The Taste of Salt

by Martha Southgate

  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.

  Six

  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.

  • • •

  THE 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.”

  “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.

  WE 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.” A
nd 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.

  Seven

  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.