The War Between the Tates: A Novel (24 page)

Trying to set aside his disgust and anger, to compose himself for the coming battle, Brian enters the house. He is aware first of rock music soaking down from above; next that all the lights are burning in the empty kitchen, the refrigerator door is partly open, and there is food abandoned on the table: a box leaking crackers, a carton of milk souring, smeary jars of peanut butter and jam.

“Erica?”

There is no reply. He turns off the light, slams the refrigerator door, and walks through to the sitting room. Slouched down on the sofa, reading a comic book and eating a leaky sandwich, is a skinny adolescent boy with thick wire-rimmed spectacles, long dirty blond hair, and acne.

“Jeffrey. Is Mom home?”

Jeffrey looks up briefly, chewing, and returns to his comic.

“Please answer me when I speak to you. And take those muddy shoes off the table.”

“I did answer you.”

“Excuse me, you did not.”

“I shook my head,” Jeffrey says in a sullen argumentative voice, not moving his feet. “That’s an answer, isn’t it?”

“Not a very polite one.” Brian waits, but his son remains silent. “Where is she, then?”

“Idunno,” Jeffrey mumbles, spitting crumbs. “She wenout.”

“Mm.” Brian paces back the length of the carpet and looks out the window, noticing—as he would have noticed sooner if he were in a calmer state of mind—that Erica’s car is not parked in the driveway next to the overturned cans.

“Jeffo, I’d like you to do something about the yard,” he announces, attempting to speak pleasantly, even humorously. “I’ve only been gone two days, and already the place looks like a suburban slum.”

“Yuh,” his son mutters, not glancing up.

“The lawn needs to be raked. And there are a lot of twigs and branches down; you’d better stack them by the back wall. The leaves and apples can go onto the compost heap. And I’d like you to pick up that garbage. Those idiot dogs have got into it again, because somebody forgot to put the rocks on top of the cans. You know,” he adds conversationally, “it seems to me you shouldn’t have to be told about this sort of thing. You’re getting old enough now to take some responsibility for the place, to notice when you come home from school if something needs to be done, and attend to it.”

There is no visible response to this speech. Jeffrey turns a page of his comic book.

“So come on, now,” Brian continues, speaking louder and a little less pleasantly. “Go outside and get started on the job, before you forget.”

Finally his son looks up. “Wouldja stop
persecuting
me, okay?” he asks in a tone of deep grievance. “I’ll do it later.”

“I want you to do it now.” Brian keeps his voice even with difficulty. “And while you’re at it, you can clean up that mess you left in the kitchen.”

“I didn’t leave any mess!” Jeffrey slams his comic down on the sofa. “Why do you always blame everything on me, huh? If there’s any crap in the kitchen, it’s Muffy’s crap. Whydoncha ask her to clean it up?”

Brian represses a comment on his son’s choice of language. “All right, I will. And you get to work on the yard, okay?”

The rock music intensifies as Brian climbs the stairs; soon he can make out the words, which express crude, clamorous physicality. He thinks, as he has thought before, how disagreeable and unsuitable such music is for a thirteen-year-old girl. Matilda is presumably still technically inexperienced; but shut up for hours every day with those obscene noises, how can she retain any real innocence?

On the third-floor landing the frenetic pulsing and shouting are intolerable, and his knock inaudible. So, apparently, is his voice.

“Matilda? Are you there, Matilda?’

Receiving no answer, Brian opens the door. A fat witch is in the attic bedroom, standing with her back to him before a mirror. She wears the traditional filthy black skirt and cape, with peculiarly stringy and shiny long black hair falling from under a tall cardboard hat.

“GOTCHA BOOM BOOM,” screams a hoarse licentious male voice from opposite speakers, as if summoning the fat witch to a Black Mass.

“Matilda!” Brian shouts.

The witch turns. Beneath the pointed hat and straggling black plastic hair is a plump young painted face, chalk-white and hideously asymmetrical. One eye has been outlined and rayed in electric blue and black so that it resembles a huge spider; the other eye is Matilda’s. Would you turn that record down, please? I’d like to speak to you!”

With an air of sulky weariness the witch crouches and reduces the volume minimally. “GOTCHA Boom Boom ...

“I wanted to ask you, Muffy—I said, turn it down so you can hear what I have to say.”

“I can hear you now.”

Exasperated, Brian crosses the room and turns off the record player. “Boommmmm.”

“You’re ruining my Stones record!” Matilda wails, snatching the tone arm off.

“And you’re ruining your hearing, playing the phonograph so loud, do you realize that?” he retorts. “I’ve already told you, and I’m sure your mother—”

“I can hear better than you can,” Matilda interrupts spitefully, turning her back on Brian and continuing with her make-up.

“That’s not the point, Matilda. It’s a gradual process.” No response; his daughter is frowning close into the mirror, blackening her brows and lengthening them until they meet above her snub nose in a hag’s scowl. “Your hearing may be all right now, but if you don’t take care of it, by the time you’re my age you may be sorry.” No response. Matilda begins to smear her other eyelid with blue grease. Presently, when both eyes are spiders, she will go out with a shopping bag and show them to the whole neighborhood. “You know, Muffy, a witch doesn’t have to be grotesque. You’re an attractive young girl; I should think you’d want to look pretty when you go out trick-or-treating.”

Though he has spoken mildly, Matilda’s reaction is a howl. “Aw, cowplop! What’s the good of trying to look pretty, long as I’ve got these?” She rounds on him, grinning fiendishly to reveal a mouthful of metal braces laced with damp rubber bands. “And I’m not going trick-or-treating. What do you think I am, a baby?”

“Then what are you dressed up like that for?”

“I’m invited to Elsie’s slumber party.”

“Oh? And what is a slumber party?”

“Don’t you even know that? You have a party, and then you sleep overnight.”

“Overnight? You’re too young to stay overnight.”

“Mom said I could.” Matilda pulls the bottom lid of her right eye down hideously while she lines it in black crayon.

“Well, I say you can’t.” Brian makes a mental note to speak to Erica. If she gave any such consent, it must have been in a moment of distraction. “If you want to go out in the neighborhood that’s all right, as long as you’re home by nine,” he adds generously.

“But I already told Elsie I’m coming!” His daughter’s voice rises steeply.

“Then you’ll have to tell her you’re not.” Under the witch’s hat and hair, Matilda’s pudgy thirteen-year-old face takes on the foul expression she has painted onto it. “I don’t have to do what you tell me,” she declares. “You’re not my boss.” As if to prove this she squats down in her black skirt and restarts the phonograph.

“No, but I’m your father, and I want—” Brian begins, but he is shouted down by sex-crazed voices as the volume rises: “AWAH BOOM BOOM GOTCHA!” He is aware that he should turn the machine off again, should carry the battle with his daughter through, but a feeling of disgust and exhaustion has overtaken him. Erica is responsible for this insurrection; let her handle it. He turns and leaves the room.

As he descends the stairs, pursued by the lewd shouting and panting, he thinks how when he first met Erica her two favorite albums were the Bach double-violin concerto and some old English ballads sung to a dulcimer, of which he remembers best a song about a fair maid who followed her true-love to the wars. He can remember Erica shyly and eagerly setting the heavy waxy old black 78s on a wheezy phonograph in the living room of her Radcliffe dormitory for him to hear. She would go with him wherever he chose to go, the song seemed to declare, some weeks before Erica herself declared it; her life would flow after and into his as Bach’s second violin gracefully echoed and joined the first. A choking feeling comes over Brian; he leans for a moment against the stairway wallpaper, but Matilda’s infernal music drives him on down.

In the sitting room Jeffrey has not moved, except to slump lower on his spine behind
Plastic Man Comics.

“I thought I told you to clean up the yard,” Brian says, standing over him.

“S’too dark out,” his son mumbles through an apple core. “Do it tomorrow.”

“I want you to do it now.”

“I said I’d do it tomorrow, awright?” Jeffrey brays, finally looking up at his father with an insulting stare. Brian stares back, not moving. “Wouldja leave me alone now, so I can read?”

Brian feels a pounding in his chest. “You’re not reading!” he explodes. “You’re just rotting your mind with childish trash. When I was fifteen I read Gibbon, but I haven’t seen you with a book, outside of homework, for weeks. Do you have any homework today, by the way? ...Jeffrey, I asked you a question.”

“Oh, why don’t you fuck off.”

“Don’t speak to me like that.” He pulls
Plastic Man
out of his son’s hands.

“Gimme back my comic!” Jeffrey yelps, rising angrily, clumsily. Over the summer he has grown to be nearly as tall as Brian, though he probably still weighs twenty pounds less. If it came to a physical struggle—Brian holds the comic behind his back, gripping it tighter.

“I’ll give it back after you’ve done your work.”

Jeffrey glares, and begins a threatening gesture, but does not carry it through. “Awright, awright,” he growls. “If you’ll get the fuck out of my way.”

Having won, Brian overlooks the obscenity; he stands aside, and Jeffrey slouches grumbling from the room.

Five o’clock; and Erica is not back yet. Brian frowns and goes into the kitchen to check his watch. The sight of food still spoiling on the table reminds him that he has neglected to tell Matilda to clean up, or to ask when her mother will be home.

His Timex is accurate, but the times are out of joint. He feels exhausted, persecuted; his heart is still pumping. Brian has never cared much for children in general, but for years his own children have been the exception. He has treated them affectionately, seriously, fairly. Then why should he now have a son like Jeffrey, so sullen and selfish: a son who when other boys are out raking leaves or playing football sits slumped on his plastic spine reading
Plastic Man Comics?
Why should he have a daughter like Matilda, so painfully different from the gentle pretty daughter he had wanted and expected: a pudgy, whiny, sulky child who battens upon the commercial screams of sexual delinquents while disguising herself as a witch?

Suddenly the idea comes to
him
that it is not a disguise—that the scowling adolescent hag upstairs is Matilda’s true self; just as Jeffrey is in some profound sense a plastic man; that all the monstrous children he passed this afternoon on his way home, dressed as devils, ghosts, Dracula, etc., have merely made their real natures visible, this one day of the year.

As he walks about the kitchen waiting, very impatiently now, for Erica, Brian thinks how unfair it is that he should be insulted as he has just been by his children, and threatened—yes, even physically threatened, there was that in Jeffrey’s voice and stance. And Jeffrey is still growing; presently he will be taller than Brian and weigh more. Matilda also is beginning to grow; she is already large for her age. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that one day Brian Tate will be the smallest person in his family.

That he should have to listen to the daily insults and threats of these monstrous adolescents, to live in the same house with them—the irritated muttering in Brian’s head halts. Another clearer, louder voice remarks that he does not have to live in this house; that in fact all those concerned are concerned to put him out; that he is there now to argue and plead to be allowed to remain “for the sake of The Children.” That is, for the sake of Jeffrey and Matilda, who obviously would not care if they never saw him again.

He must be crazy. Why should he do anything for the sake of such children? Why should he stay here to be insulted and threatened by them; to be scolded and blamed by his wife? Considering what she has made of them, what right has she to judge him? Let her cope with what she has created; or rather—to be charitable—failed to prevent. Let him go where he is wanted, listened to, passionately loved.

Brian looks out the window again, but this time to make sure his wife is
not
coming home. Hastily, before she can do so, he retrieves his briefcase, raincoat and overnight bag, and leaves the house. Jeffrey is in the side yard, raking up apples with the wrong, or garden, rake, which is very bad for the lawn; but Brian does not stop to correct him. He gets into his car, starts the engine, and drives off into the damp, cold, darkening afternoon.

I
T IS THE DAY
after Thanksgiving. Erica is up in the storeroom sorting clothes: putting summer dresses away in cloudy plastic bags and taking winter skirts and coats out. She is alone in the house, for Jeffrey and Matilda are in Connecticut with Brian’s mother and aunt; but she is not lonely. She has not been lonely, or depressed or unhappy, for nearly a month.

At first she had hardly believed her feelings; she kept waiting for the reaction. Instead, day after day, there was only the euphoria of freedom—joy and relief at having Brian out of the house for good—in every sense “for
good
.” Cleaning out his chest of drawers, she felt no nostalgia—only a faint distaste for all those identical rolled dark-brown Orlon socks clustered together like horse droppings, for the pale shirts (14½-32) pressed bone-stiff in their cellophane bags. She took everything out and packed it into cardboard cartons; then she scrubbed the drawers with detergent and hot water, and relined them with fresh shiny blue-flowered contact paper. She dusted and waxed the empty bookshelves in the study.

Suddenly there was so much space in the house! She could walk through it, from room to room, and make everything right everywhere. She could take down the ugly yellow-varnished antique maps Brian had hung in the hall; she could move the best reading lamp, which he had somehow appropriated, back into the sitting room where it belongs She could trade in the ugly, clumsy Jar of Peanut Butter for a nice little blue VW station wagon that can park anywhere.