Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Against our will we are dragged through time, by time. Eventually Matilda will become a woman, and be restored to her; but Jeffrey will grow into a man and join the enemy. Because men are the enemy. The Hens are right about that, if nothing else.

Erica has been with Danielle to two general meetings of WHEN, which she found mildly interesting, and to a “rap session” sponsored by them, which she found appalling. She agrees with the Hens in principle, but not in practice—politically speaking, she supports their Declaration of Independence, but not most of their Constitution. She isn’t sure, for instance; that she believes in day-care centers. Mothers have a duty to their young children which shouldn’t be made too easy to evade.

It also seems to Erica that many of the Hens, though they criticize men, are trying to become like them in all the worst ways—taking on their most unpleasant qualities. They are loud, aggressive, competitive: the woman at whose house the rap session was held, for example, talks about female solidarity, but practices the sort of one-upmanship usually seen only in men. If you tell her that Jeffrey won’t pick up his room, she doesn’t reply “So aggravating” or “I know, Billy’s just the same,” but “Oh, really? Billy’s always been very good about that. Maybe it’s because when he was little I began to teach him ... etc.

Another unpleasant male characteristic many of the Hens display, and which more than anything else has made Erica determined not to meet with them again, is coarseness of speech. They use the sort of language she abhors in her children, but in an even worse way. It is bad enough to hear Jeffrey speak of his “fucking homework” and call his teacher an “ass-kissing idiot”; far worse to hear educated women use these adjectives as verbs to describe actual occurrences—to listen while they speak in clinical detail of matters which should remain private.

But the whole feminist campaign, in Erica’s opinion, is a mistake. The Hens have identified the enemy correctly, but their battle plan is all wrong. They want to scrap the old code of good manners: they don’t like to have doors and coats held for them, or seats offered on crowded trains. They reject these gestures and all that they imply. But in repulsing the traditional attentions of gentlemen, in refusing to be ladies, they are throwing away their best, perhaps their only defense against the natural selfish brutishness of men. Impulsively and foolishly they are abandoning the elaborate system of fortifications which was built up and maintained by their mothers and grandmothers over centuries.

Today, everywhere, Erica thinks, men must be laughing uproariously as they see us dismantling our own defenses from within—removing the elaborate barbed-wire entanglements of etiquette, tearing down the modest walls which for so long shielded our privacy, and filling in the moat of chastity with mud. In a provincial academic town like Corinth the destruction of the fortress is not yet far advanced, or very visible. For years, secure in a rather old-fashioned marriage, “Erica was hardly aware of it. But it was going on all the same; now she sees it everywhere.

The behavior of men to women living alone, for instance. Erica had heard about this from Danielle, but she had misinterpreted it—or rather it had been misinterpreted to her. After Leonard left, a year and a half ago, a series of semidetached husbands began to appear at the Zimmerns’ house, offering to replace him temporarily. Erica had reported this phenomenon, rather indignantly, to Brian. But Brian explained that these men came because Danielle had, explicitly or implicitly, invited them—because she was, as he put it, “broadcasting.” And Erica believed him, because he too was a man.

But she knows that she is not broadcasting now. The station has gone off the air, perhaps permanently, and yet these same men, or others like them, have begun to appear at her house, ostensibly to borrow tools or bring their children to visit hers. Others have tried appearing in the university building where she now works and suggesting coffee, or, more crudely, driving her home from dinner parties in the wrong direction and then suddenly stopping the car. But though their means differed, their ends were identical. As she said to Danielle, they only wanted one thing. (Danielle’s response, as rather often lately, was not satisfactory: “Hell, I don’t know. I used to think, if they only want one thing, the poor bastards, why not give it to them?”)

What infuriates Erica most about these men is their patronizing attitude. They all seem to believe, and some have openly, jokingly declared, that they are doing her a favor. When she declines this favor they smile knowingly and renew their attack, for they assume she must be in a state of sexual starvation, and would be grateful for the opportunity to have intercourse with them.

Needless to say, Erica was not grateful. The surprised politeness with which she had at first received these men’s attentions was quickly replaced by cool disinterest. If they were still not discouraged she showed moral indignation. This was not well received. When Erica explained that she had resolved never to do to another woman what had been done to her, or reminded her suitors that they were married, some of them laughed and asked when she was going to start living in the modern world; others sighed and began to complain in a disgusting way of their wives’ sexual inadequacies. One or two even became sneering: they said or implied that if Erica didn’t want them she must be frigid, and it was no wonder Brian had left her.

Another thing which dismays Erica is that several of her rejected suitors are the husbands of acquaintances whom she had always believed happily married—who no doubt still think themselves so. She feels a painful sympathy for these deluded women, and it has occurred to her that it might be right to tell them the truth about their husbands, but so far Danielle has dissuaded her. (“Believe me, they won’t thank you. Maybe if it was a real affair they might want to know, some of them.” She smiled cynically. “But not a business like this. Even if they don’t blame you for the whole thing, they’ll dislike you for it, and take your name off their party list. Or else they won’t believe you. Hell, you remember that time Ruth Taylor came around and said she thought I ought to know that Leonard had tried to feel her up at the English department picnic? I practically threw her out of the house.”)

Erica is still not sure Danielle is right, though. Her friend is negative about everything lately; she has become so bitter that it is almost painful to visit her. Roo and Celia are not happy either. It is going to be a sad Christmas for them. Not only did Leonard refuse to invite them to New York, he has also declined to come to Corinth to see them until after New Year’s Day, claiming that he has to work on an important article. (“Important article, my foot,” Danielle said. “It’s some girl’s ass that’s the important article.”)

Moreover, Danielle has just had a very bad experience, one which might have sent a less tough and experienced woman—Erica, for instance—into a nervous collapse. This event had occurred last Friday, when she received an unexpected visit from Dr. Bernard Kotelchuk, the veterinarian who had treated Pogo in September. Dr. Kotelchuk had called occasionally since then to see his former patient and the rest of the Zimmern menagerie; he had become popular with Celia and Roo, who has nicknamed him “St. Bernard.” Erica had met him only once; he appeared to her as a large, doggy, coarse-looking, inarticulate man of about fifty who smelled faintly of disinfectant and was losing his hair.

Last Friday Dr. Kotelchuk arrived without warning at the peculiar hour of 8:45 a.m., just after Danielle’s children had left for school. He had hardly been in the house ten minutes when, as Danielle put it, “he practically raped me on Roo’s bed with six gerbils watching.” “I fought him off as hard as I could at first,” she told Erica. “It wasn’t so easy: he must weigh about two hundred pounds. I was going to knee him in the groin like in that self-defense book, but then it occurred to me that he had probably saved Pogo’s life, and if he wanted sex that badly, why should I make such a fuss about it? I mean, it didn’t really matter to me; it didn’t hurt or anything. So I stopped fighting him and lay there, and it was just like nothing was happening. The only thing I thought was, Well, at least I’ve still got that loop inside me; I won’t have puppies.”