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.
THEY 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.
IT 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.
“Wow,” she said. “I hope you like pumpkin pie.”
He shrugged. She hung back as he started up the steps to the porch. He knocked and a moment later a skinny, black-haired woman with eyes like a Kaethe Kollwitz child opened the door.
David said, “Hi.”
The woman smiled dreamily.
“Is Mitchell here?” David asked.
The woman shook her head. “He went back to the city a few weeks ago.” Her voice was musical but the music was from another world.
“Oh . . .” He took a bit of time to consider this. “Can I come in anyhow?” he finally asked.
“Do you have anyone with you?” Margaret could have sworn that the woman had looked directly at her a moment before.
“Her,” David said.
“Oh, dear, I don’t know,” the woman said softly. “Ill have to . . . we don’t really have that much room, we’ve agreed that . . . I’ll have to check with the . . .” She disappeared from the door.
But it is dark, Margaret thought. And I am heavy with childs. A sudden pitying image of herself trudging from inn to inn looking for a bundle of hay. She’d needed to go to the bathroom for some time and now she felt a terrible cramp in her stomach at the thought of having to keep going. The woman returned with a man. A book-jacket kind of man, very slender with long, straight black hair, glasses and a pipe.
“Here they are, De Witt,” the woman said.
He nodded gravely, raised his hand. “Welcome.”
She felt another cramp in her stomach and decided to climb the stairs. Surely they would let her use their precious communal bathroom. With some difficulty, the cramps getting worse, she climbed the steps to the porch. Saw, without serious interest, that they were as stunned as her father had been at the first full sight of her.
De Witt said, “Welcome.”
“Please,” she said, “may I use your bathroom?”
“Of course,” he said calmly. “Please come in. Both of you. Come in.” T
hey stepped back to allow her to pass through. David followed. She was vaguely aware of people in the rooms to the left and right of the hallway but was much too intent on getting to the bathroom to pay attention to them. De Witt pointed to the stairs and laboriously she climbed them, clutching at the rail with one hand and her stomach with the other. But she failed to relieve her cramps in the bathroom, although an enormous amount of liquid burst from her, and when she left it, she felt she couldn’t manage to get back down the stairs. Blindly, instinctively, she headed for the nearest room and groped her way to a bed, panting with exertion. She stretched out with relief but was immediately seized with another wave of cramps. And then another. Her body was soaked with sweat and the tablecloth clung to her all over. She plucked it away from her arms and breasts, then her stomach, and was reaching to pull to pull it up from her legs when another huge cramp seized her, convulsing her whole body into helplessness, wrenching out of her a scream that was expression of nearly unutterable pleasure and nearly unbearable pain. Her body relaxed. With some difficulty, aware of a commotion on the staircase, she reached out and found a table light, which she switched on. Propping herself up on her elbows, she lifted the bottom of the tablecloth. Lying between her legs, swathed in a little blood and a great deal of some moist filmy substance, framed by excrement, with a head of dark wet hair and an umbilical cord the size of a transatlantic cable still leading to somewhere inside her, was Margaret’s first child, a girl.
A voice said, “Oh, my God!”
With enormous difficulty she thrust herself to a sitting position and picked up her child, who immediately began to cry. Gratefully she felt strong hands behind her, propping up her back, heard De Witt’s calm mellifluous voice giving orders . . . towels from the kitchen, newspapers . . . sterilize a pair of scissors . . . boil some rags, too . . . lots of newspaper . . . a mop, pillow . . . Margaret tried to bring the baby to her breasts but the cord wasn’t long enough and so she let it lie on her stomach instead, its head on its side. It cried for a moment longer, a strange noise, at once furious and subdued, like a performance at the Fillmore with the amplifying equipment turned off. There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room. Still propping her up, De Witt stuffed more pillows in back of her, then withdrew. The baby stopped crying. Silence, overwhelming in its echoes. Then the first new spasms came and the baby began to cry.
“The scissors’ll be here soon,” De Witt said. “I’ll tie the cord as soon as the placenta’s born.”
“What about the other one?” Margaret asked, holding the baby on her heaving stomach, stroking its wet downy head.
“Other one?” De Witt repeated.
“Didn’t David tell you it’s twins?” she asked through the contractions.
“David and I didn’t get to any of this,” De Witt said, smiling broadly.
She smiled back but the smile was cut short by another contraction. Breathing became difficult; her fever, which had subsided, went up again and she began panting. Someone beside the baby was crying, a woman or a girl, but Margaret couldn’t take the trouble to find out who it was.
“Someone help her hold on to the baby,” De Witt ordered. “Get the dirty blanket out from under her.” The calm of his voice was a miracle in itself. “Rip it if you have to, but get rid of all that crap and get down some newspaper.” Somehow it was done. Someone put a white cloth over the baby on her stomach. “You hold on to that one,” De Witt said, “and I’ll get the other one when it comes out.” The height of schizophrenia, this combined feeling of supernatural power and utter helplessness. She could do anything but what could she have done without him? A moment or so later one huge convulsion crowned the head of her second child, the rest of whom came out into De Witt’s waiting hands with very little labor, wet but without a trace of blood, soundly asleep, still in the middle of the original wet dream, trailing her own thick, wet umbilical rope, another girl. Kneeling beside the bed so as not to stretch the connection between them, De Witt held the new baby upside down and spanked her bottom. She cried and he turned her back upright, holding her against his sheet-covered chest. She stopped crying immediately. The placenta birthed, plopping down between Margaret’s thighs like a battle-scarred jellyfish. Someone said they should fry it and eat it but De Witt said that while Mira could live with the fact that most of them were meat-eaters, he thought that cooked human placenta would really freak her out, and even in her current condition Margaret found a second to be grateful to Mira, whoever she was, for being a vegetarian. He wrapped the second baby, who had no real hair yet, only a light down on her head, and handed her to someone kneeling beside him, then cut the cord from the second baby and covered the spot with a piece of wet cloth someone handed him. On Margaret’s stomach, still crying, the first baby was turned over and her cord cut and covered. Margaret lifted it up to her breast then De Witt laid the other one on her other breast. The first one, still crying, flailed her arms frantically and in so doing scratched the cheek of the second one, leaving a surprising red mark on it.
“Oh, dear!” said the musical voice of the woman from the front door. Mira, maybe.
“They scratch themselves sometimes,” De Witt said tranquilly. “It’s nothing. Someone get me a manicuring scissors.”
Margaret smiled but she was upset by the mark. The only thing that prevented her from being more upset about it was her tiredness and the continual crying of the first baby.
“Maybe I can nurse her,” she said to De Witt.
“There won’t be anything there yet,” he said. “But see what she does.”
“Do you believe in fate?” Margaret asked worshipfully.
“I believe in myself,” he said firmly.
“Well I believe in you, too,” she said, “but that’s not what I’m talking about. What if I’d landed someplace else?”
“Most of the farms have someone who can deliver a baby,” De Witt said.
“I can’t believe they’re like you,” she said.
“Better tend to this one,” De Witt said.
He held the sleeping baby while she brought the crying one to her nipple, squeezing the nipple and letting it brush the baby’s lips. Nothing came out, but the baby’s mouth immediately opened around the nipple and firmly bit it. The crying stopped. The nipple stayed in the baby’s mouth and De Witt told her that some were born knowing how to suck while others took time to learn. She held out her arm for the other baby, who slept on her breast without once opening her eyes.
SHE named the girls Rosemary and Rue, in reverse order of birth, and someone said that plant names were so beautiful. Margaret didn’t bother to say that Rosemary wasn’t after a plant but after her favorite cousin because then she would have had to explain Rue. De Witt had a table brought into the already cramped room, which the previous occupants had insisted upon turning over to Margaret, and he improvised a double cradle by nailing two crates to the top of it, then lining them with hay and sheets. Rosemary slept through the night but Rue was up so much that Margaret simply kept her in the bed, letting the baby suck her breast, now oozing some watery stuff that wasn’t milk but which Rue seemed to like, anyway. By early the next morning the angry line on Rosemary’s cheek had nearly disappeared.
MARGARET gave De Witt a check for two hundred dollars to cover some of their expenses and to buy for her some of the things she needed from town, asking him also to find out if David needed anything. He would also send a telegram to Roger for her, saying that the girls had been born and she was staying at the farm for a while. Mira went with De Witt. Mira was De Witt’s wife. The woman at the door. Margaret was profoundly disconcerted by Mira although she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the contrast between the unchanging, haunted eyes and the serene smiling mouth. (Roger’s mother was like that, her eyes never changed no matter what the rest of her face was doing, although the basic expression in that case was different; however weak, frightened or agonized Roger’s mother might become, her eyes were always watchful.) Perhaps it was the seductive
voice combined with the cropped hair and the convent-like, floor-length, osnaburg smock. Or maybe it was just her manner, a Mother Superior already on her way to the better place. She called Margaret dear. She called everybody dear, including De Witt, something in her manner suggesting that she was Maria Montessori and the rest of the world was her Italian slum. What had a man like De Witt seen in her?
“Yes, of course,” Mira said, glancing over De Witt’s shoulder at Margaret’s list.
When they’d left, she lay in bed, tired but comfortable. She had deflated substantially—whatever the twins had weighed, she must have lost another twenty or thirty pounds of water and other stuff so that she again looked like a human being, albeit a soft, fat and somewhat asexual one. Her breasts were swelling and hardening with the new milk, or colostrum, or whatever, and since the twins’ appetites were not yet keeping pace with the supply, Margaret frequently overflowed onto the sheet, which by afternoon had acquired a mildly sour smell which she actually found pleasant but which she suspected other people would not.
David came in to see her, a little shyer than he’d been that first time she found him in her lap.
“Hi,” he said with that endearing grin he had that was really half a grimace and half a question mark. “That was great timing.”
She smiled.
“I mean it,” he said. “They wouldn’t have let us in. They didn’t mean to take any more people, they don’t have that much space now.”
“Good,” she said. I’m glad it worked out.”
He wandered aimlessly around the little room, seeming to look at nearly everything but the twins—Rosemary asleep in her crate, Rue asleep on Margaret’s breast after a feeding.
“Did you see the babies?” she asked.
“Sure I saw them,” he said. “They’re right there.”
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