by Marge Piercy
As afraid as I had been, each person was more afraid of me. What did I want from them? Time? Money? What if they snubbed me and I actually went on to win? “Hi, I’m David Greene. I’m running for selectman. Could I ask you for your vote?”
He was bald and stout and wore brown rubber waders up to his chest, which made me think of something half dipped in chocolate. “You want my vote?” He folded his arms. “Where do you stand on the dike?”
“Out of the wind, so I don’t fall in.”
“So you don’t fall in?” His face brightened like a newly polished coin. “I like that.” He slapped my shoulder. “So you don’t fall in.”
“Hi, I’m David Greene. I’m running for selectman.”
She was maybe twenty-five, long black hair, sweater tight across her breasts, with a four-year-old trailing behind. She took my card and asked, squinting into the sun, “You the guy who told Donkey Sparks about those guys getting drunk on the job?”
I said proudly, “That was me, yeah.”
“You son of a bitch.” She ripped my card in pieces and threw it at me. “My boyfriend could have lost his job.”
When Blossom End-Rot drove up to get her mail, her face turned the color of boiled meat. “Well. David Greene.” She choked on a smile. “I didn’t realize you were mounting such a campaign?”
“You never know what to expect from us pushy immigrant types.” I left her to approach another voter. “My name’s David Greene …”
She wanted desperately to see my literature but couldn’t bring herself to ask. As soon as she thought I was distracted, she ripped a card from the hand of someone she knew and studied it front and back. She lifted her eyes to the hip boot man, walking to the car with his mail. “Ask him where he stands on the dike!” he said, waving me a victory sign. “God knows we need somebody with a sense of humor in there.”
Could I win? I doubted it but it sure felt good to ruin Blossom’s day. Of all the cars that pulled up, however, the one I was waiting for did not: Judith’s black Jeep Cherokee. I didn’t want to tell her I was running. I’d already done that and backed out. I wanted her to see me in action. When I left the post office just after noon, I drove by her office. Closed. I headed for Mary’s Tea Room. Judith sat at a rear table reading, her back to the door.
“Hi, my name is David Greene. I’m running for selectman.” I handed her a card.
“Where have you been?” I didn’t know what I was seeing in her expression. Skepticism? Annoyance? Maybe just my own guilt.
“Incredibly busy. It’s the big season for landscapers.” I sat down. “How’s Gordon?”
She shrugged, not wanting to get into a discussion about cancer.
“Do you think he’d still be willing to help?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Would you still be willing to help?”
“Do you really want this?” Her eyes grew darker, somehow more serious, and I wondered if we were talking about the same thing.
She was wearing a blue silk blouse with long French cuffs and a wide collar, through which I imagined the delicate lacework of her underclothes. “Yes, I do very much,” I said.
“I’m talking about this.” She fanned my card in front of my eyes.
“Do I actually want to be a selectman? I won’t know until I win. Do I want to make trouble for Johnny Lynch? Big time, I do. Don’t you think that’d be fun?”
The meeting took place the next afternoon at Judith and Gordon’s. Along with the alter kockers for lynching Johnny, they had rounded up twenty people. There was a table of sandwiches and drinks, and street lists with voters’ names. This was serious politics, Saltash style.
Gordon set the tone. “No offense to the candidate,” although he looked at me as if I was a sorry excuse for one, “but I want to make it clear we’re here for one reason. To put the last nail in Johnny Lynch’s coffin.”
The drinking started just after dark. The tide was low, the beer was cold, and no one seemed in a rush to get home. I milled around the room attempting to ingratiate myself, until Judith motioned me into the kitchen.
She said quietly, “Say goodbye to everyone personally.” This struck me as a sensible idea. “Then leave through the side door.”
“Now?”
“Now.” Her hand grazed mine. “And meet me in my studio around back.”
She joined me half an hour later with a satisfied smile. She drew the curtains and stoked the stove, and just when I thought I knew what she was thinking, took a seat in a rocking chair facing me.
From the house we heard singing. “I missed you,” she said. “I’ve been busy. So have you.”
“I’m here now.”
“Yes, you are. Yes, you are.” She took my face in her hands and outlined my lips with her tongue. She was tentative. Do you still want me? her fingers seemed to ask. Temples and earlobes, biceps and belly. My body was a new land she was mapping. When we began, it was cool in the cottage, the little stove working against the evening chill. We dove beneath the covers and clung together, shivering until our bodies warmed to the boiling point and we came up to cool off and breathe.
Judith took a deep breath. Outside, it began to rain and droplets fell from the eaves, drub, drub, drub, to the wooden porch. An offshore buoy clanged in the early spring wind. She lay in my arms playing with my nipple. She sighed, “I missed you so much.”
When the phone rang, Judith sprang from the bed. Upon answering, she looked at the receiver incredulously. “It’s for you. It’s a child.”
The phone sat on her desk, plugged into a jack along with the modem, among law books and journals and briefs in towering piles. I crossed the room, naked, to answer it while Judith took my place under the covers. It was Laramie. “My mom said it was okay to call you.”
“It is, Laramie. Sure. What can I do for you?”
Judith mouthed, “Who is Laramie?”
“Um. She wondered if you could pick me up from school on Thursday because she has an—” From somewhere behind him I heard Crystal say, “an interview.” “—an interview about college.”
“Thursday I can’t, Laramie. I’m sorry.”
“David?” Judith said, but I looked away from her when I heard the boy say, “Oh,” like a small puncture in a lifeboat, and I felt him going under.
“But listen, man, we’ll get together soon.”
He sighed and I heard traces of a whispered discussion. “Uh, my mom says you should call her, okay?”
“Sure. That’ll be fine.”
“Thanks. ’Bye,” he said, and hung up.
Judith watched me return to bed. “Who’s Laramie?”
“He’s a little boy I know. My sister’s crazy about him.”
“He sounds very sad.”
“He doesn’t have any friends. A new kid in town. You know how it is.”
The bed was warm and the sheets smelled of perfume and sweat. I wanted the conversation over and done, but Judith was still curious. “You never mentioned him,” she said.
“I just met him pretty recently.”
“Pretty fast friendship. His parents approve?”
“Approve of what?”
“Don’t be naive. It’s not easy for adults to be friends with kids these days. You have to be careful. A lot of charges are thrown, a lot of things imagined. I think twice before I befriend a kid. Parents can be suspicious.”
“His parents are split up. His mother’s all for it. Okay?”
“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Judith said. She pushed her hair back and frowned at the far wall, looking past me. “Do you know her well?”
“What is this? Do you want to say what the hell it is you’re thinking?”
“All of a sudden there’s a child who calls you at my house, a little boy whose name you never mentioned. Naturally I’m surprised.”
“That’s because you don’t have children in your life, Judith. You’re not used to them.”
“Tell me I’m off here, David. But that so
unds like an accusation.”
“It’s not an accusation. There are just things you can’t understand.”
“David, I don’t want to be mean, but I spent far more time raising Natasha than you did your own son. This sounds like you’re trying to create a surrogate son for yourself, all of a sudden.”
I had to remind myself where I was. In Judith’s shack, with a little fire in the stove casting shadows on the walls. In bed, naked, with a woman I was about to make love to. I could still taste the coffee on Judith’s mouth. How had this happened?
“Judith, let’s start over again. One. He’s a kid I feel sorry for. Two. His mother is cool about the whole thing. Three. I did not mean to imply that because you don’t have children you don’t know anything about … about how weird this world is around kids. I’m sorry. Please accept my apology.”
As I drew her against me, she turned. I loved the tight and delicate curve of her back, her small sickle-shaped breasts in the crook of my forearms, my sex thrust between her buttocks. But I could feel a taut coil of resistance inside her. I wasn’t surprised when she said to the wall, “Who is his mother, David?”
“Somebody I met.”
“Obviously.” Judith disentangled herself. When her back was flush against the wall behind the bed, when she had covered herself, she dropped her hands in her lap and stared at them. “She has a name.”
“Her name is Crystal.”
“And you sleep with Crystal.”
“Yes. Like you sleep with Gordon.” Even as it left my lips, the comparison felt crude. Gordon was a shell of a lover and had been before I met Judith.
“I understand your justification, David.” I had heard her use this tone with workmen who failed to live up to their contracts.
“I don’t have to justify myself. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s casual.”
“She called my house,” Judith said rising. “She knew you were here. Did you give her the number? It’s not listed.”
“Holly must have given her the number.”
“She’s a friend of your sister’s.” Judith nodded as if chipping away at the truth. Everything I said seemed to make it worse. “A single woman with a child. Of all the stupid people to pick.”
“What’s better, then? A married woman? A young student? A widow? Who? Do you want to set me parameters, Judith? Give me a list?”
Her face seemed to melt. Her lips trembled and when she finally spoke she sounded helpless. “Why did you do it?”
“Because I’ve never been involved in anything like what we’re doing.”
“We’re just loving each other, David.”
“Fifty yards away from where we’re sitting, your husband is entertaining friends. And you’re in bed with me. Is that any better or worse than a few lonely nights with some secretary who just moved to town? I love you as much as I ever did. I admit I made a mistake. We’ll come back from it.”
“I hope so, David. But if she thought the relationship was so casual, she wouldn’t have tracked you down and called here.”
“She didn’t call, her kid did.”
As she got out of bed, Judith said mockingly, “Right. As if we both believe that.”
“Aren’t we going to make love?”
“Do you have a condom?”
“What for? We haven’t used a condom since the first time.”
“Then get used to it, David. You’re screwing two women now. That changes things.”
DAVID
Some afternoons, between the time school let out and Crystal got off work, Laramie took the school bus to the nursery. It was Holly’s idea. She always had a job for him, watering seedlings, bagging wild bird food mix. He could work methodically for hours, seeming to absorb silence the way plants thrived in humidity. Watching him bag one-pound packages of thistle seed—not one-point-one pounds or point-ninety-nine—was like observing a chemist measure acid into a test tube. Holly paid him two dollars an hour. After work he and I drove around town putting up my election signs. Laramie held the wooden stakes in place as I pounded them into the ground.
I knew early on I hadn’t the experience or the organization or the base of support; that all I could really hope to do was to raise some questions, kick up a little dirt. But I was a trained competitor. Although speeches and land use policies were a far cry from lobbing baseballs, I couldn’t help playing to win. I’d ordered a hundred signs and put up eighty. Like a rancher in his pickup cruising his spread, I was up every morning before sunrise to check on my signs. Once, I’d dreamed of headlining the sports pages, but it was oddly satisfying to see the solitary squares proclaiming my name in block letters, black and white against the wet grass like Holstein cattle. One morning on my patrol, however, three of my signs were missing. Ten of Blossom End-Rot’s had sprung up overnight. I replaced the three. That afternoon, with Laramie’s help, I pounded in ten more. The following morning twenty more of hers appeared. Four of mine were down. Blossom had six nephews, but I was obsessed. At work that morning I called in an order for fifty more signs.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Holly said.
“I can’t let them get away with this.”
“People already know you’re running, David. They’re not more likely to vote for you because you fill the roadsides with cardboard.”
“Is there a problem, Holly? Let’s have it.”
“No, there’s no problem. You know I want you to win this thing.”
“Do you?”
“If that’s what you want, but …” Here it was. The reason she was not at candidates’ night, and why I saw her scowling while I was cutting scrap wood for sign posts. “It can’t be good for this business, David. We’ve worked so hard to build it up. You know how crazy people in this town are about politics.” Our own father, after seeing a Nixon’s the One sign on the lawn of a local farm stand, never bought apples there again. “People hold grudges. If you win, they’re going to hate you for some stupid decision you’ll have to make. Even if you lose, you ran against someone’s candidate.”
“But you’re not talking about people in this town, are you? You’re talking about Johnny Lynch.”
“He’s an old friend of the family, David.”
“You think Dad thought so?”
“I think Dad would have been happy to know his wife was taken care of.”
“For fuck sake, Holly, that’s how half the town thinks. He gives everyone a little piece of something and keeps the rest for himself. Everyone’s so damned afraid of losing their little piece.”
“Johnny owns the house Mother lives in.”
“Our old house?”
“You were away, David. You were having your own problems in Florida. Daddy couldn’t pay the mortgage. Johnny bought it, the way he likes to pick up property. He’s let mother live there for years for a nominal rent.” Holly looked at me with something like pity.
“She never told me.”
“Did you ever ask?”
Late one afternoon I met Judith in her office for a quick update on the campaign that turned into drinks as the sun went down and an invitation to the island for dinner. The kitchen smelled of chicken and garlic. Gordon was sitting near the fireplace with a red wool blanket wrapped around him and a glass of scotch in his big hand. “She’ll have it all together in half an hour. Now tell me how the campaign is going.”
“Well, as I was putting gas in my truck today, who should pull up?”
Judith ran in from the kitchen. “Blossom End-Rot?”
“Go on,” Gordon said.
“Did you see the picture in her ad?” Judith perched on the arm of Gordon’s couch. “The meanest teacher you ever had.”
“Judith, let him tell the story.” Gordon settled back.
“She didn’t say hello,” I said. “She could barely return my smile. She stuck a newspaper article in my face about some proposed antiprofanity bylaw.”
“I never heard of it.” Gordon asked Judith, “Have you?”
“N
either had I,” the chair screeched as I leapt to my feet. “But once I knew she was for it, I felt the need to oppose it, to draw crowds, to orate, to reorient people’s hearts and minds so that we will always and forever have the right to call each other assholes in public.”
“He’s got the fever,” Gordon said. “Blossom’s your only real competitor. The professional widow.”
“He was a war hero, right?” Blossom invoked his name regularly, and right in the middle of town, on High Street by the Town Hall, was Lieutenant Phillip Endicott Square. Every Memorial Day a wreath was laid against the street sign.
“He was a local boy who went off to Korea. He came home on furlough looking for a good time, and he got hitched to Blossom instead.” Gordon shook his head. “In Korea, he lasted two months.”
“It’s always been my opinion,” Judith said, “that she’s far happier as a widow than she ever would have been married to Phil Endicott, who liked his bottle and his feet up, or so Mattie tells me. It was a mismatch. She’s the matriarch of her clan in spite of not having children. She gives money, advice, whatever, to her eleven nephews and nieces, and she plays them off against each other. The heroic status of her dead husband—and remember, they were only together for two weeks—has grown with every passing year.”
“Her signs are everywhere,” I said. “They’re green and red to my plain little black and white ones. They’re wider than mine. I measured. And longer by six inches. I’m developing a case of sign envy.”
Gordon liked my joke. But his laughter caused him to cough hard. Throughout dinner he seemed distracted by pain. He would suddenly drop his hands to the table, eyes alert but otherwise motionless, as if listening to something inside himself. Three or four times Judith suggested he lie down, but despite his obvious fatigue, he refused.
I told them what I’d learned from Holly.
Gordon sat back in his chair, his eyes half closed. “He plays fast and loose and he plays hard. If he can’t get what he wants one way, he tries another. Remember the Town Hall fire?”
“Sort of. I was in high school. Wasn’t it some kind of accident?”
“That’s what the fire chief said. But you always have to ask yourself, who won, who lost, who benefited most? All the records were burned. All the titles, all the deeds. All the town correspondence.”