Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  DAVID

  The only campaign weapon we had left was our letter, secretly typed, copied, stamped and, by arrangement with the postmaster, delivered in time for voters to find it in their boxes the morning of the election. Gordon suspected that people had tuned out the signs and forgotten the issues. They were tired of the election and might not bother to vote. We needed to goose them, he said, at exactly the right time and above all with a light hand. Gordon had three photos of me taken, each one recalling those in Blossom’s letter of attack. Under a photograph of me in a pea coat, looking something like Ahab, was the caption: “a sobering choice.” Underscoring me in a Birdmanlike safari shirt, a pair of binoculars around my neck, were the words, “Looking to the future of Saltash.” Under a picture of me on the beach holding a garbage bag, just as Blossom had posed, were the block letters: “He doesn’t have to talk trash.” In place of the photo of me and Gordon and Judith, there was a picture of Blossom and Johnny Lynch, above the caption: “David Greene is his own boss.”

  But upon delivery at exactly five P.M. the night before the election, we were told by the postmaster that Blossom had sent out a second letter at the same time as ours, unheard of in Saltash politics. Gordon’s face was all furrows; lips, cheeks, and brow pinched together in a ruminative grin. “Looks like we have ourselves a mole.”

  “The voters will get two letters and throw away both,” I said. “We’re finished.”

  “Maybe. We’ll know tomorrow morning.”

  “The polls don’t close until seven.”

  “We’ll do exit polls.”

  “In Saltash?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Meeting that night with our committee, Gordon looked sharp despite his pallor and weakness, like a general on the eve of battle. His gaze, sometimes prone to wander off, was fixed on the registered voters street listing, a pencil steady in his hand. We would have poll watchers keeping track of who had yet to vote, telephone volunteers to remind them and a driver for those who couldn’t drive themselves. More than once Judith urged Gordon to rest. He refused more rudely each time.

  Gordon’s exit poll worked this way: on election morning, the earlier the better, each candidate staked out a corner where the voters had to pass on their way out of the polls. My job was to wave furiously at each and every car. According to Gordon, their vote was apparent on their faces. Those who would not look at you had not voted for you. They were embarrassed. Those who gave you an enthusiastic wave had certainly been in your corner; and a thumb up and a toot of the horn meant they liked you enough to tell their friends. A middle finger in your face didn’t matter. The crude ones didn’t bother to vote. A middle finger slyly directed at your opposition, however, was good, because it meant they not only liked you and had probably enlisted their friends to the cause, but had some dirt on the other candidate they were spreading.

  At six-forty A.M., I claimed the northeast corner in front of Town Hall, beating the opening of the polls by fifteen minutes and the other candidates by an hour. Blossom was next, her mouth twisted into a plastic smile. For the first two hours we were even in the thumbs-and-toot department but I had gotten more enthusiastic waves. At around ten I caught a middle finger and three no-looks in a row and tried to shrug it off. By noon, when Judith stopped to wish me luck, I was waving my sign and enjoying myself. What the hell. It was lunchtime; seven hours till the polls closed. But right behind Judith’s Jeep, Crystal pulled up in her Olds. She approached me with a brown bag lunch, just as Judith had. Standing there between them I couldn’t think of a single word to say.

  “We’re going to kick ass!” Crystal said.

  “It’s looking good,” Judith said, nose-to-nose with Crystal.

  “People in my office are all coming out!”

  Judith smirked. “To vote for Blossom?”

  My face was sunburned and desiccated. My lips were parched from calling out to cars. “You’ve been out since dawn, poor baby,” Crystal said. “As soon as you get home, I’m going to give you a hot meal and a bath.”

  “He can eat at the victory party,” Judith said.

  “Victory?” I said through a smile as tight as clenched teeth. “Don’t jinx me.”

  “What party?” Crystal stared from Judith to me and back at Judith.

  “At my office,” Judith said. “There’ll be a lovely buffet. We’re having David’s supporters over to wait for the results.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” Crystal turned to me, her eyes enormous.

  “I didn’t know about child care. I thought it would be a late night for Laramie.”

  “Too late to see his father win an election? Are you coming home first?” Crystal said.

  “I, uh, don’t know if I have time.”

  “Do you want to come to the party, Crystal?” I knew Crystal was the last person Judith wanted to invite, but she was too polite not to ask her. “I’m sure there’ll be people you know.”

  “Sure,” Crystal said, backing away, the glint of broken glass in her eyes. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  They count the votes one by one in Saltash, reading the names from a paper ballot and shouting them out in an open hall. I swung by Town Hall at nine, when the poll counters were breaking for dinner. The town clerk said there had been a near-record turnout and they wouldn’t be finished for hours.

  I knew I should go home to change and shower, to touch base with Laramie, but if my time belonged to anyone tonight, it was Judith and Gordon. In spite of my tangled sex life, my disappearances and indecision, they wished me well. In ways that surprised me, I was becoming like them. Small things surfaced, like a taste for meat cooked rare instead of overdone, a liking for vegetables as long as they weren’t boiled, a belief that olive oil and garlic were part of a good meal. I’d begun to read, for the first time in my life enjoying books—a memoir about Tip O’Neill that Judith had given me. I was thinking differently too, looking at situations in a way Gordon had taught me, not dwelling on how they affected me so much as asking who stood to lose and who to gain. Judith and Gordon had become a part of me and felt, more than friends, like family. What I was with them was better than what I had been or could be without them. With them, I grew.

  Mary, from Mary’s Tea Room, and her daughter Jo in white shirts and cummerbunds were setting up platters of cold cuts and tubs of shrimp salad in Judith’s office. One of the oystermen was shucking oysters and clams on a folding table. The bar was set up by the windows overlooking the harbor. When I walked in, about twenty people were watching the last bright pink light squeezed between clouds and the horizon. Judith’s secretary Mattie put a drink in my hand. She was off to take care of somebody else before I could thank her. People pressed close. How did I feel? Did I think we had taken it? I hadn’t hugged or shaken hands with so many people since the day I left town for the Cubs.

  Judith made her entrance in a red crepe dress, devastating but simple, slit along the side with a U-neck just low enough to show the slightest hint of décolleté. Between her breasts she wore a heavy silver necklace; her earrings were discs of hammered silver. She had changed for the party but also for me. Our eyes met and did not let go. “I called the town clerk. I couldn’t wait,” she said between gritted teeth. “They’re only three-quarters counted.” Later, over the dancing, she shouted, “David! I just got word. They’ll be finished by eleven.”

  The music was a mix of sixties rock and big band swing. Mattie was doing a lindy with the passionate plumber, placing her palm over her bosom to cover it whenever she did a dip backwards. The Birdman, with no party of his own, was chewing Gordon’s ear off. If Gordon hadn’t looked tired during the last week of the campaign, he did now. Judith got him into a comfortable chair. Stumpy Squeer cleared himself a corner of the buffet table; a fork in one hand, a beer in the other, he looked alternately at each as if unable to choose which to place in his mouth. Twice Natasha called from school, and twice Judith told her that they were still counting ballots. Tommy had come in (without Michel
le) and was hunched over the bar. Judith looked worried about the election results, about me, about her guests’ wine sloshing over the Xerox machine.

  At five to eleven I was summoned to the telephone. “Hello, David,” a woman said somberly. “It is my sworn duty as clerk of the Town of Saltash to call each of the candidates in descending order of the number of votes they received ….” As I waited, I realized the music had stopped. A crowd of perspiring bodies had formed a horseshoe around me. For all that I’d convinced myself I didn’t want to run, blood beat against my temples like a rubber mallet. “And I’m calling you first.”

  “That means I won?”

  The cheer was so loud I didn’t hear her response. My knees threatened to give. Had Gordon not been the first to shake my hand, had a hundred people not lined up to wish me well, I might have run to Judith’s arms. I might have rushed her upstairs to the loft and knelt in front of her to press my cheek to her belly. I wanted to undress her slowly and thank her in the dark. She had given me much more than help; she had given me a new vision of myself, proven to me I could win again. “Thank you so much, thank you,” I said, to anyone and everyone, fighting my way to Judith, drawing her into a corner.

  “I knew you could do it! I knew you could!” She pressed her lips to my cheek, demurely, for Gordon was here and she would never embarrass him. “My friends!” Suddenly she was addressing everyone in the room. “I know all of you are as proud as I am. Not only of David,” she linked her arm tightly in mine, for all to see, “but of yourselves. For what we’ve accomplished. David Greene is the rallying point for a new kind of politics, an era of open, accessible, democratic government in the life of this town.” Over the applause she said only to me, “You came through. You stuck with it.” I could barely hear her. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Judith, I want you.”

  Through a smile, just beneath the noise of the crowd, she said, “Can you stay with me tonight? Can you come back to the house?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Why not?” But followed the doubt in her eyes to the crowd in front of me, parting for a woman in a fringed western skirt and satin blouse, with tears running into her smile and a little boy in pajamas in her arms.

  Crystal spoke as if there was a period at the end of every word. “We. Are. So. Proud. Of you. Tell him, Laramie.”

  “I love you, Daddy!” Laramie jumped into my arms. There was nothing I could do but catch him as the crowd stepped back and sighed. A flashbulb popped. Judith was gone.

  The music began again. A new line formed at the buffet table. Cars streamed into the parking lot. Word had gotten out. Even Holly came, leading my mother in her royal-blue suit. The forces of good had won. A new day was dawning in Saltash. I swung around, searching for Judith. Laramie spotted the desserts and asked for a piece of chocolate cake. I lowered him into Crystal’s arms.

  Judith was not looking for me. She was standing behind Gordon, massaging his shoulders as he held forth in a circle of friends.

  “I lost you,” I said. “In the crowd.”

  She smiled coldly. She could hardly say what was on her mind. She could hardly ask, Why, David? Why did you do this to yourself? Why did you sink so deeply, so unnecessarily? Why couldn’t you trust me and Gordon? Why couldn’t you give us a chance? “Yes, it’s gotten very crowded in here.”

  “Could I see you tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.” For a moment I was sure she’d say no. She seemed taller, harder. There was no trace of emotion on her face. “Yes. That would be a good idea. Call my office. We have a great deal to talk about.”

  People touched my shoulder. They grabbed my hand. One man said, “You must be exhausted, son. You look ready to keel over.”

  Crystal had come to stand beside me again, pressed into me as she held Laramie upright. He was falling asleep on his feet.

  My mother studied my face. “I thought you’d be happy now that you’ve won? Aren’t you happy?”

  “Sure, Mom. Just a little tired, that’s all.”

  “You look as if you’re ready to kill somebody, doesn’t he, Holly?” She had no idea who. Or why.

  JUDITH

  The morning after the election, Gordon slept until ten. Judith worked at the kitchen table, hoping to have breakfast with him before she took off. He came out grinning with pride after a very personal victory over Johnny Lynch. But he knew what was on her mind. He said, “Look, you don’t understand because you aren’t susceptible in the same way. You’re divinely pragmatic, sane and sensible. But I wasn’t. I was as stupid as David with some women I got involved with.”

  Judith was forcing herself not to pace. It was not fair to Gordon to dump her grief on him. “Never that stupid. She’s one of the most blatant manipulators I’ve ever encountered. I’ve met murderers I trusted more.”

  “Judith, isn’t it possible she’s just desperate? A woman with a family that’s apparently of no use to her, a kid to raise alone. Little training or education. The boy’s father doesn’t help her. She’s in that old situation of women, where she needs a man to support her. It’s unfortunate for us she picked David.”

  He was right, of course, about Crystal’s desperation, but that didn’t excuse David. “But he picked her too! He could have refused to allow her to move in. He never had to get involved in the first place!”

  “Remember the second Mrs. Stone? Beverly, now Caldwell. Beverly eats gold. Her proper environment is pure money. She can’t breathe without it. Yet it took me ten years and two children to figure out I could never satisfy her. And to bruise my ego further, while I was used to being now and then unfaithful, I was not accustomed to having it done to me. She had an affair with her therapist. She had an affair with Larry’s orthodontist. Believe me, I feel for David. I understand. That bimbo had me eaten up with jealousy.”

  “You call Beverly a bimbo, but you invite her here every summer.”

  “She was my wife, Judith. She’s the mother of two of my children. I have an obligation to get on with her. Besides, I can enjoy her now that I don’t have to support her. You have to admit, she can be funny. She knows how to enjoy herself. Dying puts a lot of things into perspective, including exes.”

  “She drinks like a fish.”

  “I used to, my Judith. I used to do the same.” Gordon sighed, collapsing on the couch. Half an hour later he returned to bed. Every day he had managed to get up, but now that David’s campaign was over, he seemed empty. He was supposed to be revising one of his most famous books: The Sociology of Fantasy: Americans Who Want to Be Somebody Else. Over the past months, he had made scant progress. She wished she could provide him with an assistant who would keep him interested.

  Thursday, Judith was glad her office was air-conditioned. The temperature had risen twenty-five degrees since yesterday. As suddenly as if the heat had hatched them, tourists were everywhere, driving too fast or too slow on every road, standing in clumps staring at buildings as if the town were a museum. She had a court date tomorrow, and the tides were not cooperative, so she was staying in her office. She expected David, but she was feeling anxiety instead of pleasant anticipation. She ran over her memos, her notes and her brief while she waited. The leaking roof case was finally coming up.

  Mattie had left for the day. Judith rubbed her temples. A year ago the thought that she could love a man besides Gordon had appeared absurd. She simply did not look at other men as sexual or romantic objects. Gordon had primed her for experiencing a possible attraction, but until David, none had occurred. Then it had happened quickly, without her willing it or even becoming aware until it was there, full grown, in the middle of her consciousness. She had not quite realized until one night in her office when they were sitting before her gas fire discussing his running for selectman, that she was going to become involved with him. She had not considered the possibility. She was used to men looking at her as David had, with evident attraction, but in fourteen years she had not responded.

  She wondered sometimes if she had not
plunged into this out of her habit of pleasing Gordon. She knew he was worried about his ultimate creation, his menagerie of buildings, as Natasha worried about the animals she had brought home and who now lived with them, cared for by Judith. They were both terrified she would move away.

  Now she considered herself a fool. She had fallen hard, seriously, passionately, for a man who seemed to prefer a coarse and manipulative woman—younger, yes, a liar. Who had grown up here. Who had a child for whom David seemed to care a great deal. All those points Judith had gone over with Hannah, with Barbara, with Natasha, and, in a more restrained way, with Gordon. She had found herself distracted in court last week when she should have been paying close attention to a hostile witness’s testimony. She had not been so sloppy and absorbed in something irrelevant to a case since Gordon had been diagnosed with cancer. Her intense focus was her best weapon and she had almost lost it. She owed her clients a housecleaning.

  David stood in the parking lot, looking weary and uncertain. He could not guess she was observing him. He grimaced, almost a wince, and then came slowly toward the building. Did he dread seeing her? Did he guess how estranged she felt? More likely the latter. He was observant and smart about people; mostly, that is. He had no smarts about Crystal.

  She offered him coffee. They sat facing each other. She needed the distance. They spoke for a few minutes about the election. However important that had felt twenty-four hours before, it did not seem to be foremost on either of their minds. “David, don’t you find it a little embarrassing to have Laramie, as sweet as he seems to be, call you Daddy? He has a real father, doesn’t he?”

  “He was abusive. Violent. Maybe dealing drugs … I’ve never told Laramie to call me Daddy. Crystal tells him to. I can’t hurt him by telling him not to. I can’t, Judith.”

  “Do you intend to be his father?”

  David shrugged, running his hands roughly through his dark coarse hair. He was darkly tanned. His eyes seemed lighter than ever, chips of something luminous and rare. “I don’t know what to do.”