Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  I’ve never needed the job, I tell him. I’m not at the department store for the money. My parents pay the rent. They give me money for almost anything we want. I work behind a counter in a department store that overwhelms me with perfume and glittering floor tiles because I don’t know what else to do and I ruined my chances at college exactly as my parents said I would ruin my chances at college. Because if I sit at home, I want to disappear.

  At night, I flip through the channels from bed. I click back to a Law & Order rerun because, oh my God, it’s the woman, the woman from the store—but it’s not her at all. It’s just a brunette who on closer scrutiny does not look like the woman and does not even look like my mother. Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury.

  I call my mother anyways. I believe in signs. We make plans to meet at La Palma the coming weekend, and she asks if I want to say hello to my father and I say hell no as usual.

  Mario is completely knocked out next to me and I wrap my arm around his head and cradle it as I talk to him. I think about if his head were a baby and run my nails over his cheek. He looks so helpless this way. I just want to protect this head baby. From what, I don’t know.

  It’s been only a month, together, in my apartment. And I want him to stay so bad that I am afraid. No man has ever given me so much attention, made me feel like some kind of savior. I am constantly calibrating who to be, what kind of woman Mario wants, though I know that he likes me because he thinks me the kind of woman not constantly calibrating who to be. For him.

  So I try to be all things and nothing, and sometimes I feel that I am dissolving and I lean into the mirror, like my mother, and touch my face: I am still here. It bothers me that I can never really see myself as someone else can, as Mario can. I have to trust that the reflection is right. I have to trust that seeing in reverse is close enough to seeing straight on.

  Mario likes that I’m willing to try it all, that I’m willing to go there, that I am not a barrier to whatever he wants. You’re not like other girls, he says, and I wind the words tight around me, a cape. The world is full of other girls—shiny-haired, giggle-glowing, simultaneously pure and sex-enthralled, groups of them, worlds of them, walking in community, writhing under club lights, running through parks. But if he says he doesn’t like other girls, if I am not an “other girl,” he will be mine, not theirs.

  Except that I know deep down that I am other girls. They spin in me and around me. I am of them: my coworker who has been wearing the same lipstick shade, Barely Legal, every day since some guy leaned over the counter and complimented her on the color. My mother who buys and buys, sure she hasn’t found the right cream the right needle the right dress to win a man back, so she keeps trying. She keeps buying. Sasha who is no longer my best friend, because her boyfriend told her he thought she should dress more like me (clarified: more sexy) and so she realized I was not an other girl to him or that she was not a special girl, a chosen girl, or that all the categories collapse at the behest of the men who make them and that it is just easier to pretend that we have any control in the first place. Control is pushing me away.

  Mario has no idea. He has no idea the time and energy I spend trying to hide all this from him. Instead of telling him, I tell myself: Do it all. Never say no. No is for other girls.

  I met Mario in rehab, my first one. I wasn’t really addicted, I still don’t think, even though yeah, yeah, I know. It was just coke and it wasn’t even every day but I’d lost my office job when I failed a drug test and my mother was relentless and finally I said okay, I can afford to check out for twenty-eight days if it will get you off my back. It was a religious place, twelve steps, all that. The staff didn’t really care. They were making money. I never talked.

  Almost everyone made me sad except Mario. Abstinence only, which meant that Mario, who was there trying to wean off a Lortab habit, couldn’t get any medication assistance. So of course rehab failed. Of course he left rehab with a new dealer contact (his roommate) and a job at the clinic (also via his roommate, former employee). It was okay, though. Mario doesn’t believe in that abstinence-only bullshit, and unless you’ve used opioids, you wouldn’t understand, he says. Like addiction is more like a spectrum. It’s more like a balance. Like if you’re strung out and your whole life is fucked up, then yeah, you need to stop. But if you’re mostly clean and you want to indulge in something once in a while … how realistic is it that you’ll never use any kind of substance ever again?

  He got kicked out of a sober-living house when they found his Percs, and by then we were talking every day and I said, Come, I’ll take care of you. Mario believes in gray areas, and people like my mom believe everything is black and white, and I’m not sure where I fall, except that Mario is the smartest man I’ve ever known. He can explain everything like how buying a house is the smartest investment and we can get a mortgage even without our parents’ help and even if we don’t have our own money and he never asks me about my family and he clings to me like I am the piece he’s been missing all this time.

  I learn so much from Mario and I start to wonder if this is what I missed not going to college like him. I listen and it feels like growth. I listen and sometimes I drink and sometimes I do a little coke and stay up all night talking or molly and fuck and fuck or benzos when I need to finally get some sleep. And it’s fine. It’s mostly the weekends. And Mario, he doesn’t even touch the Oxys, just sells them or trades them for Percs but it’s just to keep the migraines at bay, not even as much as before. I’m afraid of addiction, I’ve seen what it did to my father. So we’re careful. I don’t say no—I’m not another girl—but I’m careful. I hug his head.

  * * *

  The woman’s husband comes around Christmastime. The woman’s husband is handsome, with legs too spindly for his body, like a gazelle in a suit. Isabel walks him to my counter and says, he needs a cream for his dry skin but nothing that smells too flowery. Then she walks away to browse shoes, and I tell the husband about our line of men’s products in blue-black containers that suggest sailorly conquest and rapacious strength. I’m sorry for my wife, the husband says, she sounds so dumb sometimes. I don’t know how to respond, so I say do you use a daily antioxidant to battle signs of premature aging? He frowns and walks away. I place a hand on the cold glass counter and picture it cracking under my weight. I am thin and wispy like a bowl of feathers, like crumpled paper tumbling in the wind. Nothing cracks in my presence.

  * * *

  At home, Mario nods off again. All he does lately is sleep. I make dinner and set the table, but he does not wake. I curl beside him on the couch and say hello, I am home, but he does not wake. I lay my head over his chest and listen to his heartbeat and I kiss his chin. Love me, I whisper. Look how happy we are, I say.

  * * *

  I don’t understand why you don’t at least come home, my mother says. I mean, just to visit. I’m not saying you need to live there.

  We are sitting in her car and it’s pouring rain outside, the kind so dissipated it almost looks like it’s raining in reverse. She is dropping me off at the mall after taking me to get a haircut. She is wary now of giving me big chunks of cash but wants me to do my hair at her fancy place anyway.

  A woman needs to have presencia, she says, and then she starts going into her thing about how she always puts on a full face of makeup every morning even if she’s just staying home and doing nothing, which I will never understand.

  Mom, I say. You should leave him.

  Who, your dad? she says, laughing. She is staring straight ahead at the water hitting the windshield like how she sounds typing with her long, perfectly round nails.

  Do you realize he just lies in bed all the time now? she says. Do you realize how sick he is? I mean, I’m the one who has the power now. The seats in her car are heated, which seems like such a waste in Miami, but I’m comforted nonetheless, tucked into the nest-like embrace of warm leather. I try to make myself smaller, shrink deeper.

  But you fight all the time, I say,
and I lean my head against the passenger-side window. I watch another mall employee, plastic bag held over her head, running toward the door of the department store. I am glad to be early. I am glad not to have to run in the rain.

  My mother pinches the top of her nose like she’s getting a headache. It’s the kind of thing she does when she’s being dramatic. I love her, I really do—I just wish she made better choices.

  Jeanette.

  What?

  You’re being ridiculous. We don’t even fight anymore. He doesn’t even have the energy if he wanted to.

  She places a hand between my shoulder blades, a thing she does when she wants me to stop slouching.

  And anyway, that was the alcohol, you know that, she says. That was a disease, a disorder. He did things and said things he would not have done or said if he wasn’t sick. You should understand that.

  I slouch again as soon as she moves her hand away.

  When we used to fight, you know when he used to drink … I have accepted that was not the man I married, she says, and that’s not the man he is now. He’s just an old man. I just want us to be, oh, a normal family again.

  Now it is my turn to laugh. Mom, I say. I’m nineteen. It’s a bit too late for that, don’t you think? And he’s not drinking, because he can’t. And it is the man he was. And I don’t love him, okay? I’ve decided I don’t love him.

  My voice snags in my throat and comes out hoarse, and then before I know it I’m gulping and crying and she’s looking at me and shaking her head like she just doesn’t understand and I’m thinking, say it, say it, and still I can’t.

  Just choose me or him! I scream at her instead.

  But I would always choose you! she yells back at me, and now she looks like she’s going to cry too. I just don’t understand why you think I need to make that choice! Why we both can’t be happy and healthy. I just don’t get why you don’t want me to be happy. You think you’re protecting me? You think I want you to hate your father?

  And she’s rambling again about how he’s better now and they don’t fight anymore and none of it is about me, so I start to gather my bag at my feet and wipe my eyes, glad it will look like rain smeared my eyeliner.

  Wait, she says, leaning over the console between us. She puts her arms around me and pulls me toward her and I end up just leaning my head on her chest while she strokes my hair like when I was small. Outside the rain lets up. A valet in front of the department store starts to wander over to us, but he sees us and awkwardly stops and goes back to his station, glancing over every few minutes. I look up at my mom, and she looks tired.

  You know I would do anything for you, right? she says, leaning her head back. I just want to see you well, she says.

  I know, Mommy, I say. I know.

  I’m late to work that day, but I don’t even care.

  * * *

  And that day the woman comes back with her husband. He holds her bicep as he walks her over to my counter, his knuckles red but not cracked like Mario’s, and I think, I know his hands would be soft in mine. I think, hers would be too.

  I thought you bought a moisturizer last week, the woman says to the husband. She fiddles with the sapphire ring on her finger. I thought last week I brought you—

  We didn’t come here last week, honey, the man interrupts.

  No, we did—I mean I think we did—and I said you didn’t want anything flowery, the woman says.

  Honey, the man says, the fact that you keep imagining these things is really starting to worry me.

  He smiles at me, and the smile is so warm I imagine a stone that sloughs the dead skin from my body, sloughs away the rain, the car, my mother’s hand on my back, Mario sleeping more and more and more.

  I am so sorry, the man says to me, and I want his hand gripping my biceps too. When he buys the cream, he does what no one has ever done for me—hands me a tip, fifty dollars. You’re beautiful, he says, and his wife looks away.

  * * *

  I agree to see her again. She bombards me with phone calls, and what can I do? I say okay, okay, fine, and I pop some Xanax so that I can at least relax but it just makes me sleepy.

  My mother orders a disco volador with guava and cheese and I order a greasy pile of churros that I dip into hot chocolate so thick it’s more like sweet mud. We sit outside on uncomfortable metal seats like playground benches under the multicolored tarp that reminds me of one of those circus-looking termite tents that engulf the unluckiest homes in Miami. The traffic on Calle Ocho zooms by, headlights blink and circle, neon signs light up the night. Another pain clinic across the street. Another dark window. I’ve accompanied Mario to his clinic a couple of times to pick up his paychecks. I notice them everywhere now.

  They have blossomed like someone scattered seeds from above and hit every strip mall, every billboard, every back page of the free weekly. There are discounts and two-for-ones, promises of no wait time and in-and-out appointments, cash only, three hundred, twenty-four hours, doctors on call. Walk-ins welcome, HGH and testosterone, too, discount with MRI, commissions on every customer referred, blackout windows, flashing OPEN sign. The massage parlor next door. Check cashing across the street.

  Mario tells me some of the doctors don’t even bother with pretense, just ask, What do you want? How much? The pharmacies on-site behind bulletproof glass. The clinic managers who carry heat. The parking lots crawling with out-of-state license plates: Kentucky, Virginia, Maine. The Oxy highway, the Oxy Express. The patients, all tapping feet and abscess scars, lining up outside the doors some days, some already sniffling and rheumy, itching—no, dying—to stave off the sickness. The doctors barely glancing their way, the doctors with their fat gold watches. So unlike my father the doctor, my father the classy super-clean. The money is fucking insane, Mario says. I just have to get a bigger piece of the pie, he says.

  My mother cuts her sandwich with a knife and fork. She looks so out of place among the greasy discarded trays and the line of men in undershirts, women in stretch pants, the cafecito-to-go attendants in their starched white shirts and hairnets.

  My mother chews and swallows. She runs her tongue over her teeth, a habit when she’s nervous. One I can’t stand. Her lips are my own lips, naturally plump, slightly crooked when she smiles. We’ve been told, always, our smiles look fake. But even doubled over in genuine laughter, that crooked smile.

  How are you? she says. Veins on her hands. I wonder if mine will look like that. If I will notice as they change or if I will just wake up one day, wondering when green lattice emerged from under my skin.

  I want to cry again and I don’t even know why. I want to tell my mother to take me home. I want, again, to tell her about my father, but I won’t even tell myself about my father. I think about this often, about whether the past is real if we don’t bring it into the present. Tree falling in the forest and all that.

  I’m okay, I say.

  I don’t know if I am the tree or the no one who doesn’t hear it.

  My mother searches my eyes. Runs her tongue over her teeth.

  See me, I think. Just this once, see me, Mommy.

  My mother opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, closes it again. Finally she speaks. Your skin looks so good, my mother says, and there is sadness on her face, I can see it. But I just feel so much relief.

  * * *

  Mario was supposed to get a Lortab script but the doctor wasn’t in and the other doctor was too busy. I should have jacked a script pad, he says. Bro, my boy at the clinic fucking sells them. He’s in such a bad mood. Calm down baby, I say. I offer him some of my coke, but he’s like nah, I’m already too on edge. You know what, he says, let’s see what all the hillbilly hype is about. He’s been avoiding the Oxy because (1) it’s stronger and more pure, and he isn’t trying to get super-hooked or anything, and (2) that’s where the money is and everyone knows that once you dip in your own supply, you’re screwing up. It’s cheaper here in Florida, but Mario’s been talking to his friend and
they are planning the drive up to Virginia, see if they can set up something steady.

  Fuck it, he says. It’s one time.

  I give him my fifty-dollar tip. It’s like I paid for it, I say.

  We hold each other that night and I want to simultaneously die, laugh.

  The fan whirs above us and I watch a mosquito perched on the edge of a blade. How can it stay so still when everything is spinning? I wonder, but I wake up with bites all over my body.

  * * *

  My mother invites me to Versailles for the Sunday tamal en cazuela special. It’s our third weekend seeing each other in a row, it’s hard to believe. She knows tamal en cazuela is my favorite. I don’t like Versailles, its combination of “yellow rice with beans, please” tourist crowd and old guard prim-and-proper Cuban Americans. But the tamal en cazuela. I live for the salty mush—corn, lard, pork—burning my tongue. We end the meal with cortaditos, and my mother places a hand on mine. She is so uncomfortable showing emotion but then she cracks, and the crack then breaks me and I rush to put up the façade again. We do this dance over and over and over again, and it feels worse than not talking at all.

  I know I have failed you in some way, she says. And I just wish I knew how. I just wish I knew how to fix whatever is broken between us.

  I can’t look up. I can’t look up from my coffee, from the foam dissolving into the tiny cup. Tell her, I think, tell her.

  But what would it do other than widen the gulf? We are already two continents; impossible to imagine a bridge could even exist. I wish to dissolve into my cup, I wish to dissolve on the tongue, to be sugar and not this bitter, watery substance in the shape of Girl.