The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate Page A

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 thenwhen 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