The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Humpty explains to Dumpty what tampons and, a fortiori, their wrappers are, though she’s never seen either, either. Their mother wouldn’t have imagined she could wax nostalgic about menstruation, but there she goes, prompted perhaps by that SEX EDUCATION playscript. Prompts Peter The FBI, and assures her we won’t forget to call Irma.

  Yeah, well, obvious enough, K supposes: When she and Jaime Aiquina were running up mileage on I-95 between Bolton Hill and Embassy Row to be with each other, and she and likeminded gringo Latinophiles founded Hands Off South and Central America, our various three-letter secret police outfits took a certain interest, as did those of their counterparts south of the border who maintained operatives in D.C. Even before President Allende was murdered in Santiago and his former ambassador Orlando Letelier ditto in Washington, the HOSCAs correctly assumed their telephones to be tapped and their organization otherwise monitored, perhaps even infiltrated. The American High Sixties were, after all, the palmy days of Operation COINTELPRO and other big-ticket domestic snooperies and harassments, when President LB J entertained his friends with J. Edgar Hoover’s tapes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s humping his lady parishioners, and the actress Jean Seberg was hounded quite to death by strategically circulated gossip that—but never mind, Pity, never mind, Terror: We’ll initiate you into governmental reality when your little characters are formed and sturdified. What confounds the heart, but doesn’t quite break it, is that college-educated American grown-ups in Silver Spring and Des Moines and San Bernardino, with salaries and schoolkids and mortgages and pension plans, devoted years of their mortal office lives and millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money to breaking the law of the land and the norms of common decency to intercept, transcribe, analyze, file, and report upon the high-minded, low-level, mildly leftish, essentially patriotic though frequently dissenting and above all not very effective grumblings of the likes of HOSCA, not to mention burglarizing, sabotaging, besmirching, and otherwise persecuting various of its membership. Oyoyoyoyoy, kids: Sometimes your momma hates the fucking facts of life.

  So anyhow, then the CIA and ITT and General Pinochet made their big move in Seventy-three with Henry Kissinger’s blessing, and the Chileno goon-squads literally got away with murder in our nation’s capital, and Jaime Aiquina, who had been a gentle-mannered moderate Marxist, joined the Movimiento de Izquierdo Revolucionario and snuck back home in time to get his poor sweet body tortured and mutilated and desaparecido’d, and I went kind of crazy for a while, but good old May Jump not only kept my head together but saved me from forever despising my country, though not sundry arms of its federal government, by keeping me busy with those rafting trips and bluegrass pluckfests and bookmobile safaris into darkest Baltimore. She saved me for you and these several children, is what she did, and I’m going to call her up and thank her once again just as soon as we reach the end of this story.

  Says Peter Me too. We three, say Tambo and Bones at least.

  Which is, says Kate, that more out of friendship for me than out of her personal politics, May took a busy interest in HOSCA, and that interest earned her her very own personal file in our Federal Bureau of Investigation, which thereafter kept an undercover eye on ASPS as well, since some of our radical feminists were fairly radical on other questions too. So the chances are—and here’s as much of a point as this story’s ever likely to manage—the chances are that a certain number of entry-level white-collar FBI employees in Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia—people morally no better or worse than my office staff at the Pratt or yours in the U. of M. English Department—have seen on their little green screens that the wife of the moderately noted writer Peter Sagamore and expectant mother of his children has slept around with niggers and commies and dykes, and goddamn it, honey, that’s none of their smirking business!

  She’s crying; likewise Arm & Hammer & Sickle, in frightened sympathy. Peter comforts all as best he can. And do you think nobody else gets to those files? Kate cries. One day we’ll be turned down for a bank loan, or our car insurance will be cancelled, or one of these children’s third-grade teachers will have a certain shit-eating grin on her face, and we won’t even know why. Do you think I want them to read in some future biography of you that their mother went to bed once with May Jump? It’s an insult to everybody!

  Peter comforts her. She’ll wipe the fucking grin off that third-grade teacher’s face! K bawls. What’s the crime? Conspiring to debate and protest nonviolently the secret agenda of U.S. foreign policy in Central and South America, that’s what, plus poor-mouthing our secret police. I’m so tired of being pregnant I could just shit!

  Peter comforts her, and this time she lets herself be comforted. He mentions the Freedom of Information Act. Never mind the Freedom of Information Act, sniffles Katie; it’s by the Freedom of Information Act that May found out this stuff. But they censor what they give you anyhow. We need a Freedom from Information Act, is what we need. She blows her nose. Bastards. I’ll call Mom now. No; I’d better call May first. But she’ll be at work. What do we want to do with this goddamn lay day? When’s checkout time in this place? Could you hand me the phone?

  CHESAPEAKE & POTOMAC

  is the Maryland telephone company, not another brace of names for our work in progress. P’s relieved that K’s experience of impudent wiretapping has not soured her on telephones; C & P therapy is a standby on her side of our house. He supposes that if she gets together with May Jump, he’ll pick up some odds and ends at Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc. and then spend the morning making notes on some of these stories. No drafts, Kath reminds him between Kleenexes. No drafts, he agrees. Or, if she can’t get hold of May, we’ll just stroll and window-shop and then check out of here and have lunch somewhere and think about packing it in. His wife declares We’re not packing it in; we haven’t even met Don Quixote yet. Her husband says Then maybe in the late afternoon, if the wind drops, we’ll move out to the anchorage or sail up the Severn for the night.

  He goes to shave. Kate’s flypaper memory holds every telephone number that matters to her, but when a husky-rich middle-aged woman’s voice answers, she wonders whether she maybe hit a wrong button on the touch-tone. She hears what sounds like a man and another woman arguing in the background; before she can ask Is this May Jump’s residence? the first woman says Hold on please and mildly asks the arguers Would you guys keep it down a bit? and then to Katherine Sorry there.

  Is this Eight Oh Nine Five?

  I’ll check, the woman says, surprisingly. Yeah.

  May Jump’s residence? K’s sure now that it isn’t, but the throaty voice says You got it; who’s calling, please? and a bit later May’s on the line. Kiss? She’s been down all week with a virus, May reports, but it’s gone now, but she’s staying out of the office till Monday. No, that wasn’t her new friend that answered, the one she was coming home from Ocean City with last time she and Katherine talked. That was her new friend’s mother, as a matter of fact: the maybe next president of ASPS and HOSCA both, whom Kiss has simply got to meet just as soon as possible. Where are you guys? It is quickly arranged that May will pick Katherine up in front of the Hilton in half an hour. Not to worry about the virus, Mama, May assures her; it’s gone completely. I want you to meet my new friend . . . aaand . . . our son!

  Maze?

  May chuckles: Half an hour.

  Peter shakes his head, too.

  Now we call Nopoint Point, does Katherine, and gets her brother Andrew, the only one home just now besides Olive Treadway. Andy makes note of our lay-day intentions, accepts our thanks for the Brandy roses and the room-service breakfast, and relays to us his mother’s reminder, who knew her daughter would be calling, that we are to double-check our bill to make sure that that breakfast doesn’t get mistakenly charged to us. Says smiling Kath Okay. Now look here, Chipper: What’s come over our older brother?

  Okay, well. The boy confirms that Willy has done a one-eighty on a coupl
e of things and adds the information that Mister Trippe (the ex-interior secretary) blew him away last Sunday on the matter of supporting the Baldwin-for-Congress campaign. Andrew doesn’t even want to repeat what Mister Trippe called Poonie, to Willy’s face, right there on the tennis court, not long after we sailed off. He’ll maybe tell Peter in private, and Peter can tell Kath. But he doesn’t know whether that set-down is connected to Willy’s turnaround with Molly on the Deniston question or not.

  Katherine Sherritt can detect high harmonics of emotion through microwave relays and kilometers of copper wire, as if a C & P telephone set were a $2K state-of-the-art stereo. What are you worrying about, Chipper?

  What? Nah. Look, he really can’t discuss stuff on the phone. Do we have any idea when we’ll be coming home? Now, Kath says at once, if you need us.

  No No.

  Chip?

  No. You guys take care. Have fun.

  K’s frowning across our hotel room to Peter, toweling his neck, who has caught her tone and stepped out of the bathroom to stand by. Well, she says to Chip. Kiss everybody?

  Yeah. Bye, Kath.

  The boy is twelve. Moreover, we consider, he is Andrew Christopher Sherritt, not some dork. In the matter of his needing us, if he had meant yes he’d not have said no, no? All the same we frown; we wonder; and we shall call again when we can.

  Hum.

  LET’S GET GOING ON THIS LAY DAY OF OURS,

  all right?

  All right. K will walk P as far as Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc. and then stroll back. She washes, we dress; she takes the pretty roses with her to give to May and May’s friend and May-and-May’s-friend’s son, whatever that may turn out to mean. In the down elevator, Peter reports that yesterday’s sight of Rocinante IV with its odd hailport, Montesinos, has got him thinking about that most mysterious episode in Cervantes’s novel: the one wherein D.Q. has himself lowered by rope into the spooky Cave of Montesinos in La Mancha and is hauled up sound asleep half an hour later and awakened only with difficulty. He straightway prays God to forgive Sancho Panza and their guide for having broken off the most delightful vision any mortal ever had: a vision so fantastic that not only does Sancho disbelieve it, as might be expected, but Cervantes pretends to quote a marginalium by the Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli himself, complaining of the episode’s implausibility; yet so compelling to the Don that later in the novel he offers to believe Sancho Panza’s lie of flying to heaven on a wooden horse if Sancho will believe the story of what he saw and did in the Cave of Montesinos.

  What is singular about the episode, in Peter Sagamore’s opinion, is that of all the knight’s encounters with the apparently marvelous, this is the only one unrefuted by reality. It is never accounted for, and though nothing in the plot turns upon it, Quixote clings to his belief in it to the end. Alas, however, neither Peter nor memorious Katherine can remember what it was Quixote claims to have seen and done down there. Maybe we’ll pass a bookstore in today’s wanderings and check it out; or May Jump might have a copy at her place. Maybe there’s a Montesinos, Florida? Anyhow, it is an appropriate hailport for Rocinante IV, because in Peter Sagamore’s judgment the Montesinos episode is as central to Don Quixote as La Mancha is to Spain and the Cave of Montesinos to La Mancha.

  Katherine Sherritt says, crossing the lobby, that if the late Jean Heartstone’s Magic Language Theory is worth the paper it never got printed on, then this much talk about Don Quixote ought to pipe him right aboard. We step out into the gusty sunshine—Hoo, what a breeze; good-bye, roses!—walk a quarter of a block, and there he is, leaving Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc. as we approach. He squints and leans into the wind like Jacques Tati playing Monsieur Hulot, holding a faded blue Greek fisherman’s cap onto his head. A wiry, gray-bearded, leather-looking old chap in lean worn jeans and long-sleeved workshirt, he carries a coil of light nylon line in his hat-holding hand as if he’s about to noose his own skinny brown neck, and in his other a plastic shopping bag. Says Kath, who’s in no shape to run, Go catch him and tell me all about it over lunch, but at that moment a silver Jaguar sedan honks and turns out of the traffic to and from the Spa Creek bridge; it pulls up onto the Fawcett’s parking-lot sidewalk, blocking D.Q. from view, and the woman driving it calls from behind the wheel: Kiss?

  Kath squeezes her husband’s hand. As we stroll carward, May Jump pops out and around behind the car and trots to meet us.

  GAY MAY

  She’s wearing khaki slacks and old running shoes and a too-small un-ironed tails-out short-sleeved madras shirt instead of a shredded greenish paisley flotation envelope; otherwise, that shot of “May” in that SEX EDUCATION playscript back there in Day 1 in Dun Cove is not far off the mark. May Jump is russet-cropped, big-boned, green-eyed, freckled, friendly; she is makeupless, outdoorsy-looking, sure-voiced, strong of grip; an easy pal, nobody’s fool. Pete had a friend much like May Jump down in Hoopersville in boyhood days and thus knew the type before either he or his sister Sue-Ann or Charlie-for-Charlene Smart ever heard the word lesbian or could have imagined such a thing as women making out with other women. Charlie Smart was the daughter of a waterman who’d wanted a son; she was a tough and bluff and affable tomboy much attracted to Sue-Ann Sagamore in junior high but almost as close friends with Peter; she was the best all-round infielder and touch-football running back in lower Dorchester, a wondrous cusser, a precocious smoker of Camel cigarettes regular size no filter and drinker of Schlitz beer. Such young women as Charlie Smart in that innocent place and time had free and happy early high school years, perhaps more than usually confused dating experiences in later high school; they next went either to nursing school in Cambridge or to the state teachers college over in Salisbury, where they majored in phys ed and had certain new experiences that surprised them; they then returned to South Dorchester and, depending on the strength and clarity of their desires, either led celibate coaching or nursing lives or settled in like Charlie Smart with a similar soul and were occasionally looked askance at but never harassed by the hometowners—unless, in a moment of madness, one of them laid unequivocally amorous hands upon one of her charges, in which case a quiet fuss was made, and the offender left town without complaint or due process, like Charlie Smart, to butch it in the big city. Some years ago, reminded of Charlene Smart by his acquaintanceship with May Jump, Peter Sagamore asked his sister Did you sort of know, back in high school, that old Charlie Smart was lesbian? and Sue-Ann Sagamore Hooper, smoking a king-size low-tar filter-tip cigarette and drinking low-calorie beer straight from the sweating can, drawled D’you s’pose she was?

  May Jump now reassures us Don’t worry, shaking hands with Peter and carefully hugging Katherine, kissing her hair: My bug’s all gone. Come meet my new family. Peter doesn’t really want to, but chides himself for his ungenerosity. He truly believes that what still sticks in his craw is not Kath’s having at a shaky stage in her life once gone to bed with this good-hearted woman, but Jean Heartstone’s having been exploited virtually to death by that other dyke, that talentless ex-criminal procuress-poet. Katherine, in the middle, wants to know What’s this son business, Maisie? as we move to the car. No sign of Don Quixote now; he has cut behind Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc. and gone either into town or back out toward the docks. May chuckles Wait’ll you hear, then steps in front of us, walking backward with her hands on K’s shoulders. But you gotta be nonjudgmental till you do hear, okay?

  Peter hums. May complains to Katherine He’s humming. He hums, says Kath. Words like nonjudgmental make him hum. So hum, May says to Peter, but be nonjudgmental. We’re at the silver Jaguar, on the passenger side. On the front seat is a fat boy the age of Andrew Sherritt, but with slicked-down short black hair, reflector sunglasses, and, improbably, the beginnings of a mustache; also a floral polyester long-short-sleeve shirt that Chip wouldn’t be caught dead in, and shiny black slacks, blue socks, black shoes. He looks to Katherine like a miniature Central American right-wing general in Miami exile or a
shopping-mall demonstrator-salesman of Yamaha electronic organs with pushbutton rhythm accompaniments. On the rear seat is a scared-eyed, lean-faced, punk-cut, twiggy-limbed, cigarette-smoking woman younger than Katherine, who reminds us both at once of a movie actress whose name neither of us can recall but who plays roles like that. The Jaguar is air-conditioned; the pair both push their window-down buttons, the man-boy later than the woman, as we approach.

  Pete Sagamore and Kate Sherritt, May announces. This is my friend Simon, and this is my friend Marian, Sy’s mom.

  Owing to our respective positions on the sidewalk, Katherine says Hello to Marian first, wondering how so small and thin a woman ever squeezed out so gross a boy, and Peter shakes hands with Simon first, noting that the son, surprisingly shy in the handshake, must outweigh the mother twice over. The mother, he notes next when we switch places, is shy too, at least of handshaking, despite the orange-streaked hair and green eye shadow, and has next to no breasts under the sunny-side-up fried eggs printed on her Ocean City boardwalk T-shirt.

  Old Sy here wonders if he can have a look at your sailboat, May informs us; his aunt and uncle are big-deal sailor types. The Marian woman says at once But he’s not allowed to go on it. The Simon boy groans, but not loudly, Aw Ma, and we see that they really are mother and son. Remarkable, we suppose, would be a reasonably nonjudgmental adjective for that circumstance. Sure he can go on it, says easy Katherine. Why shouldn’t he go on it? Is this your car, Maze? Oh: These flowers are for you-all.