Storm Tide by Marge Piercy, Ira Wood Read Free Book Online

have one.”
    Judith usually remembered to speak a different way at school with other kids than at home. Sometimes she forgot.
    A week after Judith’s bat mitzvah, paid for by Dr. Silver, but attended by Sandy, there was a phone call from Cindy. “Jerri,” Cindy said. She always spoke so loud that Judith, sitting next to her mother, could hear both sides of the conversation. Yirina, who had excellent hearing, held the phone away from her ear while Cindy was bellowing. “Jerri, it’s Dr. Silver. He’s had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”
    Dr. Silver never recovered consciousness. Cindy said they should not go to the funeral, but Yirina disobeyed. Yirina got Sandy to drive them (it did not matter anymore if he went with them, since Dr. Silver could no longer ask who he was) to the cemetery, way out on Long Island where they had never been. It was a cemetery in a wilderness of cemeteries. They stood well back. Judith stared at her sisters. They were older. The widow was blond and so was one of the daughters. They were dressed in suits and hats.
    She got a much better look at them a couple of days later, when they were called in by Dr. Silver’s lawyer, Mr. Vetter, along with the rest of the family. He seemed ironically amused as he introduced them, without explanation. “Jerri Silver,” the widow Sharon Silver repeated. “Are you a cousin?”
    Yirina shook her head no. She volunteered no information. Judith stared at her sisters. Lisa was pretty, dressed in a pink pants suit with bell bottoms. She must be eighteen, maybe nineteen. Brenda was pregnant. Her husband was addressed as Doctor. They all kept looking at Yirina and Judith. Judith felt frightened. Yirina was wearing black, one of the dresses she used to put on when she was playing piano in the cocktail lounge. She held Judith tightly by the hand and sat upright in one of the chairs.
    “I don’t understand why they’re here,” the widow said. “What are they, some obscure relatives?”
    “It will all be clear when I read the will,” Mr. Vetter said suavely,poking his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “Should I commence, then?”
    This man was the first lawyer Judith had ever met face-to-face. Judith did not have any desire to be a doctor, although Yirina spoke of it as the highest calling. She hated hospitals and sickbeds and pain. But it looked powerful to be a lawyer. You told people what was what. The law stood behind you. People waited on your words. She felt as if Mr. Vetter did not despise them, but was somehow on their side. He was a slight man, balding with a patch of dark hair over either ear, but he seemed to radiate power and confidence. He had a strong carrying voice like an actor or a rabbi.
    Dr. Silver left most of his considerable estate to his wife and his daughters, with a trust for his coming grandchildren. But he also left a trust for Judith, to be applied only to her education. It was not to be touched except for that purpose. If she failed to attend college by age twenty-five, it was to revert to his other daughters. She was so referred to. She was finally spoken for as a daughter. They were his other daughters. Judith began to weep, not from grief or joy, but from the overwhelming sense of no longer being invisible. She hardly listened when the lawyer read the bequest of five thousand dollars to Yirina, to be paid in two installments a year apart. She hardly registered the screams of the widow and the daughters, their ranting, their insults.
    “You’re telling me my husband was having an affair for the last fourteen years? That’s not possible. This is a lie!”
    The blond daughter, Lisa, began to sob. “Our daddy wouldn’t do something that low! You’re trying to tell us that … that shabby creature is our sister! She doesn’t look anything like us! And her mother can’t even speak English.”
    “I speak six languages,” Yirina said coldly. “English, Czech, German, Turkish, Spanish and Yiddish. I also