Any Minute I Can Split (9 page)

“And nobody minds?”

“And nobody minds.” He smiled at Margaret in a manner which, if it had been her own husband smiling at some other woman, would have been upsetting to her, but Mira registered calm.

“I have a favor to ask of you,” Mira said—as though the previous conversation hadn't taken place.

The moon? The stars? Leave immediately?

“Yes?”

“The children are so anxious to see your babies.” She was positively winsome. “Do you think they might come up now? They've been asking all day.”

Margaret laughed. “Are you kidding? People've been in and out of here all day, saying hello and everything.”

“I know, but I thought the noise might bother you, you know how children are.”

“Sure,” Margaret said. “Of course. They won't bother me at all.”

“Oh, I'm so grateful to you,” Mira gushed—as if it
had
been the moon and stars she'd requested and Margaret had given in. She left to find the children.

“These should do for two or three months,” De Witt said, tapping the wicker baskets. “We don't have to think past then, for now.”

Margaret thanked him. “Does it really not matter?” she asked. “That I don't know what I'm going to do?”

“Not to me, it doesn't. Especially since you're paying your own way. To someone who worried ahead, it might.”

“Don't you ever worry at all?” she asked.

“Only about being bored,” he said with the utmost seriousness.

An extremely self-possessed child, a girl of somewhere between the age of seven and ten, Margaret could never tell children's ages, appeared at the door, trailed by a younger one of indeterminate sex with long hair, big eyes and a heart-shaped face. Mira's children. But De Witt's, too.

“Mira said we could see the babies now,” the older one said to her father. De Witt nodded and they came in. They went to one side of the bed, then the other.

“Is he sleeping?” the little one asked, standing on tiptoe to see.

“Yes,” Margaret said.

“It's a girl, you idiot,” the older one said. She turned to Margaret. “How come they're both girls?”

“It just happened that way,” Margaret said.

“I'm Lorna,” the girl said.

“Who's that?” Margaret asked her.

“That's my brother,” Lorna said. “Baba.”

“Hi, Baba,” Margaret said.

The little boy smiled at her in a beautiful sunny way and Margaret decided it would be possible to overlook his resemblance to his mother.

“You know you have a beautiful smile,” Margaret said to him.

“Could you tell he was a boy?” Lorna asked.

“Sure,” Margaret said.

“Everyone thinks he's a girl,” Lorna said. “When we go into Brattleboro people say isn't she cute? Isn't that deeeesgusting? Nobody at the farm says it but I still think he looks like a girl, don't you, Baba?”

“Lorna,” De Witt said, “go see if your dinner is ready.”

“Mira's making it,” Lorna said. She turned back to Margaret. “My mother has to make our dinner all the time because we're vegetarians. Not Daddy, but me and Baba and Mira, except bacon is Baba's best food, isn't it, Baba?”

“Lorna,” her father said. “Go down now and see if dinner's ready.”

“Maybe you can come back early in the morning,” Margaret said. “They'll be awake then.”

Lorna left, trailed by Baba.

“De Witt,” Margaret said uncertainly after a moment, “I guess there's no one exactly in charge here . . . but if there were, it would be you, right?”

He nodded.

“I don't even know the ground rules.”

“You will.”

“I know, I know,” she said, “but I mean meanwhile if I do something that seems perfectly all right to me and it just happens to upset you . . . or Mira, say . . . or everyone . . . how will I know?”

“You'll know. After the outdoor work is finished we'll pick up again with regular meetings, at least a couple
of times a week, to get things off our chests, confront each other with gripes and so on, so they don't become major.”

“Meanwhile, if there's something I should be doing that I'm not doing, you'll tell me?”

“I'll tell you. We schedule very closely. We tried it the other way, waiting for people to feel moved to feed the chickens and milk the goats and so on. It doesn't work. Ask the chickens and goats. Half the chickens died when no one felt moved to give them water for three days. All the duties are rotated but it seems to me that being a new mother is about all the duty anyone should have for a month or two. It seems to me Starr's baby was a few weeks old when they came last year and she didn't share in chores for a while. I'll take it up with the others.”

“This business about David sleeping in here,” she said . . . fools rush in . . . “I guess he can bring in an old mattress or something. I wouldn't have thought it would bother anybody but Mira seemed . . .”

“Don't worry about it,” he interrupted. “Mira became celibate a couple of years ago. It's a religious thing and in theory she accepts other people's sexuality but in practice it's difficult for her sometimes.”

We were married for a short time, actually . . . Don't worry about it, Mira's a celibate
 . . . Was he crazy or was he into some very advanced form of sanity?

“As far as the others go,” De Witt continued, “I imagine David's sleeping in here'll bother a couple of the young girls.” He smiled. “Nobody else.”

“I don't think he's ready for young girls,” Margaret said. “It's not that he's particularly attached to me. Actually he's suspicious of everyone. Maybe he's a little less suspicious of me because he's known me a little longer.” She laughed. “Like four days.” Was that possible? Less than a week? “De Witt, do people come and go from here a lot?”

“Sure,” De Witt said. “Especially the younger ones. They don't even feel it when they move around, most of
them have no sense of being rooted anyplace. If you talk to them about roots they'll quote the Fuller line about man being born with feet, not roots. If you say that applies to our bodies but not necessarily our minds they'll look at you blankly or maybe quote some vaguely Eastern line about the oneness of body and soul.” He smiled in a melancholy way. “A lovely thought but certainly not true in all cases . . . mine, for instance.”

“Do you feel as though living in a setup like this changes people?”
Because I really feel the need to change, to grow up, although I don't know exactly what I mean by that.

De Witt shrugged. “People who're susceptible to change seem to change with any new experience. The others . . . most of them will tell you they've changed, too. And there're people who say that if you think you're different then you are.”

“That's the New York thing, isn't it. People who seem absolutely crazy going around telling you how crazy they used to be before they had therapy.”

“When I was practicing psychoanalysis in the Midwest,” De Witt said . . . so that was it . . . “I found that one of my greatest difficulties was in learning what kind of
personalities
my patients had, as opposed to what kind of conscious or unconscious problems. Once I treated a young woman so depleted by melancholy that she could barely talk. After months of trying to understand what was getting in the way of her functioning I happened to walk into a party where she was having a political argument with someone. Her voice was so strident that almost all other conversation had come to a halt. And I discovered from the conversation of the people who'd brought me that this gentle, depressed creature had the reputation of being one of the most vicious, witty, argumentative women in Oak Park.”

“But she was really different when she was with you.”

He nodded. “If anything, the other part was the fake but that isn't quite so either. The fact is she saw herself
in a different light in my office and so she behaved differently.”

“Did you feel,” Margaret asked after a moment, “when you were practicing psychoanalysis, did you feel that you got real results?”

“My rate of cure,” De Witt said, “was somewhat lower than when I was practicing chiropractic in Los Angeles.”

S
HE
hadn't been hungry since the children were born. Three times a day someone brought her a tray with food. There was always a glass of fresh goat's milk and some fruit—an apple or peach or some preserved berries—and then there was homemade bread and some eggs or cheese, or an occasional piece of unidentifiable meat or stew surrounded by vegetables. She ate what they brought with pleasure and craved nothing in-between. Gone was that driving hunger that had plagued her through pregnancy, or even the restless noshing need she'd often felt before.

She found herself also to be quite free of sexual desire, even as the days wore on and the soreness from her delivery disappeared. At odd moments she might still look at David's naked body (he had brought in the mattress and slept on that when the twins filled up the bed) with something akin to nostalgia. Or her mind, during one of De Witt's reminiscences (he had been, it developed, a lawyer in Hays, Kansas, a C.P.A. in Vincennes, Indiana and a real-estate broker in San Francisco, all apparently without benefit of license) might suddenly pan to a picture of herself and De Witt tumbling in the hay someplace, or talking very intently on the staircase from
Gone with the Wind
, but she was free of lust. Partly it was that the experience of birth had been so earthshaking . . . or whatever was the personal equivalent of earthshaking . . . SHE was the earth and SHE HAD SHAKEN . . . and what could she do for an encore . . . ? But beyond that there was the sense of herself as part of a closed circuit. David might
touch it but not he nor anyone else could become a part of the charmed circle comprised by herself and the twins. Her sexual needs were satisfied by fondling them and by having them suck at her breasts.
They
didn't care about the condition of her body, her stomach flabby with lost volume, ridged with stretchmarks which resembled nothing so much as strips of mauve grosgrain ribbon sunk into her flesh; her breasts still stretched to near-blue translucence; her thighs stretched too, though not so greatly. Before they were married Roger had once said that he liked her fat legs because of the way they could grip him, but it had been easy for him to say, then, when her legs weren't really fat and only her thighs bordered on the generous.

The thought of Roger's seeing her naked was enough to make her physically ill, if she let herself dwell on it, although she couldn't conceal from herself the wish that he would care enough to visit them for a few hours. A couple of times each week she received mail addressed to her, as opposed to both her and Roger, and the forwarding address was in Roger's handwriting, but beyond that there was no word. Once she dreamed that she passed a room and looked in and there was Roger, sitting in bed, an arm around each of the twins, all of them looking beautiful and happy, and in the dream she kept saying over and over, “Such a beautiful father, such beautiful girls,” and somehow in the dream there was the feeling that it was
he
who had given birth to them, but her waking fantasies were of a less surrealistic order, with Roger coming back and falling madly in love with his daughters and a newly glamorous wife.

T
HE
second week she wrote a postcard to her father telling him about the birth of the twins, using the farm's post-office box as a return address. Then she went downstairs for the first time.

They'd already had their first hard frost at night; everyone was working with a pleasant urgency because winter would soon be setting in. One end of the long
trestle table in the kitchen was piled high with green tomatoes; at the other end Baby Butterscotch and Carol were separating potatoes, putting the good ones in crates for storage in sand, peeling and cutting the imperfect ones to be cooked right away or put up in jars. Carol and her husband were both potters but Leonard was a painter, a printer and a photographer as well. Carol's older girl, who was about five, was standing on a stool, drying dishes as Lorna washed them. Carol's year-old baby was curled up in an old blanket in one of the potato crates, fast asleep. Mira was sitting in a rocking chair, coring and slicing apples; her eyes were half-closed and she was smiling. Dolores, very tall, very thin, with braided black hair and a long, finely drawn face, was packing sliced peaches into Mason jars which were, in turn, put into a big sterilizer. Dolores was a weaver. She'd come to Margaret's room once to say hello but it had seemed to be a difficult thing for her to do. She had that ambiance that always made an instant slave of Margaret—very kind and at the same time very withdrawn. Starr was placing winter squashes on newly built shelves at the other end of the kitchen; someone had told her they would prefer the kitchen's warmth to the cellar's cold. Her three-year-old boy was handing her the squashes from a bushel basket; her baby was strapped to her back by a piece of canvas, sleeping. Starr was a gifted batikist and seamstress. From time to time the women spoke but Mira was never involved in the conversation.