The War Between the Tates: A Novel (37 page)

The doors bangs open, admitting two more of Linda’s friends: a pretty, sturdy girl with a Jewish Afro hairdo, and a bearded young man. Both are already known to Brian: the young man is the graduate student in physics named Mark who used to live downstairs. He now lives in a commune with the girl, Jenny, a Corinth undergraduate with whom he is having a relationship, but not a really meaningful one. As Wendy has explained to Brian, “In a relationship you’re just screwing the guy. In a meaningful relationship you’re screwing him and also he’s your best friend.”

“Hiya, everybody.” Jenny pulls a poncho over her bushy head. Beneath it she is dressed in a style Brian recognizes but still finds odd. Unlike Wendy, with her mixed East-West Indian costume, Jenny and most of her undergraduate friends get themselves up as poor cowboys and dirt farmers. They wear heavy boots and faded, patched jeans, with a man’s shirt or sweater. For parties the sweater is replaced by a fancy low-necked blouse trimmed with lace or bright embroidery; necklaces and long earrings are added. But the jeans and the boots remain, making these girls look mismatched at the waist, like the cardboard figures in a game Brian had as a small child.

“How’s everything?” Linda raises a limp bony arm and hand from the floor, where she is lying prone.

“Lousy.” Jenny waves away the joint one of the other-guests has offered her and sits down next to Brian, reaching for a can of beer. “I’m really disgusted at this university.”

“Oh, yeh?” Brian shifts position, relieving the weight on his leg, and turns toward Jenny with pleasure—not only because she is very pretty, but because he may now hear something of interest. Also, he may be able to help. In the last few months he has counseled Wendy’s friends on a variety of problems: academic foul-ups, hassles with landlords, job applications, draft resistance. His advice is valuable to them, partly because of his greater knowledge of university procedures, partly because of his greater experience of the world. “What’s happening?”

Jenny frowns as she pulls open her beer can, but is silent.

“It’s that man in your department, that Professor Dibble,” Mark explains. “He sort of keeps insulting women in his lectures.”

“Not sort of,” Jenny says. “He does it blatantly.”

“Ah.” Brian is familiar with this problem; more, he is in a sense responsible for it. It was he after all, who last Thanksgiving suggested to a hitchhiker that she enroll in Dibble’s course. Sara had not only acted on the recommendation, she had passed it on to friends and members of her commune. As a result, at least three militantly feminist students are taking Poly Sci 202. They have not found Dibble sympathetic, nor he them; Brian has already heard complaints from both sides.

“I figured he was going to be bad when we got to the Nineteenth Amendment, but I didn’t think he’d be this bad. I mean, he’s really a fascist chauvinist pig. Some of the things he’s said, I didn’t think I’d ever hear them in an American university; they sound like
Mein Kampf.
And you can’t reason with him.”

“You’ve tried?”

“Oh yeh. Pat and Sara tried to talk to him after class, and I went to his office twice this week. The first time he wouldn’t even speak to me because he had some meeting, and yesterday he made me wait about half an hour and then gave me five minutes. And he was like really insulting. He said he was surprised an attractive young woman like me should be associated with such a foolish cause.” Jenny imitates Dibble’s supercilious look and prissy manner, then scowls darkly. Neither expression is able to disguise beauty so remarkable that even a woman-hater like Dibble was aware of it—the full young mouth, the very full young breasts unconfined in the flimsy embroidered blouse.

“Disgusting,” caws Linda, of whom such an insulting remark will never be made. “You know what you ought to do, you ought to stop going to his class.”

“That’s what Pat said. She thinks we should just drop the course and write Dean Kane telling why. But I don’t know. It seems like sort of futile to me. I thought maybe we should try to organize a boycott.” She turns to Brian. “We could call a meeting of the women in the course and try to get them all to cut class, and send a letter to the
Star
about it. What do you think? But why wouldn’t that work?” (for Brian is shaking his head).

“It’s wrong politically,” he explains. “Negative tactics. Let me ask you one question: What do you want from Dibble?”

Jenny takes a breath, raising her breasts. “We want him to listen to us, and stop saying denigrating things about women, and apologize publicly—at least correct the lies, like when he told the class that women’s IQ stops at age twelve, and—”

“Exactly,” Brian interrupts. “But Dibble doesn’t listen to you, and he won’t pay any more attention to a letter to the
Star.
And I doubt it will help if you cut class. How many girls, excuse me, women”—he smiles at Jenny—“are there in 202?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe twenty.”

“And how many of them would join you, do you think?”

“All of them, I hope,” she says warmly. “Or almost all. There’s always a few Aunt Toms in every bunch.”

“Hm. But all right. Suppose you did get real cooperation. I know Don Dibble. He wouldn’t care if every female student quit his courses. And he’d be quite happy to fail ten or fifteen of you for unexcused absence. Or at least lower your grades. No.” Brian shakes his head once more decisively. “There’s no point in removing women from the course. What you want to do is bring in
more
women.” He glances around; everyone looks puzzled except Jenny.

“You mean, we should ask our friends to come to class—a whole lot of them—fill up the room.” She rises to her knees, the light of battle beginning to shine in her big brown eyes. “I get it! Then when Dibble starts his stuff we can all look angry-groan and hiss—interrupt even—stamp our feet—” She laughs eagerly.

“That’s right.” Brian smiles at Jenny, thinking that she has a lively mind and, for one so young, a good grasp of the principles of political action. Then he looks down at Wendy, whose face is still clouded with incomprehension. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that if he had consciously set out to leave his wife for a student, he could have done better in terms of both brains and looks.

“You can get everyone you know,” Linda says, sitting up. “I’ll come, and I could ask Marilyn—”

“More than that,” Jenny interrupts. “I’ll go to the next WHEN meeting and ask for volunteers. Then we can organize them into shifts, and have signals—It’s a great idea. Wow, thanks!” She turns toward Brian and suddenly embraces him, kissing his cheek; her large warm breasts are briefly pressed against his shirt.

“You’re welcome.”

“Fantastic,” Wendy seconds adoringly, embracing and kissing him from the other side. Brian hugs her back; but he cannot help noting the physical contrast, and wondering why, for the second time in his life, he has become involved with a relatively flat-chested woman. It is not as if he preferred small breasts. But his life is not over yet. Perhaps eventually he and Jenny ...

“It’s easy for Brian. He only has to see them once a week.” Erica stops, hearing the shrill complaining tone of her own voice.

“Ah.” Zed hands her a mug of mint tea.

“He never disciplines them,” Erica continues, for after all she has to complain to someone. “He just takes them out to dinner and lets them order whatever they want: pies, Coke, steak sandwiches and greasy French fries; he never makes them have milk, or vegetables. So of course they think he’s keen.” Holding her mug, she sits down on the thin, lumpy day bed in the back room of the Krishna Bookshop. “I know all about it, from my own childhood.”

“Mm.” Zed has perched opposite her on the rubber top of a kitchen stepladder, with his worn tweed jacket hung around his shoulders like the wings of a skinny bald bird.

“Only in my case it was worse. I hardly ever saw my father after he went into the Canadian Army; so I not only preferred him, I thought of him as an ideal hero. All through high school, whenever I was unhappy or felt my life was unjust, I had fantasies of how he would come to rescue me. Or sometimes I imagined how I would go to England or France or Canada to find him, and we would have a romantic reunion.”

“And then, when he came back?” Zed prompts after a pause.

“He didn’t really. He came less and less; after I was fourteen, not at all. I pretended to the girls at school that he did, though, sometimes,” she adds, looking down. Then she looks up, but his expression has not changed—it is still gentle, impartial.

“I went to see him once,” she continues. “It was in spring vacation, my second year at college. I told my mother and everybody that I was invited to visit a friend in Detroit. Then I bought a bus ticket to Ontario, and wrote and told him I was coming, too late for him to stop me. Or really, too late for his wife Myra to stop me; I’d decided that it was all her fault, that she’d been keeping us apart for years, saying spiteful things against me, even tearing up the letters I wrote him every Christmas and birthday, which would explain why he never answered.”

“And how was it when you saw him?” Zed asks after another pause.

“It was awful ...Not that he was any of the things my mother said—he wasn’t hateful, or cruel, or cold-hearted, or neurotic. But he seemed to be ... I don’t know ... a Canadian. A middle-aged Canadian businessman, with a large wife and three small children. Quite good-looking—I knew that already; I’d always thought of him as the handsomest man in the world. But he was a lot older than his photographs; and he was tired, and worried, and not very successful or well-educated. He didn’t read much. He liked watching hockey, and camping—Nothing to do with me, that was the main thing. But there I was.” She laughs, not very successfully.

“At first it was really terrible. My father and Myra thought I must have come to ask for money, so they were very stiff and cautious, and took pains to show me how hard up they were—cotton-flannel sheets on the bed, and corned-beef hash for dinner, and a lot of talk I didn’t understand about Canadian taxes. Once they found out it wasn’t that they were nicer to me, but puzzled. When I left two days early they were very relieved, and even friendly. They took my picture in front of the house and gave me a box of maple-sugar candy in the shape of maple leaves, each in a little green pleated paper cup.”

“I bet you didn’t eat it.”

“No.” Erica laughs. “I gave the whole box to Marian when I got home.”

“Did you tell her where it came from?”

“I never told anyone.” She laughs again briefly, like a cough. “I felt too stupid, going all that way for nothing ...That last night, in their spare room—only they didn’t have a spare room, it was the oldest boy’s really, with newspaper-supplement photographs of Canadian sports stars tacked to the wallpaper—I thought—I lay awake, and I thought that the reason my father never came back to rescue me all those years was, he didn’t want to.” Her voice is strained. “He didn’t want the responsibility of children. He was really more or less a child himself.”

“Yes.”

“And I lay there in the bed, sort of diagonally across it because it was too short, one of those youth beds; and I made up my mind then that I would never be like that; and I would never marry anyone like that, anyone who wasn’t dependable and grown up, no matter how handsome and nice he was ...Oh, Sandy. Please don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“But you know, Brian wasn’t like my father when I married him,” Erica insists, sitting forward on the day bed. “He was serious, and responsible. I don’t know what happened.” She looks down into her mug of mint tea. “He changed. I suppose people do change.”

A silence. Then Zed says, “Brian didn’t change. He’s always been the same. A typical double Capricorn; he needs to appear responsible and serious in the eyes of the world. But most people are like that. They want to look good. You’re eccentric; you want to be good.”

“I’m not eccentric,” Erica exclaims, setting down her mug. “I’m quite a conventional person really. At least, I’ve certainly never thought of myself as unconventional.” She gives the last word, which was one of her mother’s terms of praise, a particular bitter intonation.

“Oh, Erica.” Zed does laugh now, out loud. “Don’t give me that. The conventional thing for you would have been to refuse to divorce Brian and refuse to speak to Wendy.”

This speech seems a little overfamiliar, even rude. But Erica decides to excuse it; after all, Sandy is a very old friend. “Maybe so,” she says. “At least, that’s what I guess Brian expected me to do. Really, what I think he wanted was to keep us both,” she adds.

“He would.” The tone in which Zed utters this reminds Erica of what she has once or twice thought: that Sandy not only does not care very much for Brian, but for some reason actually hates him. “With his Capricorn moon where it is.”

Erica does not comment. She frowns slightly, sits back. “Do you really believe all that?” she asks, in a cooler voice. “About the movements of the stars influencing people’s lives?”

“Not the stars, the planets.” Zed also shifts position: he moves his feet to the top of his ladder and rests his elbows on his knees.

“But it seems so deterministic.” She smiles now, glad to have changed the subject. “I look at the horoscope column in the paper sometimes—I suppose everyone does—and it’s always about how if you’re born in September, you’re very fussy and critical, and you can’t do anything about it, especially not on Wednesdays.”

“Those daily columns are a fraud. Dangerous, even; most serious astrologers despise them. The point of astrology is that every individual is unique. Of course, there’s fate—your planets—but there’s also human will. You can’t reverse your nature, but you can use it for better or worse. That’s very comforting; it provides both encouragement and an excuse, whichever you need at the time.”

“Yes.” Erica laughs. “But all the same—What good does it do, really?”

Zed smiles at her between his long narrow hands. “You’re still asking that. I remember back in Cambridge it was one of the things about you that most impressed me. I was less morally ambitious than you, even then. I didn’t aspire to do good; that seemed too difficult. I only wanted not to do harm.” He sighs. “Even that—I think sometimes I ought to close this place down and just do charts.”