Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“Not especially. Sort of betwixt-between. I think it’s the weather, and ... Erica pauses. The local climate, the encroachment of Glenview Homes, the fact that she has been asked to do elaborate artwork without remuneration, are too familiar to explain her mood. “And Brian’s being away, that—” She swallows the rest of the phrase, recalling that Leonard is now always away; that from Danielle’s point of view she has little to complain about. “And the children.”

“Oh?”

“They were rather tiresome this morning. So loud. And rude too, really. It used to be fun getting up and having breakfast with them, but now—Whatever I cook, they don’t like it; they want something else. They’re so awful to each other; and they don’t like me much either. And I don’t always like them. Sometimes I think I hate them.” Erica laughs to take the weight off this declaration, which she had not intended to make. The fact that she hates her own children is her darkest, most carefully guarded secret. Even to Danielle she has never fully revealed it. In public she speaks of them as everyone else does, with proud concern or humorous mock despair. Her acquaintances protest that on the contrary they have always found Jeffrey and Matilda most polite (as apparently they can sometimes pretend to be). Then, in a light, humorous tone, they complain amusingly of John’s room or Jerry’s attitude toward homework, which makes Erica wonder if they too might be harboring monstrous lodgers. When Susan says, smiling, that her children are “quite dreadful,” does she mean in reality that she dreads them? When Jane exclaims that her daughter is “hopeless,” has she indeed lost hope?

“Adolescents ought not to be allowed to live at home. There ought to be a law against it,” she says, hopping back into the convention.

“You’re telling me. I thought last night, when we were arguing about what to do with those mud turtles, how I’d love to give Roo to Reed Park along with them, and the hamsters and the chameleon and Pogo. They could all live in a cage there together and kind people could feed them through the bars.”

Danielle, unlike Erica, can afford to be frank about how awful her children are. It is self-evident, at least to Danielle’s self, whose fault it is: that of their father, who has deserted them and given them neuroses, so that now Roo prefers animals to people, including her former best friend Matilda Tate, and Celia, age eight, has become shy and withdrawn.

Erica laughs. “I’d like to send mine there too sometimes. Both of them.” She looks around guiltily at the kitchen clock, but it is only three: Jeffrey and Matilda won’t be home for half an hour. “It’s not really that I don’t like them any more,” she lies. “It’s just that I don’t know how to cope with them. And I know it’s my fault if they’re difficult.”

“Your fault? Why shouldn’t it be Brian’s fault?”

“Well, because I’m their mother. I must be doing something wrong—Oh, I know I am. This morning, for instance. They were late for school and they started shouting at me, and I shouted back at them.”

“Hell, everyone loses his temper sometimes. You can’t always be right.”

“Mm,” Erica replies, not expressing agreement. Her greatest ambition is to be right: seriously and permanently in the right. Until recently, that was where she usually felt she was. “It’s the same with the house. Lately, it’s as if everything I do goes wrong.” She laughs consciously.

“But you’re the best housekeeper I know.”

“Not any more. I keep forgetting to buy detergent and I leave the parking lights on in the car and I lose the library books. Brian keeps asking what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Danielle pronounces, “Everyone forgets things like that sometimes. Brian’s just making you feel guilty.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Certainly not consciously.”

“It doesn’t have to be conscious,” Danielle says impatiently. “Men can make you feel guilty, and stupid and incompetent, without even trying. Because that’s how they really believe women are.”

“Uh.” Erica makes a deprecating noise. She wishes she had never mentioned Brian. But it is too late: Danielle is already off again on her new hobby-horse, the awfulness of men. Erica sees this horse as a large gray-white wooden nag mounted on red rockers, unattractively and aggressively female.

“It’s the truth. And what’s worse is, we accept that judgment. They get us to believe at one and the same time that we can’t do anything right and that everything is our fault because we don’t.”

“You make it sound like an international conspiracy.” Erica smiles.

Danielle shakes her head. “There doesn’t have to be any conspiracy. It’s all been going on so many hundreds of years that it’s automatic with them.” She leans forward; Erica imagines her urging the old gray mare on, its coarse white hair and tail, and her own dark mane, flowing roughly in the wind. “You know that conference I had Monday with Celia’s teacher? Well, at first, like I told you, I felt Mrs. Schmidt was being overanxious. Celia didn’t mind her nickname, I thought. She knew we meant it fondly, that nobody thought she was really silly, any more than they thought her sister was a kangaroo. But yesterday I was talking to Joanne—you know, the woman I met at that last WHEN meeting ...

“Mm.” Recently Danielle has been going to a campus discussion group called Women for Human Equality Now; Brian refers to them as the Hens.

“Well, Joanne said that if Celia were a boy, nobody would dream of calling her Silly. Men don’t have nicknames like that. Even in college they aren’t called things like Bubsey and Ducky and Sliver, the way our friends were.”

“No,” Erica agrees.

“But you know, our names, yours and mine—they’re just as bad. They’re not real names, only the feminine diminutives of men’s. Little Eric and Little Daniel.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Erica says.

“No, neither did I. But once I had, it really bothered me. I don’t like the idea of being called Little Daniel all my life.” She laughs. “I was thinking, maybe I should change my name.”

“What would you change it to?”

“I suppose to Sarah. My middle name.”

“I don’t know if I could get used to that. I have a conviction that your name is Danielle.”

“I don’t know either ... Oh damn. I’ve got to go, Silly’ll be coming home. I mean Celia: You’re right: it’s not going to be easy. Well, we’ll be over later.”

As she stands by the kitchen window, watching her friend drive off into the wet, chilly afternoon, Erica thinks of Leonard Zimmern with irritation. It is one more thing to hold against him that he has turned Danielle against men in general—since women judge men in general by the behavior of their husbands.

But, after all, Danielle’s open dislike of men is better than what Erica had grown up with: the lies and subterfuges with which her own mother tried to cope with the same situation, the desperate playacting, the feinting and flattery—Erica, frowns, staring out into the empty yard. She does not think of her mother very often any more; Lena Parker has been dead for seven years. Even when she was alive Erica thought of her as seldom as possible. She thinks of her now: a tall, slim, bony woman with a distinguished face and slightly protruding eyes; always well-dressed and carefully made up; unconventional, intelligent but ill-read, impulsively and effusively affectionate. Since adolescence Erica had not cared for her very much. Perhaps that was unfair: Lena Parker certainly had her troubles; perhaps Erica’s old dislike is now being dreadfully revenged through Jeffrey and Matilda.