Alison Lurie: The War Between the Tates: A Novel

The War Between the Tates

A Novel

Alison Lurie

For

DINO READ

NELL MOORE

PEGGY ASHFORD

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

Acknowledgments

A Biography of Alison Lurie

Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the color of this line will be like no other color. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated ...

Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

The Book of Imaginary Beings

1

MARCH 20. A COLD spring morning. It rained last night, perforating the crusted snow of the Tates’ front lawn, and everything is wet and glitters: the fine gravel of the drive, the ice in the ditch beside it, the bare elm twigs outside the bathroom window. The sun shines sideways at the house, brilliantly, impartially. Seeing it through the kitchen window when she comes down to make breakfast, Erica Tate feels her emotional temperature, which has been unnaturally low of late, rise several degrees.

“Tomorrow’s the beginning of spring,” she says to Jeffrey Tate, aged fifteen, as he stumbles into the room fastening his shirt.

“What’s for breakfast?”

“Eggs, toast, jam—”

“Any sausages?”

“No, not today.” Erica tries to keep her voice cheerful.

“There’s never anything to eat in this house,” Jeffrey complains, falling heavily into his chair.

Suppressing several possible answers to this remark, Erica sets a plate before her son and turns toward the stairs. “Matilda! It’s twenty minutes to eight.”

“All right! I heard you the first time.”

“Look at that sun,” Erica says to her daughter a few minutes later. “Tomorrow’s the first day of spring.”

No reply. Erica sets a plate in front of Matilda, who will be thirteen next month.

“I can’t eat this stuff. It’s fattening.”

“It’s not fattening, it’s just an ordinary breakfast, eggs, toast ... Anyhow, you’re not fat.”

“Everything has gobs of butter on it. It’s all soaked in grease.”

“Aw, shut up, Muffy, you’ll make me barf.”

Again Erica suppresses several rejoinders. “Would you like me to make you a piece of toast without butter?” she asks rather thinly.

“Okay. If you can do it fast.”

The sun continues to shine into the kitchen. Standing by the toaster, Erica contemplates her children, whom she once thought the most beautiful beings on earth. Jeffrey’s streaked blond hair hangs tangled and unwashed over his eyes in front and his collar in back; he hunches awkwardly above the table, cramming fried egg into his mouth and chewing noisily. Matilda, who is wearing a peevish expression, and an orange tie-dyed jersey which looks as if it had been spat on, is stripping the crusts off her toast with her fingers. Chomp, crunch, scratch.

The noises sound loud in Erica’s head; louder still, as if amplified: CHOMP, CRUNCH, SCRATCH—No. That is coming from outside. She goes to the window. In the field beyond the orchard, something yellow is moving.

“Hey, the bulldozer’s back,” Jeffrey exclaims.

“I guess they’re going to put up another ranch house,” his sister says.

The tone of both these remarks is neutral, even conversational; yet they strike Erica as more coarse and cold than anything that has yet been said this morning. “You don’t care what’s happening to our road!” she cries. “How can you be so selfish, so unfeeling? You don’t really mind at all, either of you!”

Her children go on eating. It is evident they do not.

Chomp; smash. The hands of the clock over the sink move toward eight. Jeffrey and Matilda rise, grumbling, grab their coats and books, and leave to catch the bus for junior high. Alone in the kitchen, Erica clears the table. She pours herself a cup of coffee, puts the buttered toast Matilda refused on a clean plate, and sits down. She starts to reach for the sugar bowl, and stops. Then she puts her head down on the table beside a splash of milk and some blobs of cherry jam, and weeps painfully. Tears run sideways across her small, slightly worn, delicate features, and into her crisp dark hair.

There is no one to hear her. Her friend and husband, Brian Tate, is away lecturing on foreign policy at Dartmouth. If he were there, she thinks, he would understand why she had screamed at the children, and not blame her (as he sometimes does lately) for being unable to handle them. He would listen to her, share her feelings, and console her afterward—possibly back in bed. Lately the Tates have taken to making both love and conversation on weekday mornings before Brian leaves for the university. In the evening there is always the suspicion that the children might be listening—at first from the sitting room for the unguarded exclamation, the raised voice; later, overhead, for the thump and squeak of bedroom furniture.

Once, Erica had liked the acoustical permeability of this old house, because it meant that she could always hear Muffy or Jeffo if they should wake crying with an upset tummy or a bad dream. Now, at night, she and Brian dare not either laugh or cry. In the dark, in their pajamas, they may begin to speak or move: “They were so rude today,” Erica will sigh. “That ass McGruder, my grader, you know what he’s done—” Brian will begin. Then upstairs the floor will creak, and he will fall silent; or will remove his hand from her breast. “We live in the same house and we sleep in the same bed and we never see each other any more,” Erica had whispered once recently.

But now it is eight-fifteen. Brian is in Hanover, New Hampshire, and she is sitting with her head on the kitchen table, weeping, trying to understand her situation. How has it all come about? She is—or at least she was—a gentle, rational, even-tempered woman, not given to violent feelings. In her whole life she cannot remember disliking anyone as much as she now sometimes dislikes Jeffrey and Matilda. In second grade she had briefly hated a bulky girl named Rita who ate rolls of pastel candy wafers and bullied her; in college freshman year a boy with a snuffle and yellowed nylon shirts who followed her around everywhere asking her to go out with him. She had, in the abstract, hated Hitler, Joseph McCarthy, Lee Harvey Oswald, etc., but never anyone she had to live with and should have loved—had for years and years warmly loved.

They were a happy family once, she thinks. Jeffrey and Matilda were beautiful, healthy babies; charming toddlers; intelligent, lively, affectionate children. There are photograph albums and folders of drawings and stories and report cards to prove it. Then last year, when Jeffrey turned fourteen and Matilda twelve, they had begun to change; to grow rude, coarse, selfish, insolent, nasty, brutish, and tall. It was as if she were keeping a boarding house in a bad dream, and the children she had loved were turning into awful lodgers—lodgers who paid no rent, whose leases could not be terminated. They were awful at home and abroad; in company and alone; in the morning, the afternoon and the evening.

But the worst moments for Erica were at night, when they were asleep. She would go into a bedroom to close the window against wind and rain, or make sure they were covered. In the filtered light from the hall, the childish features she remembered so well could be recognized again beneath the coarsening acned masks. Her dear Muffy and Jeffo were still there, somewhere inside the monstrous lodgers who had taken over their minds and bodies, as in one of Jeffrey’s science-fiction magazines.