Any Minute I Can Split (18 page)

“Which question?”

She wanted to shriek something unintelligible. He'd left her in the mangle and then walked away from it.

“About what binds me to Roger. Besides the kids.”

“Forget it,” he said. “You answered that already.”

“I did?”

“Sure. A lot of bullshit binds you to Roger, that's what.”

“I'm going upstairs now.”

“That's okay. I don't need you here. You or your bullshit.”

T
HE
twins slept late and so did she. Roger was still sleeping when she took them downstairs. The couch had been stripped and David wasn't around. Only Dolores and Butterscotch were left in the kitchen—and Dolores's new lover, a young girl with long black hair and the eyes of a fawn caught in the headlights, who never spoke to anyone but Dolores and then in a whisper.

“Is it all right to talk about David?” Butterscotch whispered as Margaret gave Rosie her bottle, put her in the playpen and sat at the table to nurse Rue. She nodded.

“He took off early this morning,” Butterscotch said. “I think he's upset.”

“Where did he go?”

“He wouldn't say.”

“Did he say when he'd be back?”

“He wouldn't tell me.”

A moment of fear. David has gone. David is hitching another ride on the potholed highway of life. Who will pick up David next? Another old lady? An older old lady than me or a younger old lady, like maybe twenty-eight? Hey! It was her birthday! She hadn't thought of it until now. You could make out a case for disaster; briefly it freed your mind of symbols.

“He did say he'd be back, though?”

“When I asked he just said why wouldn't he be, as though he was pretending he didn't care about your husband.”

Margaret nodded. “We talked late last night but it doesn't seem to do any good. It's very difficult . . . Roger's still asleep,” she added irrelevantly.

“I sleep much better than I used to, better than I've slept since I was little,” Butterscotch said, “but Jordan doesn't fall asleep until it begins to get light.”

“I guess I'll go see how De Witt's doing with the goats,” Dolores said. “Leila's having trouble with her udders.” She left, followed by the girl.

“No matter how busy we are all day,” Butterscotch said softly, “he doesn't go to sleep while it's dark. It frightens me because I always think he's so strong.”

“Maybe that's when he gathers his strength.”

Butterscotch smiled gratefully. “That's a beautiful way to think of it.”

Hannah came in now, having given her kids breakfast in the trailer. She poured herself a cup of coffee (not allowed in the trailer) and sat down.

“I'm exhausted,” she announced. Her friend who'd brought the films had slept in the fourth bunk and apparently he snored. In the middle of the night she'd dropped down her pillow on his head and he hadn't awakened but had slept badly and, blaming her for this, had gone off early in high dudgeon. Hannah giggled. “No more films.” She didn't seem upset that her friend had gone off angry with her.

Roger came down and asked where the girls were.
Margaret said they were in the playpen, pointing to the other room. Roger went looking for them.

“He's making up for lost time,” Hannah said softly, something in her tone inappropriate to a woman who kept her kids away from her husband for three hundred and sixty-four days a year.

Roger came back holding Rue. “Rosie's asleep in the playpen,” he announced, sitting down with Rue on his lap. “How about some breakfast?” He was looking at Hannah as he said it but Margaret got up to make some eggs after noting that Hannah smiled demurely.

“Who're you?” Roger asked.

“I'm Hannah.”

“I'm sorry,” Margaret said. “Roger, this is Hannah and this is Butterscotch.” She broke three eggs into the pan, brought Roger a cup of coffee. He was bouncing Rue on his knee; she seemed to accept him without question.

“You really dig your kids, don't you,” Hannah said.

“They're fantastic,” Roger said. “No one ever told me they'd be like this.”

Rue lunged for his coffee and he pushed it away but then dipped his finger into the cup and let her lick it.

“Coffee's terrible,” Hannah said, solemn but twinkling. “Aside from giving you false energy it robs your body of B vitamins.”

“No shit,” Roger said.

“No shit,” Hannah said.

There was a pause. “All right,” Roger said. “No more coffee, baby.”

Hannah smiled sweetly. Margaret gave Roger his eggs.

“You and me,” Roger said to Hannah, “we can have a cuppa, huh?”

“As long as we're perfect in all other respects,” Hannah said.

Margaret bit her lip. She was experiencing that feeling of dread which had lost its familiarity in recent months. Maybe it was this she'd been anticipating
when she'd refused to let herself be purely glad that Roger had come. She sat down at the table but it was like having to watch your own execution, a ritual which once you'd forgotten it, couldn't be resumed again so easily. She took Rue and wandered into the sewing room, letting Rue down on the floor to play while she hemmed napkins for a while. When she wandered back into the kitchen, only Roger and Hannah were still there.

“They think they're ready for anarchy,” Hannah was saying. “That's because they don't know what anarchy is.”

Roger nodded. “The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans.” He seemed quite serious, not at all condescending. He really liked Hannah. For the first time since meeting her, Margaret was able to feel a simple, direct dislike toward the other woman. “Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.”

“Well said,” Hannah murmured.

“I feel qualified to discuss this at length,” Roger went on, “because I'm an absolutely typical American in that respect.”

Hannah smiled. “You're young. There's time for change.”

“I'm very young,” Roger agreed. “I'm two years younger than my wife, as a matter of fact.”

“I'm three years older than your wife,” Hannah said.

“Good, good,” Roger said. “That's promising. Anyhow, the problem is, I don't really want to change. I have yet to be convinced that I'll benefit in any real way from changing.”

Hannah, who might in other circumstances have been repelled by Roger's confession, was quite charmed by it, said that at the moment she couldn't see where there was any crying need for change.

“But here I find myself in this place you say is full of half-assed anarchists,” Roger persisted.

“I wasn't talking about this place,” Hannah said. “I was talking about the last place. Here the problem is quite different, from what I can make of it.” She glanced at Margaret, seemed about to go on, stopped herself.

“What's the problem here then?”

“Well . . .” She was still hesitant but she was going to force herself. “This place seems to be full of people looking for the father they never had. Ready to turn over their brains and free will to the first fake wise man who promises to take care of them.”

Margaret was stunned, although she wasn't sure by what—this simple new version of their lives with De Witt or Hannah's assurance that it was all right to voice it. De Witt, who had assumed leadership so reluctantly because without any leader the whole thing didn't work!

Roger laughed. “That doesn't describe my wife.”

“I didn't mean—” Hannah began.

“My wife will turn over her brains to
anyone,
fake wise man or not.”

Hannah laughed. “Margaret, you're not going to let him get away with that, are you?”

“Sure,” Margaret said, standing up, faking calm. “Why not?” Then left the room quickly before the façade could crumble. Went out on the porch, then down the front steps although it was freezing cold out, a cold gray day in March, and she was wearing only a light sweater.

Why not? Because you were out of the habit and it was a good habit to be out of.
Margaret the shit-eater. Making fun of her had been like something Roger did instead of working. And her readiness to accept his mockery had been based not on saintliness or good will but on some crazy idea of the way she was
supposed
to be. Some lopsided notion of femininity maybe not invented by her but certainly fully acquiesced in. Not that she was ready to disclaim the whole notion; it was only that in recent months she seemed not to have worried much about what she should be. She had worried
about her sex life, about whether she was a good mother to both girls, about whether she was doing her share. About what she was
doing
, in other words, instead of about what she
was.
And now back came Roger with his yardstick and she wasn't in the habit any more and
fuck you, Roger, that's all, fuck you! Even when there is justice in your remarks you never make them in the interest of seeing justice served!

She wandered over to the barn where Paul and Jordan were holding down Shirley while De Witt cleaned her udder, which had become so distended that it dragged along the ground and had picked up some surface infection. Now, as De Witt spread bacitracin on Shirley's teats, Margaret went around the stall picking up the tiny, neat pellets of goat shit and tossing them out the little window into the pen. Shirley rammed Jordan angrily as soon as they all let her loose.

Afterwards Paul and Jordan went back to the house and Margaret asked De Witt if he would take a walk with her. Gone was the uneasiness she'd felt with him in recent weeks; in the crisis of Roger's arrival De Witt's presence was purely reassuring to her. All but an inch or two of snow was melted from the meadows and the road was clear but for a thin layer of ice that would turn to slush when the midday sun warmed it. In another two weeks, De Witt said, the mud would be so deep that the little kids wouldn't be able to walk through it and even the adults would have difficulty. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm.

“Roger and Hannah seem to be getting along fine,” she said, and laughed uncertainly.

De Witt glanced at her but said nothing. She shivered. He put an arm around her and she put an arm around him. She began to cry. They kept walking.

De Witt said, “Do you know that you never talked about Roger at all?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I don't know why,” she said. “I mean . . . I talked
about him to David but I guess David asked me questions about him. Roger . . . Roger is a very interesting person,” she finished lamely.

“I don't doubt it,” De Witt said.

They walked some more.

“We've been married for almost . . . more than six years, actually.”
So what
? “He's an artist . . . I must've told you that.”

“Nope.”

She laughed. “I always dug artists. I don't know why.”

De Witt laughed. “I think you dig everyone, Margaret, unless you get turned off.”

“That's true,” she admitted. “I guess I'm not very fussy.”

“Why do you put it that way? As though there's something wrong with liking people.”

She thought about it. “I guess because I feel as if it's not as though I like them because I'm a good person, charitable or something, I accept them mostly without thinking about whether I like them, but out of my own
need
, y'know? Not out of goodness.”

“What's wrong with that? You think it's unusual?”

“I dunno, it's just . . . I had this neighbor, for instance, in Hartsdale, this suburb where we lived . . . Celeste . . . she was a pain in the ass, really, nobody could stand her, none of my other friends, neighbors, and so on, but it took me a long time before I even realized she was supposed to bug me, that it was okay, I mean, because I
liked
having her drop in, especially before I knew anyone else, because Roger was always taking off and I didn't know anyone, and I was lonely, that's the thing. I wasn't tolerating her because I'm a tolerant person.”

“Sure you were.”

“Oh . . .” But she wasn't annoyed, she was pleased. She kissed his cheek and he squeezed her. They were almost at the main road. They walked into the corner of the woods where the kids had built their igloo, which
was only beginning to melt because it was heavily shaded by pine trees. They peered into the igloo. A bed of pine needles made it look inviting but the roof was dripping in twenty different places. They returned to the road, arms around each other again.

“Do you want to go back?” De Witt asked.

“Not really,” she admitted.

They began walking along the side of the highway.

“I'm a little worried about David,” she said.