Any Minute I Can Split (33 page)

Aunt Diz came out of the house and greeted them warmly. Margaret's mother's younger sister by barely a year, she had the older-sister qualities Margaret's mother had lacked. She was direct and managerial, less tepid than the others, in that way the best of the lot. She was charmed by the twins. She said that she only wished Margaret's mother could have been alive to see her wonderful grandchildren and Margaret nodded, but what passed through her head was that if her mother had had any serious interest in seeing her wonderful grandchildren then she would not have killed herself while Margaret was pregnant with them. Then it occurred to her that it was funny for her to be having disloyal thoughts toward her mother when she had just split irrevocably from her father on grounds of disloyalty.

A short while later Uncle Chuck wheeled Great-Aunt Margaret onto the porch. Great-Aunt Margaret had had a stroke and was in a wheelchair and easier to deal with than she'd once been, although her eyes were as sharp as ever. Aunt Diz and Uncle Chuck, with occasional grunts or half-articulated words from Great-Aunt Margaret, discussed at length which of the twins' ancestors had provided them with which of their features, but the name McDonough did not enter the conversation.

“My father has twin uncles back in Ireland,” Margaret pointed out during a lull in the conversation.

“How nice,” Aunt Diz said. “Something from everyone.”

Roger laughed.

“How
is
your father, Margaret?” asked Aunt Diz, the one who'd tried hardest to be pleasant to him.

“The same as ever,” she said. “I'm afraid.”

They laughed uncomfortably; they felt better ignoring him than having her be impolitic.

The conversation turned to Aunt Diz and Uncle Chuck's three teenagers, stretched out on the beach.

“I didn't recognize them,” Margaret admitted. “It's been so long.” A few years. None of that generation had come to the funeral, naturally. Like David they didn't believe in hassling themselves unnecessarily. Besides, funeral parlors were so Western; maybe if they'd arranged a pyre . . .

“I hardly recognize them myself,” Aunt Diz said with a sigh. “I keep telling myself we have plenty to be grateful for. They're staying in school. They're boys.” Aunt Diz and Uncle Chuck had been married a long time before they had their three boys; the oldest was twelve years younger than Margaret and Margaret could recall some lamentation, somewhere along the line, that Diz hadn't succeeded in providing herself with a girl. “They've all become vegetarians. It makes planning meals very difficult, especially up here where we have fish and seafood just about every day.”

Did Aunt Diz know that where there was a vegetarian up front there was usually an acidhead not far behind?

“I must say they've kept their manners, though.”

Was she terribly worried underneath her casual authoritative façade, or had the family reached some sort of Emperor's New Clothes agreement under which the kids could do any kind of dope they wanted as long as they washed their hands before they came to the table? Her own father had put up with anything he didn't have to know about.

They had a marvelous day on the beach, Margaret's major worry being to keep the twins from getting too burned. She oiled them frequently and by afternoon was making them wear long shirts and pants. She and Roger bought bathing suits and were bright red by the end of the day.

At five o'clock they had cocktails with distant cousins who had a house at the other end of town and had been invited over to see Roger and Margaret and the twins. Margaret, her system by now thoroughly unaccustomed to hard booze, got incredibly high on one martini and experienced enormously loving mellow feelings toward
Great-Aunt Margaret, Aunt Diz, Uncle Chuck, the distant cousins, the house, the beach, the ocean and S. S. Pierce.

“God, I love it here!” she exclaimed happily. “I love this house! I love all of you! I don't ever want to leave here! Can we stay here forever?” She glanced uneasily at Roger but by a second later she couldn't remember what she'd had to be uneasy about.

For dinner they all had lobsters, even Rosie and Rue, who sat on Diz and Chuck's laps through the meal and grabbed at random from their plates, to the delight of the adults. At night, when they'd put the twins to sleep in one bed with chairs on either side, and the martini had finally cleared out of Margaret's head, she and Roger took a long walk on the beach. The tide was halfway in and they crisscrossed back and forth over the wet and dry sand, Margaret occasionally stooping to pick up a shell, a feather, a rock, throwing it away when Roger teased her about shit-collecting, but then almost immediately picking up something else. After the first few times she began stowing some of the prettier shells in the pockets of her jeans, but Roger saw.

“What're you trying to do?” he asked, but indulgently. “Bring the beach back to the farm?”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

“What was that bit about staying here forever?”

“I was drunk.” That wasn't entirely honest. “Not that it doesn't appeal to me, but that's how it slipped out.”

“There's no law that says we couldn't do it.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Not in this house, obviously, but we'll have enough to buy a place here if that's what we want to do.”

“Oh, wow.” It was more than she could handle. “Don't you think we have an obligation to use the m—”

“To ourselves,” Roger said. “That's who we have an obligation to.”

“Wouldn't your father be furious?”

Roger laughed. “With you? You can write him a letter. A composition. How I Spent My Mother's Suicide Money.”

“My God!” She was flooded suddenly with images of De Witt and the farm. “How could we back out on the farm at this stage?”

“Easier now than later, actually.” He paused as though challenging her to say they had to do it.

“I guess that's true,” she said slowly.

“I'm fighting the idea there's anything we
have
to do unless we feel like doing it,” Roger said. “I want to feel as if I can back out on the whole farm deal, or just the cattle business, or buy something down here. There're actually more possibilities for making money down here, if you're into that. Tourists are big business.”

He would procure them and she would cook and clean for them. Just like the farm only the ocean would be right outside the window.

“I'll keep the books and you'll cook?” she asked.

“Oh, come on, Maggie, I'm just spinning off some possibilities.”

“It sounds as if you were spinning them off before I started collecting shells.”

“That's true,” he admitted.

“How come?” she asked. “The magic of the Cape or something?”

“No,” he said. “It started before we got here.” The tide was getting higher; by tacit consent they perched side by side on the sea wall, looking out at the ocean. “It's this business of living with De Witt. I wasn't thinking about it all that seriously, it was like a casual thing when I mentioned it when you were talking about Mira, but then later . . . the truth is it was when my prick of a father was pawing you . . . anyhow, it hit me that I'm really not all that anxious to live so close with
anybody.
In the same house, I mean. I like De Witt, you know that, it's just a question of whether I want to live that close to this guy my wife has a running thing with. Even if it's only an almost. And it's always gonna be an almost. I mean, if it's people we're attracted to. And who wants to live with people we're not attracted to?”

“It's true,” she said slowly. “I wouldn't want to live with any woman you liked as much as I like De Witt.
I'd feel as if then you could turn me off any time you didn't dig me and you'd have someone all ready and waiting.”

“Exactly.”

“But I couldn't see living up in a place like that with nobody else. No other kids. The twins are so accustomed to having people around. I really think they don't know what loneliness is.”

“They say twins never do.”

“All right. Then I'm thinking about myself, not them.”

“Even if I wanted to go back to Hartsdale or the city, you really wouldn't want to, would you?”

“No,” she admitted. “No. They don't seem possible any more.”
There's nothing there.
She thought of David with a guilty twinge. He'd tried to enter her mind a few times during the day but she'd pushed him away.
You're just another escape, David, really. I've got to grow up now, even if you can't.

“On the other hand, we don't have to buy any place now. We could just travel around for a year or two, see what we like.”

She sighed. “Shopping around for our lives.”

“Don't get melodramatic.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Maybe it doesn't even matter. Maybe whatever we want to do we can do it practically anywhere.”

“If we know what it is we want to do,” he said. “And who we want to do it with.”

“Maybe the farm is as good a place to start from as any,” she said.

“I don't know,” he said. “We'll have to think about it a lot. We'll have to talk to De Witt, see how he reacts to the separate houses thing, assuming we're willing to go ahead. The others, too. The more I think about it the more I'm sure I don't want to live in the same house with anyone else. You can't be the way you want to be when there're always other people around. Like, we had to come out here to talk, and it's not just because they're
who they are, it's because they're other people. Even living with one other person you have to stretch yourself a little out of shape, the more people you've got the more you have to stretch. You end up using all your energy that way.”

She smiled because she never thought of Roger as changing to accommodate other people; he was so much more honest and consistent than she was.

“The barn is practically a house already,” she pointed out. “If we wanted to be, like, separate but equal.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” he said. “And there's nothing to prevent us from putting up a third house. Nothing at all.”

“Tell me again,” she said, “that we'll always be able to come back here.”

B
Y
the time they got back to the house all the adults had gone to bed. The boys sat stoned around the gas heater in the living room, ignoring Margaret and Roger as they walked through and up to their room. In silence they got undressed, feeling the sun-tanned warmth of their own bodies and then each other's. They made love. The twins slept.

“Soon,” Margaret said, “they should go into a separate room.”

“Mmm,” Roger murmured. “Then I can beat up on you.”

She smiled, said, “Don't do that, you're the only man I've got.” And realized that she wasn't talking about the loss of De Witt but of her father. Her hand flew to her mouth, ready to lose another nail.

Then she asked herself who she was kidding; it wasn't that day she'd lost her father but many years ago. And it wasn't his disloyalty to her mother that had been the final blow but her ultimate inability to deceive herself that he had any loyalty to
her.
That he had even so much as a frame of reference that included her needs. He'd never let her be a part of his inner life. If the truth were to be told, she hadn't split from him at
all, she had only made visible the split of his choosing. You heard stories about objects so closely connected to a dead spouse that the survivor couldn't bear to have them in the house. The only inanimate object that had been important in her father's marriage was the TV set, which was unevocative. But then there was Margaret, who had dropped into his new life out of the blue and clowned around in that harsh way she had, trying to force him to believe that he'd once had another union whether or not it was recognized by the Church, and that union had indeed produced a mass of flesh and feeling named Margaret, whether she was recognized by the Church or not. Call the moving van! Get it out of the house, that large object over there which consumes its own fingernails!

She felt herself drifting off to sleep. Stopped herself. Had a funny thought. Giggled.

“Roger?”

“Mm?”

“I just had a funny thought.”

“Mmm.”

“I was just thinking what I should've said to my father.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake!”

“No,” she said. “Listen. I mean it. I should have pointed out to him—it only just occurred to me now . . . I was falling asleep . . . I should have told him that once upon a time, before scissors were invented,
everyone
must have bitten their nails.”