Alison Lurie: The War Between the Tates: A Novel

This conversation, though banal, raises Erica’s morale. It reminds her that she is successfully married, whereas Helen is a widow, and her best friend Danielle Zimmern a divorcée; that Brian is an important professor who receives urgent business letters; and that he calls home every evening when he is out of town.

She is encouraged to stand up, to clear the table and do the dishes and start her day’s work. She picks up the house, skipping the children’s rooms; washes out two sweaters; draws for an hour and a half; and makes herself a chicken sandwich. After lunch she goes shopping and to the bank, driving cautiously, for the sky has darkened again and an icy drizzle is falling from it. Her morale has fallen also, and a parody of Auden, composed by her friend Danielle some years ago, keeps running tediously in her head:

Cleopatra’s lips are kissed

while an unimportant wife

writes “I do not like my life”

underneath her shopping list.

She drives home, puts away the groceries, makes a raspberry mousse, and is mixing some lemon cookies when Danielle’s VW pulls into the driveway.

“What a hell of a day, huh? Spring, it says on the calendar ... Oh, here’s that letter for Brian, before I forget,” Danielle says, stepping out of her slushy boots on the back porch and coming into the kitchen in purple tights.

“Thank you. How is everything?” Erica puts the letter on a shelf in front of her cookbooks without looking at it. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Love it. The kids won’t be home till four, thank God.” Danielle pulls off her coat with the careless, angry energy that has lately marked all her actions, and flings it toward a chair. Twenty years ago, when Erica first met her, she had a similar energy—only then it was not angry, but joyful.

Erica and Danielle had known each other at college, though not intimately—Danielle being a year ahead, and in a different set. After graduation they lost touch; in the autumn of 1964, when Danielle’s husband joined the English department and the family moved to Corinth, Erica was not aware of it, nor did Danielle realize that Erica already lived there. But a few weeks after their accidental meeting at Atwater’s Supermarket, each accompanied by a nine-year-old daughter, it was as if they had remained friends uninterruptedly.

Danielle, like Erica, has been described by her admirers as tall, dark-haired and beautiful. But where Erica is narrow, in the shoulders and hips, Danielle is broad; she is deep-bosomed, and stands on sturdy baroque legs. Her hair is long, heavy and straight, with a russet overtone; her skin has a russet glow even in the northern winter, when Erica bleaches to the color of cream. People who do not much like Erica admit that she is pretty, while those (a larger number) who do not much like Danielle admit that she is good-looking.

In college they had avoided each other slightly, as women who are attractive in conflicting styles often do—for the same motive that prevents Atwater’s Supermarket from placing cases of ice cream and sherbet next to cartons of beer. But now that they had both been purchased and brought home, this ceased to matter.

That first day Erica accompanied Danielle back to her house and stayed there, drinking coffee and talking, for two hours. Soon they met or telephoned almost daily. Erica recommended to Danielle her pediatrician, her garage, her cleaning woman, and those of her acquaintances she thought worthy of the privilege. They lent each other books, and went with their children to fairs and matinées and rummage sales. Muffy Tate and Ruth Zimmern (known as Roo) also became inseparable.

Equally agreeable, and more surprising, was the friendship that developed between Brian and Leonard Zimmern. For years, both Erica and Danielle had had the problem that their husbands did not get on very well with any of their friends’ husbands. Now they realized, with relief, that this was not due to prejudice or character defects. It was merely that men of their age (Leonard was then forty-three, Brian forty-one) could not be expected to become intimate with the fledgling editors, lawyers, artists, teachers, etc., whom their wives’ friends had married.

Since they were in different divisions of the university Leonard and Brian could not share the concerns of colleagues; but this very fact prevented competitive jockeying and the tendency to talk shop on social occasions, so tiresome to wives. Neither could hinder or further the other’s career; so they were able to risk disagreement, to speak their minds freely. The differences of temperament and background which had made Erica and Danielle fear they would quarrel actually endeared the men to each other—and to themselves. Leonard congratulated himself on a range of interests and sympathies that allowed him to get on with a WASP political scientist, while Brian felt the same in reverse. Moreover, the existence of the friendship proved to both men that any revulsion they might feel from some of the pushy New York Jews or fat-ass goyim bastards they ran up against professionally was ad hominem and not ad genere.

Even the fact that Danielle did not really care for Brian; and that Erica, though she liked Leonard, found him physically unattractive (too thin, and with too much wiry black hair all over his body) helped to stabilize the relationship. The sort of complications which often occur when two couples spend much time together were avoided almost unconsciously, by mutual consent.

“I see they’re at it again.” Danielle gestures with her head at the field next door. The bulldozer has now made what looks like an incurable muddy wound there, with the white roots of small trees sticking up from it like broken bones. “I thought maybe they wouldn’t come back this year, the way building costs are rising.”

“That’s what I hoped, too.”

“What you should do, you should plant some evergreens; then you won’t have to look at it.”

“I’d still know it was there.” Erica smiles sadly.

“Or you could put up a redwood fence,” continues Danielle, who has learned since Leonard’s departure to take a practical view of things and cut her losses. “That’d be faster. And if you did it now, before the people moved in, they couldn’t take it personally.”

“Mm,” Erica says noncommittally, pouring her friend a cup of coffee. Redwood fences, in her view, are almost as bad as ranch houses.

“Thanks.” Danielle sits down, spreading her full purple tweed skirt. “You’ve been drawing,” she remarks, glancing into the pantry, where Erica’s pad lies open on the shelf. “Let’s see.”

“Just sketching. I was trying to work out something for the Ballet Group; Debby asked me to do a program for their spring show. Freezy, of course.”

“That’s slick.” When alone, Danielle and Erica use the language of their college years; the once enthusiastic phrases have become a sort of ironic shorthand.

“Virginia Carey is doing the poster, but she told them she hadn’t time for the program.”

“Yeah, man.” Among the old slang, Danielle, since she started teaching, mixes that of the present generation.

“I don’t mind really. I’m better on a small-scale. I know that.”

“There’s one thing about posters: they get thrown away,” Danielle says encouragingly. “People save their programs for years.” Erica does not reply or smile. “Maybe you should do another book.”

“I don’t know,” Erica sighs, stirs her coffee. In the past she had written and illustrated three books dealing with the adventures of an ostrich named Sanford who takes up residence with an American suburban family. These books had been published and had enjoyed a mild success. (“Gentle and perceptive fun for the 4-6 age group”; “The drawings are lively, delicate, and colorful.”) But the last of the series had appeared over two years ago. Erica does not want to write any more about Sanford. For one thing, she cannot think of anything else for him to do. And she does not want to write any more about Mark and Spencer, the children with whom Sanford lives. She knows that they would have grown up by now, and what they would be like.