Any Minute I Can Split (15 page)

Safe. “But the atmosphere!” Of course if you were
really in the mood you didn't notice the atmosphere. But she
had
been in the mood, or at least she'd thought so. “It's not that, De Witt. I know it's not that. Maybe it's the kids, I keep thinking about them.”
The truth is I keep thinking about anything at all I can think of to avoid thinking about what's happening here, whatever that is.

He turned on the light, gazed at her tenderly. “Are you telling me that you want to go home?”

She nodded. “I know I'm being revolting and I'm truly sorry I let you pay for the room but I'm—”

“Margaret,” he said sternly, “you've got to stop all this self-criticism. You are a lovely woman, and in a particular situation at a particular time, you felt a particuular way. Another time you might feel quite differently. Now get dressed and I'll have you home in a flash. Okay?”

She nodded without looking at him.

I
T
had begun to snow but the roads weren't coated yet. They rolled home without passing a single car, the silence broken only by an occasional shift of gears or one of them coughing. Everyone had finished dinner. Mira accepted De Witt's accelerator-trouble explanation with a celestial smile and gave them each a bowl of soup and some bread. David wouldn't look at Margaret or speak to her. Rosemary had had a full bottle and gone to sleep for the night; Rue was awake but not cranky. They put her on the rug in the common room where she could see the hearth fire as well as the various people. Everyone laughed because she began to cry as soon as she saw Margaret. When Margaret came in or out of a room, David left it.

Later, when Margaret had gotten Rue off to bed—under piles of baby blankets because the upstairs was now terribly cold with only the wood-burning stove in the hallway—she debated whether to go down again to join the evening huddle around the fire and try to make
David meet her eyes, or to stick it out in the cold, get into bed in one of her new flannel nightgowns and try to make some sense of the jumble in her head. She put on the blue nightgown then unbraided and brushed her hair. She'd gotten laid in pigtails. In a motel. What happened in a motel by definition couldn't be completely good; it was like saying you could sustain real life in a test tube. But if her failure hadn't been a failure but a success, the success of having refused to be a full participant in the swinging motel age, why was she depressed? Oh, screw . . . she couldn't go to sleep like this. David was perfectly capable of crawling under the covers and warming his feet on someone he wasn't speaking to but she would be up all night, tense and worried. She went downstairs. The women were huddled around the kitchen stove, talking about the school. The men were at the table, talking about a craft cooperative. De Witt and Paul had recently become concerned with the problem of becoming more financially independent of Mitchell. Maybe even buying the farm, if he should ever decide to sell it, as he'd hinted he someday might. One possible way, they felt, would be to establish a cooperative that would function on a more steady basis than the guild shows that gave craftsmen without steady outlets their only chance to display. David was with them but when she came into the room he walked out. De Witt beckoned to her to come and sit next to him but she shook her head and went back to the living room, which was empty. She stretched out on the rug in front of the fire; a moment later David's feet appeared before her eyes and then the rest of him plopped down next to her.

“What'd you do to your hair?” he asked accusingly.

“Nothing,” she said. “I took out the braids.”

“I never saw you leave it just loose without even tying it,” he said.

“So?”

“Nothing.” He took some of it in one hand and stroked it with the other.

“Where were you all day?” he asked.

“In Brattleboro,” she said.

“What were you doing?” he asked.

“Shopping,” she said.

“What'd you buy?” he asked.

“A lot of things,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like some make-up.”

“Make-up! Since when do you wear make-up?”

“Once in a while I put it on. For fun.” A criminal of cosmetics.

“What else?”

“Some stuff for the twins.”

“What else?”

“A couple of presents for people.”

“Who?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I wanna know.”

She sighed. “I bought some wool to make a sweater for you.”

“What else?” No change of expression.

“A shawl for Butterscotch.”

“What, are you queer for her?”

“No, idiot,” she said. “I'm queer for you.”

He stared at her with unmitigated disgust. “I don't believe you.”

“So you don't believe me. So I'll slit my wrists.” She got to a sitting position and tried to stand up but he was holding on to her hair.

“Anyway,” he said, “you smell as if you've been fucking.”

She stared at him helplessly for a long time. Then, unable to confess or to lie, she pulled her hair out of his hand and walked upstairs in what she hoped was a dignified manner. Still warm from the fire and the interrogation, she took off her nightgown and crawled under the covers. Not two minutes later David came in, slammed the door, got undressed, got under the covers, and without preamble climbed into her ready and
eager body. She began coming from the moment he entered her and didn't stop until he, too, was finished.

S
TARR
had fallen madly in love with a fifteen-year-old boy, who was a student at the Putney School, and was spending a great deal of time away from the farm. Paul, looking as though he'd been hit by a ton of Styrofoam bricks, wandered around the house aimlessly when he wasn't taking care of the children, until Hannah took him and the children in hand and got him functioning again. The argument between Starr and Paul that had preceeded Starr's falling in love had been over the question of whether Paul was a good and/or devoted father. Starr complained that he might as well have deserted them as her own father had abandoned her and her mother, for all the love and warmth he gave them. Carol and Jordan had both taken Paul's part in that argument, asking Starr what for Chrissake she wanted from the poor guy, who was always perfectly decent to his kids, the result being that Starr wasn't speaking to either of them although she was on polite remote terms with her husband. Jordan was making it with Butterscotch. Carol took great pains to let everyone know that this was just fine with her because she'd really had it with men for the time being anyhow and was thinking of getting into women. Or mescaline. She did have to be careful when she talked to Hannah, whose feelings against both drugs and lesbians were very strong and a source of amusement to Dolores. Carol did still spend a great deal of time with Hannah, although she began to be upset not so much by Hannah's ideas on women and drugs as by Hannah's comments on motherhood. It was Hannah's opinion, for example, that any woman who intended to work after having babies would do the kindest thing if she drowned the babies first, a view which caused Carol guilt and pain and terrific confusion because she wasn't absolutely certain that Hannah was wrong. Carol tended to be indifferent to babies and children and
some of the worst scenes during the winter were over her reaction to their noisiness and needs. Aside from the fact that she got very remote when her own kids were demanding, Lorna made her crawl up the walls.

A whole mystique arose around the trailer, who visited Hannah and when. De Witt and Dolores were the only ones who never did for any reason. Hannah didn't consider that anybody really liked her who wasn't willing to pay court in her own domain. Margaret still felt very ambivalent about Hannah but in this period after her unadventure with De Witt, when she found herself somewhat shy with him, she often dropped by the trailer for an hour or so of conversation.

If the farm was a refuge from one's previous life, the trailer was a refuge from the farm: bright (everything in it was white, bright blue, orange or a combination of those colors); neat almost beyond belief, considering that three people spent a lot of time in it; not an inch of space unused, from the floor area between the bunk beds, with its thick rug over foam rubber that Hannah called “my sofa,” to the ceiling over the cooking area, whose every inch was covered with screw-in canisters holding stores of wheat germ, whole grain and soya flours, dry milk, apricots, nuts, molasses, safflower oil and a mind-blowing collection of vitamins and healthful herbs ranging from desiccated liver through lecithin to seaweed. Hannah gave her kids most of their meals at the trailer, where the regime was a purer (and more expensive) form of Adelle Davis than was observed in the big house. (Hannah said that they read from
Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit
every evening at dinner the way some people read from the Bible, and it was part of her charm that she could be quite serious about this but also know it was funny.) Hannah tended to be very sharp in her comments on the people at the farm which was discomfiting because you wondered what pointed comment she was making about you when you weren't there. On the other hand it gave Margaret a distance from the goings on which she sometimes felt she needed.

For as she'd settled in, becoming really at home on the farm, her tendrils had spread to the other people there, attempting to replace what she'd lost. She had left behind the person in the world she was closest to as well as most of her friends, who were largely his friends, Roger having expressed early on a distaste for the kind of women she was attracted to so that her once close friends she'd eventually begun to see only a couple of times a year for lunch. After her arrival and during the harvest season she'd found almost everyone friendly in a casual way and had assumed that once the heavy labor was done there would be warm, winter-fostered intimacy. But the complications in the others' lives, the fluidity of their marriages, mitigated against the kind of solid friendship she'd looked forward to. If Carol and Starr came to her for a chat it was invariably to moan about some immediate crisis in their lives, there being prevalent the mistaken notion, perhaps, that Margaret's life had ceased to be in crisis when she left her husband. Dolores and Mira, for different reasons, were too remote for easy intimacy. David told her she was full of shit every time she tried to talk to him and while she was as fond as ever of De Witt, she was full of guilt about her greater pleasure in sex with David and could hardly talk to him about her emotional needs when she'd rejected his attempts to fill them. So there was Hannah, who Margaret would surely one day bring herself to confide in, but who meanwhile had a marvelous collection of stories.

“When I told Eddie to fuck off, don't you see, Margaret, I was saying it to my whole life, not just to my husband. To everything in my life that was lousy, which is to say everything but my kids. I didn't know what I was going to do next but I knew I wasn't going back where I came from because that was no less a death than the other kind.” She'd been ill. She'd drunk a lot during that period anyway and one day she'd gone on a fast to prove a point to her husband and that would have been okay except she kept drinking. At the end of two weeks she'd been taken to the hospital with
hepatitis, infectious mononucleosis and one destroyed kidney. For the first few days it was touch and go but then she'd rallied. “They started bringing me stuff to read, all these magazines I subscribed to that'd been piling up around the house, and I started reading, only the thing I did now that I'd never done before was, I got very selective. For seven years I'd been reading every goddamn magazine I could lay my hands on.
Vogue, Glamour, Time, Life, Newsweek, Harper's, Cosmopolitan, Better Homes and Gardens, Atlantic,
the
Times,
the
Voice
, the
News, The New Yorker, Prevention. Prevention
I got because Eddie's maiden aunt who was a health food nut gave me a subscription. Before I was sick it hadn't made any more of a dent than any of the other shit I was reading. Now I realized it was the only damn thing in the pile that made any sense, and what I'd done was, I put his aunt in this bag and I was afraid of jumping in because I labeled the bag
NUTS.
So I really got into
Prevention
and I started getting
Organic Gardening
and a lot of the other back-to-nature stuff and then someone brought me a copy of the
Whole Earth Catalog
and in some way that crystallized this plan that'd been coming into my head. Not that it had the stuff on trailers, but it was this whole idea of independence, which is really where it's all at, of being able to do for yourself so you won't be victimized by the Machine, or the Man, or whatever. Self-regulation, self-control, self-motivation, self-education, the whole thing. Setting your own house in order. Creating your own environment. Controlling your own destiny.”