Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  Brian was acceptable as a member of the household. She could think of him as a stepson, like Larry. She could think of him as a family pet. She could handle him: just never let him declare his feelings. She started watching television in the evenings. Renting videos. Then she began to fix up her office at home so she could escape to it. She mostly hadn’t bothered working on the island since Austin retired and she moved her practice to the harbor, but it was time to refurbish her home office. It was a distance from the main house, and she would gradually begin spending evenings there. She could bring the walkie-talkie out with her, and if Gordon needed something, he had only to summon her. She would order a new computer Monday with a fast modem. All right, Gordon wanted Brian, he could have Brian as much as he wanted. But she could erect a few barriers to limit Brian’s access to her and keep his yearning safely distanced. She would waste no more of their precious time together arguing with Gordon, but neither would she let herself be pushed.

  DAVID

  Candidates’ night was a blood sport in Saltash. Every April, heron stabbed alewives, coyote fattened on nestling rabbits, and the people of this town gathered in the elementary school gymnasium with a similar hunger for flesh. Judith had invited me over to help write a speech, but I felt that as soon as she saw me, she’d know; as if that one night with Crystal could cling to my skin like the odor of sex. When Judith telephoned, I said I didn’t need help. “You think I don’t know why?” she said.

  I felt my body square, as if to defend myself. I’d spent one night with a lonely woman while Judith herself was home with her husband. I was about to say something about our little triangle when she added: “You’re determined to lose this election, aren’t you?”

  The election. My shoulders relaxed. “I’m just doing it my own way.”

  “Which amounts to the same thing. What are you scared of, David?”

  Five meetings a week for three years. Small town newspapers poking into my personal life. Town crazies calling me at all hours. And that was if I was elected. At candidates’ night last year, a guy running for selectman had to shout to be heard above the insults of the same block of guys now sitting with their legs outstretched in the first row. Although I was pretty sure none of them were against my stand on the issues (since even I couldn’t say what my stand might be), old grudges were seldom buried in this town but polished to a shine like brass. Harlan Silvester. Jimmy Phillips. Their fathers had worked for mine. Tony Brockmann had stripped my sister to her underpants when she was ten years old and tied her to a tree. I beat him until his ears filled with blood and earned the enmity of the largest family in town. A quarter of a century had passed; he had married twice, lost his oldest son, buried his parents. Now Tony Brockmann, in unlaced work boots, legs spread wide, himself a grandfather at thirty-eight, glared at me as if to say my time was finally at hand.

  The man we called Ahab smelled of beer and climbed the steps dragging his bad leg. With a permanent squint, his nose and cheeks were a crosshatch of tiny broken blood vessels and his face always seemed to be on fire. He had one issue, fishing, and spent almost all his time on the town pier. I only realized, when he raised his chin to return my hello, that I had observed him for years, hands thrust in pockets, collar upturned against the wind, but I had never heard him utter a word.

  In contrast, Birdman was usually the first and last to speak at any event and had run for this office three times before. He was built from the waist up like a stack of tires, one smaller than the other as they progressed from his belly to his head—balding and fringed with wild white hair. He was well known to birders statewide for leading a campaign to save piping plovers who nested on the beach. Instead of the binoculars he always wore, he carried a large rolled-up map, which he tapped nervously against his knee.

  I figured I’d make it through my five-minute speech with platitudes about hard work and growing up in this town, but I was worried about the questions and answers. I was going to lose this election. I was eager for the campaign to end, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself. I had made a mistake. I had a crush on a woman. She asked me to run. Had she asked me for all the savings I had in the bank, or even to help her rob one, I’d probably have agreed. But I didn’t have the mind for budgets or the wit to think on my feet. I had for one sterling period of my life mastered the ability to throw a baseball, but now I moved dirt for a living.

  Sitting straight in the chair next to mine, her thin ceramic lips counting her supporters as they filled the room, was the front-runner, Blossom Endicott, whom Judith dubbed Blossom End-Rot. A teacher for many years in the Saltash Elementary School, Mrs. Endicott had so internalized her profession that she viewed the world and addressed everyone in it as if it were the fourth grade. Her hair was the cut and color of a stainless steel mixing bowl. She wore a corduroy jumper and clean white Keds. She walked to the stage with a clutch of official-looking papers, which she used like a cop used a club, to divide crowds and hint at her unleashed power.

  I was attempting to look neither at Judith, pacing the aisles in her pin-striped coat dress, nor at Gordon among the alter kockers, nor at my mother, who was sending me little waves from the third row. I tried to ignore the stooges in the front row and to look at nothing but the double doors at the back of the gym, propped open for air, the whole time praying not to see Crystal in her fringed jacket and cowboy boots. Just as the house lights dimmed, a big late model Ford pulled up in front of the gym. I watched its headlamps die, saw its ceiling lamp flash on as the door opened. The young duty patrolman, upon spotting the vehicle in the fire lane, immediately ran outside—not to chase the illegally parked car but to escort its driver inside.

  Johnny Lynch entered the gym with his hand on the young cop’s shoulder. He seemed a pillar of smooth gray stone, with his strong square chin and his cropped hair gone white. He was a head taller than almost everyone around him, and his elbow shot out from his body to shake hands like the piston of a well-oiled machine. When I was a boy, Johnny Lynch used to dress up in his Uncle Sam costume to march in the Fourth of July parade. For every kid in this town, he was the living embodiment of government. I could still feel his hand, sliding along the ridge of my shoulder, locking like a vise on my nape. As he dropped a shiny new quarter in my shirt pocket with one hand, he found a nerve with the other and squeezed until I began to howl. “He likes you,” my father insisted, but I had watched him torment other boys, watched his lips hitch up as they dangled in his grip like hanged men and tears moistened their eyes. If he moved more slowly now as a result of a heart operation, he seemed no less powerful. Gordon and the alter kockers sneered, but a small crowd sprang from their seats to wish him well. He moved up the center aisle like the father-of-the-bride. When he reached the third row—people stood to let him pass—he made his way to the chair next to my mother.

  Birdman spoke first, springing to the podium and attaching his map to an easel. Before retiring to Saltash he had been a professor of Shakespeare in a small Minnesota college. His voice was stage-trained, his language precise, his research unassailable; no one doubted his facts. Even the guys in the front row, hunters and fishermen, couldn’t disagree with his passion to restore the river valley, yet they watched him like a target through a rifle sight, waiting their moment to fire.

  Birdman’s map was a simple blowup of Tamar River, in blue, bordered on one side by the Saltash golf course, shown in green, and sixty lots on the other. Colored white and cut up in grids, they represented all the remaining land in the valley, earmarked for development. Brown arrows were superimposed over the grids, drawn in a wiggle pattern like sperm cells and aimed at the river. The speaker then pointed to the dike, explaining that a vote for him would be a vote for removing the dike and returning the yet-to-be developed land to its natural, semi-underwater state. His voice then deepened as he leaned into the microphone, “Do you know what these brown marks represent?”

  “More of your shit!” came Tony Brockmann’s answer.

  “Well, ye
s. That’s exactly what it is,” the speaker said good-naturedly, getting in his last few words before Tony and his friends made it impossible for him to go on. The audience broke into applause. Even Johnny Lynch, the owner of the lots in question, joined in, his broad shoulders and confident smile rising above the crowd like the bust of a warrior in granite.

  My mother had always been a woman who appreciated size. She liked high ceilings, big American cars, gilded picture frames heavy enough to rip nails right out of the wall. She had resented being taller than my father, having to wear flats and slouch in the company of friends. But she stood fully erect in the presence of Johnny Lynch.

  Johnny had been chairman of the board of the Saltash Savings Bank when we spent two weeks in a cabin here one summer. He owned Saltash Real Properties, Inc. He presented the curtain factory to my father as a native industry lacking only good management to thrive. Later, we learned he was unloading an about-to-be foreclosed property for his bank, through his real estate firm; taking a small personal stake in the business in order to keep the town’s only factory in operation. My father didn’t consider problems with the building or the work force, or that the market for curtains had been replaced by vertical blinds. He was anxious to start a new life for his family, to put the shame of his last failure behind him. My father thought moving from New York City to what he called “the sticks” afforded him the upper hand. If my father took Johnny Lynch for a courtly lawyer from the boondocks who wore brown suits and wide ties, Johnny Lynch saw my father as a fool.

  The consequences of that partnership were played out in my living room. Almost nightly, my father was on the phone, begging Johnny Lynch not to withdraw his profits in cash; not to support the employees’ demands for higher wages; not to charge his lunches to the business or to give away merchandise as gifts to clients and friends. Johnny Lynch had promised my father that the factory would turn a profit; two years after my father’s death, long after he had sold it back to Johnny, the town took the building by eminent domain for a price of $1.2 million.

  Compared to Ahab, who stumbled into the podium and knocked over the water pitcher, my remarks were uneventful. Even the clowns in the front row, having tried the audience’s patience heckling Birdman, did little more than make faces through my speech and walk out during the applause. Blossom End-Rot, to no one’s surprise, was far and away the favorite. Having packed the hall, her reception was long and loud. Afterwards, what questions came from her camp were designed mostly to embarrass Birdman, considered to be her biggest challenge. I was asked merely to comment on the town’s recreation budget. I assumed it was over. Some people were already filing out. There would be an election in five weeks. I would come in third, my brief career in politics put to bed. I did not hear her question at first, or even realize Blossom End-Rot was addressing me.

  Her voice was oddly kittenish. She gave the impression, with the flutter of her eyes, of curtsying as she spoke. “I was wondering,” she spoke to me through the audience, “if David could comment on the problems at the high school and what if anything he would propose to do about them?”

  The question was absurd. The high school was regional, the curriculum controlled by the state. The town had little if any input. “Certainly,” I said. The audience remained in their seats. “Uh, could you be more specific?”

  “The high incidence of teenage pregnancies, for example. The proliferation of alcohol and drugs.”

  I said something about drug testing.

  “Because David knows how important a good moral example is to the children. Don’t you, David? Being an athlete,” she said as an afterthought.

  Instinctively, I searched out Judith. My gaze escaped no one’s attention. “Well, we all try to set a good example,” I said.

  “Some try harder than others.” Mrs. Endicott smiled. “Coming as I do from a family with a two-hundred-year tradition in this town, I feel I must set standards. But of course it might be different for a candidate whose family is foreign born and entered this country through Ellis Island. He really can’t be expected to have the same commitment, can he, David?”

  At that moment I felt only the hammer of my heart in my mouth, anger rushing through me instead of words. If anything proved me unfit for office, it was this moment, this mute and shameful inability to defend myself in public.

  DAVID

  Saturday, my sister found me in the greenhouse watering seedlings. The April light that morning, as it had when I was growing up, filled me with anticipation of the season to come. I could smell the yeasty mud of the oyster flats at low tide and, when the wind came up, the tree sap running. In a month we’d have more work than we could handle, the election would be over and with it the embarrassment I felt every time I saw my name in the papers. For weeks I’d heard nothing from Holly but a list of things undone. Now she grinned at me. “Were you expecting visitors, David?” She didn’t take her eyes from Crystal or Laramie or let them get in a word. “Where have you been keeping these people? Why didn’t you tell me you had new friends?”

  My sister’s marriage had produced the same effect on her as boot camp on a new recruit: she’d lopped off her hair, lost ten pounds and seemed to be on guard all the time. The lilt in her voice when she got excited and her dimpled smile had disappeared. Even her ample breasts, which had hampered her high school swimming but made her a favorite with the boys on the team, had over time been chiseled to fit the body of a lean and efficient über-mom. But as she dropped to one knee to talk to Laramie, I heard a bit of the old little flirt. “You’re a handsome young man. Have we met? I don’t think so, and I know all the cute guys in my daughters’ school. What’s your name?”

  “It’s Laramie but—” He glanced at his mother for encouragement. “—my friends call me Larry.”

  “I’d like to be your friend, so I’ll call you Larry too.”

  The boy looked to his mother to confirm his success, but Crystal was beaming at me.

  “How old are you, Larry? Let me guess.” Holly made a show of sizing him up. Height, weight; she stepped forward and back, squinting, looking behind his ears. “Eight,” she announced.

  “We didn’t mean to interrupt you at work,” Crystal said. “But Larry wanted to ask your advice. Guy talk.” She winked.

  Holly stood, slapping her knees clean. “I didn’t know you were in town.”

  “I just moved back,” Crystal said.

  “When did you meet my brother? Where did you two—”

  “Tommy Shalhoub introduced us,” Crystal said.

  “David didn’t mention it.”

  Until this moment, nobody but Tommy and Michelle had known anything about Crystal and me. Michelle had made pancakes for us the next morning, apparently content that once Crystal met a guy, she wouldn’t be after hers. Certainly Tommy seemed relieved, if a little wistful. Crystal couldn’t have been cooler. She was up before me, getting her son ready for school. When we walked out, she kissed my cheek. “That was nice,” was all she said. I hadn’t seen her since that night.

  I felt the little boy looking up at me. “What did you want to ask me, Larry?”

  “Liam says he wants to get me something for my birthday, and I want a glove.”

  “Liam’s his dad,” Crystal said.

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “Not for a month,” he said. “But Mom says I have to tell him now.”

  “If we wait for Liam to ask, it’ll be too late. But we’ve never had a baseball glove, have we, Larry? We wanted to know what we should ask him for.”

  “Well, you look like a pretty strong kid to me. Step over here a minute. Make a muscle. Good. Squeeze my hand. Ouch!” I measured his hand by placing his palm in mine. I showed him how to throw a ball, remembering how Georgie had once shown me, guiding my arm, placing his palm in the small of my back. Attention was like food for the starved little boy. When I pronounced him a pitcher, he looked as if he’d had an audience with God.

  Holly lagged behind as we all stroll
ed to the parking lot. Crystal fell in next to me. “I’ve been thinking about you.” She was wearing a cowhide jacket and silver earrings. Although her eyes seemed clear and confident, she sounded bashful. “We have to get something clear about the other night.”

  “Crystal—”

  “I’m grateful for your confidence in me. For the way you said you thought I could be something.”

  “Well, I meant it.”

  “That’s why I had to tell you, I’ve decided to go back to school. To finish up my B.A. Maybe, eventually,” she said shyly, “to apply to law school. And I owe it to you. You’re a very special man.”

  “I’m not special at all,” I said, but that was a lie: in her presence I felt wise and powerful.

  “I’m not the only one who thinks so.” She jutted her chin toward Laramie. “Larry thinks you’re the swellest guy in the world. Look.” She stopped abruptly. “You may not want to see me again. I understand that.”

  “I didn’t say that, Crystal.”

  “Let me finish. Please.” She was shorter than I remembered her. Standing close so that her voice wouldn’t carry, her forehead only reached my cheek. Her voice seemed to quiver with fragile determination. “If you don’t want to see me, that’s okay. But just do me a favor, will you? Be a friend to the kid. I’ve seen the way you talk to him. The way he listens. If you don’t think we have anything going, okay. But think about being his friend, will you, David? That’s really all I ask.”

  Holly was waiting for me when I walked back from the parking lot. “Did you tell her?”