Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“You worry too much,” Brian remarks, sitting down and taking up the Village Voice where he left off. Erica does not reply. Silence.

It is night out now. Brian turns a page; its shadow flaps slowly across the table. Hearing another sigh, he looks up at his wife. She is staring into the middle distance out of eyes circled in muted blue.

Now Erica turns her head. For a moment their eyes meet; then both look down. Erica knows that Brian knows what she is thinking about, and he knows she knows he knows. This mutual knowledge is like a series of infinitely disappearing darkening ugly reflections in two opposite mirrors. But if he asks her what she is thinking, she will not admit it. She knows that he does not want to ask her anyhow; he does not want to bring up the subject again. And she knows she must not bring it up. So they say nothing. There is nothing to say.

4

A HAZY, HOT SATURDAY afternoon in September. Erica is at Danielle Zimmern’s, where she has gone in response to an agitated phone call. The Zimmerns’ dog, Pogo, has been hurt in a dogfight and rushed to the vet. Danielle and Roo are still anxiously waiting with her there, and someone ought to be in the house when Celia comes back from the children’s film show. So, leaving her own children with Brian, who was not pleased, Erica has driven over.

Now, sitting but not rocking in a Victorian plush rocker, she looks around the living room. It is the first time she has been alone there since the days when she and Danielle used to exchange baby-sitting. The furniture is still in the same places; the squashy old sofa and chairs upholstered in green plush; the geometric-patterned Oriental rug bought at a house sale by Leonard—its worn spots cleverly recolored by Danielle, Erica, Muffy and Roo with felt markers one winter afternoon years ago.

The rug still glows red and gold where faint oblongs of sun lie on it; the window is still laced green with climbing and trailing plants. But the room seems both more disordered and barer. Much more wall shows through the shelves beside the fireplace; half the records have gone with Leonard, and more than half the books. An early painting by Roo of a blue-striped cat browsing among giant tulips has been fixed with masking tape over the mantel in place of Leonard’s Piranesi, and the mantelpiece itself is littered with letters and plants and sewing as it would never have been when he lived there.

But though Danielle’s house has changed externally with the departure of her husband, it remains in other ways more comfortable and familiar than Erica’s own, which is physically unaltered. It is not occupied territory: Danielle’s children have not yet become unfriendly aliens. Celia, of course, is only eight—a sensible, serious child, not old enough to become an alien. And Roo, though now thirteen, still scorns adolescent culture and is interested only in her animals. Erica, who likes most children, gets on with them as well as ever; that is, exceptionally well. She feels a deep affection especially for Celia, whom she has known since the age of four.

Now that Leonard is gone, Danielle and her daughters live together in moderate harmony broken by brief rebellious skirmishes. Once or twice a week there is a conflict of interests: an outbreak of shouting and/or tears; then the loser retires from the field. Celia withdraws to her room; Roo barricades herself in the basement with her hamsters, her turtles, her fighting fish, Pogo, and any other livestock currently in residence. If Danielle loses, which happens more rarely, she retreats to her campus office.

“Hell they’re no better than your kids, they can be really impossible,” Danielle had said inaccurately but kindly two weeks ago. “But when I can’t take it, I just go up to school.” She set down her coffee mug and looked across the kitchen table at Erica. “That’s what you need, to get out of your house sometimes,” she pronounced. “You need a job.”

And after additional discussion, Erica had agreed that Danielle might be right. Very possibly she would enjoy working part-time; she would make more money than she did doing occasional artwork. But above all it would be a distraction, and she needed distraction. She spent too much time brooding about the children, and about what Brian had done last spring. She knew she ought to make some effort to distract herself from this henlike brooding: to, as it were, get up off the nest and stop incubating her grudge, her despair.

“If you were working, you wouldn’t have so much time to worry about Jeffrey and Matilda,” Danielle said; she did not mention the other egg, since Erica had never told her about it. She had not done so because she knew too well what Danielle would say when she heard of Brian’s infidelity: how warmly she would welcome Erica to the shabby fellowship of mistreated wives; how coldly she would speak of Brian, whom she had never liked much in spite of his friendship with Leonard, and now liked less because of it.

At Danielle’s suggestion, Erica went to the university employment office, and was offered employment doing library research three days a week for a professor of psychology named J. D. Barclay. She assumed Brian would approve, for at various times in the past he had suggested she might look for a job. But this time his reaction was negative.

“No, I don’t like the idea, not at all,” he almost shouted. “I’m amazed that you should commit yourself to something like this without discussing it with me.” Calming down, Brian explained to Erica exactly how inconvenient it would be to the whole family if she were to start working now. The house and children would suffer from the diversion of her time and energy, he pointed out, and Erica herself would suffer. Being both delicate and conscientious, she would wear herself out, possibly even become ill.

Besides, Brian said, this job was beneath her—routine academic drudgery. And she did not really need the money; she would be taking work away from some graduate student who did. Moreover, he finally admitted, smiling, he disliked the idea of her working for John Barclay. Not that he was jealous, Brian said—and they both laughed, for J. D. Barclay was a fat, fussy elderly man with very little hair. But he was convinced that Barclay had offered Erica the job because she was his wife. It would amuse someone like Barclay, who was definitely not a friend of Brian’s, to have Brian’s attractive wife working for him, and be able to order her around.

The intensity of Brian’s reaction, the number of his arguments, surprised Erica; it also pleased her For the first time in many weeks her husband was really looking at her and talking to her about something which was not household business or a current event. He was smiling at her, laughing with her, telling her that she was dedicated, attractive and superior to drudgery. She had better things to do with her time, he said, than check Barclay’s references; and presently he led her upstairs and proved it, with a considerate attention he had not shown in months.

Afterward, as they lay in bed, Erica told Brian that he was probably right. Upon reflection, next morning, the idea that she was not after all going to work for Mr. Barclay did not trouble her; but she felt regret that the discussion with her husband was over. She would have liked to continue longer; she began to wonder if it might somehow be resumed.

The following day Erica reported to Danielle that she was not going to take the job. She had been impressed not only by the logic of Brian’s arguments, she said, but by the evident strength of his feeling. It was obvious that he wanted her not to work much more than she wanted to work.

Danielle’s response was immediate and indignant. If Erica wanted to work at all, she announced, she had a right to; wasn’t it her life? It was not her obligation to consider the unconscious motives of J. D. Barclay or the financial needs of hypothetical graduate students. As for the domestic problem, if Erica was making $2.50 an hour she could hire someone else to clean the house and do the laundry, couldn’t she?