“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.
DE 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.”
“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.”
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“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.”
SHE 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.
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