Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  If she explained how right it had seemed until recently for them to be the way they were, for Roger to need her terribly and pick on her terribly, he would point out that one didn’t need to pay indefinitely for one’s mistakes, and she wasn’t certain that was so. Besides, that attitude involved overlooking all the good things in their marriage, the sometime excitement, the sometime pleasure, the deep involvement that could never be lessened, only totally buried as it had been when she left him. She had pleasant talks with Starr and Dolores but nothing in their conversation ever made her want to bare her soul; she wasn’t even sure what her soul consisted of. When you married someone who was visibly difficult, a large number of people were automatically willing to think the best of you, and many people thought her an awfully “nice” person because she had accomplished the balancing feat of staying married to Roger for several years, yet she knew now, had always known, really, that Roger was less her opposite than her flip side. That he fought old battles for both of them. All of which told her very little about herself nor was she sure she was ready to know more than she did. As a matter of fact, when she thought back now to her life since she’d left her parents’ home it sometimes seemed that she’d dedicated herself to a series of activities whose virtue was to keep her too busy to find out if she existed at all, that is to say if she existed uniquely, if there was any one thing that could be said about her that couldn’t be said of thousands of other women. And the farm, if you cared to look at it that way, had helped her to escape self-definition by providing her with casual friendships to avoid serious loneliness and a role to play so that she was too busy and tired to try to find out what loneliness was and whether you could accomplish things with loneliness that you couldn’t with company.

  Roger spent more and more time with Hannah. After art class they would come in for lunch, and then after lunch they would take Hannah’s kids for walks, to town, to buzz around finding local handicrafts places, libraries, art galleries. Roger would gladly take Hannah and the kids to observe free schools a hundred miles away, see films at colleges that required a two or three hour drive, or buy some organic produce that the nearby natural foods store didn’t have—although he’d always been utterly sarcastic about Margaret’s fondness for seeds and nuts—bird food, he’d called them. Hannah often invited Margaret to accompany them but even when their trips didn’t conflict with the twins’ naps or some scheduled chore, she didn’t like to go. She felt very much the outsider when she was with them and she was convinced that the problem was not just in her own mind. If they talked to Daisy and Mario as though the children were adults, they talked to Margaret as though she were some sort of harmless idiot stepchild, never scolding her for not knowing what was on their minds but explaining matters in a calm condescending way which, if she hadn’t had other adults around treating her as an equal, would probably have driven her straight out of her mind. Once or twice De Witt or Jordan made some joke about Hannah, usually about her incredibly intense—suffocatingly close, destructively overbearing, were some of the expressions they used—relation to her children, but that part of Margaret that had demanded and never found an intensity in her own mother, the part that had wanted to be held close to the point of suffocation and then released with instructions about what to do next, that part always kept her silent when the others were being critical.

  As the mud season dried into’ something you could reasonably call spring, their pattern altered somewhat. In the morning Roger would be doing farmwork with the other men while Margaret did indoor or outdoor chores, keeping the twins with her. In the afternoon, after the twins’ nap, Margaret would take the twins to wherever Roger and Hannah were, perhaps in the trailer or still in the garden, and then she would take a walk. Very often as she struck out on the path David would materialize alongside her, and together they would continue walking, sometimes staying on the road, other times exploring the woods. Looking for new leaves and buds and mushrooms. Occasionally talking, more often not. He was quieter these days, less prone to ranting about phonies he had to put up with or the injustices she had committed against him. Hannah’s name still evoked incredible tirades on evil and women who thought they knew it all. Roger’s name brought no similar negative response and at first she wondered if he was being circumspect.

  “You never say anything against Roger,” she pointed out one day.

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  “No should. I was just wondering.”

  Silence.

  “Do you like Roger?”

  He shrugged.

  “I thought you’d blow up at some of the things he says, like calling you kid.” What are you recruiting for, Margaret?

  “It’s natural for him to not like me,” David pointed out calmly. “He knows I was balling his wife, doesn’t he?I knew you’d tell him.”

  “He asked me.”

  “Mm.”

  “Anyway,” she said defensively, “you haven’t been . . . we haven’t been since he came.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I could if I wanted to.”

  “Why do you say that?” She was, she decided, offended.

  “Because it’s true.”

  Should she point out to him that the only time he’d tried, the night of Roger’s arrival, she’d refused? It sounded so goddamn petty.

  “Because,” he went on as though reading her thoughts, “all I’d have to do would be threaten to hit the road or slash my wrists or something and you’d be all over me.”

  She stopped short. She would never fly again because her insides had been removed and her wings in all their true colors pinned to a board. Helplessly she stared at him in the bright sunlight; he looked a little older than he had when they’d come eight months ago, maybe just because he was. He’d lost a little more hair; Hannah had told him baldness was caused by an inositol deficiency and he’d told her to fuck off. He seemed taller or bigger or something but that was doubtless because she was slender now and had ceased to feel that she dwarfed humans. He was still attractive to her but the nature of the attraction had changed; what was strange was that it had changed in the same way as her relation to Roger. She loved them both but had a greater distance from them than before. She hadn’t lost all sense of responsibility toward them but could recognize now the self-serving quality of that sense. She wasn’t sure which was more frightening, David’s ability to pinpoint her weakness or the possible loss of that weakness that had bound her so snugly to others. In her daydreams now of running naked along a beach somewhere in the Caribbean she was invariably running alongside De Witt or some other grown-up type and sometimes they weren’t even holding hands!

  She took a deep breath. “David, there is some justice in what you say. On the other hand . . .” On the other hand, what? “Things happen. To people, I mean. People change.”

  He spat on the ground.

  “You don’t believe people change.” You’re still the same goddamn hysterical insecure Margaret.

  “You think you’re a big fucking hippie because you spent eight months in a commune?”

  “No. I don’t think that.”

  “Then what do you think?”

  “I don’t think anything, David. I just feel a little different than I did before.”

  “Maybe you should have a checkup.”

  “And maybe you’re jealous.” She’d said it without thinking and he turned on her in fury.

  “You’ve got no fucking right to talk to me that way!”

  “You talk to me that way, David.”

  “It’s different!”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s not the way you are!”

  “Maybe I am,” she said. “Maybe there’s no law that says I always have to be Mother Earth and you’re the Bad Seed.”

  In a rage he grabbed hold of her shoulders and began to shake her and shake her until she began struggling to get free, but then his hands only dug deeper into her arms. She kicked his shins but that made him dig deepe
r and shake harder and finally she fell backward with him on top of her. When she tried to push him up he pressed into her with all his might and came down on her lips with his teeth, biting so cruelly that she could feel them swell before he’d even let go.

  “Jesus Christ, David,” she moaned, feeling blood trickle down from her lip, “we’re right on the road.” She was crying, which prevented her from getting up her full strength to struggle. He began groping at her jeans. She tried using her legs to push back off the road but all that happened was that her sweater rode up and she scratched her back on the dirt and rocks. She began banging at him with her fist but he was on top and he was stronger and she not only had an uphill fight against him but also against the part of her that was very excited and wanted him in her, wanted to salvage some pleasure out of this filthy, gruesome situation, wanted him to force her body to make love with him when her mind had refused to let her do it since Roger’s arrival. And of course that part of her won because it had David helping, and so they made love mindlessly, passionately on the hard dirt road, tangled in their own and each other’s unbuttoned clothes, stopping and resting without separating, then starting again, until they were spent. And then, as she lay exhausted on the ground, David got up, pulled up his pants, zipped his fly, pulled down his bright blue sweater, said, “So long,” and headed for the highway.

  DAZED, unable to believe that he’d meant it the way it sounded, that he was disappearing from her life, she lay on the road until the heat had died inside her and she began to feel cold. Then she wearily pulled herself up, straightened out her clothes, brushed her tangled hair back from her face, and walked back to the farm with slow, unwilling steps. Hannah was sitting on the steps of the trailer, reading. Amazingly Roger wasn’t with her. She looked up as Margaret passed and registered horror.

  “Margaret! What happened?”

  Margaret stood lamely looking for an answer. Hannah told her to come into the trailer, saying she couldn’t let the babies see her like that. Obediently Margaret followed her inside, let herself be made comfortable half-reclining on one of the bunk beds. Hannah put up some water for tea and then sat on the bunk bed facing Margaret’s.

  “Do you want to talk?” she asked softly. “Don’t unless you want to.” Her manner was extraordinarily—Margaret felt, deeply—sympathetic. Seductive to Margaret, in her depressed and helpless condition. There was none of that toughness and stridency that put one off sometimes in the group, there was only warmth and compassion in those limpid eyes. Margaret began to cry. Hannah moved over, put an arm around her, hugged her. Margaret kept crying, Hannah made tea and brought her a cup; gratefully she sipped at it. Hannah sat at the little table in the kitchen end, waiting.

  “It’s David,” Margaret finally said. “We had . . . a bad fight. I think he’s left for good.”

  “Didn’t you expect him to go sooner or later? They always do.”

  “I don’t know,” Margaret said. “I guess I didn’t think about it much. I have a thing about . . . I hate to see people disappear forever.”

  “You don’t leave yourself any margin for error that way,” Hannah said. “You have to be careful who you say hello to because anyone you say hello to you might have around your neck for the rest of your life. Everyone should turn in their friends for new ones a few times a year.”

  Margaret smiled.

  “Why do people think I’m kidding when I’m being serious?” Hannah asked.

  “I guess because there’s something extreme . . . I can’t believe half the time that you mean what you’re saying.”

  “But I always do,” Hannah said. “Even when I know it sounds crazy or it’s only partly true.”

  Roger came in without knocking, told Hannah he’d left the girls sitting in the grass, saw Margaret, stopped. Grinned.

  “How does the other guy look?”

  “Jesus,” Hannah said, “what a time for dirty jokes.”

  “My wife’s appearance,” Roger said, “is a dirty joke.”

  “There’s a certain implication there that I don’t like,” Hannah said slowly. “As though Margaret did it to herself.”

  “What difference does it make,” Roger demanded, “if she did it to herself or that psychopathic little bastard she screws around with did it to her?”

  “I think it makes a big difference,” Hannah said. Margaret leaned back in the bunk bed like some tiny UN protectorate at a Security Council debate. “You’re reminding me of all those Freudian bullshit artists who convinced the public that a woman who was raped must have gone out of her way to get it. Not that I want to give this thing sexual undertones.”

  “Overtones.”

  “Whatever.”

  “And furthermore, you don’t have to give it anything, it’s there. It’s always there.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  A hostile note, previously absent, had crept into the conversation.

  “Damn right I do. If there’s a male and a female in a room there’s sex in that room. It may be good and it may be bad and it may be perverted and it may be repressed or any other bloody thing, but it’s there.”

  “Oh, wow,” Hannah said, shaking her head, at once sad, hip and lofty, “I wish I’d known what was on your mind when we were having those long marvelous talks about art and education.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Hannah Banana,” Roger said, “you knew all right. Same thing as yours.”

  “One thing I will not stand for,” Hannah said angrily, “is having someone tell me what’s on my mind.”

  “Or theirs,” Roger suggested.

  Margaret was beginning to think the day would end better than it had begun.

  Hannah was upset—and terribly wary, as though she were going through a scene she’d lived many times before.

  “You seemed so straight to me, Roger. So open and honest.”

  “That’s me,” Roger said. “Open and honest.”

  “You never made a pass at me.”

  “I was saving it. A special treat. For your birthday or something.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Hannah shook her head. “I didn’t figure you for the kind of guy that’s got to perpetually prove he has balls.”

  “You really think that’s the only reason for having sex?” Roger asked sardonically. “To prove something?”

  “No,” Hannah said, undeterred by his manner. “There’s having children.”

  Margaret searched the other woman’s face for a hint of irony but there was none; Roger was openmouthed.

  “I begin to perceive the problem,” he said finally. “It’s not that you hate men it’s just that you hate sex.”

  “Why is that my problem?” Hannah asked. “If you wanna make me and I hate sex, that’s your problem.”

  It gave Roger pause.

  “You mean to say that you know you hate sex?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “What do you hate about it?” he asked curiously.

  “The way it feels,” Hannah said calmly. “When I’m getting fucked I feel as though I’m getting fucked.”

  Was this one of those times when she believed what she was saying even though it was only partly true? Of all the sexual confessions Margaret had seen, read or heard unsolicited from a variety of people over the years she could recall no simple declaration of distaste like this one. Her own experiences had run the gamut from extreme pleasure to moderate pain, the distinguishing difference, aside from the physical feeling, being that in the pleasure extreme her mind was disengaged while it dominated when sex was bad. Once when Roger was on acid which she’d refused to take he’d become extremely quietly loving to her. Smiling, never speaking, he’d led her outdoors to their shrub-enclosed back yard, where under the leafy umbrella of a beautiful dogwood tree he had undressed her, then himself, and they had lain looking at the stars through the foliage. The mosquitoes found them but when she complained to Roger that she was being eaten alive and wan
ted to go indoors he rolled over on top of her and in a manner at once graceful and deliberate covered every part of her body with his own, then made love to her in a tender all-encompassing way. And some strange, kinky, warped thing inside her had responded by feeling claustrophobic and resentful. He was trying to make her believe there was only one of them. He was all over her and now he wanted to be in her, too. And as he touched as far inside her as he could go she’d felt a sharp pain. She was suspicious of the idea that her pain had been physical, it seemed more likely that she was reacting to the violation of some metaphysical air space. A space she’d thought of herself as perpetually trying to fill.

  “Are you sure it isn’t just that you never had the right guy?”

  “You don’t really think it matters, do you?” Hannah replied. “I mean if you hate swimming what difference does it make if you’re in a pool or a lake?”

  There was something wrong with the metaphor but Margaret couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “How about stoned?” Roger asked.

  “I don’t like the way being stoned feels, either,” Hannah said.

  “Far out,” Roger said softly.

  “I know what she means,” Margaret said. “I mean I don’t always want to feel the way I feel when I’m stoned.” Copping out on the larger question.

  “That isn’t what I really meant, though,” Hannah said. “What I meant is that I don’t feel the need to be stoned.”

  “Maybe you could enjoy sex if you got stoned,” Roger said.

  “But I don’t want to enjoy sex,” Hannah said calmly. “Sex is just another dependency thing.”

  Roger whistled. A long drawn-out whistle. Then he said, “Come on, Maggie, let’s get out of here.”

  Did he know how it sounded? Hannah’s expression didn’t alter but her frame seemed to sag. Had there been any actual change or was Margaret touched by the other woman’s fear of being in need? Half-willingly she got up, said to Hannah, “See you later,” and followed Roger outside, only now feeling again the cuts and bruises David had inflicted on her. Her legs were Charley-horsed, as after a first dance class. She couldn’t keep up with Roger as he strode across the yard to where the twins were sitting happily in the grass, watching the birds and cats and playing with gravel.