Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

She is not right today, in her head. It is abnormal to feel referred to and mocked and threatened by window displays. That is paranoia, delusions of reference. She must go into the store like a normal person and buy something. But after waiting for fifteen minutes at a counter, elbowed and shoved by other shoppers, only to learn that they are out of Matilda’s size in skating tights except for Baby Pink, Erica has a feeling of exhaustion and revulsion and leaves the store. She walks away from the happy plastic family, taking deep breaths of the clammy December air and trying to calm herself.

Main Street has been elaborately adorned for the holiday season, with garlands of sham grass-green fir and colored bulbs looped from one lamppost to the next, and fat red and silver letters spelling MERRY CHRISTMAS hung across the street. The store windows are also decorated, but in two contrasting styles. As Sandy said last week, two different deities are worshiped in America at this time of year; and each Corinth merchant has chosen which he will enthrone. Some windows, therefore, feature nativity scenes, softly lit and trimmed with straw, silver-paper icicles, and stars: homage to nature, rural simplicity and maternal love.

But most of the shopowners prefer another god. They have erected altars, not to a poor young woman and her baby, but to a rich fat old man. In spite of his evident high spirits, he has certain unpleasant characteristics. He is not especially kind to animals, for instance. The family in the bookstore window share their lodgings affectionately with two Steiff cows and a donkey; but in the stationer’s next door a life-size cardboard cutout shows the old man wearing a velvet suit trimmed with animal fur. He has large leather boots too, and cracks a long whip over the flanks of his team. He does not favor the working classes, but brings most of his gifts to the rich. He is a pagan God—Jove, perhaps—whose worshipers have placed his image before their shops to bring not spiritual blessings, but material abundance. At the same time he is also Bacchus: look at the heavy belly, the red drunkard’s complexion; hear his manic laugh, which is broadcast continually by a speaker over the entrance of the cut-rate drugstore: “aHo Ho Ho! aHo Ho Ho!” And he has a good reason for his merriment: he has won now, he has defeated the Virgin and Child, and is on his way to Erica’s house with his sleigh full of unnecessary expensive objects.

But does she have to let him in? Can it be right, really, to take back into her house the sort of Santa Claus that Brian has proved himself to be? If she allows it, she is condoning all he has done; she becomes an accessory after the fact to his crimes. And what about the moral effect on Jeffrey and Matilda? What about poor Wendy; how will she feel, having made this sacrifice?

Besides, there is Brian’s work. He needs time alone in order to finish his Great Book, and if he does not get it he will eventually blame her and the children, even if it is not their fault but his own.

No, no, Erica thinks, turning and walking back up Main Street, almost the one person empty-handed in the crowd of package-laden Christmas shoppers. Brian must not move back into the house. She must prevent it, for his own sake, and the children’s sake, and Wendy’s. It will be difficult: he will try to persuade her, to reason with her. He will speak of his affection for her, his duty to The Children; of the relation between broken homes and school failure. He will try to make her feel guilty.

But she must not listen. She must lock her doors against him, even literally if necessary (it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have the locks changed), and if he tries to get down her chimney, she must build up the fire.

13

EARLY MARCH. IN CORINTH it is still winter; week after week cold clouds hang over the town like wet dirty laundry. A rare bright morning may release some mud and a few crocus shoots, but the air remains raw; every night the earth freezes hard.

Out on Tones Creek Road the Tates’ lawn is still spread with lumpy layers of crusted snow like an ill-frosted birthday cake—the one Erica made for Jeffrey this week, for instance—and a damp gusty wind wheezes across it at the house, as if a large child with a bad cold were trying to blow out the lights. Erica can feel this wind up in her bedroom, where she is dressing for Danielle’s party.

She has just recovered from a bad cold herself, one which began over a month ago and hung on, with headache, sniffles, clogged nasal passages and loss of appetite. She would have got over it if she could have stayed in bed for two or three days, Erica feels sure; but a woman living alone with children cannot stay in bed even for one day.

Tonight will be the first time in more than a month that she has attended a formal social event—both from choice and because she hasn’t been asked out much lately. Even when she is well, going to parties alone is difficult—especially since Christmas, when the weather turned bad and physical problems (icy roads, stalled cars, children sick at home) were added to the social ones. More and more, it has come to seem not worth the effort.

At the same time there have been fewer parties for Erica to go to. For a month or so after Brian left she was a local tragic heroine—or at least a disaster victim; she had more invitations than she could accept. Now the flurry of sympathetic and curious attention has died down, and she is just another single woman, easy to overlook when making up a list—especially if she declined your last invitation. There are already too many extra women in Corinth: spinsters, widows, ex-wives. One cannot have them all at once; they must take turns, and be grateful.

An extra man, on the other hand, is always welcome. Erica suspects, though she has no evidence, that she has been left out of many parties because people are having Brian instead. And why not? He is more successful than she, more important, better company because he is in better spirits—even, in a way, nicer. The most depressing discovery Erica has made in the past four months is that ill fortune is bad for people’s character. It makes it harder to be good-natured, either in word or deed. Sometimes she hears what hardly sounds like her own voice nagging the children or complaining to Danielle, and is horrified—and how often does she not hear it?

Ill fortune makes it harder to do anything creative, like cooking a birthday dinner for Jeffrey, or working on her painting. As for the book about the white hare, she has had to put that aside completely. The idea of being alone in the country in the winter, which seemed so lovely last autumn, has become a cold, exhausting reality of clogged driveways, frozen engines and overlapping family flu.

Dressed in a blue-lace bra-slip, Erica stands frowning in front of the bedroom closet, trying to decide what to wear to the party. There is not much choice, though for years this closet was overcrowded. Now it is not only Brian’s things that are gone; Matilda has permanently borrowed many of her mother’s clothes. It is a year since Erica bought a new party dress, and none of the old ones seem right for the occasion. The pretty mauve-and-brown plaid is now unfashionably long, the black wool too plain and gloomy. Both the paisley print and the glossy brown silk are too low-cut for her present circumstances: décolleté on a wife merely enhances a husband’s reputation; on an ex-wife, it vulgarly proclaims availability. If the wearer is not yet divorced, or even legally separated, that only makes it worse: by baring her flesh she is inviting all comers to adultery rather than simple fornication.

Erica has been stuck in this uneasy, embarrassing state, this limbo between married and single, for four months. Not on purpose: she is eager to be unwed, to be disconnected from what Brian has become. She knows couples—for instance, the Zimmerns—who have gone through months of legal and financial squabbling and seemed to enjoy it. But Erica has always despised such squabbling. She does not want to argue about who pays the auto insurance or the orthodontist’s bills. Besides, there is no need to argue about such matters. Erica knows that her proposals for a settlement are very reasonable, even generous—because her lawyer, a lady named Gara Dickson, has told her so.