The Taste of Salt

by Martha Southgate

  She turned from the window to look at me and her face brightened. “I like to skip rocks. And I like to look at stuff I find. It’s not like the ocean. I really want to see the ocean sometime. There’s way more stuff living in the ocean. But sometimes I can see a good fish or some vegetation or something.” Vegetation. How about that? Eleven years old and talking like that, so smart. But the kind of smart she was seemed to have no end. I had my limits and I wasn’t all that interested in the physical world, in understanding it and finding out where each piece of it fit together. She was. She wanted to know every bit of it. Started keeping lists of things around her—leaves, rocks, the different animals she saw—not that we had many, living right in the center of the city. But whatever she saw, she wrote down as soon as she could write. And you couldn’t keep her away from those nature shows on TV. Anything she could watch she would, especially stuff about the ocean. She spoke again, interrupting my thoughts: “I like the water on my feet, too. The way it feels. I love the way it feels to be underwater.” She fell silent. “How come you don’t like the beach, Daddy?”

  “Didn’t grow up around it. Don’t like being wet.” I took a little taste. Growing up like I did, down south in one of those blink-and-you’d-miss-it little towns, I never did learn to swim anyway. She didn’t know that, and I was embarrassed to tell her. Sarah had made sure that the kids knew how to swim. We both thought they needed to learn everything they could; that they should go to good schools and learn everything that would help them feel comfortable wherever they went. I’d spent so much of my life feeling uncomfortable. I didn’t want that for my children. “I’m glad to be going there with you though, little bit. Real glad.”

  She smiled a small smile. We pulled into the parking lot and got out.

  There were just a few cats out fishing, casting their lines over and over again into the greenish water. The air was very clear—“Fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in Mrs. Dalloway. I like her stuff, especially To the Lighthouse. I like a lot of writers that people don’t think a guy like me would like. We got out of the car and Josie ran down to the rocks along the shore, yelling, “Come on, Daddy, come on!” I followed slowly, still sipping, still feeling pretty good. It was, I dunno, my sixth beer? My seventh?

  She was taking her shoes off and wading into the water. She wasn’t afraid at all. I stood on the shore, a safe distance from all that water, just watching her. The sound of the waves was kind of nice, I had to admit. I found a rock to sit on—didn’t want to get sand in my pockets. And I didn’t go so far as to take off my shoes. Josie ran and splashed and picked stuff up and put it down, perfectly content. I don’t know how long this went on. Peaceful.

  After a while, she came up to me and grabbed me by the hand. “Come on in, Daddy. Just take your shoes off. It’s really great, you’ll see.” And she squatted down, like the little girl she was, and exuberantly started untying my shoes.

  I nearly kicked her in the face. That’s how fast I got up. She fell over backward onto her rump and looked up at me, already starting to cry. “No, damn it. I hate the water. I’m not going in there. If I want to take my shoes off, I’ll do it myself. Damn it. Damn it. I don’t want to go in the water, okay?”

  Her face, her beautiful face just crumpled. I would have given anything to explain. I would have given anything to have that moment back and be gentle with her. I would have given anything not to have done what I’d just done. But I was drunk and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t think. I ain’t gonna blame it on the booze, because that’s the kind of cop-out I’ve learned not to take in these rooms. No, I hurt my child myself. Me and my drunk ass. I was so scared. I couldn’t let her see that. So I let her cry in the sand for a little while instead. After a while I said, “We better get on back, Josie. Your mama’s gonna wonder where we are. Stop, girl. You aren’t hurt.” And that’s all I said. That’s all I ever said. That’s the way I left it. If only I could have explained. I think that’s when I started to lose her. Right at that moment.

  I’ve got a son, too. Name of Edmund, but we call him Tick. He takes after me. Smart as you please—and a stone drunk. I don’t know when it started. I was too drunk myself to see at the time. I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t even help myself. And I hadn’t let go. He’s drunk away almost everything now, and he uses other stuff besides. It breaks my heart. He’s sober for now and I pray for him, but I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s got what it takes to stay clean. It’s a long road and he’s got to walk it. No one can walk it for him—I learned that in these rooms. Even so … Lord, how I wish I could do it for him. With all my heart I wish it.

  Thirteen

  As long as I can remember, I’ve liked being out of the house. Whatever house it was. When I was a kid, I rode a school bus about fifteen miles away from home to the Dean school. I usually sat in the back and tried not to hear the cool kids talking about me—my hair or my clothes or something, everything that was wrong with me. The school bus didn’t even come to our neighborhood—Mom had to drive me up into Cleveland Heights and then I’d wait there for the bus and then it was another hour (with all the stops) before we got there. And I always stayed after for science club or catching up on homework or even, for a little while, field hockey (those skirts!). In the summers, I went to camp (I got scholarships and did work study and stuff), and then when I got older, to whatever academic or aquatic summer program would have me. I worked to earn spending money, too—babysitting, restaurant hostessing, waitressing at local diners. Anything to be out of the house. Home and all it requires—the bills, the organizing, the talking to your loved ones—that stuff makes me nervous.

  As you might imagine, this skittishness has made married life kind of tough. But then I never expected to be a wife. By the time I met Daniel, when I was thirty-three, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get married. I had come to think that perhaps I was just too odd. Too black in a white profession. Too female in a male profession. Too in love with my work to love another person. Did I really want to spend my whole life with someone else? Genetically, we are only 1.23 percent different from chimpanzees. And they are not at all monogamous. Why should we be any different? That’s what I believe. You’d think that I’d have raised this topic with my husband, my discomfort with monogamy. But somehow I’ve always been shy about doing that, as fundamental as it is. Scared, I guess. I’m scared a lot of the time.

  There is a small part of me that suspects I got married because I was tired of looking around, tired of the dry spells of being single, tired of the game. Daniel appeared right at that time. He loved me. And I loved him. But he loved me more.

  Although I was ready to stop running around when I met Daniel, there is one thing I miss: sexual variety. I love sex and I’m enthusiastic about it and so I didn’t have much trouble finding people to have it with, even though what they say about most scientists’ social skills is true. Talking to other people—generally a good preamble to getting into bed with them—is often not something they are particularly good at. But I can do what I need to do to make certain things happen. If I have to talk, I’ll talk. If I have to flirt, I’ll flirt. I’ll even enjoy it. Ever since I had my first lover when I was sixteen and even before that when I started to figure this whole thing out, I knew that sex was going to be a way to an essential mystery, something it would take me a long time to understand and even longer to get tired of. This is going to sound silly, but I have Prince to thank for this. Me and my friend Deena snuck into a screening of Purple Rain one weekend when we were hanging around the Randall Park Mall and, frankly, I was never the same after that. Until then, my crushes had mostly been chaste fantasies of adventure with one passing teen idol or another—we were spies together, we climbed mountains together, sometimes the boy of the week would take my hand. But after I watched Prince weep and moan and smile his way through “Purple Rain” (And don’t even get me started on “The Beautiful Ones.” Amazing.) something crossed over in me. I hadn�
�t thought about kissing a boy much, until that moment. Even when I lay on my bed thinking about Theo from The Cosby Show for hours and hours, I thought of being in his presence, not of kissing or anything further. But after that movie, it all made sense. Touching another person’s body would be the point of it all. It wasn’t like I didn’t know about sex. My mother was unusually frank about that kind of thing—maybe because of having been a nurse. She gave me the whole rundown when I turned twelve. I found the mechanics of it very weird. But now I got it. Why wouldn’t you want to do all that? All that kissing and stuff? Why wouldn’t you want to be as close as you could to another person’s glow, when you felt it? I still think that, to tell the truth. It makes being married hard.

  My lovers weren’t scientists, mostly. Sometimes this made for limited dinner table chat. But sometimes I wasn’t very interested in a lot of talk anyway. Often I just wanted skin to skin, the smell of it, the textures and the sounds and the animal pleasure, the feel of the sheets under my back, my head on someone’s chest, the taste of his sweat in my mouth.

  I make it sound as though it was always glorious, and of course it wasn’t always. And I make it sound as though I never loved anyone, and that isn’t true either. But that simple contact was also something I loved.

  I was in one of those relationships when I met Daniel. The guy’s name was Max. He was a bartender at my favorite bar in Honolulu. Diving culture involves a lot of hanging around bars. There are the long, glorious hours you spend underwater and then there are the hours you spend celebrating what you found there or what you did there. Most scientists I’ve met aren’t avid divers. Because I loved it so much, I spent a lot of time with divers and their friends.

  Max was Hawaiian. He had long glossy black hair that felt a little bit the way rippling water does over your skin. His body was lean and muscular from surfing and lifting weights, but it was nearly hairless and soft as a child’s. He didn’t particularly like to talk, which I at first found comforting. I had recently broken up with someone who wanted to do nothing but talk and my ears needed a rest. But after a while, Max’s silence started to seem confining.

  I met Daniel at a conference—we were on the same panel. The conference had not begun auspiciously. By this point in my career, I was used to my fellow scientists being surprised at me, a youngish black woman, as part of their very white male business. Always, there was the question in the air—What are you doing here? That day not long before my presentation there was an incident that particularly enraged me. Although there were AV guys at the lecture hall to take care of technical stuff where Daniel and I would be speaking, I was very nervous—it was an important meeting and I wanted to make a good impression. So I got up the morning of the panel, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and went over to see the space and get comfortable there. I was poking around the back of the stage when a tall, thin white guy came in. I didn’t know his name but I’d seen him briefly across the room at the opening night cocktail party. He looked at me quickly, not really seeing me, and then said, without preamble, “Is there any way you can make sure that it isn’t too hot in here today? It was broiling at last night’s lecture. And there’s a garbage can over there that needs to be emptied.”

  I didn’t say anything at first because, frankly, I really didn’t understand. But then I did. He thought I was from maintenance. There was no way that someone who looked like me could be one of them, one of him, I guess I should say. “I’m Josephine Henderson, one of the panelists,” I said, ice shimmering on every word. He turned the color of a tomato—I didn’t think that was actually possible but there it was. Stammering and apologizing and slinking out followed. I sat down alone in the back of the room and took four deep breaths and planted my feet into the floor. I was rooted there. They weren’t gonna make me leave.

  • • •

  A FEW MINUTES BEFORE the panel began, I took my place on stage next to Daniel, and introduced myself briskly. After that morning, I was not feeling all that friendly toward white men. He looked at me in a way that was both oddly preoccupied and curiously penetrating, like he was trying to figure something out important about me. But I wasn’t in the mood to look back. The panel started and he went first.

  He had a soothing, musical voice. His presentation was fascinating, so much so that without my noticing it my shoulders relaxed and the anger drained out of me enough that I could focus.

  We finished our presentations and, as often happened, there were lots of questions for him, none for me. About ten minutes in, an elderly eminence asked Daniel something that pertained directly to warm water mammals, which is what I’d been talking about. His voice was only a little bit tight when he said, “I think that’s a question that Dr. Henderson is better prepared to answer. That was, after all, the subject of her talk and she’s an expert in that field.” Then he turned toward me, smiling a little. I noticed that he had a beautiful smile. And he noticed my skill (and the way some people ignored it) without my having to point it out. I smiled back at him and started to answer the elderly eminence. After that, people started directing questions to us both.

  After the panel was over, we stood next to each other, gathering up papers. I spoke first.

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?” He said this while peering into his briefcase and shuffling through it with a distracted air.

  “For telling that guy that he should be asking me the questions.”

  Daniel quit rustling and looked up. “Well, he should have been. You really know your stuff.”

  “Thanks.” I had told Max that I might call him after the panel was over but, suddenly, that didn’t seem so important. “Are you doing anything now?”

  Again that steady look. “Nope. Are you?”

  “I hope I’m having dinner with you.” Like some impossibly witty, bold movie heroine. I rarely think of things that clever to say at the time it would be clever to say them.

  Daniel smiled broadly. “I didn’t expect that.” He paused. “But I’d like it. I’d like it a lot.” And that’s how we had our first date.

  You know how people say I knew right away that he was the one? It wasn’t like that for me. I don’t believe in that “the one” stuff anyway. I liked how smart Daniel was. I liked his laugh. I liked that when I told him the story of the trash can, that he was as angry as I was—and he took my hand across the table right afterward. That’s where things really began. I broke up with Max, and Daniel and I kept going, slow, smooth, steady, affectionate. Gradually, I moved away from focusing what was on the outside of him—his smile, his body—to take notice of how much he loved me. He told me once that I was the smartest person he’d ever met. He told me once that he dreamed about how I laughed. He told me once that I carried his heart in my back pocket. He doesn’t say things like that anymore.

  Daniel was a person I could live with, which is also not to be underestimated. I’d been with men who could make me scream with pleasure but whom I couldn’t have lived with for more than a week. He was orderly and kind and paid his bills and was respected and respectful. We laughed together. We liked the same movies. We liked to look at each other. He seemed like someone I could spend the rest of my life with. So when he asked me to do that, I said yes.

  We were married on a sunny July day when the green-head flies were biting and the air was fresh and hot and blinding. We were married on a beach near Falmouth. We were married under a big tent that Daniel’s mother somehow was able to rent at a discount through a friend of hers. Everyone was willing to help. We were married in our bare feet as the cold waves rolled in and washed over our toes, making them numb and painful. We were married laughing. We were married while everyone we loved watched us. Tick quiet and sober (this was between rehabs) and my mother standing straight and proud beside him and next to my father. My father looked shy and suspicious of the abundance of white people and the cold ocean water and the hot sun. He squinted throughout the ceremony. We were married as Daniel’s mother stared at my family, slightly ba
ffled. I don’t know if she’d ever seen that many black people together in one place before. And now they were her family. We said we’d always love each other. We said we’d take that leap of faith. Together. I was frightened but it seemed like it was time. He had beautiful hands. I was glad to be marrying those. He was very calm and steady and present. I was glad to be marrying that. He made me feel beautiful. I was glad to be marrying that. What he saw in me. What he made me feel. The way he said my name. The way he looked when he told me about his father’s death. That’s what I was marrying. That’s what I wanted near me. He was the one I wanted.

  So here we are. We have a home together. We have a life together. But so often my impulse is to stay away from it. I work late when I don’t really have to, take on extra little jobs, have to stay and work just-a-little-bit-longer on that grant or that paper or that observation.

  Like last night, a few weeks after I got home from picking up Tick. I came home around ten, exhausted, eyes burning from staring at the computer screen for hours. I’m working on a big study of the effect of LFA (that’s low-frequency active) sonar on whales. This is the sonar that navy ships use to track down “quiet” submarines—it blasts low frequency sound waves for hundreds of miles under the sea. On the way to the submarines, it impairs all the sentient marine life it encounters. The blasts of sound disorient and disable their delicate internal mechanisms and their hearing. Just another way that humans are making it rough, rough, rough for every other life form on this planet. It’s depressing.

  Anyway, I came home late and miserable. The lights were out already. I wandered around the kitchen, eating random foods, turned on the TV for a few minutes to watch a rerun of something or other, then went up to bed.