Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

So they entered Sunday school. Little Marian went into the kindergarten, where she learned to sing simple hymns and make Easter decorations from pipe cleaners and lavender and yellow construction paper. But Erica was placed in the class of a fat elderly lady called Mrs. Winch, who wore a lace-bordered handkerchief pinned to her chest, with a gold watch dangling from it upside down so that only she knew what time it was. Mrs. Winch believed in old-fashioned discipline; she informed her class that they must always be clean and polite and good so that God would love them, and so that if they should die suddenly, He would wish to take them up to heaven to be with Him forever and ever Amen. If they were dirty and rude and disobedient—well Mrs. Winch was not old-fashioned enough to go into what would happen then; but she hinted, and the other children filled Erica in.

Erica was not convinced by this doctrine, however, but morally shocked. She had been brought up to do the right thing for its own sake. Her father, who at that very moment was fighting for Freedom in a Canadian Army training camp, had taught her that she would be rewarded simply by a sense of self-respect, by the knowledge that she had done right and was a superior person. She was fastidiously revolted by the idea of a virtue which depended on bribes and threats—of a God whose opinion of people was so low that He only expected them to behave decently under the threat of being burned alive for ever. It was worse than the Christmas business, where little girls and boys were told that they’d better not pout and better not cry, because Santa Claus was coming. It was like her Aunt Ida saying “Give me a kiss, and I’ll give you a candy”—what Gran referred to scornfully as “cupboard love.”

Mrs. Winch’s cosmology therefore struck Erica as greedy, cowardly, cruel and false. If God was really operating on that system, He was somebody Erica didn’t want to know. She went home and told her mother that Mrs. Winch smelled of laundry soap and she didn’t want to go to Sunday school any more. And Lena, whose enthusiasm for the social opportunities of the Presbyterian church was waning, acquiesced.

But Sandy’s idea of a non-Santa Claus God who had no toys in his bag, but was watching Erica all the time to see whether she was still doing the right thing without thought of reward—that bothered her. Because if she were God, that is probably how she would have behaved.

And if there were this God, He might not like what she is about to do today. It is wrong by conventional standards, and also against the law. But that isn’t what really troubles Erica, though she would dislike it to become known to most of her acquaintances or the police. What she is concerned about is the private purity of her motives. Has she agreed to go on this trip with Sandy for the sake of art and love—that is, to enlarge her creative vision and prove that she really cares about him and has forgiven his recent ineptness? Or is she just trying to escape from reality for a few hours?

But it is too late to back out now. Dumping the last pail of rinse water into the sink, she leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs to remove her damp jeans and sweater, and change into—what does one wear on a drug trip?

“I don’t feel anything,” Erica complains. She is sitting upright on the day bed in the room of one of Sandy’s students who is away for the week. Half an hour ago she swallowed a white powder mixed with ginger ale; and ever since she has been watching the furniture and the rain-streaked dormer window and the sloppily-whitewashed walls hung with strips of batik and a poster of a many-armed dancing god, to see if they will begin to wriggle or change colors.

“It’s pretty early yet. And we didn’t take all that much,” Zed replies for the third time.

“I think your friend cheated you. Nothing’s going to happen, unless some policeman comes to arrest us for taking this stuff.”

“They can’t arrest you for having taken drugs; only for possession. It’s the reverse of the laws on alcohol. We could walk into the police station stoned out of our minds and they couldn’t touch us.”

“I don’t even feel drunk. A little sleepy, maybe. But everything looks just the same. I wanted the world to be transformed.”

“Transformed?” Zed raises his pale eyebrows.

“Yes, so I could put it into my drawings, make them more interesting. Different, because I’m bored by them really. Or maybe I could have a vision, a religious experience.”

“A religious experience,” he repeats slowly, separating the words.

“I’ve heard that people have them. Of course I’m not religious, but you know how it is when your life goes wrong: there’s a feeling you’re probably being punished; But for what? That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“You mean God should appear to you now, in a long white bathrobe and a Canadian accent, and say ‘Bad, naughty Erica.’” Zed grins. “That’s not religion. If you do have a vision, it won’t be like that.”

“What will it be like, then?” Erica asks, laughing rather sharply. “Tell me, since you’re so far advanced on the Path.”

“I’m not very advanced.”

“Oh, come on.” She is as annoyed by Sandy’s perpetual, almost automatic self-denigration as she was by his joke about her father.

“It’s true. I’m more like Brian and the rest of his friends up on the hill than you think. Those who can’t, teach.”

“You do all that astrology.”

“Yes. It’s a nice compromise for types like me who haven’t been able to hack it spiritually.”

Erica looks at Zed, unsure if he is joking or asking for sympathy. “But you know much more than astrology. The bookshop—Your lectures—”

“That depends what you mean by knowledge.” Zed takes a heavy breath. “Essentially I haven’t got to first base. I’ve tried, of course. I’ve read a lot of books, done a lot of exercises.”

“But it takes time, you said that yourself. Years sometimes.” She covers a yawn.

“I’ve been at it for years.”

Erica registers the tremor in his voice; she sits forward and tries to attend. “Since you were in Japan.”

“Longer than that. I began reading and studying before I went to California. By 1964 I thought I was really getting somewhere, only I needed more time to concentrate. So I quit my job, sold my car, gave away most of my possessions, and moved into one room in West Hollywood.” Zed grins ironically. “I found out what most students find out; that it’s not so easy to detach yourself from the material. You give up money and success—wanting to own a convertible and a good stereo system, and make tenure and win the American Philosophical Association award. Great. You feel very proud of yourself. Then you find you’re consumed with desire for something really petty, like a hot dog or a hot bath. You try to meditate, but you’re pulled back down to earth by bodily needs—because you have hay fever, or your legs ache in the lotus position.”

“Mm.” Erica leans back against the batik pillows of the day bed, sleepier, than ever.

“But I got past all that—or at least used to it—in Japan,” Zed continues. “I worked hard all year there, and when I got back to America I wanted to take the next step. I wanted enlightenment; I felt entitled to it, even—I had a fairly good opinion of myself then. I decided I was going to go somewhere and meditate seriously: try to go into the Silence, to unite with the All—or however you want to put it.

“So first I went home to see my family, and then I hitched to Cambridge and shut myself up in an apartment some friends had lent me. It was a propitious time—a weekend in August; the phone was turned off, and everybody I knew was out of town.