Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“You’re ruining my Stones record!” Matilda wails, snatching the tone arm off.

“And you’re ruining your hearing, playing the phonograph so loud, do you realize that?” he retorts. “I’ve already told you, and I’m sure your mother—”

“I can hear better than you can,” Matilda interrupts spitefully, turning her back on Brian and continuing with her make-up.

“That’s not the point, Matilda. It’s a gradual process.” No response; his daughter is frowning close into the mirror, blackening her brows and lengthening them until they meet above her snub nose in a hag’s scowl. “Your hearing may be all right now, but if you don’t take care of it, by the time you’re my age you may be sorry.” No response. Matilda begins to smear her other eyelid with blue grease. Presently, when both eyes are spiders, she will go out with a shopping bag and show them to the whole neighborhood. “You know, Muffy, a witch doesn’t have to be grotesque. You’re an attractive young girl; I should think you’d want to look pretty when you go out trick-or-treating.”

Though he has spoken mildly, Matilda’s reaction is a howl. “Aw, cowplop! What’s the good of trying to look pretty, long as I’ve got these?” She rounds on him, grinning fiendishly to reveal a mouthful of metal braces laced with damp rubber bands. “And I’m not going trick-or-treating. What do you think I am, a baby?”

“Then what are you dressed up like that for?”

“I’m invited to Elsie’s slumber party.”

“Oh? And what is a slumber party?”

“Don’t you even know that? You have a party, and then you sleep overnight.”

“Overnight? You’re too young to stay overnight.”

“Mom said I could.” Matilda pulls the bottom lid of her right eye down hideously while she lines it in black crayon.

“Well, I say you can’t.” Brian makes a mental note to speak to Erica. If she gave any such consent, it must have been in a moment of distraction. “If you want to go out in the neighborhood that’s all right, as long as you’re home by nine,” he adds generously.

“But I already told Elsie I’m coming!” His daughter’s voice rises steeply.

“Then you’ll have to tell her you’re not.” Under the witch’s hat and hair, Matilda’s pudgy thirteen-year-old face takes on the foul expression she has painted onto it. “I don’t have to do what you tell me,” she declares. “You’re not my boss.” As if to prove this she squats down in her black skirt and restarts the phonograph.

“No, but I’m your father, and I want—” Brian begins, but he is shouted down by sex-crazed voices as the volume rises: “AWAH BOOM BOOM GOTCHA!” He is aware that he should turn the machine off again, should carry the battle with his daughter through, but a feeling of disgust and exhaustion has overtaken him. Erica is responsible for this insurrection; let her handle it. He turns and leaves the room.

As he descends the stairs, pursued by the lewd shouting and panting, he thinks how when he first met Erica her two favorite albums were the Bach double-violin concerto and some old English ballads sung to a dulcimer, of which he remembers best a song about a fair maid who followed her true-love to the wars. He can remember Erica shyly and eagerly setting the heavy waxy old black 78s on a wheezy phonograph in the living room of her Radcliffe dormitory for him to hear. She would go with him wherever he chose to go, the song seemed to declare, some weeks before Erica herself declared it; her life would flow after and into his as Bach’s second violin gracefully echoed and joined the first. A choking feeling comes over Brian; he leans for a moment against the stairway wallpaper, but Matilda’s infernal music drives him on down.

In the sitting room Jeffrey has not moved, except to slump lower on his spine behind Plastic Man Comics.

“I thought I told you to clean up the yard,” Brian says, standing over him.

“S’too dark out,” his son mumbles through an apple core. “Do it tomorrow.”

“I want you to do it now.”

“I said I’d do it tomorrow, awright?” Jeffrey brays, finally looking up at his father with an insulting stare. Brian stares back, not moving. “Wouldja leave me alone now, so I can read?”

Brian feels a pounding in his chest. “You’re not reading!” he explodes. “You’re just rotting your mind with childish trash. When I was fifteen I read Gibbon, but I haven’t seen you with a book, outside of homework, for weeks. Do you have any homework today, by the way? ...Jeffrey, I asked you a question.”

“Oh, why don’t you fuck off.”

“Don’t speak to me like that.” He pulls Plastic Man out of his son’s hands.

“Gimme back my comic!” Jeffrey yelps, rising angrily, clumsily. Over the summer he has grown to be nearly as tall as Brian, though he probably still weighs twenty pounds less. If it came to a physical struggle—Brian holds the comic behind his back, gripping it tighter.

“I’ll give it back after you’ve done your work.”

Jeffrey glares, and begins a threatening gesture, but does not carry it through. “Awright, awright,” he growls. “If you’ll get the fuck out of my way.”

Having won, Brian overlooks the obscenity; he stands aside, and Jeffrey slouches grumbling from the room.

Five o’clock; and Erica is not back yet. Brian frowns and goes into the kitchen to check his watch. The sight of food still spoiling on the table reminds him that he has neglected to tell Matilda to clean up, or to ask when her mother will be home.

His Timex is accurate, but the times are out of joint. He feels exhausted, persecuted; his heart is still pumping. Brian has never cared much for children in general, but for years his own children have been the exception. He has treated them affectionately, seriously, fairly. Then why should he now have a son like Jeffrey, so sullen and selfish: a son who when other boys are out raking leaves or playing football sits slumped on his plastic spine reading Plastic Man Comics? Why should he have a daughter like Matilda, so painfully different from the gentle pretty daughter he had wanted and expected: a pudgy, whiny, sulky child who battens upon the commercial screams of sexual delinquents while disguising herself as a witch?

Suddenly the idea comes to him that it is not a disguise—that the scowling adolescent hag upstairs is Matilda’s true self; just as Jeffrey is in some profound sense a plastic man; that all the monstrous children he passed this afternoon on his way home, dressed as devils, ghosts, Dracula, etc., have merely made their real natures visible, this one day of the year.

As he walks about the kitchen waiting, very impatiently now, for Erica, Brian thinks how unfair it is that he should be insulted as he has just been by his children, and threatened—yes, even physically threatened, there was that in Jeffrey’s voice and stance. And Jeffrey is still growing; presently he will be taller than Brian and weigh more. Matilda also is beginning to grow; she is already large for her age. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that one day Brian Tate will be the smallest person in his family.

That he should have to listen to the daily insults and threats of these monstrous adolescents, to live in the same house with them—the irritated muttering in Brian’s head halts. Another clearer, louder voice remarks that he does not have to live in this house; that in fact all those concerned are concerned to put him out; that he is there now to argue and plead to be allowed to remain “for the sake of The Children.” That is, for the sake of Jeffrey and Matilda, who obviously would not care if they never saw him again.

He must be crazy. Why should he do anything for the sake of such children? Why should he stay here to be insulted and threatened by them; to be scolded and blamed by his wife? Considering what she has made of them, what right has she to judge him? Let her cope with what she has created; or rather—to be charitable—failed to prevent. Let him go where he is wanted, listened to, passionately loved.