Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  “The little creep really worked you over, didn’t he,” Roger said when she reached him. It was hostile but it was also friendly.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “I think for good.”

  “Too bad,” Roger said. “If I knew then what I know now I’d have matched up the two of them, they’re both out of their skulls.”

  So he was willing to be her friend now if they could step together blithely over the bodies of Creepy David and Crazy Hannah.

  “I don’t know about Hannah,” she said, “but David isn’t crazy.”

  “Right,” Roger said. “He’s just this sweet little kid who goes around beating up on people.”

  “He beat me up because he was furious with me.” For not loving him enough to make up for his inability to love me.

  “And you loved it.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe I could do it better.”

  She smiled, which made her lip hurt like hell. “That’s practically the same thing you said to Hannah. Maybe I haven’t had the right guy.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It is. And I guess I could give you the same answer. If I don’t like how it feels what difference does it make who’s doing it?”

  “She really spooked me.”

  “She spooked De Witt at first. He figured out she scared him because she refused to need him.”

  “Oh, shit, what are you, shilling for the sisterhood?”

  “What I’m trying to say is that part of me empathized with what she was saying.”

  “So?”

  “So I thought I ought to say so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would’ve been dishonest to pretend I had no idea of what she was talking about just for the sake of not arguing with you. You used to accuse me of being dishonest.”

  He grinned. “But I got accustomed to it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “because I’m doing it . . . arguing with you, whatever I’m doing, being honest . . . out of my own needs, not yours.”

  “What makes you think I give a shit for your needs?”

  “You’re married to me.”

  “I married you to fill my needs, not yours.”

  “It must be possible to fill your own needs and not forget other people’s entirely.”

  He laughed. “What if one of my needs is to forget about yours?”

  “Then,” she said, calmly and with no forethought, “maybe we shouldn’t be married.”

  He blanched. Or so she fancied.

  “At least,” she said, “maybe we should think about it.”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “You think about it and let me know what you decide.” He went into the house. She hobbled after him. He went upstairs and she followed him up, pushing into the room just before he could slam the door in her face.

  “Roger,” she said, “I don’t want you to think this is something I’ve been thinking about because it isn’t. It just came out when you said you didn’t want to think about my needs.”

  “Okay. So it came out. I did say it and it did come out. So do you want to get a divorce and get it over with?”

  “I don’t think of it as something to get over with. I haven’t even been thinking of it at all. I don’t even feel the need for it. There are people here who care about me and my needs so it hasn’t been so important.”

  “Right,” Roger said. “You don’t need me at all. If you want someone to kiss your ass and worry about how happy you are, stick with De Witt.”

  She stared at him, surprised and confused.

  “De Witt doesn’t kiss my ass, Roger.”

  “Sure he does,” Roger said promptly. “He’s just such a technician of other people’s asses that you don’t even notice.”

  She was about to tell him he was talking nonsense when she remembered, suddenly and vividly, her brief motel interlude with De Witt, when her body hadn’t been able to be convinced by her mind that De Witt really lusted for her.

  “Making love to somebody,” she blurted out, then paused, disconcerted, “ . . . being nice to somebody in different ways . . . isn’t the same as kissing their ass.”

  “It is if there’s nothing that’s really moving you to do it, if you’re doing it because they want it.”

  She couldn’t answer that. “I’ll have to think about it.” She was getting a headache and all her cuts and bruises were reasserting themselves. “I don’t know if it’s true . . . or if it applies here.” She left him and went downstairs.

  De Witt had just brought into the kitchen the large graph-paper chart on which he would plot the planting. The peas, beans, spinach and lettuce were already in the ground and beginning to sprout; in another week or so they would sow the seeds for some of the less hearty crops and then, by the second week in June when frost danger was past, they would transfer to the outdoors the tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants that had been brought to the cold frame from the greenhouse to harden off. She sat down facing De Witt, who was spreading the charts but then looked up and saw her bruised face.

  “Margaret!” He stood up and came around to her. “What’s happened to you?”

  “It’s David,” she said. “He had a fit.”

  “Wait a minute. That lip needs some ice.” He got some cubes and wrapped them in a dishtowel then brought back the compress, sat down next to her on the bench, one arm around her, and with the other hand placed the compress on her lip and held it there. She felt a wave of sexual gratitude.

  This is not ass-kissing, goddammit! This is being a good person!

  She leaned her head on De Witt’s shoulder. “I think he’s gone for good.”

  “David? Was this his farewell present?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m sorry.” He kissed her forehead. She put down the compress and he took her cold hands between his warm ones.

  “I know what I must look like,” she said.

  Very, very lightly he kissed the swollen middle of her lip. Very, very lightly she licked his lips. He smelled of rotted hay and cow manure, both of which smells struck her at the moment as being sensual in the extreme.

  “De Witt,” she said, “did I ever tell you that Mitchell was David’s stepfather?”

  “No,” De Witt said. “I don’t believe you did. I’ve wondered from time to time how he happened to find us.”

  “De Witt, do you think there was something about my relationship with David that made this practically inevitable? I mean, do you think in some way I may have been asking for it?”

  “No, of course not,” De Witt said. “Why should I think that?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something that seems right about it, in some awful sort of way.”

  “It only seems right if you believe that people who do good things deserve to be kicked in the teeth.”

  Was he defending her or himself? Damn Roger for leaving his drops of poison in her mind.

  “I was nasty to him today,” she said. “I mean not exactly nasty but it was the first time I really talked to him the way he talked to me.”

  “Good,” De Witt said, stroking her arm with his encircling arm, her hair with his other hand.

  “He said I had no right to be that way. That he and I were—well, what he was saying essentially was that I was violating the nature of our relationship. That I’d always been giving and loving, however he’d been, and it wasn’t fair for me to suddenly change.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Well, I understand what he meant.”

  “Maybe he meant that he was jealous that you were capable of change and he wasn’t.”

  She looked at him wonderingly. “That’s exactly what I accused him of, being jealous. That’s when he got so mad.”

  He smiled. “Okay, then. What’s our next problem?”

  “De Witt,” she said, “don’t ever leave me.”

  “I won’t,” he said tenderly. “I promise you that, Margaret. If I ev
er leave here, you can come with me.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “I really love you, De Witt.”

  “I love you, too, Margaret.”

  There were footsteps on the stairs; she froze. Then there was Roger’s voice.

  “Get the fuck away from my wife, you fucking motherfucker.”

  De Witt released her gently, swung around on the bench to face Roger.

  “It seems to me,” he said mildly, “that you want all the privileges of the extended family but you don’t want Margaret to have them.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to argue with you and your fucking idiot lingo, do you?”

  “Now you sound just like David,” De Witt said. “You can say whatever comes into your mind but nobody can talk back.”

  “Listen, you pimp—”

  “Roger,” Margaret interrupted, “he was comforting me because I was upset and you wouldn’t!”

  “Why the hell should I?” he shouted. “It was my wife geting fucked by that crazy little bastard, not his!”

  “I wasn’t fucking him!” she shouted back. “Not after you came! And what if I was? You’ve been fucking around yourself, you’d have had Hannah, if she could be had.”

  “She can be had, all right,” De Witt muttered.

  “And when I think back,” she went on, too furious to pay attention to De Witt, “to the number of girls you’ve had since I knew you—”

  “I never gave all those girls put together,” Roger shouted at the top of his lungs, his face bright red with rage, “the love you gave that lousy kid in one day!!!!!”

  She was dumbstruck. By what? By the truth? By Roger’s perception of it? By her own failure to perceive it before? De Witt was watching her. Roger, seeing her reaction, was calming down. Outside the kitchen window at least one of the twins was crying. How long had that been going on unnoticed? She couldn’t relate to it.

  De Witt said, “You’re trying to penalize Margaret for being a more loving person than you are.”

  Roger said, “If I tried to give you an intelligent answer you’d think I was interested in talking to you.”

  De Witt said, “You should be, we live in the same house.”

  Roger was silent.

  “We’ve been sort of walking around each other,” De Witt said. “Not arguing but never being friends, either.”

  “So what?”

  De Witt shrugged, “There must be more to be gained for both of us.”

  “What if I don’t like you?”

  De Witt’s expression didn’t change but it seemed to Margaret that he was hurt. “Then I think you should tell me why.”

  “Okay,” Roger said. “Sure I’ll tell you. You see, I disagree completely with Hannah’s idea of you. Hannah thinks, you know, you’re a fraud, some Kind of dark, menacing power freak who’s only being nice in exchange for control of the situation.”

  De Witt smiled, nodded.

  “But I think you’re just what you seem to be. Bland. Eager to please. Catering to other people’s emotions. A fucking caterer to the emotions, never getting mad because people wouldn’t like it.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” De Witt said slowly. “Although it’s true that I seldom get angry.”

  “But Roger has trouble getting anything but angry,” Margaret said. Aching for De Witt.

  De Witt smiled. “Then maybe it’s an attraction of opposites.”

  “On your part, maybe,” Roger said to him.

  “All right,” De Witt said. “On my part.”

  Silence. Outside the babies were still crying.

  “What do the poor kids have to do?” Roger asked her. “Scream out their lungs before you go find out what’s wrong?”

  Reluctantly Margaret went out. Rue had apparently eaten some dirt and choked it up; she was practically purple with rage, and Rosie was crying along with her, in sympathy. Guilt stricken, Margaret picked up Rue, who continued sobbing uncontrollably, although Rosie, watching, stopped. Margaret paced around the yard with Rue until the crying had slowed down somewhat, then she sat down in the grass with Rue in her lap; Rosie nestled alongside. The yard was alive with activity. Paul and Jordan were repairing the chicken coop. Hannah was showing some people around the grounds; she seemed in good spirits. One of the alternatives bulletins had listed them as having a school and for several weeks they’d been having visitors at least all weekend. They turned away people who phoned first, requesting that they wait until planting time was over, but most of them found it difficult to be rude to any reasonably decent human being who showed up in person, however inconvenient his presence might be. Finally, by tacit consent of the group, Hannah, who was so ingratiating with strangers, had been given the job of greeting people and answering their questions. Most people asked questions about the nature of life at the farm and Hannah was the only one who could answer because she was the only one who was convinced that her answers wouldn’t turn out to be irrelevant. How things worked had more to do with how you perceived them to work, how you made them work, than with anyone else’s idea of the order of things. Only Hannah could assure people, straight-faced and utterly believable, that there were no emotional difficulties at the farm because they didn’t have the time and energy to waste on fighting, and then point out that besides they didn’t eat white bread and all that shit that poisoned people’s minds. At the beginning, some types would do a double take on that one, but by the time she tripped off on the use of niacin to cure schizophrenia, no one seemed to think that she was kidding—or should be. The women in particular seemed to take to Hannah and often she would get letters saying it had proved impossible for someone to move up for economic or other reasons but the writer did hope that Hannah would visit sometime with her children.

  What was going on inside? She’d been sitting outside for almost half an hour and no one had come in or out of the house. It was true that Roger got angry on the rare occasions when she let the twins cry, but it was also true that he’d seemed glad of the excuse to get rid of her. She decided the twins were probably thirsty, anyway, so she would bring them into the kitchen for some milk or juice. Rosie was drinking from a cup all the time now and Rue was doing it during the day. Rue could make it up the steps now, but Margaret carried Rosie. If there was an argument going on, she couldn’t hear it from the outside, although she listened for a minute before cautiously opening the front door.

  Sounds of quiet activity throughout the house reached her ears. From the crafts room came the hum of the sewing machine, from the kitchen the sound of the oven door being closed. It was late afternoon but the house was still full of daylight. The smell of freshly baked bread dominated but other good smells, soup or stew as well as something sweet, like baking fruit, were combining with it. She put down Rosie and went into the kitchen. Starr was muttering over the stewpot. And at the long table, sitting facing each other and chatting with an easy intimacy that suggested they’d been in telepathic communication for years, were Roger and De Witt.

  So that was why he’d wanted her out of the way, he hadn’t wanted her to see him capitulating to De Witt’s friendliness! He waved her away when she tried to approach them. Resentfully she went into the other room. How like Roger, having decided he could tolerate De Witt after all, to eliminate her from the friendship.

  “Roger,” she asked later, “what did De Witt say that made you change your mind about him?”

  “I didn’t change my mind about him,” Roger said. “I think the same thing as I thought before, I changed my mind about the way I feel about that.”

  “You mean you’re compatible because you’re so different.”

  Roger nodded.

  “Why didn’t you want me there?”

  “We were talking business.”

  “So?”

  “Women can’t talk business without dragging a lot of other stuff into it.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Making the farm self-sustaining. De Witt has a feeling Mitchell wants to get o
ut. Whenever they talk on the phone lately Mitchell bitches about money. He’s having trouble with conservation groups over one of his paper company’s forests, and so on. Higher taxes.”

  “You mean you want to buy the farm?”

  “Yup.”

  “Does De Witt have any money?”

  “Nope.”

  “How could you manage it? Your income might cover a mortgage but—”

  “By selling the house in Hartsdale, to begin with.”

  “Wait a minute.” It was an automatic reaction. Exactly the words she’d used when she got the phone call about her mother. Stop and let’s go back a few minutes to when it wasn’t too late.

  “You see what I mean?” Roger asked triumphantly. “You’re in a panic already.”

  “This isn’t just business, you’re talking, Roger,” she pointed out. “This is my life!”

  “That house?” Roger asked sarcastically. “That town? You’re kidding me.”

  She shook her head. She’d never liked the house or the town. But they were a bridge to the past and she didn’t like to burn bridges behind her. If you burned too many bridges you became just like those neighbors who frightened you so, the bright-eyed corporation wives ready on a minute’s notice to collapse the contents of their lives and transport them on to Texas, New Jersey, Detroit, San Juan. To the next Newcomers’ Club, Brownies Troop, Cancer Drive, Book ’n’ Bake Sale. If their husband’s timing was right they could bake the same cake each year in a different village of the damned and then move on to the next one, knowing that the body of some other corporation engineer’s wife would appear to inhabit their home, their spot, their life.

  She began to cry.

  “Oh, shit,” Roger said. “How did I know this would happen?”

  “I know it makes sense, Roger. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense to sell it.”

  “You’re what doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know, I know.” Tearful. “Why couldn’t we rent it furnished?”

  “What would that solve? Where would we get a down payment? As it is we might have to take back the mortgage.”