The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate Read Free Book Online

getting to know the bloody order that resides in each human. She loved the taking-care part of her job, too—consoling sobbing wives, holding the hand of afrightened stranger. She often felt that she was born to take care of people this way, born to stand by holding someone’s hand as they suffered. Maybe that’s why she stayed with my father as long as she did.
    She quit working just a few weeks before I was born. The different shifts and the constant on-her-feet time just got to be too much—Ray couldn’t rub it away after a while. There was no flextime back then, no way to work anything out. If you got pregnant, you left your job. Period.
    She decided to quit one Friday night after a ten-hour shift. She sat on the sofa, her feet in Ray’s strong hands. He rubbed intently, looking at them, sometimes offering a playful kiss to one of her toes. Suddenly, she started crying.
    â€œHey, hey, doll, what is it?”
    â€œRay, I can’t keep working like this. I know we need the money and I really love the work. But my back hurts all the time and I come home and just feel like I’m gonna die. The doctor said I might have to stop when I got this far along. I was hoping I’d be different.”
    He never stopped rubbing during this whole speech. When she wiped her eyes and stopped crying, he said quietly, “We’ll be fine. You go on and give your notice. You gotta take care of yourself and the baby.”
    My mother looked at him with wonder. He rested one ofher feet in his lap and picked up his beer to take a sip. She leaned over to kiss him, hard, not even minding the beeriness. “Thanks.”
    F IRST ME AND THEN Tick, barely two years apart, into everything. They hadn’t meant to have the children so close together. But one night they’d finally gotten me to sleep. They started kissing and just got carried away. Carried away with that night was life as the parents of an only child. I was only eighteen months old when she found out that Tick was coming. Ray tried to put a good face on it when she told him but she knew. She felt the same way. It was just too soon for another baby. They were stretched so thin already.
    And Tick was a difficult baby. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. He was a perfect brown butterball, dimpled and angelic looking. Until the evening, when the colic came on him and she and Ray would have to take turns walking and walking and walking and walking while Tick screamed himself into a sleep that was more like unconsciousness. It went on for hours. It went on for days into weeks into months. At first she asked her friends about it, but then their fussy babies stopped fussing and they could offer no more counsel. He cried for four hours every night for fourmonths. At first Ray helped her, but then he told her that he was so tired at work that he was afraid of making mistakes that would cost him his job, so then she took over.
    Ray was reading less and getting up from the typewriter faster on Saturday mornings, if he sat down at all, and somewhere in Sarah’s exhausted mind, out of the corner of her half-asleep, bloodshot eye, she could see that the beer he’d always enjoyed was becoming a little more omnipresent. It crept up so slowly and her life was such a blur of diapering and wiping and walking and strolling and cooking and cleaning that she couldn’t be sure. But every now and then she would look at him, and he would be sitting in front of the television, a beer in his hand, and she’d realize that this was happening almost every evening.
    This next part is a little weird for me to imagine—what child, even once grown, likes to imagine her parents’ most intimate lives? But if I’m going to tell it, I want to tell it all. Some of this I guess at, some of this I put together from hints, clues, asides that my mother shared with me. She was so lonely a lot of the time, especially when I was younger. Sometimes, I was