Salt Lick

There were some wailing changes in me, each one more pressing than the last. First, my skin became impossibly soft, tender, and damp to the touch. Second, it began to smell like the sea. Next—as my boyfriend told me with my teat in his mouth—I began to taste like salt until I was too bitter to bear and we would spend our nights laying back to back, too embarrassed and disgusted to move or talk or fuck. Then, my color lost the dull gray overlay of the city skyline and turned brassy blue: my hair, my face, my teeth, all dipped in ink and polished shiny, until I became a statue sitting away in a collection. My nails turned tough like plates. I even developed headaches: spikes to the head that left me suspended in the dark for half of the day. That, I blamed on my lenses; I wore thick glasses that left me considering surgery, and then the headaches came on. I booked myself a consultation, hoping for a permanent solution.

“When did you last get your eyes checked?” he asked me. He put my eyes through all sorts of lenses and showed me no fewer than seven charts. I’d come in excited—I’d been waiting to get Lasik for a long time, regardless of the warnings I had heard. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the sight I had: with my last prescription, the world was reduced to smears of color and shadow without shape or form. I was eager to leave, but when the clock struck the second hour, the doctor was still working. I couldn’t imagine what else he had to do.

He lifted the panel of lenses and pulled his chair up to me. I blinked. My eyes burned with strain.

“Have you been having headaches?” he asked.

“Often, but I have a big deadline coming up at work—I don’t get as much sleep as I should.”

“Right.”

His skin was flushed down to the neck. His pen wobbled over a piece of paper until he put it down to hide his shaking hand.

“I don’t know how to best explain this,” he said, “but in my professional opinion, you aren’t a good candidate for surgery.”

“Oh.”

“While the diagnosis may sound like good news, it’s more likely to be a medical complication. Don’t get excited.”

I sat up higher.

“I’m seeing a significant reduction in your near-sightedness. We could attribute that to a number of things, some as marginal as cataracts—”

“But I’m only thirty-two.”

“—or diabetes, which may have stabilized due to sudden lifestyle changes. Looking through your family history, I would say there is cause for concern—”

He sent me a referral to the endocrinologist and a new prescription that was, in “the medical case,” as close to perfect as perfect could get. I threw my glasses in the bottom drawer after that and found that my headaches disappeared quickly after.

If I couldn’t be excited by the news, I knew my mother would be. When I turned thirty, she had set upon my aging armed with curry and oil and lime and garlic brews that she swore had kept her young. We were mirror images of each other: dark-skinned, tall, and slim, “like men,” she said. Since we were not beautiful in the way women were beautiful, she always made sure we had the extra trappings: I grew up having never cut my hair (until I cropped it to my scalp after I took my senior grad photos), and found myself falling into her way of eating in my teens.

“We have the kinds of bodies that only look good slim,” she said. She was small and waifish and light forever, the same size as she was when she married my father. She wore her wedding gown at times, to prove it, always at night, when she thought we couldn’t see. She never allowed herself a pound. It was hard to allow myself one either.

Now, she was growing white hairs that she plucked out of her head as soon as she spotted them. She spoke of it at lunch, when she also told me about “exclusive back-sleeping.”

“It keeps my face from dragging to one side,” she said. “It prevents wrinkles.”

“We don’t really wrinkle though.”

“We?”

“Black people. I was reading about it the other day—we get sunspots and discoloration maybe but we don’t really wrinkle.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t sound right.” My mother took an ice cube and put it in her mouth. I could hear the sharp edges clacking against her teeth as she picked through her meal, separating it based on color and shape. I thought of my doctor’s appointment and the best way to word the news. I slipped it in between conversation between work and my relationship: I lived with a boyfriend of five years. We weren’t married, so I was almost happy to have some news to distract her.

She did me a favor by thinking I was wearing contacts.

“No,” I said. “I don’t wear glasses anymore.”

She looked at me bent-headed.

“I went to the eye doctor and nothing.” I shrugged. “No need for glasses. My eyesight is good again.”

Her eyebrows twitched, before deciding on a hard-creased frown.

“And they’re sure everything is okay?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to get a follow-up.”

She said nothing and picked through the dark green pile on her plate. Later that night, she sent me the link to a woman-healer she had been seeing for years now. Her website was filled with natural brews to cure and purge the body.

“This helped me a lot,” she wrote. “Take care. Love Mama.”

The morning that I was scheduled with the endocrinologist, I missed a work meeting. We did five days a week at the office and had begun to clock a sixth at home with a deadline bearing down on us. I often considered quitting. Before each project deadline, I began applying to roles at smaller companies with lighter hours: non-profits, government jobs, justice initiatives, getting my master's, my doctorate. I never followed through with it.

I worked in data analytics, tucked into the belly of the building of a Fortune 500 company. I had strived very hard to get there but never meant to end up stuck.  Every morning I entered into the dim and swallowing tower, shot up to the fourteenth floor, and sat down for the next ten hours. The pay was good—my college dream. I had more than I knew how to spend and not enough time to spend it. I consumed every trend that came into the cycle because I could and what else was there to do until I was jumping paycheck to paycheck.

My colleagues called our manager a ballbuster. His name was John Cline. He was in his seventies, heavy set, patchy-skinned, and always moving. He liked to know what everyone was doing at any given time. His assistant sent emails every hour (or almost every half hour) asking for updates on the projects we were working on. He was trained in the eighties. Or maybe the seventies (I’m not sure) and he ran the office like it was a time capsule, so when we went to work, we walked into the Reagan era.

I saved all my sick days for the very end, to spend in the weeks before and after Christmas. And I hated, more than anything, having to take them off for doctor’s appointments and actual illnesses, as when I did John would lean over my desk, wispy hair over the edge of my cubicle, and ask where I was.

When I got off from my endo appointment, he was there before I even arrived.

“Good afternoon, Molly.”

My English name was Mary. My family called me Chi-chi. Nobody had ever called me Molly before. John told me he had a daughter-in-law named Mary, but of course called me Molly. I brought it up once. He never stopped.

“Good afternoon, John.”

His fingers drummed across the top of the cubicle. Tap. Tap. I set down my bag. Tap.

“How was the appointment?”

“Good.” The endocrinologist read whatever the eye doctor looked over and gave me a cup to piss in. He asked me about a number of symptoms, including dry mouth—to which I had said yes, because ever since my skin turned to salt and hands became damp, my mouth had always been so dry—and he told me that he wouldn’t be surprised if I was diabetic. I told him I was thirty-two. He said that wasn’t so young for these things anymore.

“Routine,” I said.

“Clean bill of health?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Good!” He folded his arms together and set his chin inside. He had filmy blue eyes that rummaged through my desk. I had pictures of my family on my desk—brothers, my mother, my boyfriend, and I together. John might as well have rummaged through, picking and staring and tossing aside. He let out a heavy sigh, saying, “Have you had a chance to open your emails yet?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s a lot of work to do,” he said. His face was in his hands as he shook it. “A lot, a lot, a lot of work to do. And frankly, I’m not sure we’ll get it all done in time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So it’s really hard when people take time off or schedule their appointments during critical points in the delivery schedule.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Sir—”

“And I know, I know, you have sick days and they are yours to use for moments exactly like this. But when we’re sitting at the end of the year, talking about who is going to be a leader, and who showed the most leadership even in their level one and two and three roles, we’re going to be looking at those people who were willing to go further than what was expected.”

I paused.

“Yes sir.”

“Perfect. Thanks for understanding—we need your effort on this, Molly.”

Tap.

He lingered. His eyes creased in the corners, crow’s feet gripping into the thin skin until he took a big breath. “Are you wearing perfume?”

“Just a bit.”

“It’s great—smells just like the ocean.” He smiled, patted the cubicle again (like it was a newborn), and walked away whistling. It was always the same tune as he twisted through the rows: like the drone of a conch shell without any of the beauty.

When we had heavy deadlines, we spent every evening after work at happy hour (as though we wanted to spend more time together) and the conversation always ambled back to the project. Between the fourth and fifth watered-down drinks—filled with tasteless cherries bought on the company card—we fully returned to our work. It was like we had never left it. By seven o’clock, I had my laptop out sitting at the table, drumming down notes for reference during the morning meeting.

It was a “nice” bar mobbed by businessmen in rumpled button-downs, and I assumed a few college students learning to do the same. I hovered over my glass. Tonight I had the urge to gulp down water, and for every cocktail, I had two glasses of it, so that I was running to the bathroom every half hour. I was almost sober: there was no buzz or blur. The floor was sticky and I could feel it. Taxis honked and I could hear it. The bar wasn’t nice after all—I could see the paint stripping from the wall, the wallpaper gummed in small patches to cover holes, the scratch in the corner of the mirror from a card or a ring.

I washed my hands. The water was cool, crackling. I bent to drink it—my throat was dry, rolling, itching with the beginning of a cough. If I got strep, I would have to call out. If I called out again during this project, I wouldn’t get a bonus this year. Without a bonus, there would be no wedding. He hadn’t proposed, though I was sure he was getting there before I started to taste like salt.

I drank more water. It went down slick. I was hot all over. Some heels tapped into the bathroom and paused. A woman passed me and looked at me through the side of her eyes. I gulped until the water shot from the corners of my mouth and streamed into my nose, cooling, and sealing secret cracks. I stepped away from the tap, my makeup dripping down my neck, into my black, unbuttoned collar. I wiped the lipstick from my mouth, and patted splotchy, clinging foundation and powder into my cheeks. I breathed. A gurgle rose out of my throat. Water sloshed in my belly. I dried my hands and left the bathroom.

I was more sober than before. I clipped back to the table and sat down. My co-workers sat slumped, discussing the intricacies of the project. “We’re now rounding the home stretch,” John said. He had a damp stain on the pocket of his shirt. His face blinked with the flicking of screens and the dip of keystrokes, while he sat in the center directing, talking, “The presentation is more important than the write-up, executives don’t read.”

I picked up my bag and my jacket and let them hang on my arms. “I’m going to head out,” I said. “I’m not feeling well.”

I got a couple of coos, a few “get-wells,” and a “so early?” from John. “Is it the same thing as before?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I should drink tonight.”

“Do you need a ride home?”

“I’m going to call a car.”

He didn’t look fit to drive anyone home, but he stood up, car keys tight-fisted in one hand. “I’ve only had one drink.”

I thought about refusing: call the taxi home and quit quietly, no notice, no need for one. I had savings to subsist on. I went to a good school–someone would hire me. I could call my boyfriend. He could come and make small talk with my coworkers (and with John, who liked him), drive us home, and slide in beside me, his breath in my pores. I imagined telling him “I quit,” in the morning, seated in the crook of his leg, and watching him take the news well.

“All right,” I said.

I strapped myself into the car seat and held onto the leather beneath me. It was a low-riding sedan, a Tesla, faceless and without character.  In the summer he let interns take turns driving it to pick up coffee. They always ran late and flushed-faced to our meetings after, envious or newly ambitious.

“It’s nice, right?” John asked.

“Very nice.”

We continued in silence. I fidgeted with the wet patches of my clothes—my damp skirt, my sticky collar—and picked at my nails. John shifted onto the highway.

“Molly, I’ve been getting really concerned about you lately.” The car drifted into the passing lane. “I feel like you’re not completely focused on our goals with this project. And with driving the team forward.” He passed a car; he veered to the right. “I mean, is everything all right at home?”

“Yes.”

“How’s David?”

“He’s good,” I said. My stomach bubbled. The car sped up. I held my belly in one hand and then gripped the grab handle with the other. John looked at me through the rear-view mirrors. His eyes were filmy, dull, drunk. But he talked very clearly, and very softly.

“Plan on getting married anytime soon?”

“Not soon. We’ll probably buy our own place first.”

“Well, don’t wait too long.” He dragged the car into the left lane again. “Despite what they’re saying in the media, I don't know a single person whose life wasn’t better after getting married, believe me.” He turned to look at me. “I wanted to make sure that I was covering my bases—you’re a good worker, Molly, but this is a tight business, it waits for nobody. It’s hard to have health issues, but you’re putting me in an impossible position.”

The red lights of a car glistened in front of us. John shifted into the left lane again and sped up to pass. My stomach blistered. I had my hand bruising the skin, the feeling trying to drown out the nausea; they tugged back and forth as the car shot forward. I hoped one of these cars around us was unmarked, or a squad car was sitting behind the trees on the side of the road to stop us.

The car crossed between two lanes.

“Sir—”

“You know I can’t promote you, Molly”

He cut back to the right, the car so close behind us, more lights in front of us, another car going to the left, a truck to the right, the spot too tight for the Tesla.

“Sir—”

“I may even have to let you go.”

I felt the car shift under me and the wheels eat on each other when he stamped on the brake. My head lolled back and snapped forward. The driver behind us slammed on the horn before spinning out of the way. The Tesla stopped. The car in front of us, which we hit, stood still. John was buried beneath white clouds.

“Molly?” John pushed the airbag away. “Are you okay?” There was a knock on the car window, and he lowered it. “You want to exchange information, I know, give me one second.”

A voice came from the other side. “It smells like alcohol in here.”

“My employee had something to drink. We’re just coming back for a work dinner.”

“I’m calling the police.”

I opened my door. Traffic continued in the right lane, slowing to see what we were doing, the light washing over me. On the other side of the right lane was a shallow undergrowth, a thin stream of water passing under the road, clogged by fallen trees and rocks and glass bottles floating on top. Petroleum bloomed in rings, under lamplight there was a faint green tint to standing pools sitting around the stream, crickets chirped, and I threw up.

John and the other driver argued. I spent so much time holding onto the railing, waiting for the police to come. I threw up again. It tasted blisteringly like liquor and salt. Hanging over the rail, head beating, I thought I saw some fish swimming in the petroleum pools, darting insects, a snake curling, its body black and polluted, coming out of the water, dancing—no, not dancing—eating, holding down a thrashing fish and unhinging, swallowing, its body widening and its eyes rolling to make more space. When it was finished, it slithered onto the stream bank, stopped, lifted its head, and looked at me. It paused, bared its mouth. Its belly quivered with the still moving fish beating against its body, but it curved around itself to quiet the moving, until that too stopped altogether and there was nothing but us and the twinkle of greasy nightlights against the greasier water.

Then, it disappeared.

A hand squeezed my shoulder, and I turned. John angled himself away from me. “The police will be here in a few minutes. Could we get our story straight?”

“I called a car—I’m going home.”

He stared at me, his very blue eyes turned ugly at night: there was no contrast between the white and blue, only the high shine of his emergency lights. “It’s really important that we know what we’ll say to the police officer. We’re going to be in trouble.”

“Call me. I have to go home. My head.”

“Molly.”

The car came. I went home. John called me a dozen times and sent two emails. I shut off my phone.

David greeted me with confusion and panic as I told him the story. He was silent for a time.

“You’re going to be fired.”

“I’m putting in my two-weeks’ notice tomorrow morning.”

I brushed my teeth. Stripped. Took a shower. Came out with softened, salty skin that smelled like seawater. He asked to call my mom. He asked to take me to the hospital.

“I want to rest.”

The bed was good beneath my body, skin to the sheets. David lay down beside me. Our legs were hooked.

“You smell good,” I said.

He paused. I waited.

“You too.”

“Do I?”

“Salty.”

“Is that good?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh?”

I turned until my breasts lay bare against his chest and I let my hand sneak under him until I held him tight, and my hand splayed against his ribcage. We laid neck on neck next. I opened my mouth to breathe him. Opened my legs next. I unhinged my jaw to swallow, felt his skin in the folds of my teeth, felt his sucking, felt him pay no mind to the salt crystals (even felt him dash his tongue across them). My skin was dark and tender, slightly wet, scaly behind the legs, the elbows, and the curve of my shaking lower belly. I curled up, wrapped around him. He lay thrashing between my arms until he grew still, breathing carefully. He blinked, watching me. I stretched forward then, over and over him; slowly, I enveloped him until he stopped moving altogether.