Any Minute I Can Split (16 page)

Controlling your own destiny. It had a quaint ring if your brain had been even briefly sandpapered by the implications of the moon, the tides and the military-industrial complex.

“How did your husband feel about all this?” she asked.

“Feel?” Hannah repeated scornfully. “Eddie didn't
feel
anything. He
thought
maybe I was making a mistake. He
thought
maybe a woman shouldn't be alone on
the road with two kids. He
thought
maybe we could start by setting in order our lovely eighteen-room duplex full of Aunt Isabelle's ivories and Uncle Thad's chess pieces and Great-Aunt Mathilda's glass collection. He
thought
maybe you couldn't erase the past, you could only learn to live with it, and I thought maybe the only way to erase it was by refusing to live with it, and that's what I did, and it worked.”

A triumphant crescendo followed by silence.

“How often do the kids see him?” Margaret asked.

“Once or twice a year if I happen to be around New York.”

She started to ask how he felt about that but then remembered Hannah's statement that he had no feelings.

“And I'll tell you something else,” Hannah said defiantly, “it doesn't mean shit to them. He's no further away from them than when we all lived in the same place and his mind was always on his stocks, anyway. He thought his kids were just two more growth stocks.”

Margaret thought of Roger, who had two children he'd never seen and no interest at all in the stock market.

“What's the matter?” Hannah asked.

“I was thinking about my husband,” Margaret said.

“What about him?”

“Well, that he's never seen the girls . . . they've never seen him. They wouldn't know who he was if they saw him, I guess. They probably think De Witt's their father or David, or God knows who.” She laughed to dispel the sadness she felt at this. “Maybe they don't even know I'm their mother.”

“They know you, all right,” Hannah said.

“I guess I know that,” Margaret admitted.

“Personally, I don't think the father ever has the same importance to a child. A lot of the Freudian literature has it that at a given age they grow away from the mother toward the father, you know, someone pushes a button or something. I never saw it in my own kids.
What I think really happens is that a lot of half-ass Radcliffe girls read some Freud and then when their girls reach the age of six they say, okay, kid, time to go through your daddy stage, so they push away the kid and naturally the kid has to go someplace for comfort.”

“What school did you go to?” Margaret asked uncomfortably.

Hannah smiled. “Radcliffe but it's irrelevant . . . the only thing it did for me was to retard my education for another four years. Anything I ever learned I learned in spite of some school system.”

Margaret nodded. She knew how Hannah felt about schools, a lot of it carried over even into their little school, where the way other people were teaching her children was a constant source of argument between Hannah and those others. Daisy and Mario now seldom took classes with the others, doing most of their work with their mother in the trailer. Her own school memories involved boredom but little pain; she vaguely remembered having been happy to go off to school every day, if only to be out of the bleak, silent house she lived in.

“School's not what's on your mind, though,” Hannah said.

“No,” Margaret said, “I guess Roger's on my mind. I have very mixed feelings about Roger, but I really want him to see the twins. I want him to be . . . I guess I want him to love them. It seems very important to me.”

“I'll tell you one thing,” Hannah said. “It's better for them not to even know he exists than to have him drop in and out of their lives or not give a shit about them.”

O
N
the eve of Margaret's thirtieth birthday an old friend of Hannah's came by with some Newsreel films and they sat in the common room watching the Richmond Oil strike, that unique and lovely strike where the workers had for once understood that when the cops broke your strike you got radicalized. Then there was a film about People's Park, interesting because
the pictures showed the utter destruction of the Park while the narrator talked triumphantly of the people's victory.

Someone turned on the lights and there was Roger, leaning against the archway, hands in his pockets, as though he'd stood in that same doorway a thousand times before. He was looking around but not with any apparent anxiety about finding her. He'd shaved off his beard and moustache so that the fine, almost delicate, lines of his face showed once again. Her heart leaped when she saw him but she didn't move. Not toward him, not away from him.

“Who's that?” Carol asked.

Roger's eyes met Margaret's. He smiled in a desultory way. She smiled back, trying to remember how she looked, trying to see if Roger was seeing how much better she looked. She started to get up and go over to him but stopped herself. Confused.

“Hi, Roger.”

“Hi, Maggie.”

Roger himself was looking somewhat drawn, maybe because of the beard but probably not just that. He'd looked this way when they met so that for all his verbal machismo her heart had gone out to him. Only later had she become aware of the universal quality of her reaction, that Roger, who under normal circumstances was quite attractive to women, had to fight them off physically when he looked like this. He claimed, as a matter of fact, that it was this situation that had created his mistrustful attitude toward them, that he'd become attractive to women only after, as he put it, the kiss of death had been planted on his forehead when he was seventeen. His mother said this was Roger's fiction, that girls and women had adored him from infancy, with his beautiful gray eyes and curly blonde hair and sassy tongue, and that from those tender years he had been suspicious of everyone. Nobody had ever been able to explain this satisfactorily, that a child treated so well from infancy should be so mistrustful and dissatisfied.
Actually, though, Roger was only mistrustful if you were trying to please him, as though he'd decided very early in life that anyone trying to do so was trying for reasons of convenience, not love, and if this were true it seemed adequate reason for his dissatisfaction. Or so she'd sometimes thought in a sympathetic moment.

People began to get up and stretch and mill around. David was sitting next to her on the floor. Watching her. He didn't get up. De Witt and Mira were standing on the other side of the doorway from Roger, also watching her. She went to them.

“This is Roger,” she said vaguely, hoping De Witt would remember her husband's name because Roger didn't like to be introduced as my husband.

De Witt nodded.

“We've been hoping you would come,” Mira said tranquilly. Margaret wanted to kick her in the shins. Roger said nothing. David was drawing designs on the rug with his finger.

“Do you want to see the girls?” Margaret asked.

“I see them,” Roger said, nodding toward Hannah. “That one's not too bad.”

“Oh, dear,” Mira said playfully. “No wonder Margaret left home.”

Roger stared at Mira for endless yards of time, a capacity of his Margaret envied. De Witt suggested to Mira that she put up some tea and Mira went quietly.

“Where are my daughters?” Roger demanded now—as though she'd been holding out on him.

She led him upstairs. De Witt and Paul had built a sort of bunk-crib arrangement against the wall, two sections with a removable divider in between. In the dim light from the night lamp they could see the girls, each curled up in her own compartment, facing the other through the wooden divider, looking, with their identically beautiful baby faces and furry blue pajamas, like two sides of a Rorschach blot.

Roger,
she begged silently,
please don't say anything
bad about them,
but when she looked at him she saw there was no need to say it for he'd been disarmed. He stood quite limp with wonder at what he had wrought.

“What are they like when they're up?” he asked after a long time.

“Rue's very lively,” she said. “She's more active. She stands up already if she's got something to hold on to, and she cries if she doesn't get what she wants. Rosemary's quiet, sweet, she hardly ever cries. You can put her someplace and she'll sit there and look and look and never cry. Not that Rue's bad-tempered, she just . . . wants what she wants.” This was something that occasionally troubled her, the possibility that she was preferential to Rosemary. She loved them both, was fascinated by both, thought them both beautiful, yet there was in her feeling toward Rosie that extra desire to give, to please, that one had only toward those who asked little. It was probably one of the most basic rules of human nature, that protective feeling toward those who didn't think to protect themselves, to call on the kid who didn't raise her hand, and so on, yet she thought it might be unfair.

“Good for her,” Roger said emphatically. “Only an asshole wants what he doesn't want.”

It wasn't what she'd meant but of course Roger knew that. She could feel him waiting for her to begin one of her losing arguments but she didn't feel like it. What she was feeling was a combination of curiosity and relief; curiosity at her own mixed reaction to Roger's arrival, relief at his reaction to the twins. For in all the times she'd thought of his coming, it was always in terms of how he would react to
them,
never in terms of whether he would be loving to
her.

On the other hand, it
was
somewhat flattering that he'd come. After all, the days when you could walk out on your husband and picture him in a state of abject misery were past; he could have love and/or care at will, so that his having sought her out could be interpreted as a specific need for
her.

If he comes you won't really know why. Whether he's curious or he feels like meeting the other people or he's attached to you.

She wondered what David was doing now.

“I missed you, Roger.”

“Oh? What'd you miss more? Getting laid or getting insulted?”

“Oh go fuck yourself. There're people here who can do both.”

They smiled at each other. She was happy because her response had come so easily, unlike the old days when he'd always had to goad her into expressing her nastier thoughts. Roger was happy because he enjoyed resistance. Years ago he had told her what she was sure was his own made-up plot of his supposedly favorite novel of all times, the name of which he claimed to have forgotten, but it was about a man and wife who fought side by side in war and then went home and made love. The wife was eventually killed on the battlefield and the husband never remarried because he never again found a woman who could fight like that.

“Tell me about it,” he said, easing her back toward the bed.

“I don't feel like it,” she said.

He kissed her warmly and warmly she responded to him.

She said, “The door is open.”

“Isn't that the way you do it here?” he asked in her ear, licking it.

“It's not the way I do it,” she said, shivering.

“With who?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He started to unzip her jeans but she forced herself past him and closed the door of the room. Roger took off his sweater, lay down on the bed, watched her. She had a vague feeling that there was something to be settled between them but she couldn't say what it was.

“What is it?” Roger asked.

“Nothing.” She turned off the light.

“For Christ's sake,” Roger muttered, “when you
looked like a hippopotamus with clap you walked around the house naked all day, now you look like a human being and—”

“And I'm acting like one,” she said defiantly, afraid to tell him she felt shy.

“You're acting like a fucking idiot!” he shouted, “That's what you're acting like!”

Rue began to cry. Roger leaped to his feet and turned on the light in one motion.

“What's wrong?”

“You woke her up.”

“Big deal. What is it, the first time in her life she woke up?”

“She often wakes up crying, especially to loud noises.”

Roger picked up Rue and cradled her in his arms.

“How'd you know how?” Margaret asked, pleased and startled.

“That's a dumb question.” He hummed and rocked Rue in his arms. Watching, Margaret felt cosy and excited, eager for Rue to go back to sleep so they could make love. Somewhere in her parents' photo album there was a picture one of the uncles had taken, of Margaret's father cradling her in his arms when she was a baby. His face, his whole body, bespoke love and tenderness. When had it changed? When the realities of herself as an imperfect human being had emerged, dimming his hopes for self-justification through fatherhood?