The War Between the Tates: A Novel (32 page)

“I should think so.”

“He was pretty surprised too. But appreciative. He wants to take me out to dinner tonight at the Gables.” Danielle half laughs.

“Are you going?”

“Hell, sure. Who would turn down a meal at the Gables?”

“I don’t know,” Erica replies, thinking that she would, but trying not to let any note of disapproval into the tune of her voice. She reminds herself that the men with whom Danielle was briefly involved after Leonard left also had faults. Some were opportunistic, others neurotic. But at least they were all presentable, intelligent men: lawyers, artists, professors—not Polish veterinarians.

“Of course I can’t really talk to him,” Danielle adds, as if she had heard Erica’s thoughts. “If I mention anything I’m teaching, he just looks dumb. And politically he’s hopeless: a grass-roots agrarian populist. But hell, I’m sick of talking to men. Once you start talking to them the next thing is you begin to get emotionally involved, and I’m not interested in getting involved with any man. I don’t have to worry about that with Bernie, because he doesn’t want it either. Basically he’s a pretty domestic type, even kind of romantic. He’ll probably end up with one of those nice women out in Brookdale. But right now he’s not ready for that; his wife has only been dead about a year. It’s just a physical thing between us: I need it and he needs it, and that’s all.

“Mm,” Erica comments, thinking in spite of herself that Brian last spring had used almost these same phrases to describe his feelings toward Wendy.

“And I really don’t like masturbation,” Danielle confides in a lower voice. “I tried it a few times, but I could never get much out of it. I couldn’t come or anything; I just always felt nervous and silly, you know?”

“Mm,” repeats Erica, who has had the opposite experience.

“Bernie and I talked it over,” Danielle continues. “I told him, no sentimental lies, no commitments, no promises.” She pushes her heavy dark hair back and her jaw forward.

“I see.” Erica knows that Danielle wants her to accept, if not approve, this plan of finding temporary sexual gratification with Bernie Kotelchuk. But how can she? It is so flat, so grossly practical—as if Danielle were to announce: “I want a piece of meat, so I’m going to the grocery.” Better, surely, to make out with what is already in the cupboard, or to become a vegetarian.

But she is anxious not to hurt her friend’s feelings, so she says something vague, and then, inventing a dentist’s appointment, declares that she must leave, in order to prevent herself from saying anything more—or worse, having to meet Bernie Kotelchuk. In a flurry of false haste, she scrambles on her coat and boots and scarf and gloves and literally runs from the house. She starts the car fast and, in case Danielle is looking, heads it downtown.

It is a heavy, cold, unattractive afternoon; the clouds hang close over the bare trees, like a huge sodden canvas tent; the wind, still blowing hard, beats and slaps the empty branches about. Erica feels like weeping for Danielle, who has been so beaten about and exploited by men—and by her own dependence on them. Gripping the cold wheel with her driving gloves, she promises herself that she will never, never let herself be so exploited. In spite of herself her eyes begin to fill with tears. Never, never—

She stops for a red light, blinking. She is downtown now, but what is she doing there? There must be something useful, some errands, or Christmas shopping. In the past Erica had always finished this task by the first week of December, but this year she is far behind, partly because she can’t decide what to get for anyone, especially the children. Brian told her yesterday that he is thinking of buying them each an expensive AM/FM radio, something she considers quite unnecessary, indeed an ill concealed bribe. Not to mention the additional noise these radios will cause in the house, where of course Brian is not living at the moment.

Brian feels guilty toward Jeffrey and Matilda, but not any longer toward Erica. He thinks he has done her a favor by arranging the murder of Wendy’s child, and he proposes to do her another soon by moving back into her house and bedroom. For surely that is what he had in mind last night when he said they must have a serious discussion soon. Like her unwanted suitors, he would be first incredulous and then abusive if she said she didn’t want him; that she doesn’t want to live in the modern world with a modern man.

But she cannot sit crying in traffic. Perhaps if she were to park and walk past the stores ... and there is a space across from the post office. She backs into it, gets out, walks away—then returns and feeds a series of pennies into the metallic head of the parking meter. Jeffo and Muffy used to love to do this for her when they were little; they loved the story she had invented for them about how all the meters in town belonged to a big family of underground aluminum giraffes, and late at night when nobody was looking they would pull their heads back down through the pavement and play together under the city. But the last time she had referred to this fancy, about a year ago, she had been badly snubbed: “Oh, Mother, must you be so stupid?”

The giraffe smacks its cold metal lips on each coin,
pst, pst, pst,
and sticks its round metal tongue farther out. Erica walks away from it toward Main Street, looking into shop windows. But instead of useful purchases, everything reminds her of what she wants to forget: a real estate office “Photo Gallery of Desirable Homes”; in the window of the savings bank, fourth-grade clay artifacts from the school Muffy and Jeffo once attended, where they had made the same loving lopsided bowls and glazed blue animals for her; the gift-shop display of Great Artists’ Puzzles, featuring a Renaissance nativity in sawed-up wooden fragments.

Across the street it gets worse. The department-store windows are vindictively symbolic: on one side an imitation ideal family—hers of five years ago—in matching ski outfits sprinkled with soap flakes; on the other, four grinning young people in party clothes. The display case flanking the front entrance is full of men’s shoes and boots drawn up in rows at different levels, decorated with argyle socks and plastic holly. They are glossy, heavy-soled, brutally new, ready to stamp and kick and tread on women—

She is not right today, in her head. It is abnormal to feel referred to and mocked and threatened by window displays. That is paranoia, delusions of reference. She must go into the store like a normal person and buy something. But after waiting for fifteen minutes at a counter, elbowed and shoved by other shoppers, only to learn that they are out of Matilda’s size in skating tights except for Baby Pink, Erica has a feeling of exhaustion and revulsion and leaves the store. She walks away from the happy plastic family, taking deep breaths of the clammy December air and trying to calm herself.

Main Street has been elaborately adorned for the holiday season, with garlands of sham grass-green fir and colored bulbs looped from one lamppost to the next, and fat red and silver letters spelling MERRY CHRISTMAS hung across the street. The store windows are also decorated, but in two contrasting styles. As Sandy said last week, two different deities are worshiped in America at this time of year; and each Corinth merchant has chosen which he will enthrone. Some windows, therefore, feature nativity scenes, softly lit and trimmed with straw, silver-paper icicles, and stars: homage to nature, rural simplicity and maternal love.

But most of the shopowners prefer another god. They have erected altars, not to a poor young woman and her baby, but to a rich fat old man. In spite of his evident high spirits, he has certain unpleasant characteristics. He is not especially kind to animals, for instance. The family in the bookstore window share their lodgings affectionately with two Steiff cows and a donkey; but in the stationer’s next door a life-size cardboard cutout shows the old man wearing a velvet suit trimmed with animal fur. He has large leather boots too, and cracks a long whip over the flanks of his team. He does not favor the working classes, but brings most of his gifts to the rich. He is a pagan God—Jove, perhaps—whose worshipers have placed his image before their shops to bring not spiritual blessings, but material abundance. At the same time he is also Bacchus: look at the heavy belly, the red drunkard’s complexion; hear his manic laugh, which is broadcast continually by a speaker over the entrance of the cut-rate drugstore: “aHo Ho Ho! aHo Ho Ho!” And he has a good reason for his merriment: he has won now, he has defeated the Virgin and Child, and is on his way to Erica’s house with his sleigh full of unnecessary expensive objects.

But does she have to let him in? Can it be right, really, to take back into her house the sort of Santa Claus that Brian has proved himself to be? If she allows it, she is condoning all he has done; she becomes an accessory after the fact to his crimes. And what about the moral effect on Jeffrey and Matilda? What about poor Wendy; how will she feel, having made this sacrifice?

Besides, there is Brian’s work. He needs time alone in order to finish his Great Book, and if he does not get it he will eventually blame her and the children, even if it is not their fault but his own.

No, no, Erica thinks, turning and walking back up Main Street, almost the one person empty-handed in the crowd of package-laden Christmas shoppers. Brian must not move back into the house. She must prevent it, for his own sake, and the children’s sake, and Wendy’s. It will be difficult: he will try to persuade her, to reason with her. He will speak of his affection for her, his duty to The Children; of the relation between broken homes and school failure. He will try to make her feel guilty.

But she must not listen. She must lock her doors against him, even literally if necessary (it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have the locks changed), and if he tries to get down her chimney, she must build up the fire.

E
ARLY MARCH. IN CORINTH
it is still winter; week after week cold clouds hang over the town like wet dirty laundry. A rare bright morning may release some mud and a few crocus shoots, but the air remains raw; every night the earth freezes hard.

Out on Tones Creek Road the Tates’ lawn is still spread with lumpy layers of crusted snow like an ill-frosted birthday cake—the one Erica made for Jeffrey this week, for instance—and a damp gusty wind wheezes across it at the house, as if a large child with a bad cold were trying to blow out the lights. Erica can feel this wind up in her bedroom, where she is dressing for Danielle’s party.

She has just recovered from a bad cold herself, one which began over a month ago and hung on, with headache, sniffles, clogged nasal passages and loss of appetite. She would have got over it if she could have stayed in bed for two or three days, Erica feels sure; but a woman living alone with children cannot stay in bed even for one day.

Tonight will be the first time in more than a month that she has attended a formal social event—both from choice and because she hasn’t been asked out much lately. Even when she is well, going to parties alone is difficult—especially since Christmas, when the weather turned bad and physical problems (icy roads, stalled cars, children sick at home) were added to the social ones. More and more, it has come to seem not worth the effort.

At the same time there have been fewer parties for Erica to go to. For a month or so after Brian left she was a local tragic heroine—or at least a disaster victim; she had more invitations than she could accept. Now the flurry of sympathetic and curious attention has died down, and she is just another single woman, easy to overlook when making up a list—especially if she declined your last invitation. There are already too many extra women in Corinth: spinsters, widows, ex-wives. One cannot have them all at once; they must take turns, and be grateful.

An extra man, on the other hand, is always welcome. Erica suspects, though she has no evidence, that she has been left out of many parties because people are having Brian instead. And why not? He is more successful than she, more important, better company because he is in better spirits—even, in a way, nicer. The most depressing discovery Erica has made in the past four months is that ill fortune is bad for people’s character. It makes it harder to be good-natured, either in word or deed. Sometimes she hears what hardly sounds like her own voice nagging the children or complaining to Danielle, and is horrified—and how often does she not hear it?

Ill fortune makes it harder to do anything creative, like cooking a birthday dinner for Jeffrey, or working on her painting. As for the book about the white hare, she has had to put that aside completely. The idea of being alone in the country in the winter, which seemed so lovely last autumn, has become a cold, exhausting reality of clogged driveways, frozen engines and overlapping family flu.

Dressed in a blue-lace bra-slip, Erica stands frowning in front of the bedroom closet, trying to decide what to wear to the party. There is not much choice, though for years this closet was overcrowded. Now it is not only Brian’s things that are gone; Matilda has permanently borrowed many of her mother’s clothes. It is a year since Erica bought a new party dress, and none of the old ones seem right for the occasion. The pretty mauve-and-brown plaid is now unfashionably long, the black wool too plain and gloomy. Both the paisley print and the glossy brown silk are too low-cut for her present circumstances: décolleté on a wife merely enhances a husband’s reputation; on an ex-wife, it vulgarly proclaims availability. If the wearer is not yet divorced, or even legally separated, that only makes it worse: by baring her flesh she is inviting all comers to adultery rather than simple fornication.

Erica has been stuck in this uneasy, embarrassing state, this limbo between married and single, for four months. Not on purpose: she is eager to be unwed, to be disconnected from what Brian has become. She knows couples—for instance, the Zimmerns—who have gone through months of legal and financial squabbling and seemed to enjoy it. But Erica has always despised such squabbling. She does not want to argue about who pays the auto insurance or the orthodontist’s bills. Besides, there is no need to argue about such matters. Erica knows that her proposals for a settlement are very reasonable, even generous—because her lawyer, a lady named Gara Dickson, has told her so.