Of Women and Salt

That there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.

I thought, for the first time, My God. Nobody asked you either, Mary. Nobody asked if God could build a temple out of you, if you wanted to turn your life into an offering.

This is how most relationships must end, I think. Slow and without drama or pandemonium, without reason: just two people who become accessories to the bland survival of the everyday.

She mistook happiness for what it was - how we build lives out of the strings we hold. But we should have known deep down that she was lying to herself. She had said I knew the secret, what was really important in life, what made a person happy. If that was true, it didn't make sense when she went back home and left all that 'happiness' behind.

It was minor abuse. He’d touched Jeanette twice only, over her clothes. Just her breasts, Jeanette had said. That minor and abuse could even fit in the same sentence seemed preposterous. There was no minor in abuse, there was no Thank God, it could have been worse. Sexual abuse was no car accident.

The conversation, once everyone sat for dinner, was painstaking, fifteen people desperately waiting their turn to insert an opinion, nobody concerned with what anybody else thought about anything. Perhaps every conversation played out like this, and it was only now, aware of every move, every reaction, that Carmen realized it was a miracle human beings learned anything about each other at all.

We are more than we think we are. There was always more.

María Isabel thought it had always been women who wove the future out of the scraps, always the characters, never the authors. She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read.

She knew a woman could learn to resent this post, but she would instead find a hundred books to read

I believe family is whoever we point to. I did not just have you. You did not simply happen to me. I chose. I saw the possibilities and I chose and I would not judge the woman who chooses differently.

Tell me you want to live, and I'll be anything you want me to be. But I can't will enough life for both of us.

The only love she knows what to do with is the kind of love that breaks a person over and over again

What kind of fear is credible? There are so many kinds of fear.

She feared her husband more than any president or his men.

Listen, I have secrets too. And if you’d stop killing yourself, if you’d get sober, maybe we could sit down. Maybe I could tell you. Maybe you’d understand why I made certain decisions, like fighting to keep our family together. Maybe there are forces neither of us examined.

We are more than we think we are.

She hated that her own survival depended on a shadowy political future she could hardly envision.

She didn’t have the vocabulary to say, I want to know who I am, so I need to know who you’ve been.

She wonders what real prayer she'd whisper if she were the kind of woman who prayed

I know everyone will say in Miami, Tell me about Cuba. Most of them expecting an answer like, It is hell on earth. Or maybe a few, subversively, will ask me expecting an answer like, It is socialist paradise. I’d rather answer with a question, Tell me about the United States?

there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.

I fled the person who killed my brother. Simmering violence. A government whose response was to militarize the streets. Of course with US help. Of course they don’t talk about this on the news.

All I knew was that you smiled for a time, and then you didn't.

A person is not idle because they are absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

how could I explain it to you, you so small and full of hope still? That the place you called home had never considered you hers, had always held you at arm’s length like an ugly reflection?

The not-so-whispered dictate of enslavers: mix to mejorar la raza. Spanish men, your violence is a favor, your violence is bettering the race of this colony.

And [she] has wondered whether loss unspoken becomes an inherited trait. — Gabriela Garcia, Of Women and Salt (Flatiron Books; 1st edition (March 30, 2021)

It isn’t cheating if the marriage is on life support.

How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she’d seen her father’s face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.

Yet the factory paid her by the piece, half of what the men earned, and she was the only woman in the shop, knew the men resented