Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

With a sigh, Erica drags the pail out from under the kitchen sink and fills it with hot water. It is her day off, but since she cannot afford help, she usually spends most of it cleaning house. She has to hurry today, because she is meeting Sandy at noon. She adds detergent and scouring powder to the pail, wondering why she is doing this, when nobody will care if the floor is dirty. The children never notice; and Sandy isn’t coming here, and if he were wouldn’t notice either. This is discouraging, though in a way nicer than Brian—who always noticed, and sometimes complained.

Sandy is nicer than Brian in many ways, Erica thinks, lifting the pan out of the sink. He is kinder and more considerate, with a better sense of humor, and he knows much more about gardening and carpentry and art and music and old children’s books. Though he has refused to attend any more parties, he will go with her to places and events Brian used to scorn: an art opening or a tour of the new fire station or a house sale or a bird walk. This is important, now that Jeffrey and Matilda are rudely unwilling to accompany her, and Danielle more and more often busy with her boring Dr. Kotelchuk.

Sandy is an agreeable companion on all such excursions. His work at the Krishna Bookshop seldom seems to get in the way—though he has warned her that it may do so this summer, when he and his students begin working on their “meditation center.” They have already bought land about twenty miles from Corinth in a barren wooded area, and are planning to clear it and build a cabin with their own hands, including Sandy’s hands. For a moment Erica gazes out the kitchen window across the fields to the west, in the direction of the proposed meditation center, frowning. Then she opens the cellar door to unhook the sponge mop from the wall within, and shuts the door quickly so as not to be reminded that the cellar also needs to be cleaned.

Putting the mop into the pail to soak, she sets the kitchen chairs on top of the kitchen table, thinking that in spite of his odd beliefs Sandy is easier to talk to than Brian. He does not, as she had feared he might, try to convert her to his faith; he never lectures her or tells her what to read or what to think. He listens much better than Brian; also he has a wonderful memory and can tell amusing stories about his childhood and his adventures in California and the Far East.

Erica sloshes the mop up and down in the sudsy water and begins mopping the floor in shiny overlapping strips. For the hundredth time in six years she thinks what an expensive mistake it was to buy these red vinyl tiles, which looked so good in the store but faded to a dirty pink within the first year and showed every spill and speck of dust from the start. Then, for the hundredth time in six weeks, she thinks of something Danielle said about Sandy: that he is not only nice but “too nice to be a man.”

Recently Erica has had proof of the truth of this statement, though perhaps not yet conclusive proof. But she might have suspected sooner—even on that first snowy evening in the bookshop, when Sandy did not press his advantage as most men would have. Or she might have guessed in the following weeks, when he seemed quite content with gently enthusiastic kisses and hugs of the sort an affectionate child might lavish on a new pet.

Erica noticed this hesitancy, this childish diffidence—but it pleased rather than troubled her. She thought that Sandy was too much in awe of her to hope or expect that she would sleep with him; that he wanted to spare them both the embarrassment and pain of a refusal. No doubt he had suffered refusals before; had, perhaps often, been laughed at and rejected. Certainly something like that must have happened to make him hesitate, even turn away from life. But knowing what men are like, Erica knew that instinctively Sandy must want more. It was her duty to give it to him—to convince him that her friendship and charity were real. Nor would hers be a shallow, soup-kitchen kind of charity: she did not mean merely to fill a temporary need, but to deconvert Sandy, to bring him back into the world in every way and show him that it was real and good, so that he would give up his pathetic empty asceticism.

With all this in mind, Erica chose her time and place carefully. She had given Sandy his unexpected birthday present impulsively and under poor conditions. Now that he was, in both senses, going to receive the present of his life, it should be under the best possible circumstances and in the most attractive gift wrapping. It must happen in her own house, for motels were sordid and the Krishna Bookshop grungy and cold—and when there was no chance of interruption. Therefore she waited until the children had gone to Connecticut with Brian for spring vacation, and the place was empty.

Erica, like the rest of the nonacademic help at Corinth, had no spring vacation to speak of, but she did have Good Friday off. She made a light but elegant lunch (avocado salad, shrimp bisque, white wine) and cleansed the relevant parts of the house. She changed the bed in the spare room, putting on fresh sheets with a pattern of wild roses, and drew down the blinds three fourths of the way, so that parallelograms of sun fell on the carpet and a warm, watery light suffused the rest. She did not dress up—it seemed too obvious, and she had nothing really nice to wear anyhow—but she took a shower and put on a clean garnet-colored sweater and black wool slacks, and under them her best lavender-lace bra and panties. Then she got out her diaphragm, which had become quite stiff and dry with neglect under its coating of talcum powder, but seemed on inspection to be intact—at least it didn’t leak under the faucet—and put it in with an extra large helping of jelly, bought with some awkwardness the day before at a drug store where she was unknown.

Everything was ready. And for the first hour, everything went as she had planned. She kissed Sandy even more affectionately than usual when he arrived, though his face was unpleasantly blotched with cold from the time he had spent trying to hitch a ride out to Jones Creek Road. She served lunch, turning the talk lightly toward love, teasing, reminiscing. There was a significant moment when she made some generalization about men, and Sandy, smiling, protested, “You can’t say that.”

“I can too,”

“Speaking from wide experience, I suppose.”

“I’ve never had any experience, except Brian,” Erica replied. “But a woman just knows.” And she laughed gaily, glad to have told Sandy what would make the gift he was about to receive more valuable.

It was not difficult after that to make clear what she intended; to move from the kitchen to the sitting room and then upstairs to the study. In the warm confusion of that move, and the chill of what followed, she forgets details. One exchange remains, when after gently helping her out of her clothes, Sandy pulled off his own shabby garments. In spite of their last, close embrace, she was startled, almost frightened by what she saw: the long white narrow torso; the burning bush of wiry hair—not faded with time like that on Sandy’s head, but still bright vermilion—and what rose from it.

“You,” she half whispered, extending her hand, but not to touch. “That ... I mean, isn’t it awfully large?”

“Just average, as far as I know.”

There was a silence while both thought the same thing, about Brian.

But Erica’s confusion and distress at that moment were nothing to what came after. First misunderstanding and misguided reassurance—for, thinking that Sandy hesitated out of consideration, she kept murmuring that it was all right—until at length she moved her hand and discovered that it was not all right She can hear her own squeak of exclamation now: “Oh! What’s the matter?” and Sandy’s reply, muffled and bleak: “I don’t know.”