Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  Aside from that week his last manifestation of feeling had been upon hearing of the death of John F. Kennedy and beyond that she could remember only small violent rages at the people upstairs for walking too hard and slamming doors. He had an obsession about slammed doors which Margaret had inherited, like so many other incomprehensible obsessions. When you thought about it, the genes were weighted against her on the matter of slammed doors since her mother was upset by all loud noises. She bit off one of her nails, a habit she always thought she’d kicked until she visited home.

  “Is that you, then, Margaret?” her father said uncomfortably.

  “Of course it’s me,” she said. “Who did you think it was? Kate Smith?”

  His eyes went to the girl who stood somewhere in back of Margaret, then returned to Margaret.

  “What brings you to Boston?” he asked. Not willing to acknowledge any tie between them strong enough to have made him the sole reason for her visit. The way his wife’s family had felt about him, he felt about her, that was the truth of it. She’d always made him uncomfortable. If the inhuman standards of behavior they had set were unfair to him, that didn’t mean that his daughter shouldn’t have naturally abided by them. From the beginning she’d been a disappointment to him, who’d assumed that Wasps were born toilet trained.

  “I heard a rumor you had some kind of white-slave business going here, Dad,” she said.

  From behind her there was a gasp. The ruddiness of her father’s face increased a thousandfold in the space of a second.

  “Curb your tongue, Margaret,” her father said.

  Curb your tongue, curb your dog, curb your instincts, curb your humor, curb your appetite. And don’t slam the door! But she was contrite in spite of herself.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. You didn’t give me a very warm welcome, you know, and your colleen didn’t even want to let me into the house.”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl whispered. “I didn’t know.”

  She nodded without turning around. His angry color subsided. She had succeeded in putting him on the defensive, perhaps because of his knowledge that given his own way he would just as leave the colleen hadn’t let her in to witness his quickly-found contentment. He belched a deep, easy beefstewy-belch, covering his mouth so that while his body might be racked by it, no sound would disgrace him. The containment theory of digestion etiquette; what didn’t actually leave the body could not be proved to have ever been there. Every morning for as far back as she could remember he had locked himself into the bathroom for half an hour and farted fireworks that reverberated spectacularly throughout the apartment, a fact of which he seemed blissfully unaware. But that was the only audible sign ever that all the tea bags and all the meat and bread and potatoes had not taken a one-way journey to the center of his being where they would forever rest in peace.

  “Maggie,” he muttered, “this is Margaret.”

  “I’m sure I’m pleased to meet you,” the girl said. Not actually curtsying.

  “Did you know he had a daughter?” Margaret asked.

  “Not living,” the girl said, then put a hand over her mouth and stared at Margaret aghast, a victim of that peasant stupidity that let people believe that saying something could make it retroactively true.

  Margaret laughed.

  “I mean,” the girl said lamely, “I don’t know wherrrre I got that idea . . .”

  “I’m having twins,” Margaret said, patting her stomach.

  “Oh, how wonderrrful,” the girl said, clapping her hands, her eyes filling with the holy tears of other women’s weddings and childbirths.

  “Twins,” her father said.

  She’d forgotten to tell him.

  “You know me, Dad,” she said. “Anything for a laugh.”

  “There are things you don’t laugh about, Margaret,” her father said.

  “Mmmmm.” Once she had asked him for a list of them but of course there was no paper long enough. That there were things you couldn’t survive unless you joked about them was an idea utterly foreign to him, humor being linked as it was in his mind with drinking and the other vices.

  She bit off another nail.

  “I really think it’s time you stopped biting your nails, Margaret,” her father said.

  “You always did,” Margaret said.

  Silence.

  “Where’s Roger?” her father asked.

  “Home,” she said. “I just left him.”

  “Left him!” Did her ears deceive her or was that an audible exclamation point? “What kind of craziness are ya tahhhking, Margaret?”

  They’d thought she was lucky to get him, the bright white scion of a breakfast-cereal fortune, two years younger than she, a chain smoker who’d arrested lung cancer at the age of seventeen, painter and collagist whose greatest efforts now went into his titles (Madonna with Six Pack; Ivory Soap with Pubic Hair; Campbell’s Soup Can from the Inside); still, they didn’t know his stuff was dirty and he had a regular look about him that they liked, the look of a choirboy who will be arrested in ten years for multiple murders, and maybe that was what her father in particular had taken to, everything seemed to be safely inside. At least in the beginning. Even then he would pinch her hard or kick her in the shins under the table if they had an argument when her parents were around, coming attractions for his proclivity to hit below the belt. She’d found this strange in an objective way that amused her when she thought about it later on; all the things they saw about each other were strange or amusing and perhaps not entirely desirable and yet never before their marriage were they reasons to consider whether that marriage should take place. Once you decided to get married there was a kind of impetus that carried you through without leaving room in your thoughts for questions of mistakes. What was she to say now to her father, who thought change was the only serious mistake that could be made in a life?

  “I mean, he’s home and I’m here,” she said. “I left him home.” Chicken. She was overwhelmed by self-dislike. The cowardice that other women coaxed and fertilized and periodically trotted out for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Femininity shamed her when she found it in herself. Why bravery, of all the things Margaret might have chosen to ask of Margaret?

  “Anyway,” she said, “I was in the mood to use the motorcycle and we couldn’t all fit on it.”

  “Motorrrcycle,” her father repeated numbly.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess I’d better go if I’m going to get there before dark.”

  Neither one made any attempt to stop her, or to find out just where she had to be before dark, so she waved goodbye, clambered down the front steps and mounted her cycle.

  HER mother had been so frightened of being alone. (Loneliness was much more frightening than death, the absence of pain.) She needed her husband, however she loathed him, and it was this contradiction that had torn her apart every day of her life, destroying her self-esteem, making honest hatred of him impossible—indeed making all action impossible by the end, bringing in its wake a total external paralysis. If only ambivalence could have slowed down her mind as it slowed down her body. The only ambition she’d had for the last ten years of her life was to die before he did, never taking note that it would be possible to die ten minutes later. She wouldn’t be left behind once more.

  “Nobody wants to be left,” Margaret had told her, and she’d answered that it was different for men. Why was it so different? Because men found other women right away. Ohhh . . . there was no possible satisfactory answer. Obviously the complaint had some reality to it, yet Margaret continually sensed that it wasn’t the real part that was the problem. For her mother, men were part of that whole world of vulgar things whose very coarseness guaranteed their survival. . . . What coarse gesture had found him this lovely maiden to do for him? He hadn’t the normal complement of widows, friends of his dead wife, themselves lonely, to begin inviting him to dinner, telling themselves they were only doing it to ease his pain. The one who’d tried he had brushed off. She had desp
ised him during his wife’s lifetime and he wouldn’t permit her to change her mind now. And verily he had found himself a dutiful young colleen who only wanted to serve . . . they also serve who only serve. Who hadn’t known he had a daughter living. Did she know now for sure? Her father was a man with a deep-seated aversion to the truth. Painstakingly honest in all financial matters, the only man on the force not on the take in even a small way, he had the self-righteousness of the utterly honest man while in point of fact, his mind, when confronted with the simplest question with the most potentially painless answer, automatically, went through labyrinths to arrive at an answer which at best lacked relevance and at worst was the exact opposite of the real answer. Her mother couldn’t tell a lie and had had no more desire than most to hear the truth so had retreated into silence over the years. But her father’s special form of aphasia was so extraordinary that Margaret could easily envision a conversation between her father and the girl which began with the girl’s saying, “Mrr. McDonough, I didn’t know you had a daughterrr . . . that girrrl who called you Dad, she was your daughterr, was she?” and ended some minutes later with the girl not only uncertain of Margaret’s identity but no longer sure that she’d heard him called Dad.

  Where to now? She was hungry, she had to have something to eat, but then after that? There were the cousins . . . someone might still be at the house, they seldom really closed it before the end of October and the Cape was so beautiful in the fall. She hadn’t seen any of the cousins since the week after her mother’s death although they’d called her often when her mother was alive, and one or the other was always stopping off to visit on a trip to New York. Before. They didn’t even know how ghastly she looked, so it wasn’t that her appearance upset them, it was deeper than that. It was that with her mother’s death all those traits of hers which they had for so long found exotic had been seen to be born not out of sheer Rabelaisian whimsey or some casual flair for the bizarre but out of a driving desperation not unlike their own but perhaps more acute. They felt cheated. As though, during a circus performance, someone had whispered that all the clowns wanted to play Hamlet, so that they’d been unable to enjoy the rest of the show.

  After the funeral they’d gone back to cousin Hilda’s house where Margaret had sat spaced out in a deep corner of the sofa rubbing her belly which was aching in some way that probably had nothing to do with the three-month-old baby, as she still thought of it, inside, while Roger had mocked them all, for her eyes only, by being excessively polite, and her father chanted his Poor Creature litany and aunts and uncles wafted through the room, embarrassed, these foreigners, by her failure to be embarrassed at the manner of her mother’s death. Like a horse made skittish by the tension of its handler, she’d begun to make jokes, laughing nervously when they stared at her as she claimed that her mother had died of 1) cancer of the psyche; 2) indefatigable loss of the will to live; 3) medicophilia, a difficult ailment in which the contents of the medicine chest are seen to have greater appeal than everything else in the world combined. She’d flown home without Roger, who was in great good humor at being the Patcher Up, taking a taxi from the airport, telling the driver within five minutes of getting into the cab that her mother had just committed suicide, which gave him enough to talk about for the rest of the hour and a half ride. It was something she continued to do for months afterward, tell everyone she met, sometimes she had to stop herself from going up to perfect strangers on the street to tell them, very much in the manner that she would have felt impelled to tell them that the sky was falling if she had just come from the place where it was beginning to go and thus knew before anyone else. She carried with her a sense of disaster as immediate as lightning to someone standing under a tree. She made out her will and included provisions for the care of her child, if she and Roger should both die but it should survive.

  She hadn’t seen the cousins since that week although one or the other of them had called on the last day of each month of the few months since then, their regularity so obvious as to make her realize they were taking turns. Let them not once again be accused of negligence. Not that they’d actually been accused of neglecting her mother but the legacy of a suicide was a general accusation of neglect, barring the particulars of which no one could offer a self-defense and be exonerated. Who the hell had ever asked them for anything, anyway? What Margaret’s mother needed they couldn’t have given her, nor had she the right to expect it. Nowhere had Darwin made provision for a cold-water species which after seven generations of nonevolution produced a member who needed warmth to survive. Or who thought she did. The ambivalence of her claim being proven by the man she’d married who, on the surface so different from them all, was just beneath the skin and to the inner core a caricature of everything the Wasp, a caricature to begin with, stood for. Who initially strove to be what they thought he should be because it was what he really wanted to be in the first place, and only became grotesque in the striving.

  She had some dinner and headed toward the Cape. There was at least an even chance the house would be empty in midweek at the tail end of September, and if it weren’t, she could see who was there and then decide whether to stay. It had taken her many years to realize that she liked some of her cousins more than others. For so long she had thought of them as one glorious cousin pie which, cut open, produced people who were happy when she visited them. To differentiate between them would have been a form of criticism and it had never occurred to her, until one or two of them grew up and bolted to seed, that there were strong individual variations among them. Depending on who was there, she would stay or not stay. If the house was empty, well, she had the key, she had never taken it off her chain, and whether she would be able to bear it alone there, she couldn’t tell in advance.

  IT was fairly dark as she crossed the canal and headed toward Sandwich. Sudden apprehension made her park the cycle off the highway about half of the ten or twelve miles there. She was exhausted and her bottom had finally reacted to its two-day punishment with soreness and itching. She should sleep in a bed where her weight could be distributed more reasonably. Yet the thought of entering the empty house in the darkness filled her with dread. When the tide was high the waves lapped at the sea wall with a noise that was soothing if you were happy, ghostly if you weren’t. The house itself got musty after even a short damp spell. One of the cousins, years ago when they’d seen a movie called Isle of the Dead in which a coffin opened up and a dead woman rose from it, had made a joke about that coffin’s lid being like the door of the house at the Cape when they first opened it in the spring, and the image, which had come fleetingly over the years, was strongly with her now. She half-sat, half-lay down with her head against a tree trunk, wishing she had something soft to wedge under her behind, barely able to raise it off the ground for a second or two at a time for relief. For a while she lay flat on her back with her head on the grass but it was hard and ants crawled down her neck so she half-sat again. The whole movie took place at night in the mist, maybe because it was an isle. The woman who got out of the coffin had long, soft hair and her eyes were closed. The lid squeaked horribly but everything else was very quiet. Doors and lids. The first time she’d smoked dope after her mother’s death all the pictures had been doors and lids opening endlessly in silent-movie time. Twice now she felt herself falling asleep and forced open her eyes. Then, finally, unconsciousness came.

  She awakened in extreme discomfort, feeling that she couldn’t move at all, and discovered that this was at least partly true because a young boy was asleep between her sprawled legs, his arms around her middle, his head on her breasts. She couldn’t see his face but from his size she guessed him to be at least sixteen. He was wearing a sweatshirt and army pants. His boots, which had holes in the bottoms anyway, had been taken off, perhaps under the rules of some twenty-first-century etiquette that said you didn’t go to sleep on strange ladies with your boots on. Next to the boots was a small stack of comic books and on top of the comic books was a sketc
hbook. Trying not to disturb him, she reached out for the sketchbook and let it flip open; every page was blank. She put it back again; the boy stirred. A clenched fist came up to his mouth, resting near it on her breast, the knuckles just touching his lips. There was something in his hand which, when his grip relaxed, she could see was a small, purple lucite box of the variety used to hold grass. It appeared to be empty. Occasionally his thumb moved back and forth along the surface of the box. His hair was fine and brown, down to his shoulders. She had a great urge to caress it and felt that under the circumstances he couldn’t seriously object, but when she lifted one hand to his forehead she lost her balance and came close to toppling them both over sideways to the ground. He awakened and sat up, still in the narrow triangle made by her fat sprawled legs, rubbed his eyes without letting go of the box. He might be older than she’d thought; his hair had already receded somewhat. His face had that quality that makes people call some men of forty boys. It was a lovely, gentle sad face and she was moved by a strong desire to kiss his eyes.

  He said, “Hi. I guess I fell asleep.”

  She smiled.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It must be nearly five. It’s getting pretty light.”

  He nodded.

  “Are you going to Sandwich by any chance?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so. I’ve been on the road.” He smiled. “That’s the best sleep I’ve had in a while.”

  “How long have you been on the road?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I dunno. All summer. Maybe longer.”

  “Don’t you have to get back to school or anything?”

  He shook his head. Nobody had to explain any more why he didn’t go to school. It had cost her nearly a year of her life explaining in the fifties why she’d dropped out of her Sarah Lawrence scholarship and gone to work as a waitress in New York, but a few years later everyone had a whole new vocabulary to explain the boredom that had weighed on her like a physical presence, turning the very air of Bronxville into stone.