She wandered over to the barn where Paul and Jordan were holding down Shirley while De Witt cleaned her udder, which had become so distended that it dragged along the ground and had picked up some surface infection. Now, as De Witt spread bacitracin on Shirley’s teats, Margaret went around the stall picking up the tiny, neat pellets of goat shit and tossing them out the little window into the pen. Shirley rammed Jordan angrily as soon as they all let her loose.
Afterwards Paul and Jordan went back to the house and Margaret asked De Witt if he would take a walk with her. Gone was the uneasiness she’d felt with him in recent weeks; in the crisis of Roger’s arrival De Witt’s presence was purely reassuring to her. All but an inch or two of snow was melted from the meadows and the road was clear but for a thin layer of ice that would turn to slush when the midday sun warmed it. In another two weeks, De Witt said, the mud would be so deep that the little kids wouldn’t be able to walk through it and even the adults would have difficulty. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm.
“Roger and Hannah seem to be getting along fine,” she said, and laughed uncertainly.
De Witt glanced at her but said nothing. She shivered. He put an arm around her and she put an arm around him. She began to cry. They kept walking.
De Witt said, “Do you know that you never talked about Roger at all?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I mean . . . I talked about him to David but I guess David asked me questions about him. Roger . . . Roger is a very interesting person,” she finished lamely.
“I don’t doubt it,” De Witt said.
They walked some more.
“We’ve been married for almost . . . more than six years, actually.” So what? “He’s an artist . . . I must’ve told you that.”
“Nope.”
She laughed. “I always dug artists. I don’t know why.”
De Witt laughed. “I think you dig everyone, Margaret, unless you get turned off.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “I guess I’m not very fussy.”
“Why do you put it that way? As though there’s something wrong with liking people.”
She thought about it. “I guess because I feel as if it’s not as though I like them because I’m a good person, charitable or something, I accept them mostly without thinking about whether I like them, but out of my own need, y’know? Not out of goodness.”
“What’s wrong with that? You think it’s unusual?”
“I dunno, it’s just . . . I had this neighbor, for instance, in Hartsdale, this suburb where we lived . . . Celeste . . . she was a pain in the ass, really, nobody could stand her, none of my other friends, neighbors, and so on, but it took me a long time before I even realized she was supposed to bug me, that it was okay, I mean, because I liked having her drop in, especially before I knew anyone else, because Roger was always taking off and I didn’t know anyone, and I was lonely, that’s the thing. I wasn’t tolerating her because I’m a tolerant person.”
“Sure you were.”
“Oh . . .” But she wasn’t annoyed, she was pleased. She kissed his cheek and he squeezed her. They were almost at the main road. They walked into the corner of the woods where the kids had built their igloo, which was only beginning to melt because it was heavily shaded by pine trees. They peered into the igloo. A bed of pine needles made it look inviting but the roof was dripping in twenty different places. They returned to the road, arms around each other again.
“Do you want to go back?” De Witt asked.
“Not really,” she admitted.
They began walking along the side of the highway.
“I’m a little worried about David,” she said.
“He wasn’t around this morning.”
“He took off. He’s angry with me because Roger showed up. He said he’d be back but I don’t know . . . if something better turns up . . . of course I should want him to go if something better turns up.”
“Maybe you know nothing better than you will turn up.”
She laughed. “You always give me such nice motives.”
“You always give yourself such poor ones.”
“Do you really believe that? That David can’t do better than me?”
“Yes. I really believe that.”
“Doesn’t want to, you mean?”
A little white sports car went past, stopped and backed up. The woman driving leaned over and opened the window; FM rock blared out at them.
“Wanna ride?”
De Witt looked at Margaret, laughed, said, “Sure, why not?” He grabbed Margaret’s hand and they ran to the car, but it was hard to get in because the front seat was occupied by a car seat in which sat a large baby screaming over the music. The driver got out and they went around the car and got into the back where a somewhat older child was singing over and over again, “Turn off the music, it gives me a headache, turn off the music, it gives me a headache.” The woman turned off the music and for a moment the car was absolutely silent.
“Am I far from, like, Brattleboro?” the woman asked.
“Once you get on 91, less than half an hour.”
“How far am I from 91?”
“About ten minutes.”
“Are you going, you know, to Brattleboro?”
“No. We’re just going a little ways down the road.”
“Is Brattleboro a good town?”
“I suppose it depends on what you’re looking for,” De Witt said.
The woman laughed nervously. “What I’m looking for is some decent grass, if you really want to know.”
“Sorry.”
The woman laughed again, that uneasy, grating laugh. “You probably think I’m a narc.”
“I don’t think anything,” De Witt said. “I think this is where we get off.”
“But there’s nothing here,” the woman said, so piteously that Margaret felt for her.
“Mushrooms,” De Witt assured her. “We’re collecting mushrooms.”
“Where are you from?” Margaret asked as the woman pulled over to the side of the road.
“Would you believe Elmhurst?” the woman said. She turned on the car radio again and the baby began crying and the older child said, “Turn it off, it gives me a headache.”
They got out and began walking back to the farm.
DAVID came out of the barn to accost them.
“Where’ve you been?”
“We took a walk.”
“Some walk.”
“Where’ve you been, David?” De Witt asked gently. “We were worried about you.”
“I was sleeping at the end of the barn,” David said. Bristling. He fell into step with them except he walked just slightly behind, as though he were afraid of giving De Witt access to his back. As they neared the house, Roger opened the front door. “Where the hell’ve you been?”
“I took a walk,” she said.
“Do you always walk out of the house and leave your kids to scream their heads off?”
She was stricken; it was true she hadn’t given them a moment’s thought when she left.
“If you’d been here with them for the past few months,” De Witt said calmly, “you would know what she did when they cried.”
“Where the fuck do you get off butting into this argument?” Roger said.
“I’m sorry,” De Witt said, “I feel very close to Margaret. We’re like brother and sister.”
Attempts at incest having more or less failed.
“Isn’t that touching,” Roger sneered, turning his wrath then to David. “How about you, cousin? You have something to say, too?”
David didn’t.
“Where are the girls?” Margaret asked.
“They’re upstairs with Hannah,” Roger said. “You’re damn lucky she was here.”
“Mmmm.” Hannah had never looked twice at the twins before but if you left your kids alone there was always someone around to take care of them.
That was it, she’d taken it for granted until now, never thought how lucky she was to be there instead of alone in the house in Hartsdale, having to hire sitters if she felt like going someplace herself while Roger was tripping off to the Lower East Side.
“Is she putting them to sleep?” Margaret asked.
“How the hell do I know? Go up and find out.”
“No, that’s all right.” She smiled. “I’m sure Hannah can manage them very well.”
He stared at her fixedly. Her smile became strained but she forced it to stay there. Their eyes were locked.
“Which one of these jokers is fucking you, Maggie? Or is it both of them?”
She stood her ground but her insides caved in.
“Don’t let him put you on the defensive, Margaret,” De Witt said. “Ask him what he’s been doing with his time.”
“What I don’t see,” Margaret said, “is why everything has to end in the same place. A second ago we were talking about the children.”
“And children have nothing to do with fucking.”
“Not in the context that we were talking about. Whether I can leave them in the house with other people.”
“Without a word.”
“When they were tiny I never left the house at all.”
“And now they’re teenagers.”
“Now I sometimes take a little walk or something.”
“You were gone for more than an hour.”
“So I took a big walk,” she said, concealing her doubt and letting only her irritation show. “You were here, weren’t you? Other people were here. I knew they’d be all right.”
Hannah came down announcing that the children were both in their cribs, Rue was sleeping and Rosie was playing quietly, something in her tone suggesting that some special Hannah magic had been required to bring about this miraculous turn of events. Hannah waited and Margaret suddenly realized she was expected to say thank you for doing me this huge favor but she wouldn’t say it because it would be a point for Roger and she knew what Roger did with his points. She announced that she, too, was going to take a nap and went upstairs, brushing past Hannah without a word.
She gave Rosie a kiss and stretched out on the bed, wide awake, with no thought of napping. Waiting for Roger to come up and rant at her some more. So that when he did come and begin ranting, she had a curious sense of displacement—as though she were screening a replay. He paced around the room saying pretty much what he’d said before only in sharper language and she stared at him as though he were a caged animal in the zoo, his anger no more caused by her than the animal’s would be. That was it. That was what she was seeing that she’d never seen before: her own irrelevance to Roger’s moods. Living together, just the two adults of you, it was easy to fall into that cliche—being mad at each other. And since so many of Roger’s complaints about her mirrored her complaints about herself—her genuine or faked incomprehensions . . . her sometime fat . . . her suppressed anger . . . her need to mother—it had been easy to believe that these qualities angered him. Bearable to understand that his anger masked a dependence that made him need her to be a better person to fight against, i.e. to lean upon. Yet she was the same person now as she’d been before; why had those qualities which had disturbed Roger so much failed to irritate De Witt, who surely saw them as clearly as Roger did? Was it simply the lack of that chafing bond? No, because then the insanity of Mira, to whom he was tied, would have disturbed him more than it did. De Witt’s vision was different, he didn’t see other people as the reasons for his problems. Which brought her back to her final irrelevance, because the tides of Roger’s anger had about as much to do with her as with his mother’s menstrual cycle or the traffic patterns in Philadelphia. Less, probably.
He stopped. He stared at her.
“What’s happened to you, Maggie?” His anger had evaporated; so it was true that it had been by mutual consent. “Don’t you care about me any more?”
“I did last night.”
“Just having sex, you mean?”
“I don’t know if it was just that.”
“Maybe I’m obsolete, now that I gave you your babies that you wanted.”
“Then why would I like sex?”
“Maybe you just like sex with anyone.”
“Maybe.”
He looked out of the window. “I gave up smoking after you left.”
“That’s great.”
“I had a sore throat and I got scared and I said to myself what kind of fucking stupid game am I playing, smoking the cigarettes and remembering the old throat thing, and I stopped. Just like that.”
“Maybe it was good for you, too,” she said. “Me going away.”
“Maybe.” He walked around the bed, looking down at the twins for a while, looked back at her. “You’re not in love with someone else, are you?”
“The phrase gets in my way,” she said. “The closest answer I can give is that I think there are a few people here I sort of love.”
“De Witt?”
She nodded.
“That kid?”
She nodded.
“Who else?”
“A couple of the women. Starr. Dolores.”
“You’re not screwing around with women, are you?”
“No.”
“How about the others?”
“I tried once with De Witt but it wasn’t too good, I don’t know why, I was full of guilt and my mind just . . . I don’t know.”
“And the kid?”
“David.”
“All right. David.”
She hesitated. “I came here with him. I met him on the road after I left. He knows the guy that owns the farm, it’s—”
“De Witt doesn’t own it?”
She shook her head. “He’s a friend of De Witt’s. He’s David’s stepfather, as a matter of fact. He’s rich and he owns it but he only comes once in a while. I’ve never met him.”
Roger laughed. “David’s stepfather.”
She nodded.
“So,” he said, “you and little David are making it.”
“I guess you could say that. We were. It didn’t begin that way, I mean, you know the condition I was in, and anyway, it wasn’t what he was looking for. He wanted someone to take care of him, you know, even now . . .” But she stopped herself. Even now half the time David didn’t come. He would make love to her and she would come and come and then his erection would disappear and he would he quietly inside her, and sometimes they would fall half asleep that way, but she couldn’t tell all this to Roger, it would be disloyal, and besides it might be used against her or David at another more hostile time. “What I’m saying is, he’s a very sad kid, very needy . . . He’s upset that you’ve come and he can’t sleep in this room.”
“That’s too fucking bad about him.”
“I know, Roger,” she said patiently. “I’m not asking you to let him.”
“Am I supposed to be grateful?”
“I don’t care if you are or not.”
“I thought,” he exploded, “we were talking like two adults for a change!”
“I thought so, too,” she said.
“You don’t sound like any goddamn adult to me . . . I don’t care if you are or not,” he mimicked, as though she’d said it spitefully.
She waited. Thinking how strange it was, he’d been so calm when they were talking about her love life and now here he was, furious over . . . over what? Choice of words? Her very minor declaration of independence from his moods? She started to say that all she’d meant was . . . Stopped herself. They’d both understood what she meant and she wasn’t going to help along a tantrum by trying to soothe it.
“You’re faking it!” he said when she was silent. “You must think I’m some kind of an idiot. You’re pretending to be some kind of fucking Buddha saint and I know damn well you’re the same hysterical insecure Margaret if I can crack that fucking façade!” He picked up a water glass from the night table and dropped it on the floor. She gla
nced at Rosie, who was staring at her father in fascination. The glass shattered into hundreds of pieces. Margaret didn’t move. Rosie made no sound. In rapid succession Roger dropped everything else from the top of the dresser—her brush and comb, a pile of clean diapers, some dirty underwear, her sunglasses. Then he turned and stalked out of the room.
HANNAH convinced Roger that he would be a marvelous art teacher. In one corner of the schoolroom in the barn they made a series of simple two-frame easels and a separate worktable for clay. They spent a whole day in town buying art supplies. Hannah and Roger and Daisy and Mario. Hannah taught Mira how to do cuisenaire rods and first thing in the morning Mira worked on them with the younger kids and Hannah with Lorna and her own. Then Carol had improvisations with the younger kids while Roger had art with Daisy and Mario and a couple of the others. At first Carol had done a separate improvisation class with the older kids but Daisy and Mario had dropped out of it for some reason no one would discuss, although Margaret sensed that Carol was upset by it. In the afternoon they had cooking and weaving and indoor gardening and various other activities which were part of the normal life of the farm. Margaret was doing chores in the house and caring for the twins most mornings so she didn’t see the class itself, but marvelous art work began to come out of the class and get hung on various walls and placed on shelves.
Margaret and Roger seldom fought because they made few serious attempts at communication. Sometimes they made love simply because they were two warm bodies in the same bed. David continued to sleep in the barn and generally refused to converse with her. She felt closer than ever to De Witt, understood that part of her new strength derived from his presence, yet she couldn’t easily communicate with him because she perceived her problems to be not susceptible to solutions from the outside, even masterful ones. Once or twice she almost began conversations with De Witt with some words like, “De Witt, about Roger being the way he is and me being the way I am,” but such a conversation had to be dishonest because she knew it would turn out with De Witt reassuring her about the kind of person she was, denying her complicity in the cancers of their marriage.
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