Any Minute I Can Split (11 page)

“When I was about nine or ten she finally sent word that she was there and she wanted to see us but she couldn't face coming back. My father got plane tickets and took us up there the next day. My brother and I. We hadn't been out of Texas in our whole lives. When we landed in Chicago it was snowing. I'll never forget it. At the moment we landed I made up my mind that when I grew up I'd live in a place where it snowed.”

“Maybe it was because you were going to see your mother,” Carol said.

“How come your father would take you up there after what she'd done?” Starr asked.

“That's just the way my father is,” Dolores said.

“My son-of-a-bitch stepfather,” Starr said, “if you
sneezed
the wrong way he'd never talk to you again.”

“What was your mother like?” Carol asked Dolores.

Dolores just shrugged.

Outside the kids were rolling, sliding, trying unsuccessfully to pack the dry powdery snow into balls. Even Lorna looked happy. Margaret felt an old urge to go out and roll and scream with them.

“My father always hated the snow,” she said. “The super didn't clear it fast enough so he always ended up doing it himself and complaining the whole time. He hated any kind of exercise.” Why was she talking about him in the past tense? Maybe because he'd never bothered to answer her postcard announcing the twins. Couldn't he even have sent his colleen—maid—whatever—to pick up a card? Something appropriate, with flocking and a pink satin bow?
Sincere congratulations
on your untimely freak birth?
“The snow is so clean here,” she said. “In the city it gets so filthy.”

“How'll Mira get to the ashram in this?” Carol asked no one in particular. Mira, into some particularly rigorous form of yoga since an acid vision a couple of years earlier, attended services once a week which involved more than an hour of driving each way even in the good weather. No one bothered to answer.

“Why couldn't we be one hour out of Boston instead of two or three?” Carol asked plaintively.

“Oh, shit,” Jordan said.

“It's easy for you to say oh shit,” Carol told him. “You don't hate car riding!”

Carol's whining was beginning to get to Margaret, who was afraid that it was a preview of her own feelings of boredom and isolation during the winter months ahead.

“Doesn't Brattleboro have a lot of things to do?” she asked.

“Ohhhh,” Carol said, “not really. I mean there's nothing really there. A couple of movies. Stores. One or two restaurants. That's it.”

“What else do you need?”

What else might
she
need? Sex. Sooner or later she would surely get interested in sex again. It was almost comforting to know that her sexuality was buried for now but it was horrifying to think this situation might continue indefinitely. Mira had pretty much renounced sex, except as a means of procreation (but not to be enjoyed in any event) when she went on her yoga trip and whether that contributed to her objectionable piety or vice versa, the whole syndrome was appalling. De Witt had a girlfriend in Brattleboro who'd lived briefly at the farm but had been driven out by pressure from Mira, although Mira was supposedly understanding about De Witt's disinclination to become a celibate vegetarian. Both Starr and Dolores had told Margaret that once Mira had been a really beautiful sexy woman, but De Witt never referred to their life together.

“I dunno,” Carol said. “More of something. Or better. I get so
bored.”

“Don't you make a lot of your pots in the winter?”

“Yes, but I thought that we were trying to get away from that whole bit when we came here, that whole pressure of constantly having to
produce.”

“I'll tell you what Carol wants,” Starr said. “Carol wants to lie on her back and have a bunch of buttons, a Feed Me button, a Fuck Me button, a Make Me Happy button, one for everything so she never has to do it herself. YOU'RE A PAIN IN THE ASS, CAROL, Y'KNOW THAT?”

Margaret smiled; Starr's furies were always relaxing to her. She waited for Carol to argue that Starr was being unfair but instead Carol nodded dejectedly.

“You're right. I know you're right.”

“And
you're
a fucking ballbuster,” Jordan said to Starr, suddenly coming to his wife's defense, “but do
you
know
that?”

“You think any woman with guts is a ballbuster,” Starr flung at him. “Isn't that true, Paul?”

“Leave me out of this,” Paul said.

“Out of WHAT?” Starr exploded. “Out of EVERYTHING! That's what you really mean, isn't it. Leave you alone, don't bother you with arguments, don't bother you with your kid, don't bother you with LIFE! You're worse than
she
is because at least she
wants
to be happy if someone would only do it for her!”

“My God,” Margaret said, “I thought you were the one who
liked
winter.” She laughed but she was uneasy; if she'd always cared about people, here at the farm there was an urgent quality to her caring. There were very few people in her real world now; each was precious beyond belief.

“I LOVE winter,” Starr said. “What I can't stand is being dragged down by deadheads.”

“You're frightening me,” Margaret said, surprised to hear herself admitting it. “I keep thinking you're going to get mad at me next.”

“Why would I get mad at you?” Starr asked.

“I don't know,” Margaret admitted. “I just . . .” She was on the verge of tears, for crying out loud. She smiled. “You sound as if you hate everybody, so why not me?”

“Hate?” Starr looked genuinely puzzled. “I don't hate anybody. You mean Carol? I LOVE Carol, Carol's my soul sister.”

Paul laughed. “It's like my mother's old joke,” he said. “With that for a friend you don't need an enemy.”

“Fuck your mother,” Starr said.

Paul laughed again. “Right on.”

“I'd think that by now,” De Witt spoke from his corner for the first time, “a lot of the free schools would be in full swing.”

“So?” Starr said.

“So I was just thinking,” De Witt continued, “that maybe when the roads are cleared a couple of people might want to take off and look at a few of them, get some idea of how they're run, and so on.”

“De Witt,” Carol said, “I love you.”

“What about the kids?” Starr asked suspiciously. “Would we have to take the kids?”

“I don't see why you should,” De Witt said, “unless the others . . .”

Margaret and Butterscotch said it was fine with them if the kids stayed. Mira, her eyes closed as she sat in the rocking chair, said nothing.

“How about you, Mira?” Starr asked.

Mira opened her eyes. Starr explained the question again, as though to a deaf person. Mira said she thought by all means the children should stay.

“Fine,” De Witt said, “I'll find out what steps we have to take to make a school legal.”

T
HE
younger group came back from Canada. Butterscotch was pleased to see them and baked a cake to celebrate their return; they treated her with friendly condescension, someone fit to keep the home fires burning
while they manned the barricades. They looked very much alike, the four boys and two girls. All around twenty years old, uniformly tall, handsome, healthy looking. David displayed no interest in any of them, although they were so close to his own age; when she questioned him, he said he wasn't into their phony revolution bag. She asked whether it might not be better to be in a phony bag than in no bag at all and he stomped out of the room, brushing shoulders with one of them as he went. They seemed not to notice him or anyone else as they trooped toward the kitchen for a meal, ignoring Mira's gentle protests that lunch wasn't ready yet.

“Do they talk to anyone?” Margaret asked De Witt.

“Not much,” De Witt said. “They're suspicious of us. They feel the odds are that at least one of us is CIA, probably me.”

“Doesn't that bother you?”

He shrugged. “In the long run it doesn't matter. Trust can change, too.”

“Why would the CIA bother with this place?”

De Witt smiled. “I can't think of any good reason, but maybe the CIA can.”

I
T
kept snowing. Carol and Starr got tired of waiting for it to clear and took off in Carol's Volks after De Witt had plowed the dirt road for them.

Rosemary was sleeping through every night and Rue was just waking up once for a feeding and then going back. Margaret gave a lot of attention to Starr's and Carol's kids, none of whom seemed to mind in the least that their mothers were gone.

She began doing yoga exercises every morning with Dolores and Mira.

The younger group built an igloo in the woods beyond the farm. “They're on a survival trip,” Butterscotch explained. They slept in it for two nights and then decided to spend the winter with some friends in the movement in Key West.

When she thought about Roger it was most often to wonder idly who he was screwing, or how many at a time. Occasionally she questioned the nature of their relationship: whether it was more good than bad (probably not); whether there were reasons aside from parenthood to continue it (probably not); whether Roger would mind if she were to write him she was going to stay at the farm permanently (probably not). She didn't actually think of it as staying at the farm so much as she thought of it as staying here with De Witt. This brought up a lot of other questions, like the difference in her bonds to the two men; why she was more relaxed with De Witt than with her own husband (that was an easy one, really—De Witt accepted her as she was while Roger, at best, accepted her in spite of what she was, whatever
that
was); whether those qualities of hers that Roger detested were about his problems or hers (maybe both; all the things he said about her always sounded terribly right, but why had he married her, then?); whether she could be happy indefinitely without that complicated tension that made life with Roger at once so difficult and interesting (probably not). At this point, where to progress meant to plan or at least to anticipate the future, she always backed away from her thoughts into the present.

Carol and Starr came back from their investigation with Carol's friend of the previous year from Rindge and her two children, who'd become so unhappy where they were that they'd decided to help set up the school at the farm. Carol's ancient Volkswagen had died trying to get out of a snowbank in Maine and they all arrived in Hannah's jeep, which was pulling a small trailer. Everyone was pleased, not only because Hannah and her children were attractive and likable but because they'd brought their own living quarters with them. Hannah had a snowplow on the front of her jeep which, combined with the tractor plow, made a short job of clearing the snow from enough of one side of the barn so that a long side of Hannah's trailer could nestle
against it. Hannah made one request, that they plow in such a way that she could get out at any time. Otherwise, she explained, she would feel claustrophobic.

“I was hoping you'd really settle here,” Carol said, looking very upset.

Hannah laughed. “Who knows? Maybe you won't feel that way in two months.”

“I know I will,” Carol said vehemently. “It's not just you I dig, it's your kids.”

H
ANNAH'S
children were, in truth, delightful to have around. A girl and boy of twelve and nine, respectively, Daisy and Mario both seemed possessed of unusual poise and assurance. Agreeable to each other as well as to the rest of the children, all of whom were younger than they, they seemed to fall into a natural leadership, so that immediately after their first lunch at the farm, for example, instead of the younger kids hanging around while the grownups chatted, they all followed Daisy and Mario out to the barn to set up a basketball hoop that had been transported in the trailer along with the Berksons' other possessions, which were minimal. Hannah had a thing about ownership and had decided at some point in her life that she would never again own any more than she could fit in her little trailer along with its tiny bathroom, Pullman kitchen and four bunk beds.