The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  Erica is in this cellar on a Monday afternoon in December doing the laundry, which should have been done days ago, when she was in no condition to do it. For a week she has given in to her own bad feelings; she is almost literally washed out, as if she had climbed into the Maytag and let hot rage and soapy self-pity slosh over her, swishing her back and forth in the dark, draining her finally with a hard sucking noise and leaving her as she is now: limp, wrinkled and wrung out.

  She still feels wrung out, but the chore cannot be put-off any longer, for the weather has suddenly turned worse, as everything’ has turned worse. Erica cannot feel the wind down here, but she can hear it beating around the walls with a noise like hostile laughter. The basement air is at once chilly and stuffy, as if it had been left too long in a refrigerator.

  It is Brian’s fault that she is here, because when he came last Sunday to take the children out to dinner he asked if she could find his old Navy shirts—which she later discovered, dirty, in Jeffrey’s closet. “It’s getting pretty fucking cold for this time of year,” he explained in the new youth-culture manner he has recently grown to go with his new sideburns and way of life. She should have screamed at him. Find your own old shirts! But she was-too stunned; she merely smiled tightly and agreed to look. She went on behaving as she had been behaving for weeks: as if theirs was the most civilized, high-minded, mutually agreeable separation ever seen in Hopkins County. And this although Brian had just given her news that made the separation, and all her plans and efforts and sacrifices, meaningless. Laughable, even. For over a month she had been a romantic and moral heroine; now, with one stroke, he had turned her into a character in a cheap farce.

  But for ten minutes, until Brian and the children drove off, she went on smiling, conversing—like those figures in cartoons who go on running in the air after they have passed the edge of the cliff, or had the bridge blown out from under them—until the glance down, the double take. Then they crash. As she had crashed after she was left in the empty house with the news that Wendy was not going to have her baby.

  Brian had announced this calmly; almost as if he were not concerned. But of course he must have arranged it all; must have been trying to arrange it for weeks. She had been naïve not to have known that he would do this if he could. Naïve and stupid. The wind whuffles against the house, choking with laughter.

  And of, course Brian knew what it would mean to her. That’s why he told her when he was about to leave, when the children were practically within hearing—so that she dared not respond: Because he is a coward, afraid to face the consequences of his acts, as Danielle said. Erica doesn’t blame Wendy; she knows how Brian must have bullied and argued her into it, probably with some of the same arguments he used here in this house when Erica wanted a third child: overpopulation, financial responsibilities, his age. She can imagine too how he must have underplayed the risk of an illegal operation at this point—the pain, the danger. “But isn’t it too late for that?” she had whispered when he told her. “Wasn’t it very dangerous?” “No,” Brian replied smugly, standing there in her dining room in the new dirty-tan Student-Shop duffle coat fastened with imitation clothesline and clothespins, which he has bought to go with his new sideburns and manner and way of life. “Not too late.”

  And why shouldn’t he look smug? He has won; his lies have come true. There will be no inconvenience in his life now, no night feedings or diapers, no use for clothespins except to decorate his coat. There will be no inconvenience to his reputation either: almost no one will ever know that Wendy had been pregnant; no one but Danielle and Linda Sliski and Sandy will know what Erica had planned to do for her. And if she were to attempt to tell anyone else, to explain how this separation had been different from all others, how she had arranged it herself out of unselfish motives, probably they wouldn’t believe her. They would think she was deluding herself, or trying to delude them, or both, like—Like—

  Like Lena Parker, her mother. Erica lets an armful of crumpled wash slump toward the floor, and stands there. For twenty-eight years, ever since she was twelve, she has been running away from Lena Parker and everything she represents. Now she has circumnavigated the globe and run back into her mother’s arms. She too has a husband who has ambiguously left home; she too can loudly justify herself, and claim more freedom of choice than she really had.

  At least Lena isn’t alive to see it, to add her rationalizations to Erica’s, to say what she would be sure to say about the separation: that it was best for everyone; that Brian was never “right” for her daughter. “A man married to his work, who does not know how to enjoy, how to laugh!” as she had once exclaimed.

  But no doubt Brian is laughing now. He has won: he has destroyed Wendy’s child; his own child; her child.

  Stooping wearily, Erica picks up the clothes she has dropped, and climbs the cellar stairs to the dining room. She sorts the clothes, folds them, and climbs two more flights to her children’s rooms. Jeffrey’s looks as if it had been recently burgled: the bed is torn apart, drawers are wrenched out and overflowing, books and magazines thrown about. She begins to tidy up, for the third time in a week, then stops. What is the use? Let him live in filth and chaos, if that is how he chooses to live. She sets her mouth and shuts the door behind her.

  Matilda’s room, across the landing, is somewhat neater, but equally painful to enter. The bedcovers have been more or less pulled up, the drawers are shut—but in the corner behind the door is an ugly heap of debris. It has been there for two days, since Saturday morning when Erica sent the children upstairs to clean their rooms. Jeffrey was back almost at once (obviously having done as little as possible), but Matilda delayed. Presently, while Erica was ironing, she became aware of distressing sound effects overhead: banging and splintering. Setting the iron on end so fast that it spat water, she ran upstairs, calling her daughter’s name.

  “Yeh, what?” Matilda held her door open two inches, scowling through the gap.

  “What’s going on up here? I heard dreadful noises.”

  “I’m cleaning my room, like you told me to.”

  “Cleaning your room? It sounded as if somebody were breaking things. Let me see.”

  Matilda said nothing, only stood aside so her mother could enter.

  “Muffy! What’s happened? Your weaving loom is all smashed—and your planetarium.”

  “You told me to get rid of all the crap I didn’t want to play with any more. You’ve been hassling me about it for weeks.”

  “I didn’t say for you to destroy everything. Oh, look at your ballet scrapbooks! And that beautiful map of Fairyland, that you used to love so much.” Erica felt like weeping. “And the dollhouse, it’s all smashed sideways. How could you do something like that?”

  “I was sick of it,” Matilda cawed. “Can’t I do what I like with my own stuff?”

  “No, you can’t.” With difficulty, Erica kept her voice under control. “Somebody else might have wanted these things, didn’t you ever think of that? We could have given them to Celia Zimmern.” No answer. Don’t you touch anything else! Do you hear me?”

  “Ookay,” Matilda sighed theatrically—her new victim-of-injustice manner, which Erica finds almost more infuriating than the old sulks and screams.

  Not all the remains of Matilda’s destructive fit are still in her room. Erica has carried what was beyond repair out to the trash can, leaving only a few toys which are undamaged or salvageable: some hanks of colored yarn, a few old picture books, and parts of a plastic Blue Willow tea set—the one that Muffy and Roo used to set out on the grass in the orchard for dolls’ tea parties, with one of her striped linen dishtowels for a tablecloth, and apple-juice tea and animal crackers.

  And the dollhouse. Once an elegant Colonial mansion, with real turned white wooden bannisters and flowered wallpaper and a pink-and-yellow celluloid fanlight over the door, it looks now as if it had been hit by a hurricane. The roof is unhinged and gaping, the windows sprung out of their frames; furniture an
d rugs and dishes and doll people have been shaken into the corners of the rooms, which are compressed into ugly parallelograms. Gripping the open sides of the house, she tries to straighten it out. But as soon as she lets go, the beaver-board and wood collapse again with a nasty creak.

  Erica feels her head filling with anger and tears. The selfish destructiveness of her daughter, the loss to Celia—and not only Celia, there would have been lots of children, generations of children, who would have been very, very happy to have all those nice toys. Someday, if Wendy’s child had been a girl, and been born, instead of being scraped out of her by some greedy crooked doctor and flushed down a drain in New York—

  Erica sinks onto Matilda’s braided rug, beside the beautiful Colonial dollhouse which Matilda has turned into a broken home—as if one weren’t enough for her. This whole house is a broken home now, she thinks—as if some stupid teenage giant walking over the world had picked it up and then, losing interest, flung it aside. Like Matilda, she doesn’t want to play with it any more; but it is all she has.

  Her head aches with tears and rage, but she mustn’t cry again, it will only exhaust her, and besides it is useless. Even if her broken home could be repaired, she wouldn’t want it now. She doesn’t want her husband back, though the cause for which she sent him away is lost; because who could possibly want someone like that, so selfish and cruel and cowardly and weak and dishonest? What she wants is her old friend Brian Tate, the honorable, strong, brave, kind, generous young man she married. But that is impossible. There is no such person.

  Against our will we are dragged through time, by time. Eventually Matilda will become a woman, and be restored to her; but Jeffrey will grow into a man and join the enemy. Because men are the enemy. The Hens are right about that, if nothing else.

  Erica has been with Danielle to two general meetings of WHEN, which she found mildly interesting, and to a “rap session” sponsored by them, which she found appalling. She agrees with the Hens in principle, but not in practice—politically speaking, she supports their Declaration of Independence, but not most of their Constitution. She isn’t sure, for instance; that she believes in day-care centers. Mothers have a duty to their young children which shouldn’t be made too easy to evade.

  It also seems to Erica that many of the Hens, though they criticize men, are trying to become like them in all the worst ways—taking on their most unpleasant qualities. They are loud, aggressive, competitive: the woman at whose house the rap session was held, for example, talks about female solidarity, but practices the sort of one-upmanship usually seen only in men. If you tell her that Jeffrey won’t pick up his room, she doesn’t reply “So aggravating” or “I know, Billy’s just the same,” but “Oh, really? Billy’s always been very good about that. Maybe it’s because when he was little I began to teach him ... etc.

  Another unpleasant male characteristic many of the Hens display, and which more than anything else has made Erica determined not to meet with them again, is coarseness of speech. They use the sort of language she abhors in her children, but in an even worse way. It is bad enough to hear Jeffrey speak of his “fucking homework” and call his teacher an “ass-kissing idiot”; far worse to hear educated women use these adjectives as verbs to describe actual occurrences—to listen while they speak in clinical detail of matters which should remain private.

  But the whole feminist campaign, in Erica’s opinion, is a mistake. The Hens have identified the enemy correctly, but their battle plan is all wrong. They want to scrap the old code of good manners: they don’t like to have doors and coats held for them, or seats offered on crowded trains. They reject these gestures and all that they imply. But in repulsing the traditional attentions of gentlemen, in refusing to be ladies, they are throwing away their best, perhaps their only defense against the natural selfish brutishness of men. Impulsively and foolishly they are abandoning the elaborate system of fortifications which was built up and maintained by their mothers and grandmothers over centuries.

  Today, everywhere, Erica thinks, men must be laughing uproariously as they see us dismantling our own defenses from within—removing the elaborate barbed-wire entanglements of etiquette, tearing down the modest walls which for so long shielded our privacy, and filling in the moat of chastity with mud. In a provincial academic town like Corinth the destruction of the fortress is not yet far advanced, or very visible. For years, secure in a rather old-fashioned marriage, “Erica was hardly aware of it. But it was going on all the same; now she sees it everywhere.

  The behavior of men to women living alone, for instance. Erica had heard about this from Danielle, but she had misinterpreted it—or rather it had been misinterpreted to her. After Leonard left, a year and a half ago, a series of semidetached husbands began to appear at the Zimmerns’ house, offering to replace him temporarily. Erica had reported this phenomenon, rather indignantly, to Brian. But Brian explained that these men came because Danielle had, explicitly or implicitly, invited them—because she was, as he put it, “broadcasting.” And Erica believed him, because he too was a man.

  But she knows that she is not broadcasting now. The station has gone off the air, perhaps permanently, and yet these same men, or others like them, have begun to appear at her house, ostensibly to borrow tools or bring their children to visit hers. Others have tried appearing in the university building where she now works and suggesting coffee, or, more crudely, driving her home from dinner parties in the wrong direction and then suddenly stopping the car. But though their means differed, their ends were identical. As she said to Danielle, they only wanted one thing. (Danielle’s response, as rather often lately, was not satisfactory: “Hell, I don’t know. I used to think, if they only want one thing, the poor bastards, why not give it to them?”)

  What infuriates Erica most about these men is their patronizing attitude. They all seem to believe, and some have openly, jokingly declared, that they are doing her a favor. When she declines this favor they smile knowingly and renew their attack, for they assume she must be in a state of sexual starvation, and would be grateful for the opportunity to have intercourse with them.

  Needless to say, Erica was not grateful. The surprised politeness with which she had at first received these men’s attentions was quickly replaced by cool disinterest. If they were still not discouraged she showed moral indignation. This was not well received. When Erica explained that she had resolved never to do to another woman what had been done to her, or reminded her suitors that they were married, some of them laughed and asked when she was going to start living in the modern world; others sighed and began to complain in a disgusting way of their wives’ sexual inadequacies. One or two even became sneering: they said or implied that if Erica didn’t want them she must be frigid, and it was no wonder Brian had left her.

  Another thing which dismays Erica is that several of her rejected suitors are the husbands of acquaintances whom she had always believed happily married—who no doubt still think themselves so. She feels a painful sympathy for these deluded women, and it has occurred to her that it might be right to tell them the truth about their husbands, but so far Danielle has dissuaded her. (“Believe me, they won’t thank you. Maybe if it was a real affair they might want to know, some of them.” She smiled cynically. “But not a business like this. Even if they don’t blame you for the whole thing, they’ll dislike you for it, and take your name off their party list. Or else they won’t believe you. Hell, you remember that time Ruth Taylor came around and said she thought I ought to know that Leonard had tried to feel her up at the English department picnic? I practically threw her out of the house.”)

  Erica is still not sure Danielle is right, though. Her friend is negative about everything lately; she has become so bitter that it is almost painful to visit her. Roo and Celia are not happy either. It is going to be a sad Christmas for them. Not only did Leonard refuse to invite them to New York, he has also declined to come to Corinth to see them until after New Year’s Day, claiming that he
has to work on an important article. (“Important article, my foot,” Danielle said. “It’s some girl’s ass that’s the important article.”)

  Moreover, Danielle has just had a very bad experience, one which might have sent a less tough and experienced woman—Erica, for instance—into a nervous collapse. This event had occurred last Friday, when she received an unexpected visit from Dr. Bernard Kotelchuk, the veterinarian who had treated Pogo in September. Dr. Kotelchuk had called occasionally since then to see his former patient and the rest of the Zimmern menagerie; he had become popular with Celia and Roo, who has nicknamed him “St. Bernard.” Erica had met him only once; he appeared to her as a large, doggy, coarse-looking, inarticulate man of about fifty who smelled faintly of disinfectant and was losing his hair.

  Last Friday Dr. Kotelchuk arrived without warning at the peculiar hour of 8:45 a.m., just after Danielle’s children had left for school. He had hardly been in the house ten minutes when, as Danielle put it, “he practically raped me on Roo’s bed with six gerbils watching.” “I fought him off as hard as I could at first,” she told Erica. “It wasn’t so easy: he must weigh about two hundred pounds. I was going to knee him in the groin like in that self-defense book, but then it occurred to me that he had probably saved Pogo’s life, and if he wanted sex that badly, why should I make such a fuss about it? I mean, it didn’t really matter to me; it didn’t hurt or anything. So I stopped fighting him and lay there, and it was just like nothing was happening. The only thing I thought was, Well, at least I’ve still got that loop inside me; I won’t have puppies.”

  Yesterday evening, in answer to Erica’s anxious inquiry, Danielle insisted that she was all over the incident; but Erica doesn’t believe her. No matter how experienced you are, that isn’t the sort of thing you recover from in a few days. And when you are already as badly hurt by men as Danielle has been, it could have lasting psychological effects.