Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

“You’ve tried?”

“Oh yeh. Pat and Sara tried to talk to him after class, and I went to his office twice this week. The first time he wouldn’t even speak to me because he had some meeting, and yesterday he made me wait about half an hour and then gave me five minutes. And he was like really insulting. He said he was surprised an attractive young woman like me should be associated with such a foolish cause.” Jenny imitates Dibble’s supercilious look and prissy manner, then scowls darkly. Neither expression is able to disguise beauty so remarkable that even a woman-hater like Dibble was aware of it—the full young mouth, the very full young breasts unconfined in the flimsy embroidered blouse.

“Disgusting,” caws Linda, of whom such an insulting remark will never be made. “You know what you ought to do, you ought to stop going to his class.”

“That’s what Pat said. She thinks we should just drop the course and write Dean Kane telling why. But I don’t know. It seems like sort of futile to me. I thought maybe we should try to organize a boycott.” She turns to Brian. “We could call a meeting of the women in the course and try to get them all to cut class, and send a letter to the Star about it. What do you think? But why wouldn’t that work?” (for Brian is shaking his head).

“It’s wrong politically,” he explains. “Negative tactics. Let me ask you one question: What do you want from Dibble?”

Jenny takes a breath, raising her breasts. “We want him to listen to us, and stop saying denigrating things about women, and apologize publicly—at least correct the lies, like when he told the class that women’s IQ stops at age twelve, and—”

“Exactly,” Brian interrupts. “But Dibble doesn’t listen to you, and he won’t pay any more attention to a letter to the Star. And I doubt it will help if you cut class. How many girls, excuse me, women”—he smiles at Jenny—“are there in 202?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe twenty.”

“And how many of them would join you, do you think?”

“All of them, I hope,” she says warmly. “Or almost all. There’s always a few Aunt Toms in every bunch.”

“Hm. But all right. Suppose you did get real cooperation. I know Don Dibble. He wouldn’t care if every female student quit his courses. And he’d be quite happy to fail ten or fifteen of you for unexcused absence. Or at least lower your grades. No.” Brian shakes his head once more decisively. “There’s no point in removing women from the course. What you want to do is bring in more women.” He glances around; everyone looks puzzled except Jenny.

“You mean, we should ask our friends to come to class—a whole lot of them—fill up the room.” She rises to her knees, the light of battle beginning to shine in her big brown eyes. “I get it! Then when Dibble starts his stuff we can all look angry-groan and hiss—interrupt even—stamp our feet—” She laughs eagerly.

“That’s right.” Brian smiles at Jenny, thinking that she has a lively mind and, for one so young, a good grasp of the principles of political action. Then he looks down at Wendy, whose face is still clouded with incomprehension. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that if he had consciously set out to leave his wife for a student, he could have done better in terms of both brains and looks.

“You can get everyone you know,” Linda says, sitting up. “I’ll come, and I could ask Marilyn—”

“More than that,” Jenny interrupts. “I’ll go to the next WHEN meeting and ask for volunteers. Then we can organize them into shifts, and have signals—It’s a great idea. Wow, thanks!” She turns toward Brian and suddenly embraces him, kissing his cheek; her large warm breasts are briefly pressed against his shirt.

“You’re welcome.”

“Fantastic,” Wendy seconds adoringly, embracing and kissing him from the other side. Brian hugs her back; but he cannot help noting the physical contrast, and wondering why, for the second time in his life, he has become involved with a relatively flat-chested woman. It is not as if he preferred small breasts. But his life is not over yet. Perhaps eventually he and Jenny ...

“It’s easy for Brian. He only has to see them once a week.” Erica stops, hearing the shrill complaining tone of her own voice.

“Ah.” Zed hands her a mug of mint tea.

“He never disciplines them,” Erica continues, for after all she has to complain to someone. “He just takes them out to dinner and lets them order whatever they want: pies, Coke, steak sandwiches and greasy French fries; he never makes them have milk, or vegetables. So of course they think he’s keen.” Holding her mug, she sits down on the thin, lumpy day bed in the back room of the Krishna Bookshop. “I know all about it, from my own childhood.”

“Mm.” Zed has perched opposite her on the rubber top of a kitchen stepladder, with his worn tweed jacket hung around his shoulders like the wings of a skinny bald bird.

“Only in my case it was worse. I hardly ever saw my father after he went into the Canadian Army; so I not only preferred him, I thought of him as an ideal hero. All through high school, whenever I was unhappy or felt my life was unjust, I had fantasies of how he would come to rescue me. Or sometimes I imagined how I would go to England or France or Canada to find him, and we would have a romantic reunion.”

“And then, when he came back?” Zed prompts after a pause.

“He didn’t really. He came less and less; after I was fourteen, not at all. I pretended to the girls at school that he did, though, sometimes,” she adds, looking down. Then she looks up, but his expression has not changed—it is still gentle, impartial.

“I went to see him once,” she continues. “It was in spring vacation, my second year at college. I told my mother and everybody that I was invited to visit a friend in Detroit. Then I bought a bus ticket to Ontario, and wrote and told him I was coming, too late for him to stop me. Or really, too late for his wife Myra to stop me; I’d decided that it was all her fault, that she’d been keeping us apart for years, saying spiteful things against me, even tearing up the letters I wrote him every Christmas and birthday, which would explain why he never answered.”

“And how was it when you saw him?” Zed asks after another pause.

“It was awful ...Not that he was any of the things my mother said—he wasn’t hateful, or cruel, or cold-hearted, or neurotic. But he seemed to be ... I don’t know ... a Canadian. A middle-aged Canadian businessman, with a large wife and three small children. Quite good-looking—I knew that already; I’d always thought of him as the handsomest man in the world. But he was a lot older than his photographs; and he was tired, and worried, and not very successful or well-educated. He didn’t read much. He liked watching hockey, and camping—Nothing to do with me, that was the main thing. But there I was.” She laughs, not very successfully.

“At first it was really terrible. My father and Myra thought I must have come to ask for money, so they were very stiff and cautious, and took pains to show me how hard up they were—cotton-flannel sheets on the bed, and corned-beef hash for dinner, and a lot of talk I didn’t understand about Canadian taxes. Once they found out it wasn’t that they were nicer to me, but puzzled. When I left two days early they were very relieved, and even friendly. They took my picture in front of the house and gave me a box of maple-sugar candy in the shape of maple leaves, each in a little green pleated paper cup.”

“I bet you didn’t eat it.”

“No.” Erica laughs. “I gave the whole box to Marian when I got home.”

“Did you tell her where it came from?”