Salt and Sweet

Salt and Sweet

Every once in a while Mari would announce, “I’m going to buy a wedding cake!” She liked the kind with the bride and groom on top, the kind you had to order ahead of time. Totally white, not even any vanilla. She would call a local bakery and the woman would ask, “For how many people?”

“Well, it’s going to be a small wedding,” Mari would answer, “but we’re big eaters.”

It would be delivered to Kit’s house, not far from the university. They would sit together after Kit’s kids were asleep, watching Star Trek and eating Fritos and wedding cake. It was Mari’s favorite snack. She called it “salt and sweet.” 

Quick

She was bright—quick bright. As a child she often played chess with her father, until she checkmated him and then he couldn’t find time to play anymore.

 Pin Prick

She kept secrets even when there didn’t seem to be any reason to. And she was stoic, so stoic about pain. The ballet teacher used to say, “I’ll prick you with a pin if you don’t do as I say!” And one day her mother Barbara found her in her bedroom pricking herself with a pin, to know what it felt like.

Taken In

She wore Julie’s wedding dress, a classic white satin number, just a bit taken in. Barbara thought it was bad luck for her to rewear her sister’s gown, but Mari felt the whole affair was perfect.  

Leaving the chapel, beneath the apple trees that lined the brick path, she walked with her chin high, in a puffy white veil. Beside her, Bill looked out shyly from behind a pair of Buddy Holly glasses. That was the last some family members ever saw of him.

Wastebasket

The family gathered at the ranch each Thanksgiving, the only time many of them saw one another. One year Mari was very withdrawn, spent a lot of time in her room. After she left, Barbara found in the wastebasket a charcoal drawing that she had made. It was a self-portrait with her knees drawn up to her chin. The lines were heavy, black. She sat on the floor of a closed birdcage, hugging herself like a child.  

The Quarter

Barbara asked Julie to go with her to New Orleans to check on Mari. “I’m worried about her,” she said, “and I don’t want to go alone.”

They sat with her in her dark apartment, the blinds drawn. They told her they had come for a little vacation, and she didn’t question it. She took them out to dinner and showed them the Quarter, the trinket and jewelry shops. But it was, she was—she was far away.

She shared a common room with a neighbor who came and went at all hours. To sleep on the couch you had to let him pass by you in the middle of the night, so they slept in Mari’s big bed with her. And each night, after all three climbed into bed, they would hear footsteps on the path beneath her window and a light would come on in a room across the way. And Mari would creep out of bed and disappear, until morning, when she returned and climbed back in, pretending she had never left.

Therapy

She was meeting regularly with a psychiatrist, a Freudian psychoanalyst. Long-term, intensive talk therapy. The process was powerful, she told Susan. It could take over. Make you spacey, absentminded. You had to be careful crossing the street.

One night the psychiatrist called Barbara, tracked her down in her guest room at a weight-loss spa in California. He was worried about Mari, he said, as a patient. She had become obsessed with him, very dependent on him. She would not stop calling him. He asked: Would Barbara please ask her daughter to leave him alone?  

A Hairbrush

Long after, it came out that Bill drank. That in Ohio they had lived in a dry town and over time it became Mari’s job to drive to the next town over and buy booze for him. That he was an alcoholic, an abusive one. I knew because one time, incensed by some comment my sister made, she shouted that Bill used to get drunk and beat her with a hairbrush.

When I asked her not long ago why she left him, she dismissed it. “I can’t remember,” she said, her tone curt.

“Mom—” I was annoyed. “You can’t remember?”

Through the phone I heard a huff, slight, her particular sound. “I don’t like to—I don’t think about that anymore.”

The Matter

I was maybe five or six the first time I saw her cry. I came upon her alone, pausing at the cracked bedroom door because I heard a sound. She was lying on the bed, racked with tears. I asked her what was the matter.

“Nothing!” she said, brightening, sitting up. A smile. I knew it was a show. “Now go on downstairs and I’ll be there in a minute.”

Babbling

As my father tells it: It was early in their marriage, her second. A typical day, midweek. He got home from class in the afternoon to find her curled up on the floor of their small bedroom closet, naked. When he stepped near, she lunged at him. Furious. It was beyond— It was something else. Flailing, clawing, babbling, not coming out of it. He fought her off, told her to get up. She wouldn’t. He grabbed her and tried to drag her out of the closet. In the scuffle, struggling for a good grip, he whacked her hard in the jaw. For years after, she’d rub the spot and complain that it ached. 

 The Story 

 “Mom,” I asked, “Did Dad ever hit you?” I knew the story but I wanted it from her.

“I can’t recall,” she said. “I don’t remember.” As I waited on the line, she repeated the words, more thoughtfully.

It was a warm day, early fall, still lush. I stood staring out a floor-to-ceiling window, toward the forest and the river beyond it. Earlier in the week I had tried to rescue a squirrel with a gash on its forearm. I had spotted it holding the limb gently aloft, its pink wound glowing in the underbrush. But I hadn’t caught it, and now the unused box and towel lay empty against the glass.

Then, her voice: “I haven’t been hit in a very long time.”

I felt myself turning. Pivoting on my heels, my toes. What do you say.

“I’m really sorry you got hit, Mom.”

She was quiet for a moment. And softly: “It happens. People get hit sometimes.”

Blanket

She was the kind of mom who would come up to you silently while you napped on the couch to toss a blanket over you. She was the kind who liked to make cupcakes. Not for any reason, usually, but often she’d do it when you were sick and staying home from school. I remember how they tasted when you had a bad cold, when your sense of smell was barely there. It made them different—not bland, really, but the chocolate of the frosting wasn’t exactly chocolate anymore. It was more elemental, stripped down, like her voice when she was tired. All that came through was the salt and the sweet.

Marin Sardy

Marin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day (Pantheon, 2019), which was excerpted in The New Yorker online. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, Guernica, the Paris Review, the Missouri Review, and many other journals, as well as in two award-winning photography books. Sardy has been granted residency fellowships at Hawthornden Castle and Catwalk Institute and has three times had essays listed as “notable” in the Best American series. She teaches writing for Authors Publish and Catapult.