The War Between the Tates: A Novel
Page 25
For a long while Erica has hoped that Danielle would recover from her bitterness toward the other sex with the help of some kind, sensitive man who would be wise enough to approach her gently and slowly. What happened Friday seems likely to set this recovery back months, perhaps years—assuming recovery is possible. Or that there is anyone in Hopkins County worth recovering for. Erica remembers how she used to think that Danielle and the Hens were prejudiced against men. Individually they might have had bad experiences; but not all men were like the ones they have known, she can remember saying to Danielle. Brian Tate, for example, was not like that; he was decent, serious—Of all the women she knows, she had been the most deceived, just as now Wendy is the most deceived.
One of the most miserable hours of the past miserable week was the one Erica spent having lunch on campus with Wendy. It had been a long time since they met. For some weeks Erica had kept expecting to run into Wendy, and Brian, at one of the many parties given at this season. She had explained to all her friends that there was no reason not to invite both her and Brian, and she was sure that she would be able to meet him calmly, and behave in a generous forbearing manner when he showed up with his pregnant hippie girl friend. But she was given no opportunity to exercise this forbearance; and she realizes now how naïve it was of her to have imagined that Brian would ever choose to appear in public with a pregnant hippie.
It was dreadful just to look at Wendy now; to see her no longer confident and blooming but sallow, weary, with a nervous tremor in her voice. Worse still was the way she parroted Brian’s arguments, acquiescing in her own defeat. She didn’t reproach him for anything—only herself, for having caused him inconvenience. “I mean, I’ve got years to have kids,” she bleated, pushing aside a half-chewed cream-cheese sandwich. “But if Brian doesn’t finish his Book now, when it’s published it could be too late to save this country. I could like kill myself when I think how much time he’s already lost because of my stupid behavior.” And Erica could not find it in her heart to tell Wendy that she was like killing herself; that no book was worth this double human sacrifice. That would only make her more tense and unhappy—as tense and unhappy as Erica herself.
Pity and self-pity are catching up with her again as she sits on the floor in her daughter’s room, tempting her to get into the washer again, to give in to despair. She must find something useful to do quickly. She remembers the rule a counselor at camp once taught her: whenever you feel awful, go do something for somebody who feels worse. Psychologically cynical, perhaps—but over the years Erica has found it effective. Now, for instance, she could pack up what is left of Matilda’s toys and take them over to the Zimmerns’. The dollhouse, too; even if it can’t be repaired, at least it will be out of her sight.
Erica finds Danielle at home in her kitchen, where she is cutting the meat off the roast chicken they had last night for Sunday dinner, and looking rather better. Her hair has been washed and brushed, and she has on a new red ribbed sweater.
“Look at all that,” she says, gesturing with her knife. “I can’t plan meals right yet; I still think in terms of a normal family. And I keep forgetting about Roo and her stupid diet.”
“I know.” The strain at the Zimmerns’ has been increased recently by Roo’s conversion to vegetarianism. Not only did she refuse to eat any roast chicken, she did her utmost to prevent anyone else doing so. (“Do you know how they kill the poor, poor chickens?” she asked, staring emotionally at her mother, her sister and Erica in turn. “They grab hold of them and screw their poor heads tight into a sort of big vise, like the one in Industrial Arts, and then they take this big, sharp, bloody ax—” But at this point Danielle sent her daughter out of the room. )
“She told me this morning she can only have unfertile eggs for breakfast. Where the hell am I supposed to get unfertile eggs?” Danielle laughs.
“I thought all eggs nowadays were unfertile,” Erica says, trying hard not to think of Wendy’s fertile egg.
“So did I. But apparently not, at least not at the Co-op. Here, let’s have some coffee, it’s pretty hot. I can’t keep up with her any more. The rules keep changing too fast.”
“Thank you ...But that’s how it is with everything. You know what I feel sometimes?” Erica adds, sitting down on a kitchen stool and warming her hands on the mug of coffee. “As if I’d got into a time machine, like in one of Jeffrey’s science-fiction stories, and been shot forward into the wrong time. Nineteen sixty-nine—it doesn’t sound right, it’s a year I don’t belong in. It doesn’t even feel real. Reality was when the children were small, and before the housing development.”
“And before Lennie and Brian left home. Yeh. I know what you mean.”
“You see, we know all the rules for that world,” Erica goes on. “Where to shop, what to read and talk about and wear, whom to have for dinner and what to serve, what kind of sandwiches to make for each lunch box, everything. But now we’ve got moved into nineteen sixty-nine by mistake. The A & P has burned down and you can’t park on campus any more and everybody’s children have got big and awful. Everything’s changed, and I’m too tired to learn the new rules. I don’t care about nineteen sixty-nine at all. I don’t care about rock festivals or black power or student revolutions or going to the moon. I feel like an exhausted time traveler. All these new developments they have, maybe they’re interesting or depressing or amazing, but they have nothing to do with real life.”
“Future shock.” Danielle laughs.
“I want to go back where we belong, back to when we were first here, and you used to bring Roo and Silly over to play dolls’ tea parties with Muffy.” Erica looks at her friend for the confirmation and humorous sympathy she has learned to expect, but Danielle is busy again with the dismantled chicken. “How are Roo and Silly, I mean Celia, anyhow?”
“Fine. They’re all excited because Bernie promised to take us out to the country this afternoon to see his neighbor’s stables.”
“Bernie?” Erica sets her mug down. “Do you mean Bernie Kotelchuk?” Danielle nods. “I thought you weren’t ever going to speak to him again.”
“Yeh, I know. But when he came over last night, after you’d gone—Hell, you know, what happened before, it was partly my own fault.” Danielle stops chopping chicken and turns to face Erica, leaning back against her kitchen counter. “I mean, I told him when he got here there was nothing doing, that the other day was a big mistake. He took it very well. He said okay, sure, he understood; he even apologized. He said he hadn’t planned to lay a finger on me when he came to the house that morning, but when he saw me with my hair down and barefoot, and only what he called my ‘nightie’ on, he lost control of himself. It never occurred to me I wasn’t dressed properly. I mean, my nightgown’s not transparent or anything—it was the red one, you know, that I wear around the house all the time.”
“The long sort of Hawaiian mumu, with the big white flowers?”
“That’s the one. Utterly decent. Hell, it was invented by missionaries in Hawaii to cover up everything. But apparently Bernie was brought up in a different tradition. Polish or whatever it was. Respectable women don’t go around barefoot in their nighties. If I didn’t want to screw, I should have put on a flannel bathrobe and pink fuzzy slippers before I let him in ...Well, anyhow he apologized. And he looked at the turtles, and I put Celia to bed, and then Roo went to bed, and we sat around, and I poured us some Scotch—you know all those ladies in Brookdale who want to marry Bernie and keep having him to dinner with elaborate food, baked ham and three kinds of pie, only they never give him anything decent to drink ... Well, there we were ... So it happened again.”
“You mean—”
“Yeh.” Danielle looks away, then back, smiling with something almost like embarrassment. Erica does not smile. It is bad enough that her best friend should have been raped once by a stupid, coarse, red-faced veterinarian. That she should passively let it happen a second time worries Erica even more. She decides to speak out.
Danielle shrugs. She puts the cut-up chicken away in the fridge and moves onto a stool opposite Erica. “He can’t, unless he plans to marry them,” she says. “And even then probably not until after the ceremony. He explained it all to me last night. Those people operate on a different system. They’re all good churchgoing widows and spinsters who were friends of his dear departed wife. They play by the old rules and don’t commit fornication.”
“But that’s not your fault! You don’t have to let him use you sexually just because nobody else he knows will.”
“He doesn’t use me, really.” Danielle looks down into her coffee and then up again, almost defiantly. “I mean, it wasn’t so bad this time. In fact”—her face reddens—“it was sort of fantastic. I was surprised.”
“I should think so.”
“He was pretty surprised too. But appreciative. He wants to take me out to dinner tonight at the Gables.” Danielle half laughs.
“Are you going?”
“Hell, sure. Who would turn down a meal at the Gables?”
“I don’t know,” Erica replies, thinking that she would, but trying not to let any note of disapproval into the tune of her voice. She reminds herself that the men with whom Danielle was briefly involved after Leonard left also had faults. Some were opportunistic, others neurotic. But at least they were all presentable, intelligent men: lawyers, artists, professors—not Polish veterinarians.
“Of course I can’t really talk to him,” Danielle adds, as if she had heard Erica’s thoughts. “If I mention anything I’m teaching, he just looks dumb. And politically he’s hopeless: a grass-roots agrarian populist. But hell, I’m sick of talking to men. Once you start talking to them the next thing is you begin to get emotionally involved, and I’m not interested in getting involved with any man. I don’t have to worry about that with Bernie, because he doesn’t want it either. Basically he’s a pretty domestic type, even kind of romantic. He’ll probably end up with one of those nice women out in Brookdale. But right now he’s not ready for that; his wife has only been dead about a year. It’s just a physical thing between us: I need it and he needs it, and that’s all.
“Mm,” Erica comments, thinking in spite of herself that Brian last spring had used almost these same phrases to describe his feelings toward Wendy.
“And I really don’t like masturbation,” Danielle confides in a lower voice. “I tried it a few times, but I could never get much out of it. I couldn’t come or anything; I just always felt nervous and silly, you know?”
“Mm,” repeats Erica, who has had the opposite experience.
“Bernie and I talked it over,” Danielle continues. “I told him, no sentimental lies, no commitments, no promises.” She pushes her heavy dark hair back and her jaw forward.
“I see.” Erica knows that Danielle wants her to accept, if not approve, this plan of finding temporary sexual gratification with Bernie Kotelchuk. But how can she? It is so flat, so grossly practical—as if Danielle were to announce: “I want a piece of meat, so I’m going to the grocery.” Better, surely, to make out with what is already in the cupboard, or to become a vegetarian.
But she is anxious not to hurt her friend’s feelings, so she says something vague, and then, inventing a dentist’s appointment, declares that she must leave, in order to prevent herself from saying anything more—or worse, having to meet Bernie Kotelchuk. In a flurry of false haste, she scrambles on her coat and boots and scarf and gloves and literally runs from the house. She starts the car fast and, in case Danielle is looking, heads it downtown.
It is a heavy, cold, unattractive afternoon; the clouds hang close over the bare trees, like a huge sodden canvas tent; the wind, still blowing hard, beats and slaps the empty branches about. Erica feels like weeping for Danielle, who has been so beaten about and exploited by men—and by her own dependence on them. Gripping the cold wheel with her driving gloves, she promises herself that she will never, never let herself be so exploited. In spite of herself her eyes begin to fill with tears. Never, never—
She stops for a red light, blinking. She is downtown now, but what is she doing there? There must be something useful, some errands, or Christmas shopping. In the past Erica had always finished this task by the first week of December, but this year she is far behind, partly because she can’t decide what to get for anyone, especially the children. Brian told her yesterday that he is thinking of buying them each an expensive AM/FM radio, something she considers quite unnecessary, indeed an ill concealed bribe. Not to mention the additional noise these radios will cause in the house, where of course Brian is not living at the moment.
Brian feels guilty toward Jeffrey and Matilda, but not any longer toward Erica. He thinks he has done her a favor by arranging the murder of Wendy’s child, and he proposes to do her another soon by moving back into her house and bedroom. For surely that is what he had in mind last night when he said they must have a serious discussion soon. Like her unwanted suitors, he would be first incredulous and then abusive if she said she didn’t want him; that she doesn’t want to live in the modern world with a modern man.
But she cannot sit crying in traffic. Perhaps if she were to park and walk past the stores ... and there is a space across from the post office. She backs into it, gets out, walks away—then returns and feeds a series of pennies into the metallic head of the parking meter. Jeffo and Muffy used to love to do this for her when they were little; they loved the story she had invented for them about how all the meters in town belonged to a big family of underground aluminum giraffes, and late at night when nobody was looking they would pull their heads back down through the pavement and play together under the city. But the last time she had referred to this fancy, about a year ago, she had been badly snubbed: “Oh, Mother, must you be so stupid?”
The giraffe smacks its cold metal lips on each coin, pst, pst, pst, and sticks its round metal tongue farther out. Erica walks away from it toward Main Street, looking into shop windows. But instead of useful purchases, everything reminds her of what she wants to forget: a real estate office “Photo Gallery of Desirable Homes”; in the window of the savings bank, fourth-grade clay artifacts from the school Muffy and Jeffo once attended, where they had made the same loving lopsided bowls and glazed blue animals for her; the gift-shop display of Great Artists’ Puzzles, featuring a Renaissance nativity in sawed-up wooden fragments.
Across the street it gets worse. The department-store windows are vindictively symbolic: on one side an imitation ideal family—hers of five years ago—in matching ski outfits sprinkled with soap flakes; on the other, four grinning young people in party clothes. The display case flanking the front entrance is full of men’s shoes and boots drawn up in rows at different levels, decorated with argyle socks and plastic holly. They are glossy, heavy-soled, brutally new, ready to stamp and kick and tread on women—
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?