Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  They ended up with a huge variety of possible subjects, far more than there would be kids to take them, it seemed. Hannah would do cuisenaire rods, Butterscotch would bake cookies with the little kids, De Witt would set up a greenhouse and do botany and indoor gardening. Would David like to do painting? No. But Jordan would do photography.

  “What about reading and writing?” Mira asked.

  “Most of it you do yourself,” Hannah said, not unsympathetically. “If there’s one lesson in the free schools it’s that you have to educate your own children.”

  “I wish I had more skill,” Mira said humbly.

  “I’ll work with you, it’ll be all right.” Hannah’s manner was nearly seductive. “If your kids dig me, I’ll work with them. Don’t set up roadblocks in your own mind.”

  Mira smiled at her radiantly.

  “What if her kids don’t dig you?” De Witt asked.

  “If her kids don’t dig me,” Hannah said, “then I hope it’ll be because something about me really bugs them. Not because some chauvinistic bastard turns them against me.”

  “Maybe it’ll be both.”

  “What is it with you two?” Carol wailed. “Here I bring back this great person . . . I’ve never seen you be so hostile, De Witt, I’ve never seen you this way at all, you’re always the healer!”

  “It’s true, De Witt,” Starr said. “You haven’t been nice to her.”

  De Witt was silent. He seemed terribly vulnerable and Margaret longed to squeeze his hand or give him some supportive sign. Hannah was silent, either genuinely injured by his attitude or enjoying the others’ defense of her. Or both.

  “That’s true,” De Witt finally said. And to Hannah, “I apologize.”

  Hannah beamed at him, bounced over and gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “I accept, and I apologize if I bugged you. I even understand why I bugged you, so let’s forget it!”

  Carol, tears in her eyes, said, “You’re both so wonderful. This is the first time I ever had a good mother image and a good father image going at the same time!”

  To David that night, as she lay on her side nursing Rue, Margaret said, “How come you don’t want to do anything in the school?”

  “You don’t need a reason for not doing something,” David said fiercely. “You need a reason for doing it.”

  “Do you like Hannah?”

  “Don’t be dumb.”

  “You don’t like her.”

  “Why should I?”

  “You don’t need a reason for liking someone,” she suggested tentatively. “You need a reason for disliking them.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Is it because she’s aggressive?” Prepared to give him a lengthy reasoned defense of aggression, a history of its suppression in women—most recently, herself.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Aggressive? You know what it means, David. Domineering. Takeoverish.” Strange words for a defense, Margaret.

  “You don’t like her, that’s your problem.”

  “I do,” Margaret protested. “I just can see why someone else might not.”

  “Bullshit,” David said. “You’re just afraid to say you don’t like anybody. You think you’d get kicked out of here or something.”

  It was so patently unfair and so true at the same time.

  “I tend not to dislike many people,” she said. “I think it has to do with being an only child, you’re lonely a lot of the time and you place more of a value on each person you meet.”

  “You’re not a child, you’re a grownup,” David said. “That’s just a lot of bullshit.”

  HANNAH told De Witt she had a couple of marvelous biology texts and teaching aids in the trailer that he might like to look at if he was going to do botany with the kids. He said he’d very much like to see them and after lunch they went back to the trailer together. Margaret, half an eye on the clock anyway because she was rising bread for the next day, noticed that they were there a long time. When he came back he had two books and a box of teaching cards.

  “I really think I was doing Hannah an injustice,” he said.

  “Mmmm,” Margaret replied, knowing she should be glad to hear him say this.

  “There’s a tendency, when you meet a woman like her, to be, well, frightened off. But it doesn’t make sense because that whole strength thing is only a front. Underneath she’s just as soft and frightened and needing as anyone else.”

  “How could you tell?” Margaret asked, not bothering to conceal her jealousy from herself now.

  De Witt laughed. “She told me. I mean, she admitted it.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh.

  “The funny thing,” De Witt mused, “is that I had an argument with Linda yesterday almost exactly about that.” Linda was his girlfriend in Brattleboro. “She said I couldn’t stand it when a woman was independent and didn’t need me. I guess she was right . . . She was very bitter, actually. As a matter of fact, we split up.”

  “You and Linda?” Mixed feelings. Pleasure and the anticipation of pain.

  He nodded. “She did it, actually. She said I was sapping her strength by forcing her to need me.”

  “Everyone wants to be needed,” Margaret pointed out.

  De Witt smiled, rumpled her hair. “Of course,” he said. Then, “Do you know that you’re a very lovely girl—woman—Margaret? And I’m very fond of you?”

  Pure pleasure.

  BUT during the next couple of weeks he spent all his free time with Hannah. Talking, talking, talking, whenever you saw them they were talking animatedly together, or rather mostly Hannah was talking and De Witt was nodding, commenting. She looked very animated and beautiful. Her whole body moved when she spoke. Mira’s initial cordiality toward Hannah disappeared to be replaced by a cold, formal appreciation for her efforts to get the school started.

  DE WITT, with a forged teaching license from Ohio, was able to get a Vermont license. Carol, who had a primary grades license from New York although she’d never taught, also had one. School got off to a fumbling start the week before Christmas. Carol asked if maybe they shouldn’t wait until after Christmas as long as they’d waited this long but Hannah convinced her that Christmas was just another American consumer myth. De Witt said that he dug Christmas as a midwinter pagan rite and they compromised to the extent of killing two of the geese and having a royal feast with candles and a tree, but school had already begun. Monday to Friday. Mornings, mostly, except that provisions were made for the kids to be on call in case they should be visited by some nosy bureaucrat. They were all a bit paranoid on the subject of being closed down by some petty cog of the bureaucracy, and kept expecting once they began, although they’d seldom worried before, to be surprised by hostile inspectors. They followed carefully the state prescriptions for bathrooms and kilowatts and each day someone was responsible for supervising the children in a thorough cleanup. (The supervisor usually ended up doing the cleaning rather than get into an authority trip with the kids.)

  JORDAN was away on a selling trip and for a while you always saw the three of them together, Carol, Hannah and De Witt, unless it was just Hannah and De Witt, but then De Witt and Hannah seemed to have had some kind of falling out because suddenly it was just Carol and Hannah. Margaret tried in various sly ways to get De Witt to talk about it, but the most he would say was that Hannah’s trip was too heavy for him. He remained extremely polite and pleasant to Hannah but she began to be sharp with him and critical of his classes and the next thing they all knew, it had been decided by Daisy and Mario that they didn’t really dig the way De Witt was approaching the botany class and wanted their materials back so they could do the work under their mother’s supervision.

  Margaret and David took silent walks together on the road that led through the farm and out a mile or so to the highway. The snow-whitened countryside was very beautiful and she found herself wishing she could identify more of the trees and shrubs, so once she brought along a paperback tree guide but David ref
used to be drawn into speculation over which leafless tree was which. She put away the book in the pocket of the old Mackinaw De Witt had loaned her. Aside from these walks, or brief outings with the twins, she stayed indoors. Gradually the twins stayed awake for a little more of each day. She found it possible to just sit and watch them lying on their backs, looking at their swaddled toes or playing with their fingers, but if David saw her doing this he glowered and she felt guilty.

  AT the beginning of February Margaret went into Brattleboro for the first time with De Witt on his weekly trip. The twins were a little more than three months old. The first thing she did after leaving De Witt was to weigh herself on a drugstore scale; she’d lost every pound of her pregnancy weight. She’d known all along she was losing a lot but without a scale or full-length mirror it had been difficult to say how much. In an orgy of self-congratulation she bought purple eye shadow, pink lipstick, three sweaters, two pairs of pants and a ski jacket so she could return De Witt’s coat. (As soon as she’d left the store she took back the ski jacket, finding herself desolate at the thought of giving up De Witt’s symbolic protection.) Also two flannel nightgowns and some long underwear. Having put all of which in the parked jeep, she bought a snowsuit and stuffed bear for each of the twins, some heavy blue wool to make a sweater for David, a mohair shawl for Butterscotch and for De Witt, on last-minute on-the-way-out-of-the-store impulse, an incredibly soft rust-suede tobacco pouch. Purchased while assuring herself that she would now of course have to buy something for Mira, which she somehow had failed to do before it was time to meet De Witt back at the truck. It wasn’t much past four but it was already quite dark.

  “De Witt,” she said as they drove out of town, “I’m embarrassed. I bought you something . . . not a big deal, I mean, I just felt like it, but the thing is I didn’t get anything for . . . hardly anyone else . . . and now I won’t have a chance and, oh God I sound like an idiot. It’s just this little thing but all of a sudden it seems as if I can’t . . .” She broke off helplessly.

  “Maybe you’d like to give it to me now,” De Witt said.

  “Oh, yes!” Gratefully she dug around in the paper bags in the back and pulled out the pouch, wedging it between his hands and the steering wheel.

  “Mmmmm,” De Witt said, “That’s marvelous. So soft. Lovely. Thank you, Margaret.” He gave her the plastic pouch he carried with him and asked her to transfer the tobacco. In its unburned condition the tobacco had a pleasant fruity smell; she did it slowly to make the job last longer. “All right,” De Witt said, opening his window wider to tap the pipe outside, “now fill this up for me.” Carefully, feeling as though some high honor had been conferred upon her, she began filling the pipe, taking a few strands at a time, pressing them down, but then she suddenly became aware of the sexual nature of the act . . . of the present itself . . . the softness of the pouch, the whole thing . . . a soft suede proposition . . . she was full of distaste for herself. What a sneaky fumbling way to tell someone you were horny!

  Horny she was again, that was for sure. It had crept up on her slowly. Subtle accommodations to her celibate state, like trying to be asleep before David came up to the room so she wouldn’t betray her need to him. Dreams that Roger was giving her a shampoo. Memories of losing her virginity on the beach near Gloucester, except that nostalgia transformed the coarse grains of Gloucester sand into something resembling talcum powder, and fierce little Tony Lopanto into a ballet dancer in the manner of Jacques d’Amboise.

  Oh, to be a member of some earthy primitive tribe where the simplest symbol would suffice to get you laid! Twirling a bead! Baking a tart and laying it at someone’s feet! The lack of formal symbols only served to make you self-conscious about the contrived ones. Why did she have to know what she was doing so she’d feel rejected when it didn’t work? Why should she assume she’d be rejected, anyway? With the exception of Butterscotch he’d made love with every, woman at the farm at one time or another. Mira. Dolores. Carol and Starr had both needed him at bad times during their marriages, and he’d been there to fulfill their needs. Why not her? Why not me, De Witt?

  “De Witt?”

  “Mmmm?”

  Think of something.

  “When you think about the future, do you ever think you’ll stay forever?”

  “No. I never think that about any place.”

  “I used to think it about every place. Until I left.”

  “I couldn’t survive that way,” he told her. “To me the thought of being in one place forever is the thought of living death.”

  She’d lived in more than a dozen places before she met Roger and half again that many times since, but each time she’d moved she’d been paralyzed for weeks, for all intents and purposes. Once she’d accused Roger of moving just for the pleasure of seeing her go into shock. She hadn’t mentioned that she’d moved more often before meeting him but it had seemed different then because her real life hadn’t yet begun.

  “My God, you’re not planning to go soon, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. The thought of being here without you or Roger is frightening.” Whoops. She’d said what she meant. But De Witt nodded, seemed to find it easily understandable. Then do you know maybe De Witt what it’s like to want to be filled up? A phrase she’d once taken for a metaphor, the kind of thing no one ever felt except via Maxwell Anderson.

  “I sometimes think of how much I’d miss you if I left,” she said. “But I never thought about you leaving.”

  “Well that’s fine,” he said. “Because I’m right here. Aren’t I?”

  “Mmmmm.” You, me and the pouch. Talk, Margaret, make a cold shower of words. “De Witt? What’s Mitchell’s thing with the farm?”

  “You mean why he lets us use it and pays the taxes and so on?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, first of all, he has some pretty good tax breaks going, but if he didn’t he could still afford it. He’s rich.”

  “Are you close friends?”

  “I wouldn’t say so, no. We met a few years ago at a party. He already owned the farm and he was sort of flirting, you could say, with the idea of intentional communities . . . but he himself couldn’t conceive of living in one on a full-time basis. His businesses wouldn’t allow it and even if they did, he’s not really suited for it.”

  And De Witt was suited for anything as long as he didn’t have to do it for too long.

  “What makes someone suited for it?”

  De Witt puffed at his pipe; the fruity smoke wafted past her cold nose. “Oh, lots of things. Some pleasure in physical work, I suppose. Which Mitchell doesn’t have, as a matter of fact. He’s very much a city person, business, lunches, theater, cocktails before dinner and grass after, when he comes up in the warm weather he takes out a chair to sit on while he reads the Sunday Times. But let’s see, more importantly, the ability to accept some degree of organization . . . maybe you know that before we came into this Mitchell had let his oldest daughter and some friends take over the farm for a year or so, you know, a bunch of kids who thought of anarchy as an everyday way of life, the place was an incredible wreck inside of six months . . . so, there’s the ability to submerge one’s own personality just enough to permit others to express theirs, which you could say is almost the same thing as the ability to compromise. The ability to recognize that the world we came from was also something less than perfect. Aside from my own specific necessity to escape . . . some legal unpleasantness in Los Angeles . . . you can’t divorce the idea of a place like the farm as an escape, a refuge, from its other attractions. It isn’t Utopia and Utopias always exist in contrast to some outside stress, anyway. Many of the people who would flourish in a setup like this also flourish in the business world, the city, whatever, so that their intellectual perceptions of that world—”

  “Good grief!” she interrupted. “Talk about intellectual perceptions! It sounds as though you sit around intellectualizing about the whole thing all the time.” For Christ
’s sake, Margaret—goading him just because you’re horny.

  He didn’t seem irritated though. “Not all of it. I think about the whole business a lot, though. It demands some conscious effort, you know. If it didn’t I suppose I would have gotten bored with it a long time ago.”

  “Still,” she persisted, “you’re making it sound very abstract.” She glanced out the window; the highway was lighted only by the reflection of the banked snow. She couldn’t tell where they were, felt desperately frustrated at the idea that they might be nearly home.

  “That’s only because I’m talking in generalities. If I talk about specific people I can tell you things that aren’t at all abstract. I can talk about Alice, for example, who left the spring before you came. A bright aggressive woman with a mind too restless to be harnessed. She spent her first four months at the farm memorizing the contents of the Organic Gardening Encyclopedia, then planting time came and she left because she couldn’t accept the rigid scheduling. It seems it reminded her of her childhood. She got into constant arguments with Mira, who was in charge of schedules during that period, and finally she just took off one night. Then there was—”

  “Were you fond of Alice?”

  “Yes, you could say that. I enjoyed talking with her, we had some very good conversations.”