You just treat it like so much trash.”

Daddy stepped toward her and grabbed her wrist. “Go ahead,” she said. “You want to be that low? Go ahead and hit me.”

“I ought to,” he said. “If a man can't go out and have a beer with his boys on his birthday without coming home to this shit.… I ought to hit you.”

They stood there like that for what seemed like forever, though it was probably only a couple of minutes. But then he let go and sagged into the chair and said, not looking at her, “You better clean this mess up. I'm going back out. Tell the kids I said thanks.”

“Thanks! Thanks!” She was screaming now. She had forgotten us. “You're just going to go back out and get drunker? What the hell is wrong with you?”

He stood up and put his hat back on. He had his hand on the doorknob. He said quietly, so quietly we almost couldn't hear, “I swear to God I don't know.” And then he was gone.

Mom stood in the dining room breathing heavily for a few minutes after he left. Tick and I had come to sit on the top step. Tick put his head in my lap and started crying.
Then I started, too. That got her attention. She looked up and there we were.

“Oh, babies, I'm sorry,” she said. “Listen, Daddy got hung up at work and he had to go back and get something he forgot. He's very sorry that he missed our party.”

I stared at her. I couldn't believe that she would just lie like that. But maybe it was safer to believe that than to believe my own eyes. “What happened to the cake?” I said, my voice the still sound of winter.

“Oh, I was being silly. I picked it up and went to go move it and it just slipped out of my hands.”

Tick was still crying. Mom squeezed in next to the two of us on the step. Tick turned his hot little head toward Mom and she cradled him, leaving my lap cold and damp. I let him go reluctantly. I never stopped looking at Mom. “So you dropped the cake,” I said. Was she really going to stick with that story? That ridiculous story? We
saw
her. We
saw
them. But she looked back at me and said in a dead-even tone, “Yes, I did.” I nodded once and squinched my eyes tight shut. Then I leaned to put my head on Tick's back. The truth was not to be spoken. I got that. The three of us sat there for a very long time.

Earlier that evening, my father sits on a barstool, pink neon lighting his dark skin. His buddy Oscar sits beside him. The arc of these evenings—and he has avoided having such an evening for a month or so—tends to be remarkably similar. They spend all day working the line, like so many black men did before them and like gradually decreasing numbers will after. The work is stupefying; their hands are stiff from performing the same actions over and over and over. Bend lift screw. Bend lift screw. Bend lift screw. The car doors slide past them in a never ending succession. Around four, he begins to think of that first beer, the cool shock to the tongue, the friendly fizz of it, and the lightness that follows in his chest. He thinks of the smooth sound of Motown burbling out of the jukebox,
the warmth radiating from his friend's leg near his under the bar, the ease that exists in that dark room. Four-thirty comes and passes, the car doors keep sliding by, his hand keeps twisting screws in rhythmically. Until it is finally time to punch out.

It was his fortieth birthday. He had two children and a wife whom he loved very much. He had a job that ate a little bit of his spirit every day. He felt time passing, as do we all, and it scared him sometimes. He meant to go home that night. He really did. But it was his birthday. He had been doing so well, resisting that impulse for so long. What could one beer hurt?

He'd said to Oscar as they went into the bar, “I gotta get home, man. It's my birthday and they're expecting me home.”

“It's your birthday, man? I didn't know that. All the more reason to buy you a beer today. Listen.” Oscar turned to speak to the bartender. “This brother is—how old are you?”

“Forty.”

“Forty today! I think this old man needs a boilermaker to celebrate!” Oscar clapped him on the back.

The sharp cold beer and the small warm glass of whiskey sat on the bar together, inviting him, all but smiling at him. Marvin Gaye eased out of the jukebox; Oscar grinning
beside him. He'd go after this one. He'd just have this one drink this time. This time he was sure he'd be able to do it.

T
HREE HOURS LATER.
“O
H
, shit, man. I gotta go.” The same heaviness in his words that there always was after the one, two, three, how many beers? He made his way to the door, weaving slightly, the careful walk of a man who had done this many times. He drove home very slowly, peering hard at each stoplight and hesitating before he hit the gas. When he walked into the house, the children, the wife, the cake, the screaming, the dashed expectations. The weight of it was all too much. He said cruel things, none of which he meant.
How can I treat them like this?
he thought.
They just wanted to give me a nice birthday.
But the vicious words were out before they could be called back and made into anything else. He had to leave after that—his shame was too great. He felt all of our eyes, big and dark and frightened, boring through his back as he left.

He didn't have a place in mind to go when he walked out the door. He guessed that Oscar had left the bar by this time; the magic was gone anyway. His buzz was being replaced by a familiar, grinding wretchedness.

He got in the car and drove, slowly, to an open minigrocery. He paid for a six-pack. Then he drove down to the parking lot near Lake Erie. He didn't know exactly why he
chose the lake, except he knew that the parking lot would be deserted. He was able to pull up close enough to see the water from his car window. He opened the window to let in the warm spring air. He could hear the slap, slap, slap of the small lake waves. But he was afraid to get out of the car. He sat in the front seat and opened can after can of beer until they were all gone. He was too drunk and miserable even to climb into the backseat and lie down. He finally fell asleep in the front seat—passed out really—until the dawn's light pierced his eyes. When he got home, his beautiful wife said, “I called you in sick already.” She didn't say another word to him for the rest of the day. He spent much of the day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, vowing never to drink again, a vow he did not keep. His hands were clenched to fists. His eyes were dry.

After that night, the brakes were off. My father was rarely without a beer in his hand. My mother retreated to a sad silence that Tick and I could rarely get her to break. Time went on and time went on. We became teenagers. We both got scholarships to Dean, that prep school I mentioned. We didn't tell anyone there about what home was like. We just went on. We never talked about what was happening at home and whatever my parents were thinking; they certainly didn't share with us. So to tell about this last part, I'm going to have to make a bigger imaginative leap than I have thus far—bigger, perhaps, than even seems plausible. But this world is full of implausible things. So I'm going to let them speak through me. My mother first.

I
NEVER COULD GET
Tick and Josie to see that a marriage doesn't come apart all at once. That deciding whether or not to stay or go is the most complicated thing in the world. Especially if sometimes you can still see glimpses of the person you married. That person keeps darting out of reach, washed away or shut away, but you keep hoping he might come back. You keep thinking that if you just hang in there, you might get him back.

Aside from how lonely it got to be with Ray, I was bored. I missed nursing. I missed being useful, doing for people other than my family. And once the kids got big and got themselves those scholarships and started running with a whole different crowd out at that school, well, I just felt like I didn't have a place anymore. It was hard, watching Josie at that school, watching her fight to be the girl she wanted to be: a girl who loved something that really seemed to be only for white men. Watching her, I started to think that I wanted to set an example of a woman who did what she needed to do, what she wanted to do, without worrying too much about what other people thought.