Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

But for ten minutes, until Brian and the children drove off, she went on smiling, conversing—like those figures in cartoons who go on running in the air after they have passed the edge of the cliff, or had the bridge blown out from under them—until the glance down, the double take. Then they crash. As she had crashed after she was left in the empty house with the news that Wendy was not going to have her baby.

Brian had announced this calmly; almost as if he were not concerned. But of course he must have arranged it all; must have been trying to arrange it for weeks. She had been naïve not to have known that he would do this if he could. Naïve and stupid. The wind whuffles against the house, choking with laughter.

And of, course Brian knew what it would mean to her. That’s why he told her when he was about to leave, when the children were practically within hearing—so that she dared not respond: Because he is a coward, afraid to face the consequences of his acts, as Danielle said. Erica doesn’t blame Wendy; she knows how Brian must have bullied and argued her into it, probably with some of the same arguments he used here in this house when Erica wanted a third child: overpopulation, financial responsibilities, his age. She can imagine too how he must have underplayed the risk of an illegal operation at this point—the pain, the danger. “But isn’t it too late for that?” she had whispered when he told her. “Wasn’t it very dangerous?” “No,” Brian replied smugly, standing there in her dining room in the new dirty-tan Student-Shop duffle coat fastened with imitation clothesline and clothespins, which he has bought to go with his new sideburns and manner and way of life. “Not too late.”

And why shouldn’t he look smug? He has won; his lies have come true. There will be no inconvenience in his life now, no night feedings or diapers, no use for clothespins except to decorate his coat. There will be no inconvenience to his reputation either: almost no one will ever know that Wendy had been pregnant; no one but Danielle and Linda Sliski and Sandy will know what Erica had planned to do for her. And if she were to attempt to tell anyone else, to explain how this separation had been different from all others, how she had arranged it herself out of unselfish motives, probably they wouldn’t believe her. They would think she was deluding herself, or trying to delude them, or both, like—Like—

Like Lena Parker, her mother. Erica lets an armful of crumpled wash slump toward the floor, and stands there. For twenty-eight years, ever since she was twelve, she has been running away from Lena Parker and everything she represents. Now she has circumnavigated the globe and run back into her mother’s arms. She too has a husband who has ambiguously left home; she too can loudly justify herself, and claim more freedom of choice than she really had.

At least Lena isn’t alive to see it, to add her rationalizations to Erica’s, to say what she would be sure to say about the separation: that it was best for everyone; that Brian was never “right” for her daughter. “A man married to his work, who does not know how to enjoy, how to laugh!” as she had once exclaimed.

But no doubt Brian is laughing now. He has won: he has destroyed Wendy’s child; his own child; her child.

Stooping wearily, Erica picks up the clothes she has dropped, and climbs the cellar stairs to the dining room. She sorts the clothes, folds them, and climbs two more flights to her children’s rooms. Jeffrey’s looks as if it had been recently burgled: the bed is torn apart, drawers are wrenched out and overflowing, books and magazines thrown about. She begins to tidy up, for the third time in a week, then stops. What is the use? Let him live in filth and chaos, if that is how he chooses to live. She sets her mouth and shuts the door behind her.

Matilda’s room, across the landing, is somewhat neater, but equally painful to enter. The bedcovers have been more or less pulled up, the drawers are shut—but in the corner behind the door is an ugly heap of debris. It has been there for two days, since Saturday morning when Erica sent the children upstairs to clean their rooms. Jeffrey was back almost at once (obviously having done as little as possible), but Matilda delayed. Presently, while Erica was ironing, she became aware of distressing sound effects overhead: banging and splintering. Setting the iron on end so fast that it spat water, she ran upstairs, calling her daughter’s name.

“Yeh, what?” Matilda held her door open two inches, scowling through the gap.

“What’s going on up here? I heard dreadful noises.”

“I’m cleaning my room, like you told me to.”

“Cleaning your room? It sounded as if somebody were breaking things. Let me see.”

Matilda said nothing, only stood aside so her mother could enter.

“Muffy! What’s happened? Your weaving loom is all smashed—and your planetarium.”

“You told me to get rid of all the crap I didn’t want to play with any more. You’ve been hassling me about it for weeks.”

“I didn’t say for you to destroy everything. Oh, look at your ballet scrapbooks! And that beautiful map of Fairyland, that you used to love so much.” Erica felt like weeping. “And the dollhouse, it’s all smashed sideways. How could you do something like that?”

“I was sick of it,” Matilda cawed. “Can’t I do what I like with my own stuff?”

“No, you can’t.” With difficulty, Erica kept her voice under control. “Somebody else might have wanted these things, didn’t you ever think of that? We could have given them to Celia Zimmern.” No answer. Don’t you touch anything else! Do you hear me?”

“Ookay,” Matilda sighed theatrically—her new victim-of-injustice manner, which Erica finds almost more infuriating than the old sulks and screams.

Not all the remains of Matilda’s destructive fit are still in her room. Erica has carried what was beyond repair out to the trash can, leaving only a few toys which are undamaged or salvageable: some hanks of colored yarn, a few old picture books, and parts of a plastic Blue Willow tea set—the one that Muffy and Roo used to set out on the grass in the orchard for dolls’ tea parties, with one of her striped linen dishtowels for a tablecloth, and apple-juice tea and animal crackers.

And the dollhouse. Once an elegant Colonial mansion, with real turned white wooden bannisters and flowered wallpaper and a pink-and-yellow celluloid fanlight over the door, it looks now as if it had been hit by a hurricane. The roof is unhinged and gaping, the windows sprung out of their frames; furniture and rugs and dishes and doll people have been shaken into the corners of the rooms, which are compressed into ugly parallelograms. Gripping the open sides of the house, she tries to straighten it out. But as soon as she lets go, the beaver-board and wood collapse again with a nasty creak.

Erica feels her head filling with anger and tears. The selfish destructiveness of her daughter, the loss to Celia—and not only Celia, there would have been lots of children, generations of children, who would have been very, very happy to have all those nice toys. Someday, if Wendy’s child had been a girl, and been born, instead of being scraped out of her by some greedy crooked doctor and flushed down a drain in New York—

Erica sinks onto Matilda’s braided rug, beside the beautiful Colonial dollhouse which Matilda has turned into a broken home—as if one weren’t enough for her. This whole house is a broken home now, she thinks—as if some stupid teenage giant walking over the world had picked it up and then, losing interest, flung it aside. Like Matilda, she doesn’t want to play with it any more; but it is all she has.

Her head aches with tears and rage, but she mustn’t cry again, it will only exhaust her, and besides it is useless. Even if her broken home could be repaired, she wouldn’t want it now. She doesn’t want her husband back, though the cause for which she sent him away is lost; because who could possibly want someone like that, so selfish and cruel and cowardly and weak and dishonest? What she wants is her old friend Brian Tate, the honorable, strong, brave, kind, generous young man she married. But that is impossible. There is no such person.