The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

(She taught you that word early; now she’s going to pay the fare.)

  You tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts and prepare

  to take revenge upon her with your belt upon her bare

  bazooms, backside, and belly till she’s redder than a flare,

  after which you’ll make her eat you like a chocolate-cream eclair

  until your putz is bigger than that rubberized affair

  “Aunt May” straps on to fuck her with.

  “Now, Simon, don’t you dare!”

  Bullshit, you’ll say: too late for that; she’d better say a prayer.

  You’re going to split her open just the way your unknown père

  once did. (Aspiring rapists of their mothers should beware

  comparisons like that, for which poor Simon has a flair.)

  You’ll hump her like the van-man—and your issue will compare

  with his: another wretched Simon Silver, with a pear-

  shaped body and a twelve-year-old’s mustache that folks will stare

  and laugh at; one more loveless, unloved bastard. . . .

  In the glare

  of this flashforward, lust and anger melt into despair:

  Unmanned by tears, you kiss your mom good-bye, run up the stair,

  climb the rail (the dream-scene’s changed), and—since you can’t repair

  the hurt done either to or by you—jump.

  Here Sy’s nightmare

  ends, before Katherine Sherritt can work pare, player, mère, sayer, mal de mer, and other available rhymes into this intermediate-level exercise in the retrospective invention of what, knowing what we know, we can imagine Sy Silver might have dreamed, had he dreamed in relentless Simple-Simonian. In fact, exhausted by his p.m. wring-out and sedated by fifteen milligrams of Dalmane, he sleeps pretty soundly through the night, wakes refreshed though basically miserable and worried about what’s to happen to him next, and reports through the cabin to his Uncle Frank that he dreamed last night that the taut wire rigging on Reprise must be like a giant bowstring, and the hull the bow, and the cutter’s mast the full-drawn arrow, ready to be shot through the bottom of the boat to the bottom of the river. In his dream he could feel those forces, cocked and ready to let go. That’s not a bad image of the actual case, Franklin Key Talbott will reply from his berth, wondering what kind of mood mercurial Marian will treat them to this morning. But you can also think of those forces as balanced in tension, instead of ready to let fly. His wife places his hand upon her lower belly, between her navel and her crotch.

  Good morning, everybody.

  WYDIWYD BEGUN: THE UNFINISHED TELLALONG STORY

  OF SCHEHERAZADE’S UNFINISHED STORY,

  AS PUT TOGETHER LAST NIGHT BY THE SEVEN WOMEN IN OUR RAFT,

  AS RECORDED THIS MORNING BY PETER SAGAMORE IN THE LOG OF

  STORY

  Peter Sagamore wakes with a headful of good ideas for the novel Franklin Key Talbott ought to write, inspired by Reprise’s sabbatical sailing cruise to the Caribbean and back: what to keep of the actual experience, what to discard, what to alter, what to invent. Further such ideas crowd upon him as we swim, breakfast, and bid one another good morning up and down the raft. There ought for example to be some literal marvel at the story’s climax, P believes: some flabbergastment surfaced from the tale’s dark depths to echo, sea-changed, those who earlier sank and disappeared: John Arthur Paisley, Frederick Mansfield Talbott, Douglas Townshend. And he has a better name in mind for the couple’s boat: one less portentous. But he keeps these ideas under his boina, which this morning he wears even into the Sassafras, maintaining it carefully above water.

  Have it back? Frank asks him from Reprise’s ladder. I had a dream last night about old Chessie and that hat, and this morning I’ve half a mind to give fiction another go. Fresh start. No autobiography.

  Says Peter Soon. Let’s get together later this morning, the four of us, if Kath’s still pregnant. I have something for you.

  Frank says he’d like that, but they’ll have to see. It’s time they headed homeward. Marian and Simon, however, aren’t out of bed yet, and it’s not entirely clear who’s going where with whom. Nine-thirty? Ten?

  Says Peter from the river More like eleven. Our house.

  Kath’s already visiting her parents and the Basses, who-all are merrily exchanging dreams. Lee Talbott now leads her sulking sister across the whole raft to Rocinante and into deep confab with May Jump and Carla B Silver. Captain Donald Quicksoat, odd man out, visits F. K. Talbott aboard Reprise. They summon Simon Silver up to join them in a gratifyingly messy male mechanical project: the dismantling, degreasing, relubrication, and reassembly of the cutter’s manual anchor windlass, salt-fouled from a year of blue-water sailing. Today, says the National Weather Service, will be even more subtropical than yesterday—mid-ninetyish air, steamy sunshine, little or no breeze, evening thunderstorms likely—a day for awnings and air-conditioning, for swimming and sipping iced drinks, not for sailing, sentence-writing, or sweaty childbirth. From Tehran comes the radio news that Prime Minister Bani-Sadr, under pressure from the Ayatollah Khomeini, is hardening his line again on the American hostage issue. The disposal of toxic agents in the United States, declares The New York Times, is insufficiently regulated.

  Well, yes. As P goes down our companionway to work, he sees Carla B Silver literally brow to brow with her wayward younger daughter, their hands upon each other’s shoulders. He sees Frank Talbott glance over there from his windlass-work to be smiled at beautifully by Leah, three yachts away. He sees the woman of us send a kiss down in his direction from Katydid’s high cockpit next door, consult her wristwatch, smile, and raise nine fingers. It is in fact about nine o’clock now, and she has been in the ninth month of our pregnancy for what seems like nine hundred pages, but none of those is what she means.

  God’s blessing be upon these characters, thinks Peter Sagamore, himself included. Remembering suddenly last night’s dream, he then instructs our logbook RELISH IT YOU MUST. Jorge Luis Borges writes that Moses Maimonides writes that when the words in a dream are distinct and clear, and the person uttering them cannot be seen, they are from God. But subtitles on Trans-luxes?

  Under it he enters WYDIWYD, by way of a short version of the long unfinished story told at the end of yesterevening—mainly by May Jump, but chorused out by the other six women in our four-boat raft, not excluding Marian Silver. Then he puts the log away and returns with relish to the finishing of what he’s been up to since this time yesterday at least.

  Nobody’s going anywhere, Marian Silver insisted last night when Captain Donald Quicksoat suggested that Simon join his grandma and himself aboard Rocinante, to ease the post-rescuary tension on Reprise. That thoughtful suggestion got its maker later laid, but Marian declared The little bastard made his bed; let him stew in it. I’m finished with everybody. That was when May Jump, at C.D.Q.’s further invitation and Carla’s warm seconding, shifted berths instead. We were all of course concerned for the boy, dismayed by the mother, sorry for May. Hank and Irma, bless them, came through splendidly, insisting first that May and then that all of us smooth out the ragged evening in K IV’s cockpit and environs before we turned in for the night. Lee and Carla lingered awhile aboard Reprise, calming Marian, soothing Sy, while the other ten of us sipped things and changed the subject. In time, Marian agreed to let her son switch boats and go back to Baltimore today with Capn Don and Carla. She might even do the same, she thought: move back to Fells Point, if her mother would have her; try something else. But by that time Sy was mercifully asleep in his berth. The three women therefore joined us—Marian Silver conspicuously avoiding her erstwhile lover, and Frank or Lee Talbott slipping back from time to time to check on Simon’s slumber as might anxious parents a one-year-old’s.

  We have not mentioned, have we, that May had as always brought along her guitar: a weathered Gibson, dear to Katherine’s memory. When Lee Talbott brought it across Story to Katy
did en route to Rocinante with the exile’s backpack, it was Katherine who received it with a little cry, kissed its belly, propped it on her own to run her thrumb across its strings, remembering half a hundred ASPS camp-outs. She then presented it to its owner—whom also she kissed, on both cheeks—and announced that May was going to sing us a good-night song. Hear hear, said the rest of us, except Marian.

  May Jump frowned and strummed three or four quick but pensive chords. What a difference (even among southpaw guitarists, who have a problem) between the expert and the inexpert hand! Then she smiled, first at Katherine, next at Marian, and said All righty. But first I want to tell you an unfinished story about an unfinished story. She tuned a string or two: strum strum strum. This is a tellalong story—like a singalong song?—and it’s for all the wives and mothers in this anchorage. You ladies join in whenever the spirit moves you, okay?

  Strum. Now: You gentlemen all noticed Mim Silver’s T-shirt earlier this evening, first dry and then wet. . . . Strum. W-Y-D-I-W-Y-D, right? With a little emphasis on the two Y’s and a little cleavage at the I.

  Said Marian I’m leaving. Said May No need, hon, ‘cause this story’s not about you or me or any present company. Strum strum strum. It’s about the first owner of that particular T-shirt.

  Said Kath suddenly Scheherazade! May Jump fixed her with a look of serious long wonder. If they gave black belts for intuition, she said, dot dot dot and strummy strum strum. How in the loving world did you guess this was going to be a story about Scheherazade?

  Kath was darned if she knew but said Carla B Silver told us the story of Scheherazade’s first second menstruation, when was it, just the night before, over there in Back Creek; and Kath certainly wished she hadn’t missed that eleventh ASPS convention down in Kitty Hawk, and how come May hadn’t mentioned Scheherazade last week in Annapolis, if not before? Who was this person claiming to be Scheherazade? What’d she look like? What’d she wear?

  Me, said Donald Quicksoat, I never did get the point of that second-menstruation story. Must be ‘cause I’m neither wife nor mother nor storyteller.

  My friends, wondered Henry Sherritt: What on earth are we talking about?

  With a wink at Carla B Silver, May Jump invited us all to tell along, tell along as the narrative spirit moved us: the women especially, since Scheherazade’s is a woman’s story, but the men among us, too. Who’s to say who’s a mother and who’s not, till the chicks are hatched and the chips are down and all precincts heard from?

  I’ll second that, said Leah Allan Silver Talbott, taking her husband’s arm.

  From professional habit, Jack Bass inquired First second menstruation?

  Asked Peter May I? and May Jump said be her guest. In a commendable feat of abbreviation then (His long suit, no? May teased), he distilled for those who hadn’t heard it the tale of Scheherazade’s gynecological arithmetic as narrated at second or third hand by Carla B Silver in Back Creek, tabulated by Andrew “Chip” Sherritt, and now certified as plausible by Jack Bass, M.D. But nursing, Nurse Joan reminded us, could sure mess up those numbers.

  I will not milk a moral from that story, Peter said, and handed Frank Talbott’s boina to May Jump. But I have drunk its message, friend.

  Me, said Katherine, I’m going to kiss you both. She did, much touched by this rapport between her husband and her old friend, and settled the boina on May Jump’s head. Kiss, strummed May, is always kissing. Tell along, Lee Talbott urged. Declared May I will if you-all will, and set her guitar aside. More exactly, she thrust it upon Mim Silver, who, startled, took it, maybe blushed, and dutifully stood it like a child between her knees while her ex-lover—with a little help from friends old and new—went on with the story:

  She had first been introduced to Scheherazade, she said, one evening last fall in a certain Annapolis gay bar, in the straight company of a certain Maryland novelist (not Peter Sagamore) and his wife (not Katherine Sherritt), who had telephoned ahead to arrange the meeting.

  For his parents’ sake, Chip Sherritt asked Is this story G, R, or X? Said May PG. That particular bar was my idea, to give our visitor a shot of twentieth-century America. It didn’t much faze her, ‘cause she’d done time with odalisques in harems, but we’ll leave that bar now and go to my place, the four of us. Scher and my novelist friend are wearing these widdy-wid T-shirts, okay? W-Y-D-I-W-Y-D. And Missus Novelist has got one on reading T-K-T-T-T-I-T-T: accents on the K and I—May winked at Katherine—and more T’s than McCormick’s warehouse.

  A real teaser, cracked Kath, that T-shirt. Asked May But did I ask? Said Donald Quicksoat I’m about to, but Carla B Silver patted his pate and bade him wait. Marian Silver said she herself has a T-shirt that a Road Vulture gave her that says KILL ‘EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT. Said Irma You do? Frank Talbott remarked he’d heard it’s an axiom of the theater that an audience will sit still for just about anything for thirteen seconds, but that after that they want the action to start making sense. I second that axiom, said Henry Sherritt, checking his wristwatch.

  Said May I guess I’m going to need my Gibson girl after all, and retrieved her guitar from between Mim’s legs. Strum strum strum and here we go: The first night after that, when I’d got to know her better, Miz Scheherazade told me that on the thousand-and-second night, out of habit, she told Shahryar the story of Night Ten Oh One, which Mister P.S. has just now abbreviated for us. She was twenty-one years old back then, and the mother of three children, and the teller of four-hundred-plus tales in those ten hundred and one nights; but she was no more out of stories than she was out of ova, or her audience out of sperm.

  Drawled Joan Bass Four hundred plus? That happens to be how many eggs a woman lays between puberty and menopause. Irma said she herself forgot to count.

  She could’ve gone right on telling, strummed May, and turning out children too. With three sons to her credit, she’d hoped to have a daughter somewhere down the road. What’s more, the genie who’d slipped her all those stories over the past three years had let her know that there were seven volumesworth of Supplemental Nights in Burton’s Eighteen-eighty-five edition, over and above the ten volumes they’d just reached the end of. More about this genie later.

  Aha, said the literarios in our raft: Katherine and Peter and Lee Talbott. What was that T-shirt again? The one with all the T’s?

  Another story, May declared, and she’ll tell it later, as Scher told her. Just now she’s telling the king on Night Ten Oh Two how she’d said to herself on Night Ten Oh One that every morning he hadn’t killed her was a kind of penance for his having killed one of her sisters in the thousand and one nights before she’d come into his life. He had done exactly what he’d sworn he’d do when his first wife did that number on him; then he’d paid his penance for the same length of time; and there she was, about to menstruate twice in a row for the first time in a thousand and one nights. In fact (strum) her period comes on while she’s telling him this story on Ten Oh Two—and like a word to the wise, my friends, that first repeated message of her blood let her know that it was time for a change.

  Hear hear, agreed Carla B Silver, an arm around each of her daughters. Tell along, May.

  Time for a change, Scher said, May said, in the circumstances of her production. She quoted a quote her genie had laid on her from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Seventeen Forty-nine Eighteen Thirty-two: In the morning, study; in the afternoon, work; in the evening, enjoy.

  Henry Sherritt stretched out his legs and said he was enjoying the evening more than before. Kate kissed him. Remarked her mother, smiling, You do kiss, don’t you.

  Through the morning of her green-and brown-belt basic training, declared May Jump—which was the three years of Shahryar’s virgin-a-night period—young Scher there had studied storytelling like young Peter Sagamore in College Park and Portugal. Those thousand books of stories she collected; all those poets she learned by heart. She had boned-up in her library on the art of telling stories like Doctor Jack
Bass in med school on the art of delivering babies, and Nurse Joan in nursing school on the art of registered nursing. She had gone at her apprenticeship like Mister Henry Sherritt—whereabouts, Mister Henry?

  At my father’s pin-striped knee, said pleased Hank promptly, patting his son’s bare left one, where I learned some things they don’t teach you in the Wharton School of Business.

  May strummed and nodded and bade Captain Donald Tell along. Like Don Quixote studying the novels of knight-errantry, said C.D.Q., and like yours truly studying Don Quixote till I couldn’t tell me from him.

  Kiss?

  Like me learning Dewey’s Decimals from Florence Halsey in the Deniston library, said K, adding to herself And other things in other places from Yussuf al-Din and Saul Fish and Jaime Aiquina and May Jump and even Poonie Baldwin, so I’d be ready for Peter Sagamore when our time came.

  Like Carla B Silver, May proposed (Don’t ask, growled Carla), and most or all of us on this four-boat raft of ours, young Scheherazade had spent the morning of her life astudying, okay?

  Marian Silver confessed she’d spent hers mainly in the sack. Tell on, Mair, May invited her, but Mim said Nope, ‘cause she hadn’t learned diddly-squat.

  Strum. And in the afternoon, said May—I mean the thousand and one “afternoons” of a night-shift worker—hadn’t Scher worked? She’d turned out stories like Jack Bass babies, and she’d turned out babies, too.

  Like Jack Bass stories, cracked Joan. He’s got some would curl your bangs.

  Concluded May Like every one of us near or past forty in his her way: We’ve studied through our morning and worked through our afternoon. And the storytellers present have had their necks right on the line like Scheherazade, ‘cause every time we come to bat, excuse my metaphor, it’s a whole new ball game.

  (Hear hear, said Block and Tackle, hearing and remembering: Tell along.)

  But there comes a time, said May—and for Scheherazade it had come the night before, with a twinge down here and a tenderness up here, half a headache on top and the blues on the bottom line—there comes a time when Publish-or-Perish turns a girl off instead of on, if you know what I mean. There comes a time when removing the ax from the narrative neck is not only the fit reward for stories told and babies borne, but the best insurance of more to come. I mean maybe she’d tell and maybe she’d swell, but she’d earned the right, Scher figured, to tell no more stories ever; to bear no more children ever.