Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  THE 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 She had that ambiance that always made an instant slave of Margaret—very kind and at the same time very withdrawn.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.

  On a cork bulletin hung some notices. A schedule of yoga classes. Some picture postcards. A price list for the New England Co-op. A huge, beautiful, country-psychedelic chart showing planting and harvest dates for the various vegetable crops, as well as which brand and type of seed had been used and someone’s neat comments on whether each was satisfactory. Aduki beans, black beans, green beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, pumpkins, spinach, summer and winter squash, tomatoes, herbs. A November duty schedule was also posted, with Margaret’s and David’s names at the bottom. It covered jobs like cooking, baking, cleaning, sowing of the winter cover crop, wood chopping and hauling and other outdoor jobs. Margaret’s name had BABIES printed after it; David was scheduled for woodcutting and work on the barn.

  She wandered into the common room, a small pleasant place full of old rugs overlapping each other, cushions, and here and there a battered rocker or armchair. It would have been drab had not some artist—she saw now that Paul’s name was signed in the corner—covered the walls with nymphs and glades and art nouveau sunrises. She was about to go back to the kitchen when she noticed David’s sketchbook on the hearth in front of the fireplace. She looked through it and found that David had done some drawings in and around the house. With great technical facility he had drawn the fireplace, the treadle sewing machine in the crafts room on the other side of the living-room arch, the porch, the barn, the Corvair. There were no people in the pictures but their draftsmanlike quality suggested that was just as well. She found herself remembering a postcard she’d bought years before and still had somewhere at home, a Van Gogh portrait of a chair. An ordinary but gracefully carved wooden chair with a green and gold striped upholstered seat. Holding in its lap two golden books and a small lighted candle in a stand. Rich blue lights hit the wood of the chair; the rug was in warmly mottled autumn colors; the background was a meltingly beautiful green. But the chair was the important thing for with its mellow wood, its arched back and its slender arms curved in to a point where they seemed almost to embrace the candle, it conveyed an intensely human life, an unbearable warmth and longing. And then there was Roger’s work, which invariably conveyed strong feelings—be they largely hatred and pain. In his drawings and sculpture it was more the hatred that came through; it had taken film to document his pain. At the time she’d met him he’d been working with a small group of experimental film makers who’d set up facilities on the Lower East Side. She could still remember every moment of his first film, the one made in the old people’s recreational center; not just the faces but the very angles of the room, the chess pieces, the foreign-language newspapers, had fairly reeked with pain.

  What was so different about David’s pictures? About David, who could admit with equal casualness that he didn’t like to be alone and didn’t know how to become attached to people? Had he anaesthetized himself to pain and accidentally to pleasure as well? He gave no hint of any event in his life so traumatic as to cause deliberate insulation against feeling. In fact he’d suggested the opposite, that the suburban incubator in which he’d hatched and expanded to full physical size had been so devoid of color and incident as to barely exist. Was it that very emptiness he mirrored? Or maybe he’d just cleaned out his own head with acid; other people, after all, had risen above narrow stultifying backgrounds. Maybe the worst thing about the suburbs was that unlike the slums they didn’t leave you anything tangible to fight against, deprived you of the chance to build up a useful energy of rage. She replaced the notebook, listened at the bottom of the stairs for a moment for noise from the twins, then went back to the kitchen.

  “What’re they doing in the barn?” she asked.

  “They’re practically building it from scratch,” Starr said. “They put on a new roof and now they’re insulating it and then they’re going to partition it into lots of rooms.”

  “So you can have more people?”

  Starr laughed. “So the ones who’re here already don’t kill each other.”

  “Oh, dear.” Mira opened her eyes. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t,” Starr pointed out irritably. “I did.”

  “We do need more space for meditation and so on,” Mira said.

  “Oh, sure,” Starr said sardonically, “we need lots more space for meditation.”

  “You’re being provocative,” Dolores murmured.

  Starr stomped out of the room.

  “We’re really anxious to share what we have with more people,” Mira continued placidly. “There are people who have wanted to be with us but couldn’t because of space, or schools. We’re going to equip one of the rooms as a schoolhouse and try to incorporate.”

  “Also,” Carol said, “they bug De Witt now when they see him in town. Lorna’s supposed to be in school in town, she was there last year but she took a lot of crap, not just because she’s hard to take but also because she’s a natural target for the kids who’re hostile because they picked it up at home. The kids here are nothing like the Brattleboro kids, y’know, Brattleboro’s always had some city influences, even before there were all those schools.”

  “And of course there are the others, too,” Mira said, as though someone would accuse her of an ego trip if she talked about her own kid for two minutes. She hadn’t reacted at all to Carol’s saying her kid was hard to take.

  “There’re really a lot of groovy people who’d have come in the past year if we’d had even a legal excuse for a school,” Carol said wistfully. “I met this woman over in Rindge, I was crazy about her, I never knew anyone so easy to talk to . . . she wasn’t happy where she was but she had two kids around ten and twelve, she couldn’t go to a place with no school. I lost track of her, she moved again, but I thought about her all winter.”

  “How is it in the winter?” Margaret asked, puzzled by the loneliness in the other woman’s voice. Carol might have been an abandoned suburban housewife, for all the comfort she seemed to take from being surrounded by adults.

  “Ohhhhhhh . . .”

  “It’s great!” Starr said, hauling in another bushel of squash. “Plenty of snow, plenty of work, plenty of fucking and plenty of fighting.”

  Carol smiled sadly. “She thrives on it.
”

  “Which of it?” Margaret asked.

  “All of it,” Starr said, grinning. “Especially the fucking and the fighting.”

  BUT for now the life of the farm was like a brightly woven fabric whose individual threads might tangle but seldom really knotted. Anger flared but was quickly dissipated in hard work. There was a steady rhythm to their days and Margaret found herself caught up in it long before the time when she was obliged to join. One of the reasons being that if she was idle for too long, while the twins were both sleeping, say, her mind wandered back to Roger in Hartsdale and then she became miserable and confused. She had related to Roger in recent years mostly as victim so that having removed herself from that status she had no way of understanding her relationship to him.

  Other than magazines (De Witt subscribed to Fortune, Mother Earth and the Wall Street Journal) the reading stock was limited, tending to be heavy on Norman Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Adelle Davis and Castaneda and light on anything that could be called pure pleasure, literary or otherwise. But how much difference did it make what you picked up to read when your eyes generally closed after half a page? They worked hard and slept soundly. The craftsmen had only evenings to work on their own projects and they were often too tired; the downstairs lights were out by nine or ten. None of the sleeping rooms had shaded windows and they all awakened early. In the mornings the responsibility for the young children rotated. Other jobs were continuing ones—building and insulating, wood chopping, canning and preserving. Each day one man was responsible for bringing in the day’s supply of wood for the cook stove in the kitchen and the fireplace in the common room, and starting the fires in each. The upstairs had one wood-burning stove in the central hallway but in the interest of conserving wood, neither that one nor the ones in the common room and crafts room would be used until December or January, when the house would otherwise be unbearably cold. Each day one woman was responsible for cooking, one for cleaning up after meals and one for baking for the following day. By the third week of November the shed was three quarters full with dry split wood and the completion of the barn before the first heavy snowstorm was the major concern of everyone.

  David occasionally got annoyed at Margaret because she couldn’t stay awake to hear his phonies list for the day but even he admitted that he was sleeping better than he ever had. He was working very hard. He never volunteered to do anything but did what he was assigned to do without complaints. Once or twice she asked him how he felt about the work, about the farm in general, but he shrugged off her questions as though she were some particularly dumb psychiatric social worker trying to turn him into a case. They spent very little time together, awake.

  THE first real snow came. It had covered the ground and laid heavy fringes along the bare branches and evergreens by the time they awakened. It was still snowing as they finished breakfast, large light flakes that drifted down and settled in for the duration of winter.

  “Oh, God!” Carol groaned. “I keep trying not to panic but it’s really here.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” Margaret said. She’d faced the winter with a surprising equanimity, maybe because she was in a new place. “How can you mind it?”

  David sat beside her at the long table. Silent. He seldom spoke when anyone else was around. The babies, having been fed and changed, were asleep on the quilt in the corner near the heat stove. Every child who could walk had been bundled up and sent outside for the first snow. In another corner De Witt sat with his coffee, his chair tilted back against the wall. She’d noticed he had a tendency to do this when there were more than two or three people in a room, push back his chair and become an observer.

  “It makes me think of dying, that’s how,” Carol said. And in point of fact she had switched from her usual red sweater and jeans into a black sweater and black pants. “Or maybe as if someone’s trying to bury me alive. I ache all over.”

  “You always ache all over,” Starr muttered.

  “That’s not true!” Carol said, tears in her eyes, although it was certainly true that she often ran off to the chiropractor in Brattleboro for some ache or pain, particularly if Jordan had snapped at her about getting fat, or Starr was mad at her about something or the baby was being demanding. Carol’s fear of the baby’s demands, in particular, was very upsetting to Margaret, bringing up as it did memories of her mother’s perpetual refuge in symptoms.

  Dolores said, “The first time I saw snow I thought I was in heaven.”

  “That’s the same thing as being dead,” Carol said, letting herself be distracted from Starr.

  Dolores laughed. “I don’t think so. I grew up on a cattle ranch in Texas, y’know, very dry and barren.”

  Carol nodded. “I know.”

  “My mother ran away when I was very little, back to Chicago where she came from. She couldn’t take the life down there. For years we never heard from her.”

  “You never talked about your mother,” Carol said wonderingly. Few of them actually did. If you knew anything about their past it was because something filtered in from the outside world. Butterscotch’s mother showed up in a gold-colored Cadillac with M.D. plates. You found papers lying on a table that showed Jordan as a party in the bankruptcy proceedings of a printing business. Dolores’s second husband showed up with a Florida sun tan, tight-fitting, baby-blue, knitted bell bottoms and the ambience of a gangster. Dolores, peacemaker, weaver of ponchos in blacks, grays and tans. Whose third try, De Witt had told Margaret, had been in a lesbian community. A magical person, the kind of person that every bagel baby dropping acid thought she was going to be when she came back.

  “When I was about nine or ten she finally sent word that she was there and she wanted to see us but she couldn’t face coming back. My father got plane tickets and took us up there the next day. My brother and I. We hadn’t been out of Texas in our whole lives. When we landed in Chicago it was snowing. I’ll never forget it. At the moment we landed I made up my mind that when I grew up I’d live in a place where it snowed.”

  “Maybe it was because you were going to see your mother,” Carol said.

  “How come your father would take you up there after what she’d done?” Starr asked.

  “That’s just the way my father is,” Dolores said.

  “My son-of-a-bitch stepfather,” Starr said, “if you sneezed the wrong way he’d never talk to you again.”

  “What was your mother like?” Carol asked Dolores.

  Dolores just shrugged.

  Outside the kids were rolling, sliding, trying unsuccessfully to pack the dry powdery snow into balls. Even Lorna looked happy. Margaret felt an old urge to go out and roll and scream with them.

  “My father always hated the snow,” she said. “The super didn’t clear it fast enough so he always ended up doing it himself and complaining the whole time. He hated any kind of exercise.” Why was she talking about him in the past tense? Maybe because he’d never bothered to answer her postcard announcing the twins. Couldn’t he even have sent his colleen—maid—whatever—to pick up a card? Something appropriate, with flocking and a pink satin bow? Sincere congratulations on your untimely freak birth? “The snow is so clean here,” she said. “In the city it gets so filthy.”

  “How’ll Mira get to the ashram in this?” Carol asked no one in particular. Mira, into some particularly rigorous form of yoga since an acid vision a couple of years earlier, attended services once a week which involved more than an hour of driving each way even in the good weather. No one bothered to answer.

  “Why couldn’t we be one hour out of Boston instead of two or three?” Carol asked plaintively.

  “Oh, shit,” Jordan said.

  “It’s easy for you to say oh shit,” Carol told him. “You don’t hate car riding!”

  Carol’s whining was beginning to get to Margaret, who was afraid that it was a preview of her own feelings of boredom and isolation during the winter months ahead.

  “Doesn’t Brattleboro have a lot of things to
do?” she asked.

  “Ohhhh,” Carol said, “not really. I mean there’s nothing really there. A couple of movies. Stores. One or two restaurants. That’s it.”

  “What else do you need?”

  What else might she need? Sex. Sooner or later she would surely get interested in sex again. It was almost comforting to know that her sexuality was buried for now but it was horrifying to think this situation might continue indefinitely. Mira had pretty much renounced sex, except as a means of procreation (but not to be enjoyed in any event) when she went on her yoga trip and whether that contributed to her objectionable piety or vice versa, the whole syndrome was appalling. De Witt had a girlfriend in Brattleboro who’d lived briefly at the farm but had been driven out by pressure from Mira, although Mira was supposedly understanding about De Witt’s disinclination to become a celibate vegetarian. Both Starr and Dolores had told Margaret that once Mira had been a really beautiful sexy woman, but De Witt never referred to their life together.

  “I dunno,” Carol said. “More of something. Or better. I get so bored.”

  “Don’t you make a lot of your pots in the winter?”

  “Yes, but I thought that we were trying to get away from that whole bit when we came here, that whole pressure of constantly having to produce.”

  “I’ll tell you what Carol wants,” Starr said. “Carol wants to lie on her back and have a bunch of buttons, a Feed Me button, a Fuck Me button, a Make Me Happy button, one for everything so she never has to do it herself. YOU’RE A PAIN IN THE ASS, CAROL, Y’KNOW THAT?”