Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  Johnny was on his feet. “That’ll take years!” he heard himself shouting.

  Ralph banged his gavel. “I believe the floor is Mr. Greene’s.”

  “As Mr. Lynch himself has pointed out many times, Mr. Chairman, the dike has been in place for over twenty years. It would be imprudent and rash of us to eliminate it without study.”

  “You’re stalling, you little bastard!” Johnny felt sweat under his collar. “You think I can’t see through your cheap parliamentary tricks.” The bank would not wait for a study; studies took years. He’d be stuck with the property until he died. He’d never cash out. “Yes or no, up or down. It’s time to decide. We can’t have this hanging over us.”

  “Mr. Lynch!” Petersen was shouting now, glancing worriedly at the reporters in the front row. “Mr. Lynch, sit down.”

  David Greene continued, “If we make the wrong decision, as Mr. Lynch, an esteemed attorney and former town counsel knows, we could open the town up to a significant lawsuit.”

  Before Johnny could shoot his hand up to answer the patronizing bastard, a hundred people were clamoring to speak. He couldn’t see Ralph through the waving arms, but debate was cut off. They were already voting as he lumbered to the aisle.

  “All those in favor of referring the motion to a committee …” Three hands flew up. “Those opposed …” Two. “The motion passes.”

  Palmer Compton leapt on a chair and called them all cowards for not opening the dike once and for all. Joe Pound cornered Upham and Palmer. Fischel huddled with Ralph Petersen and a hundred conversations echoed in the room. Johnny couldn’t believe what he’d witnessed, what had slipped through his hands. The reality of his situation weighed like sand in his arms and legs. He could not move. Two reporters stood at his shoulder, asking questions. Ralph Petersen said as he brushed past that he would call the office in the morning. But they were all a blur to Johnny. He saw one thing and one thing only: Judith Silver smiling at him. As another lawyer, she understood as well as Johnny did how thoroughly he had just been skewered.

  JUDITH

  It was a late February day of tentative sunshine and low scudding clouds when Judith buried Portnoy under the Sargent’s weeping hemlock, where Gordon’s ashes were. The gray cat had always been Gordon’s. He had died gradually, like Gordon. The vet said kidney failure, but she knew it was a failure of the will to live. The other deserter was Trey, the three-legged dog, who had attached himself to Stumpy. He needed a male pack leader, and Stumpy seemed flattered and willing to take him in. The other cats and the remaining dog, Silkie, were hers.

  It was a quiet winter. Only Natasha came to visit. Judith spoke frequently to Hannah, had supper twice a week with Barbara. She spent more time with all her women friends and made herself go to Boston to see an evening of dance or music every month. She did not read much, because she found herself thinking of Gordon instead of paying attention. On television, sitcoms were too concerned with love and domesticity, medical shows were lethal, so she watched cops, science fiction, documentaries about anything—Antarctica, gerbils, any war, the homeless, coal mining. She took to bringing home videos. She played music loudly, to fill the silences in the house. The house was too big for her, but she could scarcely tear down half of it. She simply closed up the rooms she was not using.

  At first she spent an occasional hour in Gordon’s room, to conjure him up. Natasha put a stop to that. “It’s morbid, keeping the room that way. Besides, it stinks. You have to clear it out. It doesn’t make me think of how Daddy was. Only how he died. It’s just a sickroom.”

  Together they bundled up Gordon’s clothes and took them to Goodwill. “Somebody will like the warm sweaters and good coats and jackets,” Judith said, weeping as she put them into boxes. But she would not let Natasha clear out his office. Two of his colleagues had promised to go through his papers next July and decide if there was anything publishable, what should be kept or archived.

  Finally she took out his videos from several television appearances, a taped lecture from Capetown, and spent an evening watching them. That night she did not sleep. In the morning she put them away in his office, where she would not be tempted to look at them again for a long, long time. She felt as if the tentative skin that had grown over her wound had been torn off.

  So the winter passed into March. Now the ground was thawed and the first migrating birds were passing overhead, sometimes settling in the compound. Ducks rested overnight in the pitch pines, one roosting over Gordon’s grave. She accepted an invitation to dinner from a lawyer who lived two towns farther up the Cape. It was a pleasant enough evening. Timothy was even taller than Gordon had been and thin as a rapier. His hair had receded, leaving the top of his head quite bald, although it was still thick and brown on the sides. His forehead seemed to go on and on, marked only by slight eyebrows perpetually surprised. Timothy had a deep baritone that he could use to fine effect in the courtroom. His skin was tanned even in late March, for he was an avid boater and always took off a couple of weeks during the winter to sail around the Caribbean. He sailed all winter, keeping his boat in a harbor that usually stayed free of ice on the Sound. He offered to take her out, but she said she’d wait for spring. She saw Timothy again the next week. And the next.

  She was not immediately drawn to him as she had been to David, but perhaps this was a more intelligent attraction: he was in her field, a professional, divorced with a daughter he seemed reasonably attentive to. He saw his daughter weekends, which slowed down the progress of their relationship. That was good, for she was in no hurry. She knew she had to see men now, to resume her life. At twenty, dating had felt natural; at forty-one, it seemed a foolish and tedious game. The thought of starting from zero with someone and having to explain exactly who she was, to explain her life, exhausted her in anticipation. She was pleased to have found a sensible man with obligations and standing in the community. Since they were both part of the same collegiality of lawyers practicing in the same courts, they knew a certain amount about each other.

  She went out with a recently divorced therapist once and once only. He had a condescending attitude she found abrasive. Mattie introduced her to a somewhat younger man, David’s age, who had just moved to the Cape and opened a chiropractic office. He was full of didactic advice on what to eat and what she must not eat, to the degree that supper with him was a duel. No, Timothy was the best man she had interviewed, as it were, and if she was in no hurry to rush into an affair, he seemed equally cautious. They settled into a pattern of eating supper together every Thursday and afterward taking in a movie or a play. The first Saturday in April, he introduced her to his ten-year-old daughter, Amy, and they spent the afternoon at an ice-skating rink. Timothy was astonished that Judith had never before put on a pair of skates. She did her best to remain upright, but the next day she was sore. Her back felt out. If it stayed this way, she might have to see that didactic chiropractor. She had begun tomato and pepper seedlings inside, half her usual number. Natasha came home every three weeks or so. She had a new boyfriend she was considering bringing on spring break. Judith hoped she would like him, but knew herself hard to win over as far as Natasha’s boyfriends went. None seemed worthy. She would try to be more tolerant.

  “Do you ever see David?” Natasha asked as they were turning over the garden, about to start planting the hardiest crops.

  “I’ve gone to the selectmen’s meetings a few times. But you’d be surprised how long you can go without running into someone, even in a town this small. I get my mail delivered. He picks his up at the post office. I shop on Saturdays. I use the Shell station. A few small changes of pattern, and you can avoid almost anyone.”

  Natasha leaned on her shovel. “Why do you need to avoid him?”

  “Why do I need to see him?”

  “You don’t ever think about getting together with him?”

  “Do you think we should plant the bok choi in the row next to the lettuce? Or should we put the leeks there?”

&n
bsp; DAVID

  During Christmas school vacation I flew down to Florida. Since Terry’s first letter, we’d exchanged a couple more and talked most Sunday nights on the phone. But a lifetime apart was hard to make up in two weeks, in spite of our best intentions. The weather didn’t help. A cold snap froze half the state’s citrus crop. We canceled our camping trip and spent two weeks shuttling between theme parks, Epcot, MGM, Busch Gardens, sleeping late, eating pizza, watching TV, playing catch in the parking lots and arguing about all the things I made him do that his mother didn’t. Any notions I’d had about him were nothing more than that—notions. He was a sweet and energetic kid and headstrong just like my sister at his age, but Wynn’s death and Cesar’s departure had left him bitter and scared.

  Our arguments spun full-blown out of nothing. Sometimes Terry flailed at me; sometimes he sulked and wouldn’t speak. He was pushing, testing my limits. Who was this son of a bitch who showed up and called himself Father Number Three? I’d been a sentimental idiot to imagine Terry would have welcomed Laramie. He was fiercely jealous of his half siblings. He would have torn Laramie apart. I didn’t blame myself for Terry’s problems, but I wondered what the hell I had thought I was doing: sacrificing my life to one lost little boy, while my own son didn’t know who to call Daddy—his grandfather or a stable hand who passed himself off as a trainer.

  The night before I left, Terry called me a fucking asshole, then fell asleep in my arms. I knew that I wanted him to start visiting me, but when I brought that up with Vicki, she put me off as always. She was living with the three kids in a garden apartment in West Palm Beach. She was defensive about her plans. I could not get her to talk seriously with me about Terry or anything else.

  The winter back home continued to break all records, which seemed to fit my needs. When I ventured out, it was for breakfast or long walks with my new dog. Work was mostly snow plowing. I occupied myself with crises. The pipes freezing in Town Hall. The roof collapsing in the fire station. An age discrimination suit. What I lacked in intimacy, I made up for in meetings.

  “I see you got yourself a dog,” Judith said. It was early April and three days of rain had all but washed away the last of the winter’s ice. She was standing on the Squeer Island bridge, shielding her eyes from the sun. She looked neither happy nor annoyed to see me, but amused, if not at the mud all over my clothes then at Flubber, who kept leaping up the slippery embankment and sliding back down on his belly.

  He was a golden retriever puppy, the kind that wiggles all over and runs for a stick before you throw it. “Stay!” she said firmly when he clopped up the embankment, and stay he did in his way, chasing his tail in circles. Her own dog, the shaggy black one, was upon us in seconds. Both of them slid into the muddy creek bottom, sniffing, running toward each other and away, leaving us alone on the bridge to accomplish much the same thing.

  I’d seen Gordon’s three-legged dog sitting up in the prow of Stumpy’s dinghy, following him into town for his beer and sausages, and now a bag of kibble. “Did Judith give him away?” I asked.

  “Didn’t give nothing away. This ’un picked me out,” Stumpy said proudly. “Moved in on me.”

  I’d watched for Judith at meetings, at the post office, the tea room; collected stray facts and rumors as if amassing a scrapbook. The stories had her moving to New York, sleeping with another lawyer, selling the house, becoming a lesbian, buying a boat, starting a shelter for wounded seabirds. I’d avoided the island for seven months since Crystal’s death, but lately I began walking the dog here in hopes of crossing Judith’s path. If she still had Silkie, she had to walk her. Her favorite walks were around the island or from her house to the bridge and back.

  She looked even thinner, tired around the eyes. I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t smile at me the way she once had; encouraging, expectant. If anything she seemed to look through me. I’d practiced a hundred different opening lines and promptly forgot every one. “Did you hear about the new candidate Johnny’s running for selectman?” I said. “Bernice Cady.”

  “Are you serious?” Judith stepped toward me, then stopped. “That sweet little girl who used to be a teller at the bank?”

  “Loan officer now. Very bright. Native born. Makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Not abrasive, unassuming. Absolutely one hundred percent loyal to Johnny. People miss the old favor machine.”

  “Sure, the people who got the favors.”

  “Well, she’s very convincing. Didn’t you read about last Monday’s meeting?”

  Judith hugged herself as if against the cold, shaking her head. “Must have missed it.”

  “She gave a speech about the way Saltash used to be. Neighbors who used to build each other’s houses. Flags in every window for the Fourth of July parade. Respect for our elders.”

  “Sounds like it got to you.”

  “Might have, if it was anything like the town I grew up in.”

  “Sorry I wasn’t there.”

  “People loved it. She may win.”

  Judith looked in my eyes for a moment, then back up the road, as if someone were calling. “It sounds as if you have your hands full,” she said. “Come on, Silkie,” she walked back the way she had come.

  I was surprised to be invited to the alter kockers’ meeting because none of them had spoken to me since the hearing on the dike. But if we were to keep the wolf at bay, if we were to defeat Johnny Lynch again, we had to do it together. I was sitting behind the glass-topped liquor cart when I met Judith for the second time. She was wearing a cashmere turtleneck, ribbed, blue; silver half-moon earrings and a perfume that brought me back to the day she led me to her shack, let her coat slip to the floor, and slid her cold hands under my shirt.

  In the middle of the meeting she turned suddenly and murmured, “Is there something you want?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you’re staring at me.”

  “Well, there is something.”

  “Go on,” she said. She didn’t sound pleased.

  “Do you remember that broom crowberry I got for you last year? Is it still alive or did it die over the winter? It’s been a very cold winter.”

  “It’s alive. I had a mulch of pine needles on it.”

  “Because if it’s still alive … I think I could get some more and we could make a very nice area for it. If you want to.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Her eyes took me in.

  “Well, if you do want it …”

  “I know how to get in touch with you,” she said. “If I do.”

  You can go without seeing somebody for months in this town, then suddenly cross paths every day. Or maybe I was trying to bump into Judith, and she stopped avoiding me. I caught sight of her at the grocery, in the street, her car flashing past, her suede jacket disappearing into the library. She was chatting in front of Town Hall. She was buying a Sunday paper at Barstow’s Convenience. She had resumed coming to the selectmen’s meetings occasionally.

  I brought Kara and Allison to a Disney movie. I was taking them to the four o’clock show with a hundred other parents or surrogates and two hundred overexcited kids, then out for pizza. There was Judith with her lawyer, Timothy Worth. I’d seen him argue a case before our zoning board. Bow tie and Brooks Brothers suit; deep voice and little content. With them was a girl about ten. Before I figured out what to do, Kara bounded over. “Judith!” she screeched. “When is Natasha coming to our school again?”

  “When she comes home for Passover, maybe then.”

  “Will she bring a hawk?”

  “I never know what Natasha will bring,” Judith said with a rueful smile.

  Timothy paid little attention to me. Because they were sleeping together? Or because they weren’t? I tried to see how she looked at him, to gauge the electricity.

  “Who’s Natasha?” his daughter asked. If she didn’t know, they probably weren’t involved. Yet.

  I cleared my throat and butted in. “Did you think about that bro
om crowberry?”

  “All the time,” she said, and let Timothy Worth draw her away. What did that mean, all the time? Was she being sarcastic? Did she mean she missed me? Judith always meant something.

  I should have called first. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. If Timothy Worth’s car was in the drive, I would leave. Judith and I would be friends, nothing more; I owed her that much. It was ten-thirty on a Saturday morning—time enough to be up and dressed. I didn’t want to embarrass anybody. I hit the horn when I turned up the drive. I could see that about a third of the garden had been planted. The peas were up and rows of tiny seedlings. Something was growing under plastic milk cartons. Judith’s was the only car in sight.

  Silkie started barking. Flubber spun around in the front seat, whimpering to be let out. Two cats were sunning themselves on the porch railings, one of them the one-eyed lo and the other Principessa, the huge silver tabby who took one look at me and dove under the porch. “Stay!” I said to the dog. I felt enough of an intruder myself.

  I was carrying one pot of the broom crowberry with me, as an excuse, an offering, a talisman. Bring me luck. You did before. Judith peered out the window and then disappeared. For a while nothing happened. Finally the door opened.

  I held out the pot.

  “But I didn’t say I wanted it.”

  “It’s yours anyhow.”

  “For how long?”

  “To live and die here.”

  She studied my face, my eyes, and then finally she smiled and stood aside, letting me in. “That seems a satisfactory guarantee. I guess I’ll take it. Welcome back, David. Welcome home.”

  I put the pot down carefully and took her in my arms.

  DAVID