Any Minute I Can Split (8 page)

“I don't feel arrogant,” she said truthfully.

“Sure you do,” he told her. “You just haven't thought about it. If you reflect for a while . . . c'mere, sit up, I'll help you get your clothes off . . . if you think about it you'll realize that you have a certain good feeling these days. You're sort of satisfied with yourself, right? You don't sit around worrying about what you should be doing because you have this sense that whatever you're doing is good enough. And you're right! It is! It's magnificent!” He took the barrette out of her hair so that it fell loosely down her back and over her shoulders. Naked and happy she reclined. For the first time since she'd begun to put on weight she felt no shame, no desire to hide under the covers. Once or twice in her third month Roger had still made love to her but he had made it quite apparent that he was using her very much as he would have used a knothole if that happened to be the most readily available place for him to come, the result being that she had experienced just about as much
pleasure as a knothole would have in the same circumstance. Now, feeling like a marvelous jewel for the first and last time during her pregnancy, she made love with pleasure, and if she still tended to be submissive rather than active, that seemed to be perfectly all right with Howie, who had, after all, said that what she was doing just by being pregnant was so magnificent that there was no need for her to be doing anything else.

Not two weeks later she had gotten the call that her mother was dead.

“So how come you haven't been sleeping with him?” David asked.

“With my husband, you mean? I only said
some
men like pregnant women. I didn't say he was one of them.”

“So who've you been sleeping with?”

She started to point out that she hadn't said she'd been sleeping with
anyone,
but stopped herself. David had a shit-detector astounding in one so young and so detached.

“It was only once,” she told him. “A few months ago.”

“How come?”

“I was afraid of getting too attached to him. He only liked me because he had this thing for pregnant women.”

“How do you get attached to people?” David asked.

She stared at him, not having the vaguest idea of how to answer, not even sure what the question was. It was almost like a straight request for lessons, yet that couldn't really be it. How could you
not
get attached to people? She got attached to everyone, even people she disliked. She liked David and De Witt and Baby Butterscotch and she loathed Mira, yet already in some unbearable way she was attached to Mira just as much as to the others. A part of the same jig-saw puzzle.

“I don't know,” she said. “It's just something that happens. I'm extremely attached to Roger, even if we haven't made love in half a year and even if I'm mad at him. Even being mad at people . . . probably you
wouldn't get mad at people if you had no attachment to them.”

“Is
he
attached to
you?”
David asked.

There it was again. She smiled. “I guess so. I don't know. I'm not sure.” Why did her sense of irony seldom enter directly into her speech when she was with David? Because it was such a superficial part of her that she knew it wouldn't even register through his armor? He waited. “I guess we'll know by whether he shows up here. De Witt is sending him a telegram for me, with the address on it.”

“What did you say in the telegram?”

Unwillingly (although at first she wasn't sure why) she told him. “I just said I was at this farm with some other people, some girls and boys and some married people, and I had the twins.”

“So if he comes,” David said slowly, “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 took a deep breath. “David, tell me about yourself.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Here,” he said.

“Where did you grow up?” she asked.

“In the suburbs,” he said (with a flickering smile).

“Which one?” she asked.

“What difference does it make?” he said.

“None, really,” she admitted. “It's only that you're a very mysterious person to me. I'm trying to sort of solve the mystery by finding out something specific about you.”

“There's nothing to find out,” David said. “That's the thing. My father kept talking about being a dropout but there was nothing ever there for me to drop out of. Nothing. Ever.”

For one moment she hoped violently, physically, fearfully
that Roger would drop everything the moment he got her telegram and come up to be with her. Then Rosemary awakened and needed to be fed and she reminded herself that De Witt would be coming back before long, and then a minute later Rue, too, awakened, and her mind was filled with their needs.

D
E WITT
and Mira returned in late afternoon, when the sun was already down—so early, a warning of even shorter days ahead. They had split Margaret's shopping between them; everything De Witt had gotten for her was perfect and everything Mira had gotten was slightly wrong or worse, right down to the children's kimonos, which she'd gotten fewer of than Margaret had requested because she was sure they could dig up some old ones around the farm from the other kids, and which she'd bought in six-month size instead of three-month because she'd realized upon seeing the size of the latter that they wouldn't do for more than a month or so and she'd been certain Margaret wouldn't want to throw away her hard-earned money on things the girls would outgrow so soon. I am rich, Margaret wanted to say, and furthermore, you skinny witch, I am supported by my husband's parents, and furthermore I spent my childhood in clothes from the cousins always too big or too small or just wrong, and if you weren't a . . . but De Witt was in the room, prying the crates off the table and replacing them with padded wicker laundry baskets . . . and Margaret was afraid to anger him by speaking sharply to his wife. Maybe she wouldn't have done it anyway. Something in the other woman there was that made it inappropriate to even discuss such matters as infant clothing with her, much less get nasty over it.

Also, Margaret was tired. It was a pleasant tiredness because here in the midst of these people, most of them friendly and solicitous, there was nothing she had to do but take care of her babies' immediate needs and that required very little energy. So her tiredness, which in
other circumstances might have left her angry and upset, left her instead still and calm, elevating her anger to a philosophical level. A tentative one. It was a When I Come Down from this Mother-Birth-Tired Trip I think 111 Hate You kind of anger, almost pleasant to entertain. How could De Witt have married this creature? True, Mira wasn't ugly. When Margaret catalogued her features—a high, blank forehead, stupidly huge, dark eyes, a long straight nose, thick lips, all set in a heart-shaped face that was just about as suitable as a Valentine for looking at three hundred and sixty-five days a year—having finished this list, she had to admit that if one did away with the derisive adjectives, a beautiful woman was being described. What was the thing in Mira's face that negated the rest of it? Margaret wasn't normally reluctant to grant other women their good looks. Nor did she think it was an automatic balance to her instant worshipful love for De Witt, because it had begun when Mira appeared in the doorway, pretending to see only David.
How could De Witt,
she started to ask herself again, but stopped, because the question implied some knowledge of De Witt that made him incompatible with Mira, yet she really knew nothing about either of them. She sensed about Mira that the woman's serene surface could easily crack to reveal hysteria just beneath; she knew about De Witt only that he had a knowledge of childbirth and retained, to understate the case, an impeccable calm in emergencies.

“De Witt?” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Mmm,” De Witt said.

But what could she safely ask him? To some extent the farm represented a new life for anyone who came to it, and when people began a new life it was impolitic to ask what they'd done in the old one.

“Have you ever delivered a baby before?” she finally settled upon.

“No,” he said. “I've wanted to but the chance hadn't arisen.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two years.”

“Have the others been here just as long?” Margaret asked him.

“Not most of them,” De Witt said. “Carol and Leonard were friends of ours and I wrote to them when I'd finished getting the place to a point where it could be occupied, and they came a while later, and then Paul and Starr were friends of theirs, and then I happened to hear from Dolores, who was a close friend from years ago . . . we were married for a brief time, actually . . . and she was looking for a place and came up toward the end of that first winter. The kids we picked up all at once, not Butterscotch, she just wandered in one day, but the others . . . they're in Canada now but they'll be back in a few weeks. Anyway, they were part of a political house up near the Canadian border and while the six of them were away, all the others got busted for possession, and one of them was a friend of a friend of Starr's and asked if we could take them in. That was last spring. They worked with us through the summer but they got . . . restless before harvest and took off. We'll put them to work when they come back or we won't let them stay. Then there've been others . . . the winter is pretty rough here, some of the others just couldn't take it.”

Margaret was silent, her mind blown.
We were married for a brief time, actually.
Dolores. Which one was Dolores? Had she met her yet?

“Are you going to stay through the winter?” Mira asked. Her manner was solicitous but Margaret felt that her intentions were not.

“I don't know,” Margaret said. “I haven't made any plans.”

“You don't need to,” De Witt said.

Margaret beamed at him.

“What about David?” Mira asked.

“What about him?”

“Well, I mean, will he be staying here with you?”

“I thought he was staying with all of us,” Margaret said, but then for De Witt's sake added, “I met him on
the road. He was the one who told me about this place.”

Mira nodded. “He knows Mitchell. Do you happen to know how he knows Mitchell?”

Margaret shook her head.

“Do you know if
he
plans to stay through the winter?”

“I don't know. We just happened to meet and come here together. He's free to do what he wants and I'm free to do what I want.” Was she really lying here in a bed, a baby sleeping on either side of her, describing freedom to someone who'd been living in a commune for two years?

“What he wants,” Mira said, “is to sleep in this room with you.”

“Fine,” Margaret said calmly. “What bothers you about that? Aesthetics or morality?” Whoops. She was playing Roger to Mira's Margaret. Maybe that was what bothered her so much about the other woman—that she was a fun house reflection of all the hypocrisies in herself that Roger had made her ashamed of.

“Oh, dear,” Mira said, “I see I've offended you. I didn't mean to do that.”

Like hell you didn't.

“It's just that Paul and Starr have given up this room for you,” Mira went on sweetly, “and we were just wondering whether they should think of the new arrangement as permanent.”

“I'm sorry,” Margaret said, truly contrite, “I didn't realize . . .”

“There's nothing to be sorry for,” De Witt said. “Butterscotch gave them her room with the double bed she didn't need anyway, and she's going to sleep on the cot in Dolores's room.”