Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  Two weeks before Christmas, Judith drove up. At five-foot-three, she seemed to peer over the steering wheel of her Jeep. She jumped out in Ferragamo boots, her purse tucked under her arm like a riding crop, and marched through the store back to where I was kneeling by the side of the little pond in the greenhouse. “Where do you keep your Chanukah candles?”

  Just the week before, I had released eight more goldfish, large orange carp I’d brought back from Boston. “We don’t carry candles.”

  “But you put up that big menorah out there. No dreydles? No chocolate coins?”

  Cheek to the cold black surface of the artificial pond, I peered between the lily pads. “Sorry.”

  “I had high hopes for you people.”

  “Christmas trees, wreathes, poinsettias, lights …” Even with a flashlight I couldn’t see a thing. The goldfish were gone. Not a trace.

  She mumbled something and strolled through the greenhouse, then the yard. “David!” she called a few minutes later. I was surprised she remembered my name. “You have broom crowberry. I’ve been looking for that.”

  Actually, so had I. I got them from a supplier in New Bedford just the day before, a special order for a good customer and not for sale.

  “I’ll take both of them,” she said.

  I assessed her calfskin gloves, her cashmere coat, the scent of lemon and leather when she opened her purse for her checkbook. Judith was miniature perfection. Tiny nose. Pale skin, almost peach. I was trying to guess her age as I led her to the desk. Why was she with the old guy? “I’ll have to order them for you,” I said.

  She wasn’t pleased and her attention turned out the window. For a moment, knowing her reputation, I wondered if I could be sued for not selling her the plants. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “With the lights and all. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a menorah publicly displayed out here. Believe it or not, it means something to people.”

  “It was my sister’s idea.”

  “Good for her. I’m tired of passing baby Jesus and the wise men on the highway. I don’t begrudge the church their icons but I guess I’ve always wanted some equal time.”

  “It’s not the church. The town puts it up every year.”

  “No,” she said. “They can’t do that. It’s a rule of law. There’s been a Supreme Court decision.”

  “They store it in the town garage, they repaint it, they put it up on town time and on town land.”

  She wanted names and dates, the facts, as if doing whatever they pleased on town time was something new. The guys in the Department of Roads, Bridges and Waterways always served the town while dividing any extras for themselves. One sold firewood cut by his crew, while some used the town equipment to clear new roads for private developments. They did whatever the town boss let them. Judith stared at me. “You know an awful lot about this town.”

  “It’s a short story, really. Just two words.”

  “Johnny Lynch,” she said.

  “Love it or leave it, he’s Mr. Saltash.”

  “I don’t know too many people who love it.”

  “That’s because you’re from away,” I said.

  She didn’t back off. “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m from here and I’m not,” I said.

  “You’re an interesting man, David Greene. I hope you’ll call me.” She looked me over one last time. “About the plants.”

  “Hello. Who is this? What do you want?” were the precise words Gordon used upon answering the telephone.

  Had I not convinced myself that my intentions were profit-oriented, I would have had my sister make the call. “You must be Gordon Silver. Your wife stopped into my nursery last week and ordered some broom crowberry.”

  “There is no Gordon Silver. Who the hell is this?”

  I introduced myself. “We met at my brother-in-law Marty’s.”

  “You’re talking to Gordon Stone. Didn’t Marty tell you who I was?” I only knew what her sign read: Judith Silver, Attorney at Law. I apologized.

  “Did you go to college?”

  I didn’t know what business it was of his, but I wasn’t going to be put down. “Yes, sir. As a matter of fact.”

  “Where?”

  I knew this game. Your class status in three words or less. I wasn’t playing.

  He demanded: “What did you read in sociology?”

  “Sir, I don’t remember. If this is a bad time—”

  “You’re damned right it is, when supposed college graduates can’t even remember the author of a book assigned in almost every college in this country for well over a decade. Why did you call me, then? Why waste my time?”

  That evening, just before closing, Judith called. “Hello, David.”

  In my most professional voice: “I called to tell you your order arrived.”

  “Thank you. I have to apologize for Gordon. I hope you weren’t insulted. From what I understand, he was less than gracious on the phone.”

  “Well, maybe we should forget it. Maybe it’s too late for this season.”

  “No, David. It’s a very good time. The ground here isn’t frozen yet.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think about Judith. The steam escaping her lips in the yard. The way her eyes held mine, like a cat’s: eyelids slowly lowering to withhold what seemed offered only a moment before. But she was married to what sounded like a nasty and possessive man. What was the point?

  On New Year’s Eve, I made an obligatory stop at the party of a good customer. Perched on top of a sand dune overlooking the Atlantic, the house was barely livable in winter. Blowing sand pitted the mammoth windows and shrouded the work I had done on the gardens—which would guarantee another fine contract when the owners returned in spring. I did not intend to stay. This wasn’t my crowd.

  For as long as Saltash has attracted summer visitors, it has had a tax-paying population of painters and writers, ex-commies and anarchists, and dating back at least to the early 1950s a colony of old Time-Life people. They had retired to vacation homes bought decades ago or spent long summers here, sometimes eight months long, May through December, before going south for the winter or returning to an apartment in New York. I did landscape work for a Professor Emeritus from Yale; an ex-commissar in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; a researcher who claimed to have written much of John Hersey’s war reportage. Some of them had been around for my glory days in Little League. They were friendly, but they weren’t my friends. They were articulate and glib, fond of whiskey and wisecracks I didn’t always understand. The truth is, they liked having a local guy to talk to, but I wasn’t quick enough to interest them in conversation. Moreover, this being the holidays, many of their children were at the party, ex-prep-schoolers who’d summered together since they were kids and whose conversations bragged about their accomplishments since. Backed into a pissing contest between a foreign correspondent covering China and a playwright whose agent at William Morris said Swoozie and Olympia were dying to star in her new play, I excused my way to the buffet table for one more sandwich before going home. As I reached for the roast beef I overheard someone say, “So you and Gordon are a childless couple?”

  “Is that like a burpless cucumber?” Judith smiled, but her stare was as sharp as cut glass.

  “But you don’t have any children?”

  “We thought about it,” Judith said. “But decided on a sex life instead. Actually we have five children and six grandchildren. Hello, David.” Judith turned her back on the other woman. “I’m glad you’re here. I want to ask you something.”

  She was wearing a black velvet dress, a slender string of natural pearls like baby teeth across her bare upper breast. I followed her to a dimly lit corner near the huge bay windows, and in the glass reflection, instinctively tried to catch sight of her husband.

  “I couldn’t really ask you on the phone,” she said, so softly I had to lean close to hear. “I was afraid you’d say no. Promise you won’t say no until you think about it.”

  I was a
bout to touch her. I was about to make a fool of myself, when she said: “There are a number of people in town who say you’d make a good selectman.”

  Talk about a cold shower. “Me?” Ridiculous. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been living in this town, but people like me didn’t run for selectman. Businessmen, professionals, developers: always older, often retired, and until only recently, very connected to Johnny Lynch. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? You know a lot of people and everybody knows you. You’re the closest this town ever had to a hero, David Greene.” I liked hearing her say my name, I liked the attention; her attention. As I was about to respond, she touched her finger to my lip. “Remember, you promised,” she said. “You can’t say no until you think about it.”

  Saltash was a town built on a hill. From High Street in town center, every road sloped down to the harbor, a deepwater basin with a sizable fishing fleet and some of the best yachting on the Cape. The Tamar flowed into the bay just east of town. Once a swift moving river with a vast floodplain, it was now a muddy stream, bounded by a marsh of cattail and bramble where Johnny had been slowly filling it in. Separating the harbor from the river was Johnny Lynch’s dike—maybe ten feet high, fifty long—and whether you favored tearing it down or keeping it determined who your friends were and who ignored you on the street.

  Little Saltash was a town at war. Economics was a part of it, but not the core. Retired bankers linked arms with shellfish scratchers; electricians and roofers attended meetings with the president of the golf course; on both sides were rich and poor. At the heart was a tall and courtly man who wore bow ties and a gray felt fedora; who had read stories to the kindergarten children on the fourth Friday of every month and saw to it that no one born in this town went without shelter or a meal. Johnny Lynch had discovered Saltash on a fishing trip the summer of his last year at Suffolk University Law School. He set up an office on High Street and attracted clients by writing their wills for free. Nor did he ever send a bill for helping people fill out their tax forms. They received nothing in the mail but a postcard, asking that they remember him at the polls. John Mosley Lynch won his first seat on the Board of Selectmen by two votes and ran unopposed for the next twenty-four years. He made sure widows kept their houses and residents received building permits while he quietly searched the tax collector’s files after the Town Hall closed. Over time he bought hundreds of properties lost to back taxes. He was elected chairman of the Board of Selectmen and moderator of town meetings. He created a rescue squad. He lobbied his State House friends for the funds to construct a pier and dredge a basin for yachts—and filled in a productive salt marsh with the muck that was removed, building a hundred vacation homes in a development he called Neptune’s Garden. Johnny Lynch drifted into a dying fishing village and created a new economy based on tourism and a thriving tax base of second home owners.

  But the people who bought those homes had a different agenda. They liked Johnny—most of them had been to his house for drinks—but they didn’t think he should handpick the police chief, the fire chief and the Board of Health. They said the builders he had chosen for the new grade school had worked so badly the roof leaked and the walls were cracking. They were opposed to men on the town payroll laying out roads on Johnny’s subdivisions on town time, using town equipment. They hated him for the concrete dike he’d forced through a town meeting to replace the old wooden bridge washed away in a hurricane. They remembered the acres of dead shellfish after the dike was completed, the stench that carried for miles, the shellfishermen who wandered around their ruined beds in a state of shock, kicking mounds of dried-up oysters they’d raised from tiny seed. They resented the loss of the most productive estuary in the region, which had once given the town hundreds of species of finfish and mollusks. They mourned the loss of habitat for migrating birds, endangered reptiles, marine and terrestrial mammals—all to keep a golf course from flooding.

  The retired population, educated and well-to-do, had made it through the Great Depression and World War II and weren’t about to be gaveled to silence by Johnny Lynch. They carried copies of Robert’s Rules of Order to town meetings. They understood that protecting the environment meant protecting their property values. It was the retired population that voted in new zoning regulations: one new home per acre instead of four; that supported Audubon and tied Johnny up in court. They had time on their hands and they used it to organize. After twenty-four years they voted Johnny Lynch out of office—but he still controlled three of five seats on the Board of Selectmen at least until the upcoming election.

  The Monday after the party, I received four phone calls before noon. From the Committee for Civic Responsibility: “Hello, David. Why don’t you come to one of our meetings to talk.” From a local reporter: “Is it true you’re running for selectman?” From my sister: “What the fuck would you want to do that for?” From Judith: “Have you made up your mind?”

  Judith and I spoke every day, on the phone or over coffee. We discussed strategy, the three candidates who had already declared for the one seat up for grabs, some of the issues. But not the real one, not until that night in her office.

  “This is insane,” I said, watching the fire in her gas grate. “I’m not the kind of person who does this.”

  “Maybe that’s why a lot of people want you to do it.”

  “What lot of people?”

  “Everyone we polled,” she said.

  The word “poll” made me laugh. We were talking about Saltash, a town with a pharmacy that had to special-order any drug stronger than aspirin, with no place after Labor Day to buy a pair of socks.

  “People think you’re hardworking and honest, David. They think you listen to them when they talk. They think you’re very bright.”

  “By Saltash standards.”

  “By any standards. Including my own,” Judith said, quashing any doubts I had about why I was considering this at all.

  At first I thought it might be revenge. Taking power, sitting in judgment. I thought it might be the idea of becoming an important person again. Even making my mother proud. But it was Judith. It was her attention, my name on her lips.

  It was being invited upstairs on a freezing winter night, sitting in a wing chair by her fire. It was books all over the walls and photographs of her in a white sundress in Mexico and Arles. It was her chin in her palm as she waited me out, her eyes lingering on my shoulders and hands. “So what have you been thinking?” she said finally.

  “About running?”

  She laughed. “Is there something else?”

  “I think you know there is.”

  “And would you like that to happen?”

  Neither of us spoke for a long time. “Judith, you have a husband. And from what people say, Gordon is a very nice man.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like it to happen. If I didn’t feel I was taking you away from someone who’s weak, who can’t defend himself, who—”

  Judith closed her eyes. She held up her palm: stop. When I did, she said this: “David, you can never take me away from Gordon.” We both heard the chill in her voice. “There are no models for the way Gordon and I live. We do not fit a mold. We do not ever try to hurt each other. We don’t have affairs. We do have close friendships. Do you understand?”

  I did not. I said I did because I could not imagine refusing this gift.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said, kneeling on the rug in front of me, laying her cheek on my lap.

  She undressed me slowly. She moved her fingertips from my neck to my breast bone to my nipples. She sighed when I touched her. She grabbed my wrists to govern the speed and pressure of my hands. She wanted it to last, she whispered. It had to last all night and all week until the next time. When I touched her between the legs, she arched back reflexively. She seemed to quiver. When I entered her, she gave a short cry. The first time I made love to Judith, I thought I had hurt her, but she explaine
d that great pleasure could almost be a kind of pain. We lay awake in each other’s arms, barely moving—estivating, she called it, nearly asleep but fully aware—making it last. “Trust me,” she said. “Don’t you trust me? Why so glum?”

  Because even then I knew, it would not be all right. Even as I traced my fingertips down the bridge of her nose, to her mouth, to her breasts. Even as my cheek touched her naked belly, I knew it was wrong.

  JUDITH

  Judith had a birthday party the day before, with twelve candles on the chocolate cake. Her mother had given her a new flowered rayon skirt. Her other father, Sandy, had given her a necklace with a golden rose on it. Yirina, her mother, had her call Sandy “Daddy,” which was okay with Judith. Sandy’s full name was Sanford. He told her New York Jews of his generation all had names like Sanford and Sherwin and Marvin and Walcott. They wanted to be WASPs he said, but of course as soon as Jews used those names, the WASPs dropped them. Sandy had hair like his name, and he was suntanned even in April, her birth month, because he was a painter for real and a housepainter for money. All week he worked, but he spent weekends with them.

  Now today, her real birthday, they were having another birthday party with Dr. Silver. She was very careful with Dr. Silver. Her mother’s American name was Jerri Silver. She was not married to Dr. Silver, who had another legal family, two daughters and a wife named Sharon, but when Mother had been buying the papers that would let her enter the U.S. as an immigrant, with Dr. Silver’s secret sponsorship, she had taken his name. Mother had thought he would marry her, pregnant with his son.