Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

I couldn’t say I’d ever moved back into my house after Crystal and Laramie died; but now I was moving out. I sold the house quickly. The new owners wanted the couch, the rugs and kitchen appliances, even the sagging queen bed in my room, utensils, plates, the works. They intended to close the place up winters and rent it by the week in the summer. The couple bargained to the last nickel on every item down to the shower curtain, leading me from room to room, taking turns like interrogating cops. If they hadn’t made me feel like a mark, I would have given it all away. I didn’t want to look at this old stuff. I had to get out of here.

  Although I told Judith there was nothing left to move but my clothing—what little wasn’t already at her house—she insisted there were objects I’d overlooked. She loaded three boxes with Laramie’s toys alone. There were things of Crystal’s that I had ignored or simply could not bring myself to touch. The suitcase that had served as a bedside table next to Michelle’s old couch. A black silk kimono on a hook behind the bathroom door. Judith arrived with me at seven A.M. on a Saturday morning and packed boxes furiously until noon. It saddened me to see the house with everything pulled out. A stray button under a dresser, a tiny lost horse behind a door. When Judith’s car was loaded and each box labeled—Goodwill, Salvation Army, Day Care Center, Church—she touched my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Why not? What do you mean?”

  She was looking at Crystal’s exercise bike, which I’d discovered behind the couch and begun dismantling. Six bolts, twice that many screws. But my palms were moist and the screwdriver kept slipping from my grip. It had taken me the better part of an hour. “Is it hard to leave?” she said.

  “This house? With all the work it needs?”

  “But I can’t help feeling it’s what you wanted.” She unbuttoned her coat and made a place for herself, not next to me but on the floor, where the apparatus lay between us like Crystal’s dismantled life. “A little house. A little family. There’s nothing wrong with that, David.”

  “But it was a life with you that I wanted. I just thought I couldn’t have it. Because you loved Gordon. Because you were so much more than I was.”

  “David.”

  “I did the same thing I did when I played baseball. I turned my back on what took work and patience, what I couldn’t have right away, and did the next easiest thing. What you and Gordon offered was beyond anything I could imagine possible. Living with Crystal felt familiar. Mother. Father. Child. A little house in town. People wanted me to be that person, don’t you see? My mom. My sister. They couldn’t understand what I was doing with you. But with Crystal, I was just like them. Even people in town. I was one of the guys out with the woman and kids at Penia’s on Friday night. I was one of them. Finally. Maybe Crystal is what I felt I deserved.”

  Judith frowned. “Don’t imagine you’ll be one of them if you’re living with me, David. I’m not the kind of woman nice people like. I say what I mean. That’s considered bitchy. I never had children. That’s considered weird. Your own sister calls me cold. You’ll be living in a ten-acre waterfront compound worth well over a million dollars on the market. Don’t imagine people aren’t counting. That won’t make you one of the guys.”

  “Why would I care?”

  “Because you always did. You were an outsider from the day your folks moved here. You married into a family that used you. You were always looking for a way inside.”

  “Not anymore. I killed a woman and her son doing that. Maybe I can finally be what I choose, no matter how different it is.”

  Judith kicked aside the tools and piping between us. She touched her fingers to my lips. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Whatever I did or didn’t, it’s over. You’re the one I want.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “You will. Over time, you will.”

  JUDITH

  Judith was using her shack again to get away from the construction noise. David was having a greenhouse added onto the south side of the house. It would be part working greenhouse and part breakfast room. It was necessary for David to feel it was his house also, and his needs and his aesthetic did not always coincide with what Gordon had built. Her bedroom was to become their bedroom, with some space borrowed from the room where Gordon had spent the last years of his illness and where he had died. What remained of that room would become an additional bath and a hallway to the new greenhouse. The construction was not the most peaceful way to begin and to work out their relationship, but it was essential.

  After selling his house, David used the loft in his mother’s barn for his office and occasional bedroom in town. They needed to save money. She had taken a mortgage to finance the renovations. On her advice, David had used the money from selling his house to buy into the nursery. Judith had gone over the books with her accountant and set up the deal. She thought it was important that David actually be a partner instead of an employee—for his position in town, his self-esteem, and as an argument when the custody agreement was reopened.

  Sometimes it took all her skill as a negotiator to work out their problems. It would not be easy. David was not as verbal as Gordon, nor as confident in setting forth his needs. He kept his thoughts to himself, and a simple discussion could feel like prying. There were compensations.

  In the evening after the construction crew left and they had supper, often they went out into the dunes together. It was June, the perfect month before hordes of tourists and summer people clogged town, before the black and greenhead flies came swarming. It was picnic weather. It was beach blanket weather. It was love with the sun setting across his shoulder, the clouds barred orange and fuchsia. Their bodies fit together even better than they had.

  The first summer would be ragged, with Gordon’s children and grandchildren having to adjust to a new proprietor, a new boss, a new possessor—of her and the land. David had to work out his roles with each of them. Except for Natasha, all Gordon’s offspring were perturbed by David’s presence. His mother and sister were not overjoyed with her. She had not succeeded in charming them yet, but she had not given up trying. It would be hard for David to feel he was not an impostor assuming Gordon’s clothes; but he would find his own way gradually, she was convinced.

  She watched his confidence grow with her in bed, in conversation, in meetings with her more established friends and his inherited family; in dealing with the contractors as if this truly was his house. She knew what he wanted. He needed to have a clear position. That was how it was with David. Patiently she waited for him to bring the matter up: sometime this summer they would marry. She could feel it approaching them like a season, something coming into view. If they were married, it would be easier to renegotiate the custody settlement so that David could have his son part of the summer, half the school vacations. She would make the arrangements so she could plead on a pro hac vice motion before a Florida court, along with his new lawyer down there. She had spoken to the lawyer a couple of times and they had exchanged more formal letters. David would pay more child support in return for having his son with him part of the year. They would manage.

  The sun slipped into the bay and the sky turned to greenish-violet. A breeze played over their bare skin. It was time to get up and go into their changing house.

  Afterword

  We’re talkers. We talk things over endlessly. Not only dinner, often the first subject broached over coffee every morning at dawn, but the garden, the cats, when to paint the bathroom and fix the car, meetings, families, friends, and, of course, our work. In the car, in the living room, in the supermarket, in bed, we discuss. On long walks through the quiet Cape Cod woods, it is not uncommon to hear our voices shouting through the underbrush, each arguing to get a point across. We’ve ruined the pensive walks of nature-seeking tourists and sent hunters away sputtering. There’s a sense in which our life—like that of many tight couples—is a constant collaboration.

  The first time we worked together was shortly after we met, when we wrote a
play The Last White Class. About the busing crisis in Boston, it was written for community theaters, went through a number of productions and was published. Collaborating was a strain, but we survived it.

  We did not think of writing together again for twenty years, when Ira had the idea for a novel that Marge found intriguing but felt needed more strands to complete. We began talking about it, just as a fantasy at first. We thought we might invent a whole new persona to author the novel, and even gave our creation a name and a biography. It was still simply a pastime, but as we discussed the novel, we began to be involved imaginatively in it and finally we simply decided to proceed without telling anybody (agents, editors, friends) what we were doing—so that no one could talk us out of it.

  We had a rough idea of the shape of the story. Ira began writing David, and Marge began writing Judith and Johnny. We noticed immediately that David was in the first person (which is often how Ira likes to write) and Judith and Johnny were in the third person (which is how Marge usually writes). The logic was clear: the story begins in David’s mind. From then on we alternated characters at various points.

  When we had completed the first draft, we switched off for long periods, each of us having input into what the other had written throughout the second draft. We argued a lot in that process. What, you want to change that masterful delicious scene? How dare you! But we galloped along, rewriting and cutting and adding and moving scenes around.

  Third and fourth drafts we did together, occasionally taking difficult parts off to be chewed on and worked over separately. Always we put it back together, both sitting in the same room, Marge at the computer (she is by far the faster typist) and Ira looking quite literally over her right shoulder. There were a few technical problems in switching from computer to computer, because although they are the same make and have the same software, we configure them differently. But those were minor glitches. We haggled a lot about the shading of the characters, we fought over sentences and paragraphs, we laughed and carried on and finished up. Then we sent off what we had written to New York.

  Eventually we decided to scrap our pseudonym and be ourselves. We had learned something since working on the The Last White Class. Collaboration requires respect and good communication. It requires being able to detach from your own preconceptions and actually listen to the other person’s notions. That means a fair amount of flexibility in an arena where the writer is usually in complete and godlike control of the story and the characters. It means relinquishing that control or at least easing up on it considerably.

  Writing together is easier than writing alone. It isn’t exactly half the work, but it is about two-thirds of the work of writing a novel by oneself. It is also more fun. Writing is usually a lonely activity, months and years of labor without much feedback. But collaborating is far from lonely. And when you are in a couple, it can be sexy and satisfying. Although there were times when we each wanted to strangle the other for stubborn resistance to our own precious ideas and our own irreplaceable brilliant words, nonetheless most of the time it was highly enjoyable. Marge enjoys the act of writing (usually), but for Ira it was more of a surprise to find writing pleasurable. We have both begun individual projects since completing Storm Tide, but some years down the pike, we may well work together again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A few acknowledgments: in researching minor league baseball, we found Good Enough to Dream by Roger Kahn; False Spring by Pat Jordan; and The Boys Who Would Be Cubs by Joseph Bosco helpful to us. Women, Animals and Vegetables by Maxine Kumin put to rest any fantasies we might have had about keeping horses instead of cats as pets; while The Whole Horse Catalogue, edited by Steven D. Price, told us more than we ever wanted to know about the sport of dressage. For information on topics as diverse as nipple piercing, lung cancer and land sale scams in Florida, various sites on the World Wide Web were indispensable. Closer to home, the Wellfleet library once again has our deepest thanks for numerous interlibrary loans. Ruthann Robson, terrific novelist and poet and a fine lawyer too, answered some legal questions that came up via Judith’s career. The Fundamentals of Surgical Oncology edited by Robert J. McKenna and Gerald P. Murphy was invaluable, as was Understanding Cancer by Mark Renneker, in dealing with Gordon’s illness.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  MARGE PIERCY is the author of thirteen previous novels, including City of Darkness, City of Light; The Longings of Women; He, She and It (winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award in Great Britain); Braided Lives; Gone to Soldiers; and Woman on the Edge of Time. She has also written thirteen collections of poetry, including Mars and Her Children and What Are Big Girls Made Of? She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, the novelist Ira Wood. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. Her website address is http://www.capecod.net/~tmpiercy.

  IRA WOOD is the author of two novels, The Kitchen Man and Going Public, as well as plays and screenplays. His workshops have inspired students all over the country to dig more deeply into their personal lives, to face the barriers of hopelessness and their fear of writing in order to overcome the inner censor. Recently, he and Marge Piercy started a small independent publishing company. Visit them at http://www.leapfrogpress.com.

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Middlemarsh, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of

  Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-091089

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75620-6

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