Any Minute I Can Split (5 page)

“Aren't you too old for that?” David asked.

“No,” she said. “I'm not even thirty. I just look old because I'm fat.” For this she had left Roger. The same old birdshit dropped from a different tree.

“Where's your husband?”

“At home.”

“You separated?”

“Well, we don't exactly seem to be together.”

“You going back before you have your babies?”

“I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet. I only left on impulse, a few days ago. I got mad and I got out on the bike and left.”

“Did you ever think about going to a commune?” David asked.

“Sure,” she said. “I think it's one of those things everyone thinks about nowadays.”

“Someone told me about one in Vermont,” he said. “I was thinking of heading up there . . . when I ran into you.”

Why did he make her feel defensive? She was sure it Wasn't anything he was doing on purpose. He'd been heading out on the Cape when they met, not inland.

“You can still go,” she pointed out. And then, not wanting him to feel she was chasing him away, “I'll go with you, if you want me to.”

“You want to?” he asked, but of course she hadn't thought about that yet, she'd only been responding to his need.

“I don't know,” she said. “I guess so. I mean, why not? If I don't go home I have to go someplace else. Do you think they take babies at that commune?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Not everyone likes having babies around.”

“At the communes they're supposed to love everyone,” David said. “That's the whole thing with the communes.”

“Have you ever been to one?” she asked. “While you were on the road?”

He shook his head. “A few times I almost did,” he said. “But then I didn't feel like it.”

Why not? For her the idea actually had enormous appeal. She didn't want to go back to Roger, yet. Couldn't go back. Couldn't face him in this condition. If it was true that Roger had a natural mean streak a yard wide and very purple, it was also true that her very appearance was an incitement to riot, a monstrous joke on him as well as herself, her visible willingness to be a moving target. A statement of need constantly filled and never fulfilled. Being fat was like being suicidal, there was that element of reproach that made people uncomfortable. And when Roger was uncomfortable he was nasty. Furthermore, it was a strange fact that while Roger's indifference might arouse her sarcasm, on any occasion when Roger was outright angry or viciously critical of her, she became paralyzed. Stopped speechless. As though magnetic force had pulled together their two complementary views of her and in the process, locked her tongue between. No, she wouldn't face Roger again until she loved herself so much that his view of her had become irrelevant.

“But do they have Blue Cross?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I was kidding. I guess we'd have to get a car, it's hard to see how we'd make it with the bike.”

“What, do you have a lot of money?” David asked.

“No, I've only got about forty dollars, but I can cash a check up here easily. Everyone knows my family. And I'll trade in the bike. We should be able to get some kind of jalopy, and I've got plenty of credit cards for gas and stuff.”

Aside from his allowance, Roger's family paid any
large bills forwarded to them. They hadn't done so until he'd appeared at their home in Ardmore with his second reasonable choice for a wife. A few years earlier they might have entertained a less kindly view of a Sarah Lawrence dropout with a Roman Catholic cop for a father, but two years before that Roger had without prior notice brought home his new first wife, a colored dancer, and that single act had expanded their awareness of the possibilities to the point of making anything else he might do for the rest of his life relatively acceptable to them. Roger's wife had left him after only a year, her ego, though Roger claimed it had the size and strength of a California redwood, apparently unable to take the outrageous verbal slings and arrows that were the daily fortune of anyone living with him. His family had readily agreed to pay her alimony, and a couple of years later Roger had served up Margaret and ever since, as he was fond of saying, the checks had flowed smoothly from checkbook square.

Would Roger send her money now if she asked for it? That would be like becoming a remittance man's remittance man. Roger's father liked her, flirted with her outrageously as a matter of fact, but she wouldn't like to ask him directly for money, would never do it unless the children's needs were involved. It had taken her quite a while to get adjusted to the idea that they were supported by Roger's parents; he'd complained of her lack of sophistication in this respect, pointing out that only people with no family money were supposed to be possessed of such theoretical qualms. But always until her pregnancy she'd made it a point to keep some kind of job, full time, part time, producing little dresses to be sold in Village boutiques, producing letters with carbons, food for hungry people (when she met Roger she'd been working in a Jewish dairy restaurant on Second Avenue; he had just abandoned sculpture for film making and was doing a documentary on an old people's day center upstairs from the restaurant), producing
change from cash registers, her need to produce being laughed at by Roger, who subsequent to their marriage spent a year producing intestinal-looking collages of such a size and hideousness as to create an emotional ordeal for anyone who had to enter a room containing one of them. He filled their bedroom walls with them except that it wasn't just the walls because at points they were six inches deep, and when the walls were covered he suspended one from the ceiling over their bed so that whatever her eyes might light upon, if she happened to open them for a moment while they were making love, she became convulsed at the sight of some acid-green ruptured appendix, Day-Glow headcheese or illuminated testicle descending, which convulsions, Roger took pains to tell her, constituted a singular improvement over her normal passive-reclining style of love-making.

Roger would readily send her money if he thought she didn't care. If it didn't occur to him that she might regard generosity as a token of love and concern. Roger was never stingy, except with his symbols. At the gas station that afternoon she agreed to exchange her motorcycle and a hundred dollars for a 1963 Corvair the owner's son had done some work on. She made out a check and called Roger collect from the station, asking him, in a disingenuously casual way, to deposit a lot of money in the checking account beause she expected to travel around for a while. “Sure, kid, sure,” he said. “I'll do that.” And hung up before she could have second thoughts about what else she should tell him or wonder whether she wasn't being suspiciously cool.

David approved of her purchase in a mildly surprised way that made her realize that he hadn't assumed that just because she'd announced her intention of buying a car and left the house to do it, she would come home having done it or even having seriously made the attempt. Here again was that sense of radical evolution in less than a generation. Always there had been a disparity between what people did and what they'd
meant to do but surely there had once been some more reasonable relationship between the two.

T
HEY
slept together that night in the big bed in Great-Aunt Margaret's room. She had showered and made a bedsheet toga for herself and was reading in bed, the door to her room open, when David came upstairs and into the room, undressed and got into bed with her. She was suffused with heat and desire, dared not put down the book resting on her enormous white-sheeted belly—Great Aunt Margaret's
Compendium of Cape Cod Marine Life
—lest he see both in her face and be upset. What he wanted from her clearly had little to with sex. Yet she could not take her eyes off him while he was undressing. He had a beautiful body, not at all the kind one associated with indecision or alienation. Broad shoulders, muscular chest, flat stomach and narrow hips. Sturdy, muscular legs. At what point, what age, had she become aware of the bodies of young boys? Maybe it was as recently as her pregnancy. When you were younger you liked a boy or didn't, and while there were obvious physical factors affecting one's attraction—one simply wasn't drawn, for example, to fat boys—she couldn't remember ever attaching importance to the looks of any body feature except the face. This pleasure now in watching young boys . . . playing Frisbee on the beach . . . walking half-naked along country roads . . . not even to speak of the specific frustrated lust this one was causing her  . . . it was like some sort of coming attraction for senility. SHE WASN'T THAT OLD, GODDAMMIT! This was the century of the extended life expectancy, reality factors excluded. How could she feel so old, so young? Was it possible that some immutable factor in the internal development of man would cause everyone to go through the same stages at the same ages as people went through them in the days when forty was a reasonable life expectancy? So that if you were thirty you were emotionally three-fourths through your interior
life, even if you were going to live to be eighty? She shuddered, closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, tried to focus on the book. She looked at David; he lay on his back, eyes open.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him.

“I was wondering when you were going to turn off the light,” he said.

She put the book on the night table but at that moment one of the twins, or maybe both of them, jumped under the bedsheet. They didn't move much any more, maybe they were too crowded now. A couple of months earlier there had seemed to be almost constant motion. Roger had watched her watching them and had taken out his sketch pad for the first time in years and had seemed to be drawing her, but then when she'd looked at the picture later, everything in it had seemed to be disembodied; her eyes were up in a tree, à la Cheshire Cat, and the twins were two tiny primitive beasts dancing in a forest.

“Soon,” she said to David. “I want to watch the children playing.”

“Huh?”

She pointed to her belly, thinking, I'm jealous of his beautiful body so I'm showing him what mine can do. The mound shifted.

“What's that?” David asked.

“They're playing ring-around-a-rosy or something,” she said contentedly.

“I want to ask you something,” David said. “You ever been to a hospital?”

“A hospital? You mean a mental hospital?” she asked incredulously.

He nodded. He was utterly serious. This youth, so strange that he might have been a chunk from the planet Krypton, for all he seemed to relate to earth, or what she normally assumed to be earth,
he
thought that
she
was mad.

“David,” she said, “look.” She pushed aside the toga to reveal her stomach, the stretch marks now
barely visible in the dim light from the reading lamp. He stared at it with awe, obviously finding it more impressive in its clothed condition. “There are two babies in there,” she said. “They'll be ready to be born in a few weeks, maybe less, and when they move around inside  . . . when my stomach moves  . . . watch now . . . there  . . . see . . . ? When it moves like that, it's not something I'm doing because I'm crazy. It's
them.”

He watched as though hypnotized.

“If you want to,” she said, “you can lay your hand on it. You'll feel them when they move.”

He put his hand down on her stomach. The twins were still and she felt the momentary irritation of a stage mama whose child refuses to perform.

“Sometimes it takes time,” she said. “If you wait you'll feel it.”

Without moving his hand he adjusted his position so that he was lying on his side up against her; she raised her arm so that it cradled his head. Her heart beat wildly but her belly was motionless. When she looked down she saw that David's eyelids were closed and a moment or two later she realized that he was fast asleep.

I
T
was already dark when they arrived. The farmhouse looked very appealing—soft lights on throughout the ground floor, light spilling out onto the front porch, where bunches of horse corn hung from nails near the door and hundreds of pumpkins and winter squashes were stacked against the siding.