The War Between the Tates: A Novel (33 page)

Brian claims that he does not want to fight over details either; he tells Erica that he too is impatient for an agreement. But at the same time, through his lawyer, he has made one difficulty after another. His first counterproposal, according to Clara, was so impossible that there was no point in going over its terms with Erica. Supposedly, a compromise settlement is now being drawn up, but not very fast. Whenever Erica calls the office Clara tells her that she has not been able to reach Brian’s lawyer on the phone, or that he has been out of town and has not yet answered her last letter. “Jack Lucas
does
seem to be dragging his feet,” she admits cheerfully. “I can’t explain why, unless possibly Brian doesn’t really want a separation.”

But Erica is not cheered by Clara’s cheer, and does not for a moment believe her explanation. She believes that Brian, with the help of Jack Lucas, is trying to wear her and Clara down, to force them to agree to his terms. He wants to keep as much money for himself as possible, out of selfishness and greed, so that he can buy new inappropriately youthful clothes and a new stereo system and go to Europe with Wendy this summer. He wants to reduce her (and Jeffrey and Matilda) to poverty, out of greed and revenge; to punish her for having tried to do the right thing and make him do the right thing.

What she cannot get over is that he seems to have no sense of duty or obligation toward his family. His lack of moral responsibility for Wendy’s child seems to have been extended to his own children. For example it had not occurred to him to propose taking them for even part of the summer vacation, and he was almost indignant at first when she proposed it. And this although he claims that Jeffrey and Matilda have improved greatly in the past few months, becoming (in his view) quite easy to cope with.

It is mean and hypocritical for Brian to say this; because he does not really have to cope with the children at all, since he is never home. He has been able to de-escalate the war with Jeffrey and Matilda, to withdraw his troops from the occupied country and establish friendly or at least neutral diplomatic relations. Erica, however, has had to stay on the ground, fighting a losing battle and maintaining a precarious puppet government, with only very minimal and intermittent air support from her former ally.

She has often heard how loyally and affectionately children have rallied round and supported their mothers after separation. Indeed, Roo Zimmern had done so, though only eleven at the time. But Jeffrey and (worse) Matilda support, or at least prefer, their father, who now makes no demands on them and enforces no rules, whom they see for only a few hours a week over expensive meals. During these excursions they are on their best behavior, and Brian returns them afterward with an air of self-satisfaction, praising their improved table manners and their knowledge of current events.

At home, however, the children are as bad as ever, or worse: more foul-mouthed, untidy, rebellious and disobedient. No matter how reasonably and tactfully Erica approaches them, they refuse to do any work around the house, or to keep decent hours. They read after bedtime with a flashlight under the covers, and on weekends they stay out until eleven o’clock or later with their friends, God knows where, doing God knows what. When she asks what and where they mutter rudely or do not reply at all. But when Erica doesn’t answer their questions or is not home when she has said she will be, they complain, and are righteously indignant.

Sighing, setting her lips, Erica slips the plaid jersey (which she has not worn since Christmas) from its hanger and over her head. The fine pale wool settles loosely about her hips—too loosely; the wide ruffled collar hangs limp. In these last months she has lost weight. She straightens up and sticks out her chest, but the neckline still gapes, and folds of extra stuff hang about the waist.

Pulling the extra material around to the back as much as possible, Erica crosses the room to her dressing table, sits down, and looks into the glass, smiling slightly. For forty years she has had a happy relationship with mirrors. She regarded them with delight from the very beginning; the walnut-framed oval mirror in the front hall, to which her father held her up as a laughing baby; the long narrow mirror fastened to the back of her mother’s closet door by metal clips which rattled as if with applause as, aged seven or eight, she paraded before it in Lena Parker’s late 1930’s fashions and wedgies. She liked the heavy triple-plate glass of stores: Manon’s and Altman’s in White Plains, later Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, more recently Lord & Taylor’s and Bloomingdale’s on trips to New York; the neon-bright mirrors of bathrooms; the round and square and oval bits of glass dimmed with powder in a long series of compacts. All these, and many, many more, reflected Erica flatteringly, for she had from babyhood the sort of smooth beauty which adjusts effortlessly to its frame. Brushing her teeth in the dorm bathroom at college, she was all pink innocence; in the smoked glass of a Greenwich Village boutique, draped in a fringed shawl, she became dark and mysterious. She felt at ease even with the mirrors most women avoid. In the harsh light of public washrooms she was merely interestingly pale; and the stained greenish glass of old bureaus, mercury-speckled like stagnant water, showed her as a green nymph rising from a pond.

Now, on this cold March night, Erica sits before the mirror she knows best, and for the first time in weeks looks close into it, smiling gently, anticipatively. A woman whom she scarcely recognizes looks back at her, first with a blank, then with an injured and startled expression. This person is whey-faced, middle-aged and skinny, with a hollow goose-flesh chest above her ill-fitting, inappropriately girlish dress. Her dark hair has been chopped off too short above a too-long neck, and what remains shows crinkled threads of gray. The stranger’s nose is pinched, her mouth tight. Only the eyes—large, gray, thick-lashed—are familiar to Erica, and now they blink and turn in nets of tiny wrinkles, like caught fish.

With a fishlike gasp, Erica rises and backs off from the dressing table; and as she moves away the image she knows reappears: the familiar tall, elegant, pretty young woman in her pretty ruffled dress. It diminishes, leaves the glass, and reappears across the hall in the bathroom mirror, smiling with relief, drawing nearer, larger, leaning into the hard neon light over the sink, staring; then putting up both hands to shield its face, which has become, and remains, white, thin, creased.

Erica feels dizzy and frightened; she wants to scream at the mirror, to weep. But instead she swallows, sets her jaw, and returns to the bedroom, where she pulls off the ruffled jersey, and zips herself into the high-necked black wool. The bedroom mirror approves, if grudgingly; it reflects a slim, pale woman with neat small features, somberly dressed, not in any way ridiculous. She ties a rose-and-white silk scarf (bought in Paris long ago in a better time) around her neck to disguise its thin length and the severity of her costume. Then she rolls the ruffled dress into a ball and shoves it far down inside a cardboard carton marked
RUMMAGE
at the back of her closet.

Hastily now, for it is growing late and she has promised to be at Danielle’s before the other guests come, Erica moves to the bathroom to see what can be done with make-up. Again she stares close into the glass. She feels lost, dispossessed of her rights. She remembers a remark of Leonard Zimmern’s—that if Martians ever came to America, they would conclude our religion to be the worship of the pretty young woman, for she or her image is everywhere: at political rallies and parades and sports events; on billboards and packages; presiding over every public ceremony and every exchange of goods. For over twenty years she, Erica, was one of the incarnations of the goddess. Now the spirit has departed from her.

She must camouflage the loss, but is uncertain how to begin. Brian prefers the natural look, and as a natural beauty it is years since she used anything but a little rose lipstick and blue eye shadow—not even mascara, for her lashes and brows are naturally thick and dark. She owns no other cosmetics. But Matilda has recently begun to accumulate all sorts of bottles and tubes; they fill a shelf of the cabinet already. Opening a jar almost at random, Erica smears a thin paste, smelling faintly of medicinal soap and designed to cover adolescent acne, over the fine dry creased surface of her skin. The stuff coats her eyebrows and eyelashes; she wets them to remove it, and when this is ineffective, colors them brown again with Matilda’s mascara, and rubs her own blue shadow over her lids. She outlines her mouth with the eyebrow pencil and paints it rose-mauve. Then, stepping back, she looks into the glass. The total effect is somewhat masklike and artificial, and the pink paste has turned her eye shadow an odd, bruised lavender—but at least she does not look quite so old. She fluffs her hair out with her hands and goes to tell the children she is leaving.

Matilda, by the sound of it, is in her room. Erica climbs the stairs and knocks loudly on the door; when there is no answer she pushes it ajar. Matilda is lying on her bed with her eyes shut and a school text open face-down on her stomach; the hoarse screams of a rock group issue from opposite speakers. Erica looks from one to the other with a sense of fatigue. For the last month Matilda has been complaining that her own phonograph is lousy and is messing up her records, making it necessary for her to play them downstairs in the sitting room. The house has resounded with frenzied thumping and shouting, and the angry voices of Jeffrey and Matilda quarreling over when, how loud and for how long she could use the machine, while Erica struggled to control her own voice and act as referee. Finally, in a moment of exhaustion, she told her daughter to take the family stereo upstairs. The result has been that Erica cannot play her own records, and there is a constant faint background of bad music throughout the house at all hours.

“Matilda!”

“Yeh.” Matilda half opens her eyes. Though both children have continued to change for the worse, the change in her has been the most upsetting lately. A few months ago she was a plump, sulky child. Now she is a sulky adolescent, almost embarrassingly developed for a thirteen-year-old. None of her clothes fit or suit her, and none of her old friends. Boys, some of whose voices have already changed, have begun to phone, asking for “Tilda.” She has been forbidden to date until her fourteenth birthday, next month; but she goes for long walks after school and has been seen in disreputable hamburger joints in Collegetown. Erica wonders at intervals if she ought to speak to her seriously about birth control.

“I’m going to Danielle’s party now. I want you to have your bath and be in bed by nine-thirty. This is a school night.” The last sentence sounds suddenly loud, for the record has ended.

“Yeh.” The tone of Matilda’s voice suggests that she has no intention of being in bed by nine-thirty. She raises her head. “Hey, you look flaky.”

“Flaky? What does that mean?” But another disc has begun to blare from both sides of the room; Matilda has shut her eyes again, and her mother lacks the energy to pursue the question. She stops on her way downstairs at another mirror, but can see nothing flaking. Perhaps it was a kind of compliment?

Jeffrey is in the kitchen eating again and possibly doing his homework; at least there is a book propped in front of him.

“I’m going out now. If you need me for anything you can call Danielle’s house. And I’d like you to be in bed at ten, please; this is a school night ...Jeffrey, really. You might answer me.”

“What for?”

“So that I’ll know you heard me.” Erica strives to keep her tone friendly.

“How could I not hear you? You’re standing right nexta me.”

“It’s a matter of good manners.” No reply. “And Jeffrey, you really shouldn’t eat so many chocolate cookies; they’re bad for your skin. If you’re hungry, why don’t you have some fruit? An orange, or one of these bananas, Jeffrey?”

“Look, why don’t you blast off?” her son growls. “I thought you said you were gonna.”

Erica opens her mouth to expostulate, then shuts it because she is not sure she can do so calmly. She might shout, might howl, lose control of herself. To avoid this she retreats to the front hall, where she puts on her coat and boots. Carrying her shoes in a plastic bag with the legend
Superbread
printed on it, she leaves the house, not even slamming the door behind her.

At Danielle’s all the lights are on, and through the porch window her living room has the bright, empty, pre-party look of a stage set. Danielle, in her red mumu, opens the door.

“Yes? Oh, Erica, come in. I was afraid it was Mrs. Heyrick again.”

“Has she been complaining?”

“You said it. I thought I’d head her off; I told her this afternoon I was having a party so she could make all her fuss then. But she was just over ten minutes ago asking if it was possible for me not to play the phonograph because her husband doesn’t feel himself.”

Danielle laughs roughly. For over five years, ever since the Zimmerns moved to Corinth and into this half-house, she has been at war with the owners of the other half, an elderly couple named Heyrick. Battle was joined almost at once, on a hot September morning when Mrs. Heyrick, from her front porch, observed Silly squatting in a bed of petunias with her skirt lifted.

“What are you doing, little girl?” she cawed, rising to her feet.

“Watering the flars,” replied Silly, then aged three.

After going indoors to skewer a small veiled hat to her hair, Mrs. Heyrick proceeded down her front walk, along the street under the elms and up the adjoining walk, where she rang the doorbell and informed Danielle that this was a nice neighborhood and that her daughter was old enough to know better and to wear panties.

The resulting conflict had continued ever since, finding new grounds without wholly abandoning the old ones. It waxed and waned with the seasons: during the winter months there was usually a cooling-off period, with only occasional skirmishes about noise and the removal of snow; as temperatures rose and the un-nice behavior of the Zimmerns and their friends became more visible, it heated up again.