by Marge Piercy
“No,” Crystal said, with a harshness that drew my attention. She wasn’t looking at Laramie but straight ahead, almost blindly. Her fingers grazed the edges of the box as if feeling her way through some dark inner landscape. “It’s time to go to bed.”
But his curiosity only grew. “Please?”
“They’re glasses. Blue cobalt glasses. But we can’t unpack them now.”
“What’s cobalt?”
They were dark blue goblets, dessert cups, water glasses. Because my parents rarely entertained, they were arranged for show on a shelf in our dining room. They’d been relegated to the attic when my mother had new wallpaper put up. I hadn’t laid eyes on them since.
“Why can’t I see one?”
“Because we don’t want to open them here. Because we’ll just have to pack them again when we move.”
Laramie’s face turned the color of newspaper, white-gray. I imagined I could feel the blood leaving his lips, but of course it was my own pulse I felt, behind my eyes, in my wrists as I rubbed my hands against my sides.
“Mom said she was saving these for when we were married. But since David found us another place to live, I might as well take them anyway.”
“Crystal …” I had not found them another place. I had merely asked a friend of my mother’s who managed a cottage colony if there wasn’t a year-round unit available. The conversation had lasted thirty seconds. I was opening my mail in the post office. The woman was tossing her duplicate catalogues. Although the situation sounded ideal, the woman had not yet gotten back to me. “Laramie, maybe you should go to bed,” I said. “Put your pajamas on. I’ll bring in the radio and you can listen to the game until you fall asleep.”
It was as if I had not spoken. “Are we moving, Ma?”
“You know Aunt Holly always wanted these, Mom said.” Her fingers were peeling the stiff brown tape as her face, her eyes, all but her lips remained absolutely still. “Aunt Holly doesn’t need them because she has a house and a business and Uncle Marty to take care of her and buy her things. But we don’t have any of that, so we get these. Aren’t they pretty?” She lifted a blue water goblet to the light. “Aren’t we lucky, Laramie? To have such pretty glasses?”
The boy was looking at me, pleading with me to stop something he had obviously witnessed before, when she raised the glass high and brought it down on the table’s edge. The glass was thick and did not shatter with the first blow. She brought it down again. Then she grasped one of the jagged blue edges of the goblet and drew it along her arm. She was not aiming to cut a vein. This was more the work of an artist, a carver to be precise, for as Crystal backed away from me, as she drew the glass across her flesh she seemed to admire the long white striations that swelled to pink and burst into rivulets of blood that flowed one into another.
“Crystal, I never asked you to leave—”
“But you want us to.” Her voice sounded distant, controlled. She drew the glass across her arm again.
“I don’t want you to go anywhere. I told you you could stay here as long as you need to, as long as you want to ….” As I neared his mother, the boy was at my side, watching her face and the pressure of the glass on her arm. Yes, he seemed to tell me, not with words but the subtlest distortion of his features, his teeth on his bottom lip, the movement of his gaze from his mother and back to me. Keep talking to her, he seemed to be saying. Keep telling her what she needs to hear. “Crystal, remember the morning Michelle asked you to leave? Remember you said that you’d be interested in a place that didn’t charge two months security deposit?”
Good, Laramie seemed to be saying. This is the way.
“Remember? You said you didn’t want to borrow money from me?”
Her grip on the glass seemed to loosen.
“Well, that’s when I asked the lady from the cottage colony. Because she was looking for a family to move in as caretakers. For no deposit. That’s when I spoke to her.”
“That was two months ago,” Crystal said.
“That’s right. And I haven’t spoken to her since.”
Go on, the boy seemed to say.
“Because it’s just fine for you and Laramie to be here. Because you can stay here as long as you want.”
“You mean that?”
“Of course I mean it. This house is your house too.”
“Mine and Laramie’s.”
“I don’t know what my mother was talking about. She gets confused. That’s why I think it’s best that she has a real nurse. That’s why we’re getting Mrs. Falco to come in. Because Mom needs real care. She’s getting older ….”
“She is. She forgets things,” Crystal said. “Just last week she forgot Laramie’s name and ran through all the kid’s names before she got to his. It was really funny. She said Kara, Allison, David … before she got to Laramie. Remember?”
The little boy nodded.
Crystal looked at the gash on her arm as if it was nothing, an insect sting, a rash. She placed the broken goblet in my outstretched hand. “You really do want us to stay here, don’t you?”
“This is your house now. I mean that sincerely,” I said. And I did. It was all hers. If she wouldn’t move, I would come up with another plan. I looked at Laramie, wondering at his calm. He seemed ashamed for his mother, but not surprised. I could not risk another scene like the one I had just been through. Neither could I stay in this house.
DAVID
The Board of Selectmen was divided. Two men, Ralph Petersen and Fred Fischel, were said to be in Johnny Lynch’s pocket, while Sandra Powell and Lyle Upham had been elected with Judith’s help. I knew why I couldn’t call Judith—I had nothing yet to say. I hadn’t moved out yet. I had plans to gradually detach, cut back. But I thought of Judith. I wanted every meeting night for her to show up, hoping to explain afterwards. It was like being in a storm and remembering a quiet clear place. I missed her voice, her intelligence, her body that seemed an extension of her personality and her mind, instead of a sexual morass into which I had sunk almost over my head. But I understood Judith would not be with me while I was living fulltime with Crystal. The way things were now, I rarely saw Judith, and never alone.
The hearing before us was a simple conversion of a license, from wine and beer to a full liquor license. Powell and Upham were opposed and presented arguments against drunk driving, teenage alcohol abuse, and high school kids crossing the line from Wiggins Neck, the next town over. Lyle stood up to address the crowd and asked if one more place to buy hard liquor would improve life in this small town. “I don’t think there’s anyone here tonight who can forget about last year’s rape in the parking lot.” This was greeted with a loud rumbling in the audience, gaveled down by Chairman Petersen, who recognized Fred Fischel, a retired accountant with delicate, almost paper-white hands that he nervously rubbed together throughout the meeting. “You can’t legislate morality,” he said. “These people run a good clean business and follow all the rules. An incident like that can happen outside anyone’s store, or anyone’s home.” Petersen voted with Fischel, for the full liquor license; Powell with Upham, against.
“How do you vote, Mr. Greene?”
Gordon told me Upham had contributed to my campaign. I knew he was pro-environment. That he’d voted for a new school. Sandra ran the local day care center. She was a perky five-foot-two who wore enormous red-framed glasses and her hair in bangs. Her youngest daughter, a budding star on the high school track team, had been hit by a truck a few years back and walked with a permanent limp.
“Mr. Greene?”
Didn’t Sandra have the kids’ interest at heart? Didn’t Petersen and Fischel always toe the Johnny Lynch line? “I vote no,” I said.
Promising to take us to court, the owners stormed out. Petersen demanded silence. The next order of business was called. I was warmed from the inside with a feeling of having stood up with the forces of good. I acknowledged a demure smile from Sandra Powell.
On the way out that night, Johnny Lynch
grabbed my arm. “Tell me something. Did you know Sandra Powell’s nephew just married the owner of the liquor store across the highway?”
I continued past him. “Don’t know anything about it.”
“Got married three weeks ago Sunday.” He would not let go of my sleeve. “You gave them some wedding present there, Davey Greene. Took away their only competition. Nice work.”
It was Johnny Lynch who made sure I do everything in my power never to be ignorant again; Johnny Lynch, eyeing me from the back row, waiting for me to fail, who unknowingly encouraged me to study the state ethics laws and the statutes concerning conflict of interest, to dedicate my weekends to research at Town Hall. I would not be used again. I would question and dig and ferret out every small connection and innuendo until I had it right. I would not be caught unprepared. I studied policies and labor contracts, reading sentences twice over, repeating them aloud until they made sense, studying half the night through sometimes, hoping Crystal would fall asleep before I got to bed.
We had stopped using condoms three months ago. When I put one on again, Crystal laughed. “What is that for?”
“Just extra protection.”
“Against what? I take the pill, David. You know that. Or do you think I’m sleeping with someone else? Is that it?”
“I never said that.”
“Did you pick up something from Judith? Some kind of infection?” Crystal said. Then hopefully: “Is she fucking someone else?”
“It’s not about Judith. It’s me. I don’t think we’re ready to have a child right now.” Liam’s voice had never quite left my mind. Beneath the anger, I’d heard a desperate terror. She tricked me, I could still hear him say. She’s poison. “I want to use a condom, okay? There’s nothing wrong with being safe.”
“Fine. Use a condom,” she said. “But you won’t feel anything.” Crystal lay on her back, legs spread, eyes on the ceiling, as still as a frightened bride, determined not to feel anything either. In turn, I moved on top of her with grim determination. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked.
The boat captain wore a sleeveless black tee-shirt and orange rubber boots that squeaked as he entered the hearing room. One infant son in the crook of his arm, his lean cocoa-skinned wife holding the other two boys—Saltash’s only triplets—Dominic approached the selectmen like a jungle cat protecting his young. Those of us who weren’t moved to sympathy understood his threats. “I got me a lawyer now and I ain’t gonna be shoved around no more.” He kicked the chair in front of him. “I already been punished for what I done. Fined by a judge. If you people take away my license, that’s double jeopardy. It ain’t right and it ain’t legal.”
Dominic Riggs was nineteen. His father had fished in Saltash, and his grandfather before that. Tall and wiry, with a patchy red-blond beard and a long red ponytail trailing from the back of his baseball cap, he had the kind of drive you encounter in young corporate executives who’ll do anything to get to the top. But as a dragger captain, the top wasn’t high enough to buy a home and support a family. Dominic was often on the wrong side of the shellfish warden: caught scalloping before the official start of the season, caught in areas closed to fishing. The warden warned the kid repeatedly and often looked the other way, but this time he was pissed off. He not only took Dominic to district court, where he’d been fined for possession of twelve bushels of oysters when the legal limit was ten, he was asking the selectmen to suspend Dominic’s license.
“That fine was five hundred dollars. And another seven fifty for the lawyer.” Dominic stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his wife, Jamaican born and herself the daughter of a fisherman. “You people are killing the working man.”
According to the warden, the oyster harvest had been dwindling for the past two years. If some guys took more than the legal limit, there was less chance for the others to survive. Shellfish would go the way of the halibut and the cod; the resource would disappear.
Nonetheless, Sandra Powell said the boy had been punished enough. Who would feed his family if his license was suspended? Weren’t we in the business of helping young people? She moved we deny the warden’s request.
“Second.” Lyle Upham repeated the dangers of opening the town to a law suit. Fred Fischel, facing reelection, was counting votes in the audience, packed with shellfishermen who preferred to curse the selectmen in the lobby, rather than speak their minds in public. Dominic smiled; opinion was moving in his favor.
“Mr. Chairman,” I said.
Petersen responded tiredly, “Mr. Greene,” as if this was not the first time I’d raised my hand to speak this evening but the fiftieth. Obviously, once was too much.
“Mr. Chairman, I move that we take the shellfish regulations of the Town of Saltash and flush them down the nearest toilet.”
“Order.” Petersen banged the gavel. “I said order!” He quieted the crowd. “There’s a motion on the floor, Mr Greene. I assume that was meant to be a facetious remark.”
“No, sir. I’m waiting for a second to my motion,” I said. “Everybody in this town knows everybody else. Everybody is somebody’s neighbor or daughter or cousin or friend. We try to look the other way when one of us breaks the rules. Okay. But that means we have no rules. Why pretend we do? Let’s just flush them away. Now I know Dominic, and I know he works hard to feed his kids, but so do a lot of other guys. If we start ignoring the rules for every one of them, there’ll be no harvest at all. Now if that’s what we want, fine. But then let’s not pretend we have regulations. Let’s just flush them down the damned toilet and call it like it is.”
Fred Fischel raised his hand. “Mr. Chairman, I move to order the previous question.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
The chairman didn’t even look at me. “It means debate is closed, Mr. Greene. Do I hear a second?”
Within minutes the vote was taken. Dominic won.
“You’re in the newspaper!” Crystal said, spreading the Saltash Eagle on the kitchen table. Laramie propped his chin on his fists to watch. She read: “‘At last Monday night’s meeting, Selectman David Greene likened unenforced regulations to that which is commonly flushed down the commode …’”
“I didn’t say anything like that.”
“You know what Mr. Lynch said? He said you had real balls to take on the Riggs family.” Crystal dropped her hand in my lap. “And don’t I know it.”
I was embarrassed in front of Laramie, who just smiled dreamily at his mother and me. Crystal thought that his stock had risen since my election, that kids who’d never been interested before were pursuing him. I thought the few new friends he’d made came from his association with my sister’s girls. If anyone’s social life had taken a turn for the better, it was Crystal’s. Like my mom, whose status had soared when I pitched for the high school team, Crystal imagined herself the First Lady of Saltash. Sometimes people would call the house with questions—When is my road going to be repaved? Is it true they’re planning to build a bike path through the woods?—which Crystal would officiously try to answer. Sometimes she came home with advice from Johnny. “He says never tell reporters anything unless you want it published. Don’t mistake them for your friends.” One night I heard her tell Laramie, “You have to set an example. People are watching us.”
Crystal’s wound was shallow but wide. It formed a scab quickly but needed to be protected or it opened and bled again. This happened once when we were in bed. Several times I saw Laramie bandaging it for her. She could have done so herself, but it seemed a ritual for them. Seriously and awkwardly he would put far more gauze around the wound than necessary. The oversized bandage served as a warning to all of us.
After the liquor license hearing, I spent almost all my time at home reading, an activity Crystal elevated to the legal ruminations of a Supreme Court justice. As soon as I opened my briefcase, she would deny Laramie access to the TV. She would make me a pot of coffee and clear the kitchen table and tell anyone who telephoned, “David is studying policy
,” in the same protective voice my uncle Georgie had used to clear kids away from my practice sessions behind the school.
But what Crystal took for diligence was also a way to hide. Friends had warned me during the election, “You’ll never have enough time for the nursery or a personal life.” That was exactly the point. I belonged to the town now. Not since I played baseball was so much expected of me; or so little. I worked for everyone now, too busy to be touched.
JOHNNY
Johnny found it odd that Crystal should sometimes remind him of his dear departed Emily Ann. Crystal was a woman who had been around the block a few times. He suspected it was more her vulnerability that had got her into trouble than wantonness—although there was a kind of perfume of that about her at times. He put it down to her sorry upbringing. Her father had preferred drugs to his family. Her mother was a petulant woman, far more involved with her own disappointments than with her two daughters.
It was Crystal’s desire to please that reminded him of his wife. Emily Ann had wanted to make everything better for him, for her sons, for everyone around her. She must feed every hungry bird. She took in any stray that came by. She had raised an orphan girl, Mary Rose, now living in California with her salesman husband. Turned out better than his own son William, although it hurt him to admit it. Crystal was a good mother, as Emily Ann had been, until she could no longer manage.
Watching Crystal with the other girls, he observed her basking in her role as the more-or-less wife of a selectman. But there was the rub. Living with was not marriage, and Crystal knew it. That was where her vulnerability had got her in trouble again. If you could milk the cow free, why own it? There was a slightly broken quality to her, a resonating fragility like a good porcelain set being used for every day, that made him connect her in his mind to Emily Ann.
His wife would have labeled Crystal a bad woman. Emily Ann had a proper upbringing, her uncle a priest, her parents watching over her, and her aunt and her grandparents all protecting her not only from danger in the world, but from knowledge of danger. Her innocence, her purity had touched him from the first time he met her, at a victory dance held in the ward where she lived in Boston. He had been working for the reelection of a city councillor, his apprenticeship in politics. That very purity had broken her over the hard years. He could read faint cracks in Crystal’s composure too. But once she was safely married, she would heal. She was not as pure or fine a creature as his Emily Ann, and marriage would not weaken her but make her stronger.