by Marge Piercy
“So the explosion didn’t harm anything?”
“Everything looks the way it did yesterday and the day before. There’s evidence of a small fire—”
“Where?”
“On the rocks just above the dike’s floodgate. There’s a little carbon residue, that’s all.”
“The state will find something,” Johnny said. The state had been trying to open the dike for years, along with Audubon and the birdwatchers, the bullies like Palmer Compton and the tree-hugging retirees. They’d commissioned scientists and studies trying to prove the dike was detrimental to the town. Any idiot could tell them that once it was removed, the water would rush right up the valley, flood the golf course and the homes and the best land in this town, destroy the natural habitat of fox and deer and coyote.
Johnny had been fighting them for years. Every time he knocked one enemy out, a new one stood up to take his place.. He needed another year, maybe two, to sell off the remaining lots and see his profits. Until then he was counting on the Board of Selectmen to keep the dike in place. If it came down to a final threat to take the case to court, the board could agree to a compromise, a small opening of the floodgate, a little each year to test the impact of change on the ecosystem. Both sides could use ecology to their advantage. He’d worked all that out with Petersen. As long as Johnny managed to keep the majority of the board loyal to him, he’d be all right. This was still his town. Nobody was going to take it away without a fight, and there wasn’t anybody out there big enough or smart enough to fight him and win.
DAVID
Saltash wasn’t a hard town, but the general consensus was that the Compton kid had it coming. In grade school he used to run people off the sidewalks with his bicycle. When he took up skateboarding, he liked to charge in front of moving cars and dare the drivers to hit him. He was a dangerous combination of a need to be noticed and a complete lack of fear. He’d finally made the local headlines last summer, when he stood up in his flimsy rowboat and harpooned a disoriented dolphin just off the town beach. A hundred sun bathers and the stunned local fishing fleet watched helplessly as the suffering creature towed the kid halfway across the harbor before it bled to death.
The kindest thing I heard was attributed to Johnny Lynch. He was going to see that the boy got the best medical care, physical therapy, and job training. Saltash took care of its own, people said—meaning Johnny Lynch did. Look at Stumpy Squeer. Look at Crazy Jane Villa, who used to pull her dress up to her chin on the town green. Johnny Lynch saw they were never sent away, that they lived in their family houses with fuel for the winter and enough to eat.
Gordon called me the evening after the accident. It had been a little over a week since I’d walked in on him and his wife. I was avoiding the two of them, determined to disentangle myself. “Here’s your issue like a Christmas goose,” he said. There was genuine glee in his voice.
“The dike thing? Is that what you’re talking about?”
My lack of enthusiasm diminished his. “You want to see it opened, don’t you?”
I didn’t play golf or own land on the river or dig shellfish; I wasn’t in the building trades and had nothing to gain either way. “I suppose,” I said, mostly in opposition to Johnny Lynch.
“Well, you’re the only candidate who feels that way and has a chance to win.”
“What about Joe Pound?” Bird Man.
“Joe Pound couldn’t win if he gave every voter a five-dollar bill and a ride to the polls.”
“Gordon, I’m not sure I’m the guy.”
“Not sure? I don’t understand.”
“I changed my mind. I don’t want to run.”
“You want to see this town built up like a fucking suburb? You want to see the shellfish industry dry up? What else have we got, goddamn it? Tourists are fickle, they like a place for a few years then flock to another. Look at Atlantic City! Look at Rockaway Beach!” He was rattling off lakes and spa towns, ski resorts I’d never heard of. He was furious.
“I said I’d think about running. I never said I was definite.”
“Did you tell the Committee for Civic Responsibility? They’ve been raising money for you, David. They’ve been making phone calls in your behalf.”
“Two hundred votes can’t win an election against Johnny Lynch.”
“Not if you sit on your ass. You have really screwed us, you know that? We can’t find another candidate now—it’s too late to file. Don’t you care how people live? What do you care about? Why did you start this process, anyway?”
Because I wanted to sleep with his wife.
“Look, David Greene, it’s very simple. There are four people on the ballot and only two have a chance to win that open seat. One of them is in John Lynch’s pocket and the other one isn’t. At least I didn’t think so.”
The implication was that by pulling out, I was handing the race to Lynch. “I resent that, Gordon.”
“Well, fuck your resentment.” I had made love to this man’s wife and he hadn’t said a word. Now, his voice was shaking: “You can’t mobilize people behind you, then change your mind overnight. I’m asking you to get yourself straight, goddamn it. People are counting on you.”
Tommy’s girlfriend Michelle lived with her daughter, Kelly Ann, in the old Endicott house. Once a small hotel, later a rooming house for fishermen, and most recently apartments for young townies with little money, it sat at the top of a hill on Dock Street and seemed to brood over the bustling village the way some of its tenants sat on the front steps mulling over their lost chances in life.
Michelle’s apartment was on the third floor. The residents used each landing as suburban families used garages: for storage. There were cribs and barbecue grills, box springs and bicycles. The abiding odor of the stairwell was something like mildew and boiled cabbage. As I climbed, I smelled marijuana and cat litter boxes, diapers and incense. When I reached the third floor I began to sneeze uncontrollably. Before I knocked, the door to Michelle’s apartment opened. I heard clashing radios, children running; I smelled perfume and chili. What I remember best was Crystal’s face, moonlike in that dingy hall, luminescent and cool. Her platinum hair seemed to absorb the available light. Her head cocked, she was obviously expecting me, inspecting me. Even before she spoke, her slightly ironic smile suggested we both knew why I was here.
“Hello, David. Welcome to the fun house.” Her voice was whiskey in a tumbler with ice; hard and scratchy with a tinkle of sarcasm, it brought to mind dark cocktail lounges and cigarette smoke. Crystal wore a black cardigan with rhinestone buttons and western boots. Before I stopped sneezing, a child appeared, a thin little boy with light brown bangs. He pressed his cheek to her hip as she smoothed the hair from his eyes. “Is he sick?” the boy asked.
“Nah, he’ll be all right,” she said. “I think he’ll be just fine.”
Tommy and Michelle were sitting at the kitchen table. From the way they were dressed, I knew they were not planning to stay. Michelle had large blue eyes, meticulously lined and shadowed, and a rabbitlike overbite. Her hair was her most striking feature, a butter-yellow architecture of elaborate dips and waves as delicate as puff pastry. I’d never spoken to Michelle but I had seen her around. I judged her to be my sister’s age and thought I’d ask Holly if they had gone to school together.
The apartment was jammed. Where laundry wasn’t drying lay toys, boxes, piles of towels. Michelle’s daughter was stretched to her extended length across Tommy’s lap, poking her mother’s breast with a big toe. The table was set for dinner with mismatched plates and paper napkins. Crystal served. “She was living out West,” Tommy said. “That’s why she makes great chili. She’s a cowgirl. She even named her kid Laramie.”
“It’s a stupid name,” Kelly Ann said.
“She drove all the way across country,” Tommy said. “Her and the kid. Did it in three days like an all-night trucker.”
Crystal was broad in the bust, the shoulders and hips, but seemed to diminish in size like
a servant in the kitchen. She filled the children’s milk glasses, got another beer for Tommy, picked up Kelly Ann’s napkin when it slipped to the floor. She ate silently with her eyes focused on her son, whose appetite she coaxed with soft whispers.
“It’s like fucking courageous, you know?” Tommy said. “To come all the way back here three thousand miles where you don’t know nobody anymore.”
Michelle set her glass down heavily. “I’m nobody now?”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. It was not like Tommy Shalhoub to back off, not from a woman, but as Kelly Ann kept poking her mother, as each addition to the conversation only seemed to stall it further, it was apparent how deeply in trouble Tommy had gotten himself with his girlfriend’s roommate and how much he needed me to get him out.
“How long have you two known each other?” I asked Michelle.
She divided her chili into four equilateral triangles so her plate looked like the Confederate flag. “We were friends in school,” she said grudgingly.
Crystal began to sing: “You need no introduction to who we really are …” Tommy led an imaginary orchestra with his fork. Kelly Ann perked up and sang the words. “This shining star, this precious jewel, our Saltash Elementary School.”
“Are you here for good?” I asked Crystal.
“Till I get on my feet.”
“She just got a job,” Tommy said. “At Johnny Lynch’s office.”
“Oh, what do you do?” I asked.
“Legal secretary,” Crystal said.
“Just like a lawyer,” Tommy said. “’Cept they do all the work.”
Michelle took offense. “I don’t happen to think it’s the same thing at all. A nurse is not the same as a doctor.”
Tommy’s jaw twitched. His fist clenched, then opened. “I’m trying to introduce two people who don’t know each other. Isn’t that what we wanted to do here, Michelle?”
“Don’t kick me,” Michelle exploded at her daughter, pushing away Kelly Ann’s foot.
“This is good chili,” Tommy said. “There’s no beans. You notice that? That’s the way they do it out West. You ever hear of chili with no beans?”
Michelle’s chair screeched as she pushed away from the table, high heels clopping all the way to the bathroom. Kelly Ann straggled behind. Michelle closed the door. The little girl pounded on it. Tommy sighed and got their coats. When the bathroom door opened, Kelly Ann grabbed her mother’s leg and started to wail. “I’ll be back.” Michelle knelt to hush her. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, I’ll be in my bed. You come in and we’ll cuddle, okay? Okay?” But Kelly Ann clung to her mother until Crystal pried her away and carried her, screaming, into the children’s bedroom.
“Does this happen every night?” I whispered to Tommy.
Michelle, whose blue eyeliner was now streaked with tears, cut me an icy glare. “Not before she moved in,” Michelle said.
When they left, I wandered into the living room and found myself alone with the little boy. Like me, he didn’t seem to know where to sit, to stand, how to make himself small enough to stay out of the way. He was resting his chin on the back of an old couch, which I assumed from the suitcase next to it and the alarm clock on the coffee table was where his mother slept. Since I lived so far from my own son, I tried a little too hard with my sister’s daughters. I sensed that I embarrassed them, that whatever activities they had on their busy agenda were only interrupted by my awkward attempts to make them my surrogate kids. He looked younger than Terry, and I felt for this little boy who held himself, head down, arms at his side, like a peg to be pounded into a narrow hole. When I said, “Hi,” he almost jumped. “Have you started school yet?”
“Yeah.” He drew his hand across the back of the couch.
“Do you like it?”
He shrugged. “They’re putting me back a grade. Tomorrow. They said I have to repeat third.”
“That might not be so bad,” I said. “You’ll be smarter than everybody because you already know the stuff.”
Hope flickered across his face for a moment then went out.
“You might be the biggest kid too.”
“In fourth they made fun of me. They said I have a dumb name.”
“I think Laramie is a kick-ass name. Like a movie star or a rock singer. But if you don’t like it, change it.”
“You can’t just change your name ’cause you want to. They won’t let you.”
“Why not? When the new teacher introduces you tomorrow, you say, ‘My name is Laramie but in my old school everybody called me Larry.’ You could do that.”
He was thinking, hard. This was one serious little boy.
When I looked up, I noticed Crystal had inched her way inside the door frame. She’d been watching me and the boy, listening. She was a handsome woman. The confidence with which she moved, beneath the weariness and the baggy shirt, the way her smile demanded my attention and wouldn’t let go, suggested she knew her way around men. We didn’t exchange a word as she gathered Laramie in her arms to bring him to bed, but the heat with which she looked upon him, that same bright beam of strength and affection, included me in its widening arc. It had been decided. I was to stay.
DAVID
“You think you remember me, don’t you?” Crystal said. Her smile was half tease, half reproach. As she settled back on the couch after putting her son to bed, her blouse was open by an extra button. She pulled her fingers through her hair and shook her head—as if to toss much longer hair in place. Although it was cut short, I imagined it touching her shoulders and trailing down her back. There was a lot I found myself imagining about Crystal because nothing connected her to the past. The crucifix on the living room wall, the sewing machine, the rock star poster belonged to her roommate. Crystal’s turquoise bracelets and her platinum hair, even her little boy’s name, didn’t seem to issue from the woman whose hand was brushing my knee, but struck me, like her western boots, as something of a pose.
I felt a remarkable ease in her presence, however, a shared sympathy. “I probably know you from high school?” I asked.
“Right,” she mocked me. “Saltash’s Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine. You didn’t know I was alive.”
“Were you friends with my sister?”
“I wasn’t in the sweater set crowd.”
“Tommy said your father was a dentist.”
“You didn’t go to him.” There was a touch of resentment in her voice, but she was right. My mother took us to a guy named Horowitz. He was the only Jewish dentist on the entire Cape at the time, and that seemed reason enough to justify the forty-five-minute drive. “Try again. I like this game.”
So did I. More than a game, or even a walk through the past, it was a reality check: a contrast between the way I saw my family and the way we were seen. I remember my parents struggling to pay the mortgage, to meet the payroll. They borrowed constantly. Every unplanned expense was a crisis. But what I knew to be just one more of my father’s failed businesses, Crystal saw as the factory we owned. While I overheard my father begging Johnny Lynch to ask the bank manager not to foreclose, Crystal saw only the white full Cape with pink native roses, a half acre of locust trees and lush grass.
Her family had moved to Saltash when she was three, she said. Her father had been working too hard in the city and it was killing him. He was the kind of dentist who couldn’t turn people away. Rich or poor, every patient got the best he could give. In Saltash, half the time he came home with a bag of flounder or an oil painting or a promise of a truckload of garden manure instead of his fee. When he did get paid, he never kept track. He wasn’t interested in money. “All he cared about was helping people.”
When her parents split in Crystal’s junior year of high school, her mother moved to Arizona. They lived in a town an hour south of Sedona, a little like Saltash, she said, “Poor, scenic and two blocks long.” She started dreaming of water. She hated the desert and only an ocean could quench her thirst. After two years of colleg
e she headed for the nearest one.
She ended up in Seattle, met an Irishman with a red beard, a fishing boat and a voice like a lullaby. They moved into a house on a bluff with a distant view of the Sound. He cut his drinking to a six-pack a night and she worked in a law office. Then she got pregnant and he turned mean. She lived with Liam for five years, but the first time he hit her she waited exactly thirteen hours, until the bank opened the following morning, then cut out for good.
Crystal left Seattle with two suitcases and a kid with a temperature of 102. I imagined her speeding to nowhere, as I had after being cut, every exit another disappointment, a place someone else could call home. She telephoned Michelle from a service plaza. First she had to remind her they had been best friends in high school—then explain she had nowhere to go.
Crystal’s story filled me with a mixture of admiration and pity, although I didn’t offer either and she didn’t seem to care. “I guess I was wrong,” I said finally. “I don’t know you at all.”
“But you do. We’re the same.”
I was a little lost here. “Because we both moved back to Saltash?”
“Because we’re both failures.”
I must have been embarrassed. I laughed.
“You’re not doing what you really do, David Greene. Admit it. You’re an athlete. Nothing you’ll ever do in your life will make you as happy. It’s inside you all the time.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. But I did. I knew that I never looked at a level field without measuring out a diamond, calculating the distance from home plate to the mound. I never held an apple without my fingers closing around it in preparation to throw. When I smelled fresh-mown grass I was aware of an emptiness, the absence of a crowd.