Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

running a finger over each cheek, examining her pores. She is fond of telling me that she, too, used to have skin like mine. That I ought to stay out of the sun. As if the sun is my problem. As if my problems don’t flourish under the glare of artificial light.

The other reason I haven’t seen my mother in a month is that I refuse to see my mother in her own home—once my own home—as long as my father is there. She doesn’t understand. He’s sick and I should see him, she says. He can’t even drink anymore, she says. But I don’t go home and she doesn’t come to my new home and so we always meet in some café or Cuban restaurant—and on most of my days off, I don’t want to go. So she just calls and says, Are you okay? And I say, I’m okay. And she says, Can I go see you? And I say I’m busy and she sighs a lot and then there is just so much silence on the phone that we hang up because neither of us can handle so much silence.

The same day of the face cream and the woman-like-my-mother, Mario nods off on the kitchen table, where he racks up a line and I eat dinner by myself because he isn’t hungry all night.

He has a new job: dispensary tech at a pain clinic. He’s been there a month, and for a month he’s been slipping Oxy pill by pill in his socks. Easier than anyone would think, he says. He sells them. He wants me to quit my job at the department store. He wants to take care of me, he says.

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