Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  “And they said no.”

  “Every one.”

  Judith insisted on showing me around. Putting on a goose down parka, she led me down a lowland path through the pines. “He liked you!” She skipped ahead like an excited little girl and drew me into the forest. As the sun disappeared, the scent of pine sap overwhelmed. I walked faster and faster to catch up. “I thought it would work out,” she said over her shoulder.

  I liked him too, which didn’t make screwing his wife any easier.

  About fifty yards ahead, I made out a clearing, a gap where the trees opened to the twilight. As we neared it, Judith began to run. She stopped abruptly at the gate to her garden. It was an enormous square, protected by a wood and wire fence. On top of each fence post was a painted wooden finial, some red and white, some yellow, green and red, or orange striped with black like tigers. There were bamboo tripods for growing pole beans, the withered vines now frozen like brown lace; all kinds of structures made out of bicycle spokes and hammered fenders, torn nets salvaged from the sea, a huge scarecrow with a rusted muffler torso and arms of copper pipe. There wasn’t a plant left growing and yet it was alive, a frozen circus on the edge of a marsh.

  Judith took my hand and led me to a small A-frame beyond the garden, with a double bed inside, a desk, a computer and files. “I work here. I fixed it up when Gordon got sick.” The room smelled of her perfume and cedar; it was still warm from an earlier fire. She touched her finger to my cheek. I moved toward the door.

  “You don’t want to be with me now?” she asked.

  “But he’s at the house. Suppose he follows us.”

  “He’s taking a nap. He doesn’t object.”

  “I can’t believe he doesn’t care.”

  “He loves me, David. He wishes me happiness.”

  I was not proud of myself. I thought a better person would resist. But as she kissed my eyes, I found her zipper. As she sought my lips, I cupped her buttocks and carried her to the bed. As her husband slept, I licked her sex like an eager puppy.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “We won’t be like anything you’ve ever done before. Can you understand that? Can you give up how you think people are supposed to love? How they’re supposed to live? Because we’re not going to be what people expect. We’re not going to live that way.” Judith clung to me with a strength that belied her size. “But I’ll promise you something. If we’re honest with each other and if we have patience and respect, we’ll live more happily than anyone you’ve ever known.”

  I wanted to believe Judith. I would have conceded anything she asked. But what I thought I was agreeing to, a kind of consensual adultery, fell wide of the mark. I didn’t understand what Judith and Gordon had in mind because it was unthinkable.

  JUDITH

  Law school was like camping in a wind tunnel. After the first two weeks, Judith hardly knew who she was. She was no longer Yirina’s daughter, she was no longer the child of shame and romantic mystery, whose mother had three different passports in different names hidden in her underwear drawer, kept although they had long expired. Nor was she the adult she had felt herself to be after her divorce. She was a tired cranky frightened child, assigned seats, given hours and hours of unintelligible fudge to learn in minute detail, at the mercy of tyrannical professors, sleeping at first six hours a night, then five, then three and then hardly at all. She felt ugly and drawn thin as paper. Her skin looked sour and blotchy. Her hair was usually dirty. She lived on food that Yirina would not have considered fit for consumption, pizza and bad Chinese takeout. She ate cafeteria food and fast food. She no longer spoke like a human being. When she opened her mouth, legalese came out. All she thought of were torts and contracts, opinions and citations. Her passion was pleasing professors who despised their women students; she loved only her grades. She had no culture. She had no heart. She had only a headache that never went away and fatigue that drained color from the sky.

  She lived for the approval of cold distant daddies, the professors who taught enormous classes. The first time she was in the hot seat, called upon to discuss the fine points of a case, her throat closed and her voice emerged squeaking like a mouse in mortal danger. Who was she? She was her grade point average. She was her first brief. She was what her professors pronounced her. What was she doing inside the baroque castle of the law? Like K., she was guilty already. Like K., she would be punished no matter what she did. How could she, the child of illegality and secrecy, make her way in the law? But its very power attracted her. She wanted to live in that castle of power. She wanted to bring that power to those who most needed its help.

  Yirina had always been powerless. Judith did not want to be. She saw her classmates in the second year gravitating toward the corporate law firms. That was where money and prestige were. By the time she interviewed for a job for the summer between her second and third years, she looked much like all the other savvy law school women. She wore a gray suit. She had bought that and a navy one at a discount barn in New York. She had good earrings from Yirina. She put herself together and got a job for the summer in a Boston law firm already looking over students for associates. Prestigious large firms were beginning to court women, under pressure from antidiscrimination legislation. Her grades were as high as any woman in her class. She interned at Tremont, Smith and Cordovan, where there were forty-two partners and a hundred-odd associates. It was an unusual firm, in that there were two women partners. Both were divorced and neither had children. They worked twelve to fourteen hours a day.

  All the associates seemed to put in at least a sixteen-hour day. Not infrequently they worked all night, they worked weekends. They dressed well, they made good money, but there was no intimacy in their lives. If they were married, they probably made love twice a month. If a woman had children, sometimes she became part-time; then the others spoke of her as if she had died. “Adrienne was a good lawyer,” they said elegiacally. “Too bad.”

  For what did these people destroy themselves, burn up their years? Money. Not power. She did not see any women with power. Even the two women partners were less powerful than any of the male partners. They were not rainmakers; they did not count. One had created a valuable niche for herself as a specialist in pension funds. Little that happened here seemed useful. She found most of the partners nasty and overbearing.

  The summer was no vacation, as much as she loved Boston, and she did. It was less tropical in the summer than New York and somehow more manageable. She had little time to play tourist but knew she wanted to live there. After a couple of years in the Midwest, it felt sunnier, saltier, brisker. She worked as fiercely as she had in school, but in addition, she had to look presentable every day. She had to shine. That summer job between the second and third years was supposed to be the forerunner of the job she would take when she graduated. By the time the summer was over, she knew that she was not going to follow the high path. She would not go into corporate law.

  She decided on family law, as Mr. Vetter had long ago recommended, but she was also drawn to criminal law. She could easily identify with people on the fringes of society, with the illegitimate, the poor, even the violent. She went after a job with Legal Aid.

  The veteran lawyer who interviewed her asked before the interview was five minutes old, “Do you think you can handle child abuse? Domestic violence? The seamy side of the city the way you can’t imagine it.”

  “I want to do this work. I think it’s important.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’ll really be doing? It’s not Perry Mason. It’s sleaze. You’re dealing with the riffraff of the city so they can go back on the streets. You’re dealing with crazy old ladies and crack mothers and kids who think cockroaches are decoration. You get all of five minutes to prepare a case and you’ll be handling sixty cases at a time.”

  “I can do it,” she said. “I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Those riffraff were my neighbors. They’re human to me and I can talk to them. I can learn quickly.�
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  She was hired, although her interviewer told her he didn’t expect her to last eighteen months.

  After graduation from law school, Judith received the last of her bequest from her father, Dr. Julian Silver, one thousand dollars upon finishing her schooling successfully. “I thought we might consider that your schooling was successful,” Mr. Vetter said. “On the law review. Honors. Your father would be proud of you.”

  “Would he? I never understood him. I was always a little afraid of him.”

  “His own daughters were never what he imagined they would be. You are. You’re beautiful as your mother and bright and capable. I think you’ll go far.”

  She did, immediately. As a present to herself, she took a charter flight to Europe with two friends from law school, Hannah and Stephanie. Hannah was the real beauty, blond, willowy and well-connected. Her father was a state senator. She would be interning in Washington. Stephanie was going into a big firm in Chicago. She was tall, a little gawky but extremely hard-driving. Judith could not imagine what she would be like on vacation. Hannah, Stephanie and Judith had gone through law school in a study group with two other women off already to their new jobs, dividing up assignments before exams, trying to carry each other through the grind.

  Judith was desperate to be done with schooling. She had been deferring her life. She needed a vacation and she needed to see Europe, finally. She had always felt only partly American, with her mother so European, so multilingual. She had a heritage she barely understood, like the legacy of a diary in a language of which she knew just an occasional word. She had only a vague notion of her quest, what she must find to complete herself. She should be studying to pass the Massachusetts bar, but she would do that when she returned.

  I did what I set out to do, she thought to herself: I conquered. But there’s no I left. She had five weeks. She had to be back in Boston by July first to move into the apartment she had rented, to get ready for the bar exam and to begin her new job at poor pay and long hours in Dorchester.

  The charter flight put them down in Amsterdam, which was pleasant. She got by on her bad German which was really Yiddish, scanty, rich in curses but poor in daily phrases like “Where is the women’s toilet?” They went on to Paris. There, a sublet and a temporary job had been arranged for Hannah. Stephanie and Judith lived in a cheap Latin Quarter hotel, famous for a nineteenth-century French poet Judith had never read. Every day they walked miles. Stephanie was eager to notch every museum, but Judith found she liked best to wander the neighborhoods. To sit in cafés staring at passersby. She felt like someone in a movie, a young woman vacationing in Paris, waiting no doubt for romance. But she did not fall in love with a Frenchman. She fell in love with a village.

  It was in the mountains of Provence. Stephanie and she were staying at a small inn set in vineyards belonging to the inn family. The inn had only six guest rooms. In the middle distance were cliffs studded with juniper and pine. The local houses seemed to sprout from rock. Red rocks, beige rocks, gray rocks, black rocks. The sound of goat bells came into her bedroom. Bougainvillea grew up the side wall, spilling its luminescent blossoms everywhere. Doves cooed under the red tile roof.

  She was in the middle of a large self-involved family. The wine served was grown in the surrounding vineyards. The food was cooked by Madame, mistress of the house. One of the daughters was pregnant and lay out by the pool like a beached whale, sunning her belly. They were always laughing together, the married and unmarried sisters and a sister-in-law. They all looked somewhat alike, about the size and coloring of Judith, with dark brown eyes and black hair. She had grown up hearing many languages, and she picked them up quickly. Unlike Stephanie, she was not afraid to use her French. The sisters normally ignored the guests as if they were made of glass, but gradually they found her acceptable. They began to include her in their gossip and their games. They had names for all the men who came by. They strolled in the vineyard. They shelled beans. They picked flowers and decorated the inn. They mended, they knitted, they read, they talked, they swam in the pool.

  Judith and Stephanie had been supposed to move on in three days. Stephanie did. Judith canceled the rest of her reservations and persuaded the family to let her stay. Gradually she began to do small tasks. Her rent was reduced. She spent the next three weeks as part guest and part servant and almost family, not a daughter certainly, but almost a cousin.

  Partly it was a fantasy, a big family in place of the isolation in which she had grown up. A female-dominated family full of singing and laughter and in-jokes, full of grooming and flirting. She was studying something at least as interesting as anything she had learned in law school. What Judith saw that caused her to stay was that these were people who knew truly how to live in a daily, ordinary way. They were rich in small pleasures.

  Madame could turn any scrap fish or tough old hen into a sumptuous repast. They worked hard but they also had much time simply to sit and talk, to sip wine and enjoy. There was a casual grace to their lives that was partly the beauty of the sunburnt landscape, partly the closeness to peasant life but with enough money to provide little luxuries, partly the climate and the habits of the place. She did not idealize them. They had no idea she was a Jew, and she was careful not to tell them. She was a spy in the house of comfort. They were parochial people who despised the tourists and vacationers they catered to. Madame would not let any of them near the stove when they were menstruating, since she held as an article of faith that a menstruating woman would curdle milk and spoil wine. Madame believed in sympathetic magic and tried to cure most ailments with herbs and what seemed to Judith voodoo. Gradually Judith learned to cook most of Madame’s dishes, from watching, from making notes. She understood that the cooking style of Madame was not so much a matter of recipes as of overriding formulae. Nothing was measured; nothing was ever quite the same twice. But there were general rules and she learned them. She knew what to do with a firm fleshed fish and how to make a marinade or a sauce from olive oil, tomatoes, a few herbs and a little wine or vinegar or lemon.

  Stephanie called her from Florence. “I hate traveling alone. Italian men are driving me crazy! What are you doing there? It’s not even the beach.”

  “I’m resting,” she said. “I’m exhausted. I never want to move again.”

  She could not explain her pleasure in scraping carrots and washing rice, watering the kitchen garden, picking caterpillars off the roses: hardly Stephanie’s idea of a vacation. Hannah would think she had lost her mind. Yet Judith was almost, almost happy. She had not been happy since Yirina died. Stephanie and Hannah were two women who had been part of her study group all through law school. She was as close to them as she was to anyone, a slightly frightening thought because now they seemed to have nothing in common.

  She still did not know who she was, but she had found a part of herself that had been lost, the part that had flavor and a body and tastes and knew, as Yirina would say, how to enjoy an orchard in a flower pot.

  She observed how these women dressed, how they laughed, how they held their bodies. Her particular mentor was the sister-in-law, Yvonne, who was a little the outsider too, married to the older son. The younger son was off in Toulouse in hotel school. Soon he would be working in Switzerland for a couple of years. Yvonne cut Judith’s hair and restyled it, critiqued her wardrobe, showed her tricks of coddling the skin with strawberries and milk. It astonished Judith how comfortable she felt with the Barbière family. This was not her life, just a pause for healing and rest. Yet she felt more at home here than she ever had with Mark or her various roommates. It was not that she felt truly intimate, for they did not know her and did not even ask the sort of questions that might have led them to understand. She told them her mother was Czech. Czech refugees were not uncommon. They assumed her mother had left her country to escape the Communist regime. For years she had let people make what assumptions they chose about her background.

  The younger son was home for a weekend, on his way to Swit
zerland. He flirted with her. “You’re so beautiful,” he told her. “You’re like a perfectly ripe peach, delicate and suave.”

  Like all the family, he was handsome. They seemed to radiate a sensual health that was attractive and unrefined, like the coat of a well-groomed, glossy and well-fed horse. He kissed her under the arbor. She did not let it go further. She had had only one affair since her marriage. Men her own age seemed callow to her, a regiment of Marks; she did not believe in getting involved with her professors, although two pursued her mildly. She had had a romance with an older man the summer between her first and second years, where she was interning. He said he was separated from his wife; it turned out he meant, by several miles, from the suburb where he lived. She let it go on in a desultory manner until she returned to school. It was mildly educational and sexually all right. She had backed into it and could not extract herself gracefully.

  The son left. An Italian on vacation kissed her under the same arbor. He left and she stayed on. She asked Yvonne if she was beautiful, since Mr. Vetter and the son Armand had both said she was. Yvonne cocked her head. “Bien sûr,” Yvonne said, “you’re pretty enough … assez jolie.” She had not classic features, Yvonne explained. Her chin was a trifle sharp. She was short of stature. Her nose was a little long, perhaps. “But,” Yvonne said, waving her finger, “what does that matter? You must have confidence that you are quite pretty enough for any man you want. That’s what matters. That you feel you are desirable and that you act desirable. A woman does not have to be a classic beauty to get exactly what she wants, little Judith. She just has to act as if she is one.”

  Finally the pregnant daughter went to the hospital and the tempo of the house increased and withdrew from her. Judith understood it was time to leave. She phoned Stephanie in Athens and said she would meet her in Paris. Her French had vastly improved, even though French vacationers told her she had a Provençal accent. “You must get rid of that!” they said, but she did not want to.