Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  “If you had been born a boy,” Yirina said oftener than Judith liked, “he would have married me. All that American wife has given him is two daughters, no better than you.” But then ten minutes later Yirina would kiss her and take her on her lap and tell her how precious she was. Judith had only not to cry, not to speak and to wait, and her mother’s love would return.

  “We’re lucky he acknowledges you, think of that, child.”

  “He doesn’t acknowledge me. I have two sisters I’ve never seen. I know about them but they don’t know I exist.”

  “So it must be,” Yirina said. Dr. Silver visited them every Wednesday night and he gave Yirina money. They always needed money. Mother had various jobs. She had met Sandy when she was playing cocktail piano in a restaurant-bar right off Prospect Park. But they had got rid of her a couple of years ago. Mother said she was getting too old for that work, but Judith did not believe it. “You’re beautiful,” she told Yirina. As with so much else about her mother, it was impossible to know her age, which varied up to fifteen years depending to whom she was speaking and her mood. According to Yirina, she had escaped Czechoslovakia in 1938 when she was fifteen, eighteen, twenty, and once, twenty-three.

  Yirina had baked both cakes and decorated them. She had sent Judith into Prospect Park where the daffodils were in bloom, to cut some and hide them in a bag pinned into her old coat that no longer properly buttoned. They looked lovely in the vases Yirina had brought with her from Mexico. Yirina had taken out the good tablecloth she always washed by hand, with fine embroidery of birds and flowers. Yirina had had it since her years in Turkey, during The War. Judith’s mother could always make a feast. She could make a celebration out of a chicken, a couple of candles and a bottle of cheap Chianti. She could make a celebration out of a sunny afternoon and tuna fish sandwiches in Prospect Park. For Judith’s father, Dr. Silver, she was wearing her best red dress of real silk and the diamond necklace that went in and out of the pawnshop several times a year. It was very important that they please Dr. Silver. Judith wondered if she ever really pleased him. Was he happy she existed? Did he wish she had never been born? She was always covertly staring at his square face, impeccably shaven, and trying to read his feelings for her.

  Once again Judith unwrapped the flowered skirt that her mother had wrapped in the same paper, carefully opened the night before. Dr. Silver was a stout man of medium height, a bit stooped. His hair was all white, even the hair that bristled from his nose and ears. His eyes were a pale luminous blue, but Judith had dark eyes like her mother. Sometimes she tried to find herself in her father. She had her mother’s dark hair, her mother’s pale skin with an olive tint. Dr. Silver was ruddy. She was small like her mother, small for her age. Her mother could pretend she was ten for several years longer, when they occasionally went to the movies. But she had her father’s hands, what Yirina proudly called “a surgeon’s hands.” Long-fingered but quite strong. She had his long narrow feet. Her mother’s feet were small but wide. Her mother wore size 5C, a size they looked for in sale bins or rummage sales at the nearby churches of Brooklyn.

  “I’ve brought you something I noticed you need, Judith,” Dr. Silver said. “I hope it’s the right size.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Yirina said. She had been on the phone with the doctor’s secretary, for Judith had listened, pressed against the wall. The doctor’s secretary, a formidable woman called Cindy, was the only person in the doctor’s world who knew Judith existed, except for Dr. Silver’s lawyer. When Judith was little, Cindy would give her lollipops on the rare occasions Judith and Yirina went to Dr. Silver’s office. Now that she was older, Cindy gave her magazines from the office. Judith studied them for clues on how an American woman was supposed to be. Cindy did the doctor’s shopping for him, for his wife, Yirina, and all three daughters, the legitimate and the illegitimate. That was a word Judith brooded over. People spoke of the legitimate theater. And children. She was a bastard. When Yirina lost her temper, she called her daughter that. To which Judith, if she was furious, would yell back, “Whose fault is that?”

  But it was her fault for being born a girl, apparently. Dr. Silver sat at the head of the table, his hands in his lap. They had eaten the cinnamon-flavored chicken. (Her mother cooked Czech; her mother cooked Turkish; her mother cooked Mexican; her mother cooked American. Yirina said proudly that she knew a hundred ways to cook chicken.) They had eaten the lemon poppyseed cake, a particular favorite of Dr. Silver’s. When he was in the little three-room apartment, everything swirled around him sitting stiffly until he retired into the bedroom with Yirina and Judith was told to watch television on the set he had bought them five years before. They did not watch it much. Judith had homework every night, which she did passionately. Dr. Silver gave her a dollar for every A she got and fifty cents for every B. She managed to bring in almost all A’s. A good report card could feed them for several days. But she also wanted to prove to him she was worthy, of value. She hoped that her grades were better than the grades of his other daughters.

  She opened the package carefully, automatically saving the paper and the ribbon. It would all be used again. Sometimes the ribbons turned up in her clothing or Yirina’s. Inside was a red spring coat. “It’s beautiful!” she said. “Can I put it on?”

  It was truly beautiful, and a little big, but she would not say that. She knew Yirina had wanted it that way so that it would last longer. She paraded around the table, as Yirina told her to do. “Doesn’t she have fine posture?”

  “Like a little princess,” Dr. Silver said. “Judith, I hope you are improving your grades in math.”

  “I like science better,” she said. “But I’m working on the math.”

  She was named after Dr. Silver’s grandmother, who had died the year she was born. Who had never known about her. She was a secret child. She kissed Dr. Silver dutifully. She could feel his slight embarrassment. They were both awkward at affection with each other. She felt he liked her but could not love her. Often she wondered if he loved his other daughters. She fantasized sometimes that they all shared some holiday, Passover or an American holiday like Thanksgiving. “I’m going to visit my half-sister Lisa this afternoon,” she would say. They would all become friends. She would have a real family as others did, instead of only her mother, old photos and Yirina’s shape-shifting memories. If they only could meet her, she knew they would like her. She would please them. She would.

  Then it was time for Dr. Silver and Yirina to retire into the bedroom and for Judith to turn on the TV loud until, about an hour later, they emerged. She hated those times but she gave no sign of her feelings, because she understood this was how Yirina kept Dr. Silver coming back. She minded less with Sandy, because he spent the night and she slept on the daybed. Other nights she and her mother shared the double bed. Sandy was almost like a real husband.

  They had a small apartment on the top floor of a narrow brownstone in a neighborhood just turning Black. Most of her classmates were Jewish, like her, but not like her. Most had two parents. At school she said her parents were divorced, but that her father came to see her once a week. That was acceptable. She learned what she could say about her family life. She did not bring friends home. She was careful whom she trusted. Dr. Silver paid for her Hebrew lessons at a local synagogue; it was understood she would have a bat mitzvah next year, although Dr. Silver would not be there. Sandy would, if he was still with her mother then. Judith had learned not to take such continuity for granted. But Yirina said of herself, “At least I know how to please a man. That’s important, Judith. If he pleases you, that’s nice, but it’s icing on the cake, you understand me?”

  “I won’t need to please a man,” Judith said, when Yirina was going on about speaking softly and laughing in a pleasant refined manner. “I will work and make money.”

  “I don’t work?” Yirina laughed dramatically, tossing her head with the black hair all teased up in a new style. “I just sit on my fanny all day. Who would have known
from the way my back aches?”

  “If I go to college—”

  “We must get Dr. Silver to help you go. We must!” Yirina’s mood changed abruptly. She was wearing her house smock, sitting at the sewing machine with material all over the kitchen. She was making drapes for a lady in the next block. Yirina did alterations and made draperies and slipcovers. She had signs up at all the dry cleaners. “My own mother tried to tell me I should go to college. She was a doctor, Judith, back when there were few women doctors. She had an office on Listopadu.” Whenever Yirina used a Czech word, a name from Prague where she had grown up, her face changed. It softened. A nostalgic glow came upon her. “She tried to make me get an education, Judith, but I wouldn’t listen. I was a pretty girl, and I thought that was all I needed. I went to university, but my classes meant nothing to me. Only boys mattered. Never be like that, Judith. They can take everything from you, your money, your home, every possession, your name, but an education, Judith, you can take that with you wherever you go.” Then she leaned forward, staring at Judith, as if to see into her bones. “You must speak properly, not the way they do around here. They talk like hoodlums. You must speak like an educated person. I have an accent. But you have no reason to have one.”

  Judith usually remembered to speak a different way at school with other kids than at home. Sometimes she forgot.

  A week after Judith’s bat mitzvah, paid for by Dr. Silver, but attended by Sandy, there was a phone call from Cindy. “Jerri,” Cindy said. She always spoke so loud that Judith, sitting next to her mother, could hear both sides of the conversation. Yirina, who had excellent hearing, held the phone away from her ear while Cindy was bellowing. “Jerri, it’s Dr. Silver. He’s had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”

  Dr. Silver never recovered consciousness. Cindy said they should not go to the funeral, but Yirina disobeyed. Yirina got Sandy to drive them (it did not matter anymore if he went with them, since Dr. Silver could no longer ask who he was) to the cemetery, way out on Long Island where they had never been. It was a cemetery in a wilderness of cemeteries. They stood well back. Judith stared at her sisters. They were older. The widow was blond and so was one of the daughters. They were dressed in suits and hats.

  She got a much better look at them a couple of days later, when they were called in by Dr. Silver’s lawyer, Mr. Vetter, along with the rest of the family. He seemed ironically amused as he introduced them, without explanation. “Jerri Silver,” the widow Sharon Silver repeated. “Are you a cousin?”

  Yirina shook her head no. She volunteered no information. Judith stared at her sisters. Lisa was pretty, dressed in a pink pants suit with bell bottoms. She must be eighteen, maybe nineteen. Brenda was pregnant. Her husband was addressed as Doctor. They all kept looking at Yirina and Judith. Judith felt frightened. Yirina was wearing black, one of the dresses she used to put on when she was playing piano in the cocktail lounge. She held Judith tightly by the hand and sat upright in one of the chairs.

  “I don’t understand why they’re here,” the widow said. “What are they, some obscure relatives?”

  “It will all be clear when I read the will,” Mr. Vetter said suavely, poking his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “Should I commence, then?”

  This man was the first lawyer Judith had ever met face-to-face. Judith did not have any desire to be a doctor, although Yirina spoke of it as the highest calling. She hated hospitals and sickbeds and pain. But it looked powerful to be a lawyer. You told people what was what. The law stood behind you. People waited on your words. She felt as if Mr. Vetter did not despise them, but was somehow on their side. He was a slight man, balding with a patch of dark hair over either ear, but he seemed to radiate power and confidence. He had a strong carrying voice like an actor or a rabbi.

  Dr. Silver left most of his considerable estate to his wife and his daughters, with a trust for his coming grandchildren. But he also left a trust for Judith, to be applied only to her education. It was not to be touched except for that purpose. If she failed to attend college by age twenty-five, it was to revert to his other daughters. She was so referred to. She was finally spoken for as a daughter. They were his other daughters. Judith began to weep, not from grief or joy, but from the overwhelming sense of no longer being invisible. She hardly listened when the lawyer read the bequest of five thousand dollars to Yirina, to be paid in two installments a year apart. She hardly registered the screams of the widow and the daughters, their ranting, their insults.

  “You’re telling me my husband was having an affair for the last fourteen years? That’s not possible. This is a lie!”

  The blond daughter, Lisa, began to sob. “Our daddy wouldn’t do something that low! You’re trying to tell us that … that shabby creature is our sister! She doesn’t look anything like us! And her mother can’t even speak English.”

  “I speak six languages,” Yirina said coldly. “English, Czech, German, Turkish, Spanish and Yiddish. I also read and write them. If you never have to change countries in your life, you should thank Adonai, rather than insult those who have had to begin again and again.”

  “I don’t know who you are or what kind of hold you had on my husband, but you will not get a penny!” the widow said, shaking her lacquered finger at Yirina. “I see no resemblance between this gawky child and my dear husband.”

  Mr. Vetter stood. “Dr. Silver has acknowledged his daughter. He wishes to leave her a small remembrance. That was his wish and I doubt if you will find a court in New York to overturn this will, ladies. After all, he left you almost everything.”

  Yirina stepped forward and smiled at the lawyer. “Thank you, sir. You’ve been very understanding to a woman who has survived many troubles. Dr. Silver meant a great deal to me. I’m sorry his widow and his other daughters resent his acknowledgment of his second family. But I appreciate your gentlemanly treatment of me and our daughter.”

  “Five thousand dollars,” Yirina said after they left. “He wasn’t so generous. I thought he might give me a little house or a trust fund or some stocks. He promised to take care of me. Well, it’s better than nothing.”

  For Judith, the will meant she would go to college; and it meant she was visible, no more a shameful secret. She no longer believed her sisters would be her friends, for they had treated her as if she were a rabid dog. But she still felt better. Mr. Vetter was her new hero.

  JUDITH

  Judith went to NYU on scholarship, majoring in political science and commuting from Brooklyn by subway. In her junior year she had a part-time job typing for a professor. Often she did not get home until ten at night, after studying at the library, working for Professor Jamison, sometimes seeing her boyfriend Mark or working on her column for the school paper.

  Mark had an apartment with two other guys in what was beginning to be called the East Village, which sounded better to parents than calling it the Lower East Side. His apartment was dirty and run-down, with what passed for a bath in the kitchen. There was only one bedroom, with bunk beds. The guys took turns sleeping on the fold-out couch at one end of the big room, the kitchen. It was hard to get privacy, but obviously that was the only place they had to make love. They had managed it six times. Judith found it awkward, never knowing if the roommates would walk in, hearing the neighbors through the open barred window. The guys had been robbed once, of the TV and stereo parents had provided. This was the beginning of spring vacation, so both roommates were gone tonight. Mark had decided to stay around, to have time alone with her and to work on a term paper.

  They were both earnest skillful students, adept at taking exams and dealing with professors’ demands and foibles. She was the more driven, viewing being a student as a job. He did not have to work as hard, since his parents were putting him through. They lived in Fairlawn, New Jersey, where his father owned a men’s clothing store. Mark had many clothes and his roommates were always borrowing them. It was part of his capital at college. She thought Mark extremely handsome: he was a f
ull head taller than she was, slender, with a curly dark golden beard that made him look far older than twenty-one. Mark had light brown hair, a shade or two darker than his beard, and medium brown eyes she thought soulful and commanding. He had a fine singing voice. His roommates called him the Lounge Lizard because of his habit of singing show tunes in the tub. He was her first lover: she found everything about him extraordinary.

  But when she came home, Yirina was a cold shower. Yirina did not think much of Mark, although she did not dislike him. She simply viewed him as a puppy, with friendly contempt. “He’s just a boy,” she said to Judith. “You have twice his brains. Don’t tie yourself down. He’ll do as a boyfriend, but anything more? He’s a pastime. You’ll forget him.”

  Sandy had long gone, marrying a woman whose house he had painted, a woman with a steady income and two children. Yirina played out a five-year affair with Dr. Silver’s lawyer, but that too was over. She was working in a dry cleaner’s, which gave her terrible headaches, but what choice of jobs did she have? She had finally begun to look her age, whatever that was. “I’m tired is all, darling. I’m so tired.” They lived in the same apartment. The neighborhood was eighty percent Black now, a lot of Haitians. All summer police helicopters hung over the rooftops, setting their nerves on edge. There was a drug scene on the corner, but Yirina had always got on with her Black neighbors. Many people knew her from the cleaners, owned by a Haitian couple. Yirina’s legs kept swelling. “It’s from standing so much,” she said. “My feet could explode!”

  Yirina was nostalgic these days. She did not have many mementos or photographs from her previous lives, but what she had, she cherished more than ever. Often she took down the leather-bound album with its black pages and showed Judith the two photos she had of her parents, the photo of her brother graduating from the lycée, even a photo of her husband, a handsome Turk. In one photo, Yirina, fresh-faced in a flowered dress, was standing in the curve of his arm holding a baby.