The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate

Iremember the four of us going there only one time, when I was about nine—all my other visits were on school field trips or with the families of friends.
    In retrospect, I imagine that my father was on the wagon that time—he would stop drinking periodically for a few weeks, sometimes even a month or two. My mother’s step would lighten and the frown lines on her forehead would fade. Tick and I would fight less, afraid of making the magic disappear and the old Dad reappear. But he always did. I could never really believe that it didn’t matter how I behaved. That my father’s drinking had nothing to do with me.
    The trip to the aquarium had a special kind of holiday feeling to it—it was Father’s Day and my father, knowing how much I loved the aquarium (Tick liked it there, too, if not as much), said there was nothing he’d like better than to spend the day with us there. In the car on the way over, he was in an ebullient mood, singing bits of old Chuck Berry songs and putting his hand on the back of my mother’s neck. She looked young and pretty, the way I imagine she looked when she first met my father. I had a brief unsettling vision that they had a life that had nothing to do with Tick or me, but I couldn’t articulate it, so I picked a fight with Tick instead. Nothing was gonna mess up this day, though. Rather than bellowing and scaring us into quiet,as he sometimes did, Daddy looked up into the mirror with a gentle “Come on, y’all. We’re almost there” that somehow got under our skin. So we stopped fighting.
    The parking lot was already full of happy-looking Sunday families—mothers and fathers and varying numbers of children. Tick and I held hands as we walked through the parking lot. I know brothers and sisters never do stuff like that but that’s how close we were then. We were each other’s best allies—I thought that would never change. The four of us went in through the dark entrance hall. The first tank we saw was the one with the electric eel.
    It was huge and gray, twisting quietly through the water. For all that it was enormous, it didn’t look particularly menacing, swimming soundlessly, ceaselessly back and forth. It had a gray muscularity, an
ownership
of the water that I found beautiful.
    People were gathering in front of the tank—there was a sign saying that there would be an eel demonstration in ten minutes. What was it going to demonstrate? I thought. It just swam around—what other skills could it have? Tick and I asked Daddy if we could stop and wait to see what happened. After a few minutes, a man in an army-green shirt and khaki pants came out—he was wearing a head mic, like Madonna’s. I thought that was cool. He waved to the small crowd and explained that the electric eel fed itselfby stunning its prey with up to 650 volts of electricity. He said he had to put on rubber gloves even to reach into the tank, that a shock from the eel could knock him unconscious. The eel eased placidly through the water. I stared, mystified but excited; I could feel Tick breathing beside me. My father’s hand was on my shoulder. The keeper dropped some smaller fish into the tank. They swam around briefly and then, one by one, seemed suddenly to fall asleep. The eel inhaled them without ever slowing down its leisurely circuit of the tank. Now the keeper held up a panel of lights with two long clips dangling from it at the end of black cords. He reached into the tank with both hands and lifted the smooth, strong eel out. He laid it on a little platform over the tank. Everyone in front of the tank stood as still as Sunday morning. He put the clips onto the eel. At first flickering, then all at once, the panel of lights turned on. Everyone started laughing and gasping; some people clapped as the keeper released the indifferent eel back into the water. I stared at the eel in wonderment. I could barely breathe. “Daddy,