Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  Margaret smiled; Starr’s furies were always relaxing to her. She waited for Carol to argue that Starr was being unfair but instead Carol nodded dejectedly.

  “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

  “And you’re a fucking ballbuster,” Jordan said to Starr, suddenly coming to his wife’s defense, “but do you know that?”

  “You think any woman with guts is a ballbuster,” Starr flung at him. “Isn’t that true, Paul?”

  “Leave me out of this,” Paul said.

  “Out of WHAT?” Starr exploded. “Out of EVERYTHING! That’s what you really mean, isn’t it. Leave you alone, don’t bother you with arguments, don’t bother you with your kid, don’t bother you with LIFE! You’re worse than she is because at least she wants to be happy if someone would only do it for her!”

  “My God,” Margaret said, “I thought you were the one who liked winter.” She laughed but she was uneasy; if she’d always cared about people, here at the farm there was an urgent quality to her caring. There were very few people in her real world now; each was precious beyond belief.

  “I LOVE winter,” Starr said. “What I can’t stand is being dragged down by deadheads.”

  “You’re frightening me,” Margaret said, surprised to hear herself admitting it. “I keep thinking you’re going to get mad at me next.”

  “Why would I get mad at you?” Starr asked.

  “I don’t know,” Margaret admitted. “I just . . .” She was on the verge of tears, for crying out loud. She smiled. “You sound as if you hate everybody, so why not me?”

  “Hate?” Starr looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t hate anybody. You mean Carol? I LOVE Carol, Carol’s my soul sister.”

  Paul laughed. “It’s like my mother’s old joke,” he said. “With that for a friend you don’t need an enemy.”

  “Fuck your mother,” Starr said.

  Paul laughed again. “Right on.”

  “I’d think that by now,” De Witt spoke from his corner for the first time, “a lot of the free schools would be in full swing.”

  “So?” Starr said.

  “So I was just thinking,” De Witt continued, “that maybe when the roads are cleared a couple of people might want to take off and look at a few of them, get some idea of how they’re run, and so on.”

  “De Witt,” Carol said, “I love you.”

  “What about the kids?” Starr asked suspiciously. “Would we have to take the kids?”

  “I don’t see why you should,” De Witt said, “unless the others . . .”

  Margaret and Butterscotch said it was fine with them if the kids stayed. Mira, her eyes closed as she sat in the rocking chair, said nothing.

  “How about you, Mira?” Starr asked.

  Mira opened her eyes. Starr explained the question again, as though to a deaf person. Mira said she thought by all means the children should stay.

  “Fine,” De Witt said, “I’ll find out what steps we have to take to make a school legal.”

  THE younger group came back from Canada. Butterscotch was pleased to see them and baked a cake to celebrate their return; they treated her with friendly condescension, someone fit to keep the home fires burning while they manned the barricades. They looked very much alike, the four boys and two girls. All around twenty years old, uniformly tall, handsome, healthy looking. David displayed no interest in any of them, although they were so close to his own age; when she questioned him, he said he wasn’t into their phony revolution bag. She asked whether it might not be better to be in a phony bag than in no bag at all and he stomped out of the room, brushing shoulders with one of them as he went. They seemed not to notice him or anyone else as they trooped toward the kitchen for a meal, ignoring Mira’s gentle protests that lunch wasn’t ready yet.

  “Do they talk to anyone?” Margaret asked De Witt.

  “Not much,” De Witt said. “They’re suspicious of us. They feel the odds are that at least one of us is CIA, probably me.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  He shrugged. “In the long run it doesn’t matter. Trust can change, too.”

  “Why would the CIA bother with this place?”

  De Witt smiled. “I can’t think of any good reason, but maybe the CIA can.”

  IT kept snowing. Carol and Starr got tired of waiting for it to clear and took off in Carol’s Volks after De Witt had plowed the dirt road for them.

  Rosemary was sleeping through every night and Rue was just waking up once for a feeding and then going back. Margaret gave a lot of attention to Starr’s and Carol’s kids, none of whom seemed to mind in the least that their mothers were gone.

  She began doing yoga exercises every morning with Dolores and Mira.

  The younger group built an igloo in the woods beyond the farm. “They’re on a survival trip,” Butterscotch explained. They slept in it for two nights and then decided to spend the winter with some friends in the movement in Key West.

  When she thought about Roger it was most often to wonder idly who he was screwing, or how many at a time. Occasionally she questioned the nature of their relationship: whether it was more good than bad (probably not); whether there were reasons aside from parenthood to continue it (probably not); whether Roger would mind if she were to write him she was going to stay at the farm permanently (probably not). She didn’t actually think of it as staying at the farm so much as she thought of it as staying here with De Witt. This brought up a lot of other questions, like the difference in her bonds to the two men; why she was more relaxed with De Witt than with her own husband (that was an easy one, really—De Witt accepted her as she was while Roger, at best, accepted her in spite of what she was, whatever that was); whether those qualities of hers that Roger detested were about his problems or hers (maybe both; all the things he said about her always sounded terribly right, but why had he married her, then?); whether she could be happy indefinitely without that complicated tension that made life with Roger at once so difficult and interesting (probably not). At this point, where to progress meant to plan or at least to anticipate the future, she always backed away from her thoughts into the present.

  Carol and Starr came back from their investigation with Carol’s friend of the previous year from Rindge and her two children, who’d become so unhappy where they were that they’d decided to help set up the school at the farm. Carol’s ancient Volkswagen had died trying to get out of a snowbank in Maine and they all arrived in Hannah’s jeep, which was pulling a small trailer. Everyone was pleased, not only because Hannah and her children were attractive and likable but because they’d brought their own living quarters with them. Hannah had a snowplow on the front of her jeep which, combined with the tractor plow, made a short job of clearing the snow from enough of one side of the barn so that a long side of Hannah’s trailer could nestle against it. Hannah made one request, that they plow in such a way that she could get out at any time. Otherwise, she explained, she would feel claustrophobic.

  “I was hoping you’d really settle here,” Carol said, looking very upset.

  Hannah laughed. “Who knows? Maybe you won’t feel that way in two months.”

  “I know I will,” Carol said vehemently. “It’s not just you I dig, it’s your kids.”

  HANNAH’S children were, in truth, delightful to have around. A girl and boy of twelve and nine, respectively, Daisy and Mario both seemed possessed of unusual poise and assurance. Agreeable to each other as well as to the rest of the children, all of whom were younger than they, they seemed to fall into a natural leadership, so that immediately after their first lunch at the farm, for example, instead of the younger kids hanging around while the grownups chatted, they all followed Daisy and Mario out to the barn to set up a basketball hoop that had been transported in the trailer along with the Berksons’ other possessions, which were minimal. Hannah had a thing about ownership and had decided at some point in her life that she would never again own any more than she could fit in her little trailer along w
ith its tiny bathroom, Pullman kitchen and four bunk beds.

  “When I walked out,” she said as they drank tea, “I didn’t feel as if I was giving up a Park Avenue duplex and the good life. I felt as if I’d been carrying around a sack of fancy silver and china and antiques on my back for ten years and suddenly I’d straightened up and thrown it all off. I have no use for things, only for people.”

  Everyone nodded understanding. Margaret nodded too because she could see what Hannah meant. Hannah’s eyes were beautiful—huge, brown, limpid—and there was about her none of that aggressive piety that made you want to disagree with people even when you knew you weren’t wrong. Still . . .

  “I know what you mean,” Margaret said slowly, “but it’s not so simple. Things aren’t just things, they can be tied up with people, with the past.” There was nothing Roger wouldn’t sell if someone happened to offer him a price for it, even though he never needed the money.

  “That’s just what I mean,” Hannah said. “Who needs it?”

  “Sometimes I do. Not here, maybe, or at least I haven’t thought about it yet, maybe because I still have a home someplace else . . . But sometimes . . . My parents had a very bad marriage.”

  Hannah laughed sympathetically. “Whose didn’t?”

  “I know that sounds off the track, but what I wanted to tell you is . . . after my mother died last year my father sent me a package of her stuff, personal stuff. I guess it was too painful for him to have it around. Anyway, there was a bunch of old letters I’d never seen before.” The ribbon had fallen apart as she’d tried to untie it. “They turned out to be letters my father had written my mother just after they were married. His mother was very ill in Ireland and they thought she was going to die so they sent for him but then she hung on for months and meanwhile he wrote my mother these letters. And the thing is, they were very beautiful.” Her eyes filled with tears; ashamed, she brushed them away. “I mean, they were very tender. There were feelings in them I’d never even thought of him as having toward her because they were buried by the time I can remember back to.” By my birth, by her life, or by an unfortunate combination of the two. “They made me feel much more sympathetic toward him.” For a while, anyway. “They gave me a sense of caution about what it’s possible to lose.”

  “Letters are different,” Carol said after a pause. “They’re a part of yourself.”

  “What about jewelry, then? Or photographs?” Why couldn’t she let it go?

  “You see?” Hannah said. “You’re doing it already. Getting all weighted down.”

  “I like old things,” Starr said.

  “Me, too,” said Carol, but with some reluctance, as though she were afraid of offending Hannah.

  “Not me,” Hannah announced. “If I had my way there’d be a Design Research store in every town for me to move in and out of.”

  “But that’s the contrast factor, obviously,” De Witt spoke from his corner for the first time. “Feeling weighed down by your husband’s ornate possessions, so to speak.”

  Hannah’s eyes narrowed even before Margaret had had time to note the undertone in De Witt’s words. The narrowed eyes, recently so large and limpid, changed her appearance entirely, making her very much the mother cat.

  “I’m not into that Freudian shit,” she said.

  “Then take it on a simple, obvious level,” De Witt said calmly. But it was obvious that he wasn’t bothered by the possibility that he’d upset her. Some antagonism was there that she hadn’t seen in him before.

  “I don’t think I’ll take it at all, thank you,” she said, casual again. “I think I’ll take a walk and see what my kids are doing.” She stood up and stretched, waited for Carol and Starr, who followed her happily out of the house toward the barn. De Witt stared after them moodily.

  “Aren’t we lucky to have such marvelous people coming in!” Mira exclaimed sweetly.

  Dolores glanced at De Witt. Neither said anything. David began whistling softly. Dolores smiled broadly at De Witt. Butterscotch began clearing the remaining dishes from the table.

  “Why is everybody so quiet all of a sudden?” she asked.

  De Witt stood up abruptly. “Does anyone want to go to town?”

  “But it’s Thursday, dear,” Mira said.

  “Mmmm,” De Witt said, “but my toothache is coming back and I think I’d better try the dentist. Margaret? Are you ready for the outside world?”

  “Almost,” Margaret said, not really ready but feeling as though he wanted company.

  “If you go,” David said to her in an obvious, challenging manner, “I’ll go.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I decide.” So you can get the handcuffs.

  “On second thought,” De Witt said, “will you excuse me? I think I’d like to be alone for a while.” He bent down and kissed Margaret’s cheek. “You don’t really mind, do you, Margaret?”

  “No, of course not,” Margaret said. “I didn’t really—”

  “We’re having our first school meeting,” Mira said. “Hannah’s going to talk about—”

  “If I’m not back on time,” De Witt said, “start without me.”

  THE meeting was open to everyone, of course, and everyone came; only De Witt was missing. The common room was packed with adults and kids to a point where it seemed that it would be difficult to accomplish anything, but then Daisy and Mario led the kids into the kitchen to make popcorn and the pressure eased. There was an air of expectation and camaraderie, probably connected to the newcomers’ arrival. The petulant expression that so often ruined Carol’s face had been replaced by a lively smile as she sat at Hannah’s feet and listened to the other woman’s stream of stories and funny anecdotes about places she’d been. The school where the children had been before Rindge was called the Fountain and Hannah explained that she’d called the nominal leader of the school the Fountain Head because he was really a fascist in hippie clothing and they all laughed, feeling lucky not only to have someone new just as winter became serious but to have acquired someone so delightful and interesting. David just glowered at Hannah in a way that reminded Margaret that De Witt wasn’t back yet. Carol suggested that since De Witt wasn’t there and Hannah was the only one with actual free-school experience, she chair the meeting, but at that moment De Witt walked in and apologized for being late, explaining that he’d been talking with a lawyer about the legal steps necessary to make the school official. Papers would be coming through shortly.

  Silence. A school was an awesome enterprise. Everyone knew what a school should not be but how many of them, De Witt asked, had any particular idea of what it should be? A place where learning was available, someone said. Of course there were two kinds of learning, the kind you could get from books and the kind you got from apprenticeship, learning to do something. Someone said the latter kind was the only real learning, the rest was just mental exercise, words, words, words. Even if that were true, Margaret said, mental exercise had value. It could take your mind off yourself in a way that physical exercise couldn’t, since almost anything physical you could do left you time to think at the same time. And then she sat back, confused by her defense of academia.

  Hannah was amused. “I don’t mind thinking about myself. I’m not running away from anything.”

  “I don’t think Margaret was suggesting frantic flight,” De Witt said immediately. “She was suggesting that if your mind’s active it’s best for it to have something to relate to actively. Ideas, philosophies, politics, whatever.”

  Hannah laughed. “How old are these kids we’re talking about? What’ll we give them, Nietzsche?”

  De Witt flushed. Margaret had never seen him so rattled. “The same thing applies to young kids, obviously, it’s just a question of the level you’re going to teach on.”

  “I’m not teaching my kids to run away from their own heads at any level,” Hannah said.

  “It’s difficult for me to understand,” De Witt said, “how anyone who l
ives in a trailer can be smug about other people running away.”

  Hannah stood up. “You’ve been hostile to me since the minute I walked in here,” she said angrily.

  “Wait a minute,” Carol scrambled to her feet. “I don’t understand what’s going on here. Nobody’s hostile to anybody, are they, De Witt?”

  “No, of course not,” De Witt said.

  “If you are, tell me now before I settle in,” Hannah said. “I don’t stay where I’m not welcome.”

  “You’re positively welcome here,” Carol said frantically. “Everyone was just talking about how great it was having you here, you and your kids.”

  “Not everyone,” Hannah said.

  “What would represent an appropriate sign of welcome?” De Witt asked.

  “I have a feeling we’re getting off the topic,” Margaret said uneasily. She felt vaguely responsible for the discord, an echo of childhood when so many disagreements between her parents might never have arisen if she hadn’t brought them some need of her own, some problem to solve.

  “Right!” Several people said.

  “I hate it when people I love fight with each other,” Carol said tearfully.

  “Will there be required classes, or what?” Dolores asked. “And who’ll teach what?”

  Silence while they all tried to shift gears.

  “We might begin,” De Witt said, “by making a list of those people who’re willing to teach and what they’re willing to teach.”

  “And getting a list from the kids of what they want to learn,” Hannah said.

  “But what if there’s no one to teach them something?”

  “No problem,” Hannah said. “Someone learns it and keeps ahead. That’s the way we did it at the Fountain and it worked pretty well. Mario had a thing to learn some Latin so I just picked up the textbook and got enough to stay a couple of weeks ahead of him.”

  “Truly a remarkable woman,” De Witt muttered, softly so that Margaret thought only she herself heard.

  Carol was appointed to be secretary and they began a list of subject offerings. Dolores signed for weaving, Paul for printmaking, and Carol said she would take the younger kids each morning for encounter and improvisation. Margaret said she’d like to do clothes-making with the two older girls and Hannah asked why only girls, didn’t they want to keep out of those cultural bags? Margaret said she’d be delighted to teach clothes-making to Mario or any boy who was interested, she’d just assumed . . . And Hannah, with an extremely winning smile, said she hadn’t meant to jump on Margaret, it was just that she had a bug about kids being stuck in pigeonholes. When she was a child her consuming passion had been for math and she’d been made to feel eternally guilty about this, it meant she wasn’t feminine, while for six years she’d been forced to take flute lessons, which she loathed, all because of . . . Margaret said she understood perfectly and didn’t mind at all. This was true, but she didn’t look at De Witt.