Any Minute I Can Split (12 page)

“When I walked out,” she said as they drank tea, “I didn't feel as if I was giving up a Park Avenue duplex and the good life. I felt as if I'd been carrying around a sack of fancy silver and china and antiques on my back for ten years and suddenly I'd straightened up and thrown it all off. I have no use for
things,
only for people.”

Everyone nodded understanding. Margaret nodded too because she could see what Hannah meant. Hannah's eyes were beautiful—huge, brown, limpid—and there was about her none of that aggressive piety that
made you want to disagree with people even when you knew you weren't wrong. Still . . .

“I know what you mean,” Margaret said slowly, “but it's not so simple. Things aren't just things, they can be tied up with people, with the past.” There was nothing Roger wouldn't sell if someone happened to offer him a price for it, even though he never needed the money.

“That's just what I mean,” Hannah said. “Who needs it?”

“Sometimes I do. Not here, maybe, or at least I haven't thought about it yet, maybe because I still have a home someplace else . . . But sometimes . . . My parents had a very bad marriage.”

Hannah laughed sympathetically. “Whose didn't?”

“I know that sounds off the track, but what I wanted to tell you is . . . after my mother died last year my father sent me a package of her stuff, personal stuff. I guess it was too painful for him to have it around. Anyway, there was a bunch of old letters I'd never seen before.” The ribbon had fallen apart as she'd tried to untie it. “They turned out to be letters my father had written my mother just after they were married. His mother was very ill in Ireland and they thought she was going to die so they sent for him but then she hung on for months and meanwhile he wrote my mother these letters. And the thing is, they were very beautiful.” Her eyes filled with tears; ashamed, she brushed them away. “I mean, they were very
tender.
There were feelings in them I'd never even thought of him as having toward her because they were buried by the time I can remember back to.”
By my birth, by her life, or by an unfortunate combination of the two.
“They made me feel much more sympathetic toward him.”
For a while, anyway.
“They gave me a sense of caution about what it's possible to lose.”

“Letters are different,” Carol said after a pause. “They're a part of yourself.”

“What about jewelry, then? Or photographs?” Why couldn't she let it go?

“You see?” Hannah said. “You're doing it already. Getting all weighted down.”

“I like old things,” Starr said.

“Me, too,” said Carol, but with some reluctance, as though she were afraid of offending Hannah.

“Not me,” Hannah announced. “If I had my way there'd be a Design Research store in every town for me to move in and out of.”

“But that's the contrast factor, obviously,” De Witt spoke from his corner for the first time. “Feeling weighed down by your husband's ornate possessions, so to speak.”

Hannah's eyes narrowed even before Margaret had had time to note the undertone in De Witt's words. The narrowed eyes, recently so large and limpid, changed her appearance entirely, making her very much the mother cat.

“I'm not into that Freudian shit,” she said.

“Then take it on a simple, obvious level,” De Witt said calmly. But it was obvious that he wasn't bothered by the possibility that he'd upset her. Some antagonism was there that she hadn't seen in him before.

“I don't think I'll take it at all, thank you,” she said, casual again. “I think I'll take a walk and see what my kids are doing.” She stood up and stretched, waited for Carol and Starr, who followed her happily out of the house toward the barn. De Witt stared after them moodily.

“Aren't we lucky to have such marvelous people coming in!” Mira exclaimed sweetly.

Dolores glanced at De Witt. Neither said anything. David began whistling softly. Dolores smiled broadly at De Witt. Butterscotch began clearing the remaining dishes from the table.

“Why is everybody so quiet all of a sudden?” she asked.

De Witt stood up abruptly. “Does anyone want to go to town?”

“But it's Thursday, dear,” Mira said.

“Mmmm,” De Witt said, “but my toothache is coming
back and I think I'd better try the dentist. Margaret? Are you ready for the outside world?”

“Almost,” Margaret said, not really ready but feeling as though he wanted company.

“If you go,” David said to her in an obvious, challenging manner, “I'll go.”

“Fine, fine,” she said. “I'll let you know when I decide.”
So you can get the handcuffs.

“On second thought,” De Witt said, “will you excuse me? I think I'd like to be alone for a while.” He bent down and kissed Margaret's cheek. “You don't really mind, do you, Margaret?”

“No, of course not,” Margaret said. “I didn't really—”

“We're having our first school meeting,” Mira said. “Hannah's going to talk about—”

“If I'm not back on time,” De Witt said, “start without me.”

T
HE
meeting was open to everyone, of course, and everyone came; only De Witt was missing. The common room was packed with adults and kids to a point where it seemed that it would be difficult to accomplish anything, but then Daisy and Mario led the kids into the kitchen to make popcorn and the pressure eased. There was an air of expectation and camaraderie, probably connected to the newcomers' arrival. The petulant expression that so often ruined Carol's face had been replaced by a lively smile as she sat at Hannah's feet and listened to the other woman's stream of stories and funny anecdotes about places she'd been. The school where the children had been before Rindge was called the Fountain and Hannah explained that she'd called the nominal leader of the school the Fountain Head because he was really a fascist in hippie clothing and they all laughed, feeling lucky not only to have someone new just as winter became serious but to have acquired someone so delightful and interesting. David just glowered at Hannah in a way that reminded Margaret that De Witt wasn't back yet. Carol suggested
that since De Witt wasn't there and Hannah was the only one with actual free-school experience, she chair the meeting, but at that moment De Witt walked in and apologized for being late, explaining that he'd been talking with a lawyer about the legal steps necessary to make the school official. Papers would be coming through shortly.

Silence. A school was an awesome enterprise. Everyone knew what a school should
not
be but how many of them, De Witt asked, had any particular idea of what it
should
be? A place where learning was available, someone said. Of course there were two kinds of learning, the kind you could get from books and the kind you got from apprenticeship, learning to do something. Someone said the latter kind was the only real learning, the rest was just mental exercise, words, words, words. Even if that were true, Margaret said, mental exercise had value. It could take your mind off yourself in a way that physical exercise couldn't, since almost anything physical you could do left you time to think at the same time. And then she sat back, confused by her defense of academia.

Hannah was amused. “I don't mind thinking about myself. I'm not running away from anything.”

“I don't think Margaret was suggesting frantic flight,” De Witt said immediately. “She was suggesting that if your mind's active it's best for it to have something to relate to actively. Ideas, philosophies, politics, whatever.”

Hannah laughed. “How old are these kids we're talking about? What'll we give them, Nietzsche?”

De Witt flushed. Margaret had never seen him so rattled. “The same thing applies to young kids, obviously, it's just a question of the level you're going to teach on.”

“I'm not teaching my kids to run away from their own heads at any level,” Hannah said.

“It's difficult for me to understand,” De Witt said, “how anyone who lives in a trailer can be smug about other people running away.”

Hannah stood up. “You've been hostile to me since the minute I walked in here,” she said angrily.

“Wait a minute,” Carol scrambled to her feet. “I don't understand what's going on here. Nobody's hostile to anybody, are they, De Witt?”

“No, of course not,” De Witt said.

“If you are, tell me now before I settle in,” Hannah said. “I don't stay where I'm not welcome.”

“You're positively welcome here,” Carol said frantically. “Everyone was just talking about how great it was having you here, you and your kids.”

“Not everyone,” Hannah said.

“What would represent an appropriate sign of welcome?” De Witt asked.

“I have a feeling we're getting off the topic,” Margaret said uneasily. She felt vaguely responsible for the discord, an echo of childhood when so many disagreements between her parents might never have arisen if she hadn't brought them some need of her own, some problem to solve.

“Right!” Several people said.

“I hate it when people I love fight with each other,” Carol said tearfully.

“Will there be required classes, or what?” Dolores asked. “And who'll teach what?”

Silence while they all tried to shift gears.

“We might begin,” De Witt said, “by making a list of those people who're willing to teach and what they're willing to teach.”

“And getting a list from the kids of what they want to
learn,”
Hannah said.

“But what if there's no one to teach them something?”

“No problem,” Hannah said. “Someone learns it and keeps ahead. That's the way we did it at the Fountain and it worked pretty well. Mario had a thing to learn some Latin so I just picked up the textbook and got enough to stay a couple of weeks ahead of him.”

“Truly a remarkable woman,” De Witt muttered, softly so that Margaret thought only she herself heard.

Carol was appointed to be secretary and they began a list of subject offerings. Dolores signed for weaving, Paul for printmaking, and Carol said she would take the younger kids each morning for encounter and improvisation. Margaret said she'd like to do clothes-making with the two older girls and Hannah asked why only girls, didn't they want to keep out of those cultural bags? Margaret said she'd be delighted to teach clothes-making to Mario or any boy who was interested, she'd just assumed . . . And Hannah, with an extremely winning smile, said she hadn't meant to jump on Margaret, it was just that she had a bug about kids being stuck in pigeonholes. When she was a child her consuming passion had been for math and she'd been made to feel eternally guilty about this, it meant she wasn't feminine, while for six years she'd been forced to take flute lessons, which she loathed, all because of . . . Margaret said she understood perfectly and didn't mind at all. This was true, but she didn't look at De Witt.

They ended up with a huge variety of possible subjects, far more than there would be kids to take them, it seemed. Hannah would do cuisenaire rods, Butterscotch would bake cookies with the little kids, De Witt would set up a greenhouse and do botany and indoor gardening. Would David like to do painting? No. But Jordan would do photography.

“What about reading and writing?” Mira asked.

“Most of it you do yourself,” Hannah said, not unsympathetically. “If there's one lesson in the free schools it's that you have to educate your own children.”

“I wish I had more skill,” Mira said humbly.

“I'll work with you, it'll be all right.” Hannah's manner was nearly seductive. “If your kids dig me, I'll work with them. Don't set up roadblocks in your own mind.”

Mira smiled at her radiantly.

“What if her kids don't dig you?” De Witt asked.

“If her kids don't dig me,” Hannah said, “then I hope it'll be because something about me really bugs them. Not because some chauvinistic bastard turns them against me.”

“Maybe it'll be both.”

“What is it with you two?” Carol wailed. “Here I bring back this great person . . . I've never seen you be so hostile, De Witt, I've never seen you this way at all, you're always the
healer!
”

“It's true, De Witt,” Starr said. “You haven't been nice to her.”

De Witt was silent. He seemed terribly vulnerable and Margaret longed to squeeze his hand or give him some supportive sign. Hannah was silent, either genuinely injured by his attitude or enjoying the others' defense of her. Or both.

“That's true,” De Witt finally said. And to Hannah, “I apologize.”

Hannah beamed at him, bounced over and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “I accept, and I apologize if I bugged you. I even understand why I bugged you, so let's forget it!”