“Salt Slow” is a heart wrenching account from the woman narrator who recounts the love she has for her partner, which she depicts as an intense love that fades between them as time goes on.
Fall in love with someone who makes you ache, her mother had always told her.
Which as the reader can infer, the woman did love this man with a passion that made her ache, afraid that he might leave her. It wasn’t until much later in their relationship that her magnitude of intense love changed to become a more stable feeling.
This is a common theme found within most of the short stories I’ve read in Salt Slow; the woman’s self worth is dependent upon a man. Whether this self worth is found within the intimate relationship of a romantic partnership, as read about in “Granite,” the self destruction of being, as read about in “Smack,” or the healing and redemption of personhood, as read about in “Cassandra After.”
In the wake of this changing love felt between these two characters in “Salt Slow,” both are in the midst of surviving a global flood, while the woman is pregnant for the second time. The reader learns about the hardship experienced between both the woman and her partner, as she reflects on the loss of her first child. She shares the conflicting feelings of guilt and of brief excitement, and then utter despair when her partner exhibits disappointment in the news of her pregnancy. In fact, the reader receives little emotion of how the woman feels during this time of her life, but rather changes the narrative to how he feels about the situation, thus changing her attitude to match his, which in the end, ends up in the loss of her child.
In telling him, she had grasped at his arms and apologised and he had said very little, only releasing himself from her grip with an absent wriggle and asking, it seemed a long time later, what it was she wanted to do. That night, she had slept in strange hot fits on his futon and woken in the red-eye of the morning to find herself alone, realising after several bleary moments that he had left the room and closed the door behind him. She had lain where she was a long time that morning, tracing idle lines across her stomach and ribs and listening to him moving about in separate parts of the flat – boiling the kettle twice and leaving it, testing the smoke alarm, talking dully on the phone.
Ultimately, of course, she had only been pregnant a grand total of three months and seven days, that first time around. Even so, the memory of that morning had persisted well beyond the bleeding. A very slender sort of betrayal, the deliberate absence from a room.
The ache felt in this love could be considered the loss of the child, but I argue that it is the emotional trauma caused from the disappointment of her partner, and the occuring response of dissatisfaction in her current pregnancy.
The reader doesn’t get an explanation as to why he is against her pregnancies, which contributes to the ultimate loss of love, but it is the failure to meet expectations within the relationship that drives a divide between the two. Thus, it is the toxic socital gender norms and the expectations of those norms (pleasing the man, providing for family, etc.) that make these two strangers in the end.