Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

  I love you, Roger. I really love you.

  “In other words,” De Witt said, “you would prefer that we worked things out as a group.”

  Roger nodded. “The group thing seems to be working pretty well. I mean people’ve got all kinds of problems with themselves and each other . . . but they don’t seem to keep the place from functioning.”

  “Now everyone knows Roger’s feelings,” Starr said belligerently. “And Roger’s feelings are more important than anyone else’s because Roger has money.”

  “Only from a procedural point of view,” De Witt said. “Now I was going to suggest that we go around the room and give everyone a chance to express their feelings.”

  “I’ll tell you my feelings,” Jordan said, jumping up, scratching his head in an agitated way. “My feeling is, fuck the house and fuck the money and everything else! Who needs it? I don’t want to own anything! I don’t want to pay taxes! I want freedom, not ownership.”

  “Especially from your children,” Carol said.

  “What the fuck has that got to do with it?” Jordan demanded.

  “Plenty,” Carol said. “It’s one thing to talk about keeping on the move when you don’t have little kids and something else when you do.”

  “Bucky Fuller,” Jordan announced grandly, “says that men are born with feet, not roots.”

  “Which is true of their bodies,” Dolores said quietly from her corner. “But not of their minds.” It was exactly what De Witt had said to her once. Which of them had thought of it first? They seemed to have perfect understanding, they never even crossed verbally but seemed to have identical reactions to people and events. If De Witt’s attitude toward Mira bespoke tolerance and determination, there was nothing but love and respect for the wife who’d divorced him.

  “Right on,” Carol said.

  Silence. Mira was deep in meditation. De Witt asked Dolores if there was anything else she wanted to say.

  “I guess so,” Dolores said. “I guess I want to say that I’m for anything that lets us hold onto this place. If Roger wants to buy it, fine, if there’s some sort of share system where we share taxes or a mortgage, whatever, I’ll try to pay my share, neither way freaks me out especially. But to me it’s very important to have a home. Someplace to come back to, as Carol said. When I was on the move all the time, I came to dread the next time I’d have to pick up and go again. Once I had this place I could travel for fun again. Maybe it’s just having been raised on a farm, having a strong sense of land, of place . . . but I think it’s more than that.”

  “I think it’s age,” Jordan said, grinning. “You’re over the hill, kid, how old are you, thirty-five or some fucking crazy number like that?”

  Dolores laughed but Carol pointed out to him angrily that everyone grows older.

  “Not me!” Jordan said, “I have this plan where every year when my birthday comes to get me I’m gonna be too busy fucking.”

  “I feel the same as Dolores,” Butterscotch said timorously. “I don’t know how I can contribute my share, but . . .”

  “If you do just what you’ve always done,” De Witt told her, “you’ll be giving your share.”

  Silence.

  “I think,” Mira said in her Super Celibate Angel voice, “that it’s a beautiful idea to have someone own the farm who’s really deeply involved with it.”

  “Then it should be ten times as good having ten people own it who’re really deeply involved,” Starr said.

  “What’re you proposing?” Roger asked.

  “Nothing,” Starr said. “I’m just saying whatever comes into my head.”

  Her boyfriend stared at her adoringly.

  “I’m not dividing up the money,” Roger said. “It would be a phony trip, pretending to divide it up and then laying down a condition it has to go to the farm. I’m not even sure I can get what’s needed, I’m going to have to sweat for it, kiss my old man’s ass, I mean, and I’m not willing to have someone take a few grand of that sweat and spin out for San Francisco or something.”

  “One of the problems we’ve had in the past,” De Witt said after a long silence, “is with this question of indebtedness. Of how one has to be with people to whom one is indebted.”

  “Or to put it in English,” Jordan said, “Mitchell acts like a fucking asshole half the time he’s here and no one ever tells him so.”

  “Except me,” Starr said.

  “Except her,” Jordan admitted. “And Mitchell’s decided she’s that way with everyone so it’s cool. But if everyone decided the hell with him and his fucking hippie-capitalist ego trip and called him on his shit, we know damn well what’d happen.”

  “It’s happening anyway,” Carol said sadly.

  “Maybe it was inevitable,” De Witt said. “He had to really grow and learn and become part of the farm, or get tired of his plaything and give it up.”

  Silence.

  “All right,” Roger said abruptly. “How about dividing it up after I buy it?”

  Margaret stared at him. If in the past she’d felt strained and exhausted by his high-wire articulation and callous inflexibility, she was beginning to feel threatened by this new Roger, whose reactions she couldn’t anticipate, whose actions she couldn’t predict. She didn’t mind his giving away what they didn’t have yet; it was a more basic feeling, as though he were snatching out from under her a spot of ledge where she was trying to gain a toehold. Not that he hadn’t given away money and possessions before; it was the way he’d allowed himself to be questioned and moved from his original intention!

  “Not to do us a favor,” Starr said, eyeing him cautiously.

  “All right,” Roger said. “Not to do you a favor. To keep the group together.”

  “You mean it.”

  “Yeah. I mean it. I don’t mean the big land parcel. If I get that it’s going to go into beef cattle or big-scale farming, and if someone wants to go in with De Witt and me, that’ll be a different thing. And I’m not talking about splitting with any two-year-old that drops in for a meal and a quick lay.”

  “Don’t be a shit,” Starr said, “just because you’re giving something away.”

  “Don’t notice it for the first time just because you’re being given something.”

  “I’m not used to that,” Starr said seriously.

  “We’ll get it all over with quickly,” Roger said, “so you can forget about it.”

  “If you’re serious about this,” De Witt said to Roger, “I think you’ll have some details to work out on paper.”

  “Oh, shit,” Jordan said, “I’m not into legal documents.”

  “That’s all ownership is,” De Witt pointed out.

  “There’s Margaret and me,” Roger said. “De Witt and Mira. Carol and Jordan, Starr and Paul, Dolores, Butterscotch. Makes ten shares. We can make provision where if someone new comes in they can have a share if they want it after a certain amount of time.”

  “What about taxes and stuff?” Margaret asked.

  “They shouldn’t be too hard to handle,” De Witt said. “Split ten ways. Especially if we can persuade Mitchell to let us give him a portion of the money in cash so that the records don’t show too high a purchase price to the assessor.”

  “I’m not sure I’m into all this,” Jordan said. “Can I sell my share?”

  “No!” several people shouted at once.

  “What’re you trying to turn this into, man?” Roger asked. “Cherry Grove?”

  “There’re going to be so many things to work out,” Margaret said apprehensively.

  “Mmm,” Roger said. “But first Philadelphia.”

  “Is that where your house is?” Carol asked.

  “No,” Roger said, “that’s where my parents live. Ardmore, actually. If we can get enough money there we won’t have to wait for the sale of our own house to buy here.”

  “We,” Starr repeated, kissing Roger’s cheek loudly. “He said we. Let’s have a party!”

  MARGARET dreamed
that her mother was walking along the edge of a fog-shrouded island not unlike the one in the Isle of the Dead, reaching out desperately over the water, calling in a pleading echo-heavy voice, “Don’t go to Roger’s side for the money, darling! Come to meeeeeee! Come to meeeeeeee!” When she awakened, puzzled and upset, Roger was already dressed. She felt a surge of resentment toward him. Because he was dragging her back to Philadelphia? Or was it a carryover from her dream? When Roger came near the bed she pretended she was still asleep.

  The Adamses had never known her mother. This was somehow unbelievable to her. Roger’s parents and her parents had never met. Do you know, Mr. and Mrs. Crowley Adams, that she is dead? My mother? Whom you never expressed the remotest interest in meeting? Who when she was young, before her foothold was taken away, had so many little talents that the problem was thought to be which she might fully develop? She could sketch a little, sculpt a little, play the piano and dance but had insufficient drive to continue any of those activities when she could no longer have lessons in them.

  How many times had she seen Roger’s family herself, outside of Christmases? Six Christmases, each more funereal than the last. The four of them, plus Roger’s father’s brother who’d never married, plus (sometimes) Roger’s mother’s kid brother who’d been married four times and was as likely to show up with a past or future wife as with his present one. The place was briefly alive while he was there but otherwise it was an unremittingly dismal formal occasion, more like a board meeting than a holiday, a polite stock-option-giving ceremony from which, as little as they seemed to have given emotionally, Roger’s parents always had to recover by going to Nassau for three months. Not the least of the blessings of being at the farm this past winter had been escaping the Adams Christmas.

  “Roger?” She sat up suddenly. “What did you tell your parents last Christmas?”

  “I told them the babies were too young to travel so we wouldn’t be down.”

  “They must have known that didn’t make sense.”

  Roger laughed shortly. “You have to think about something to know whether it makes sense.”

  “Roger?”

  “Mmm?”

  Do something to reassure me, Roger. Tell me that the more things change the more they remain the same or something like that.

  “I’ve been dreaming about my mother.”

  He groaned. “I thought you were past that.”

  You’ve got to be kidding, Roger. The past isn’t what’s finished it’s only what’s invisible.

  “Everything’s flooding back on me. I almost feel guilty I haven’t thought of her more since I’ve been here.”

  “You can go to confession while you’re in Philadelphia.”

  “Very funny.” But it made sense for the trip to bother him as much as it did her. More, even, just as he was less upset by her father. Now he was building up his shell.

  “Are you sure they’ll be there?” They did spend most summers at home in Ardmore since they’d sold the camp on the Jersey shore when the area got built up. Why should they go anyplace, as Roger’s mother had said, when the club had a marvelous pool and eight tennis courts? Roger’s mother was a superb player, as unlikely as her squat frame and spindly legs made her seem for the role.

  “Mmmm. We faked a call to Sillsy.” Sillsy was Sarah Adams. They all had nicknames, that brave Wasp attempt at warmth roughly comparable to trying to heat a house with a can of Sterno. Crowley was Cowpey, Roger’s baby pronunciation having stuck where nothing before had.

  “Don’t you think we should let them know we’re coming?”

  “Uh uh. I don’t want to give them time to build up their defenses.”

  “Don’t you think they’ll resent it if we just drop in on them out of the blue?”

  He shrugged. “If they’re resentful then they’ll feel guilty and we’ll get the money twice as fast.”

  Roger the Master Manipulator.

  “That sounds awful,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” Roger said. “We’re talking about awful people.”

  DOWN 91, then ugly 95, then across Westchester to the Tappan Zee. She looked toward Hartsdale, waiting to feel a pang, but there was nothing. Roger had filled in the space between the front and back seats and put the crib mattress across the whole thing. In the hot breeze, naked except for their diapers, the twins slept on and off the whole time. Margaret did, too. Across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania.

  “I’m so hungry,” she said. She’d awakened with it, an absolutely ravenous feeling.

  “You had three breakfasts, for Christ’s sake.”

  It was true. She’d sat there at the kitchen table, not wanting to leave, thinking of one thing after another to delay departure, and as the others had come in for breakfast or fresh coffee she’d joined them. Coffee and bread and eggs, then coffee and cereal, then more coffee, and, when Starr and Carol brought them in, blueberries, the first of the season, with top milk. When Roger had finally scooped up both girls in exasperation and started out of the house, she’d buttered another piece of bread to take with her, in addition to the bread and fruit she’d packed for the twins so they wouldn’t have to stop along the way. Roger always hated to stop along the way, no matter where they were going and how little he might actually want to get there.

  “But we’ve been in the car more than six hours since then,” she pointed out.

  “Will you stop it?” Roger said irritably. “We’re almost there and you’ve had enough to eat to last you a week.”

  “I’m fortifying myself,” she said. “You should understand that.”

  AND then they were in Ardmore. Beautiful Ardmore. What people once thought suburbs were going to be like. If the houses were a bit close together, well Philadelphians were used to that sort of thing, and the stone was so thick as to constitute an adequate barrier between neighbors who didn’t tend to spill over each other with noisy warmth, anyway. They were busy people, desirable neighbors. A gynecologist on one side, an ear-nose-throat man on the other and a heart surgeon across the street. Margaret’s mother would have thought she was in heaven. The taste in the buildings and the landscaping was uniformly good and of course subdued. It had been a major coup of Roger’s, the year he turned twenty-one and spent a summer at home while his parents were in Europe, to have ordered installed a kidney-shaped swimming pool that took up most of their back grounds. Taste was terribly important. It was their word for life style and it was mistaken for content just as often as the latter. The crucial aspect of bad taste was that it revealed something about you that it was inappropriate for others to know.

  ICHABOD Moses, the family retainer, opened the door, greeted them calmly but warmly, ushered them in. Ichabod had once had an identity of his own. A wan, genteel, young soul, 4F during the Second World War by virtue of asthma and several other physical difficulties, he’d come to them in 1942 when they were still living in West Philadelphia. Roger was three and Roger’s father had gone off to be a Colonel in the war effort and it was thought that Sillsy should not be alone in the house with only the maid and the cook, also female, for protection, but at first no one could think of a satisfactory method or excuse for having a workman actually living in the house; it wasn’t like the camp, with its separate cottage a few hundred yards away. Then a friend of Crowley’s had mentioned his nephew from Minnesota who was looking for a teaching position in Philadelphia, and Crowley had asked whether the young man might be interested in living with them as Roger’s tutor. From the beginning Roger had adored and terrorized Ichabod; from the beginning Roger’s mother had had to protect Ichabod from Roger’s temper. But from the beginning Roger had truly learned from Ichabod, whom he had christened Itchy. He learned to read, he learned to write and he learned arithmetic well before entering school, a fact which, combined with his difficult temperament, created enormous trouble when he had to sit still in school and learn the same things all over again.

  There were two strange facts, though, connected to the tale
of Roger and Itchy. The first was that as Roger precociously acquired knowledge from Itchy, Itchy himself seemed to shed it. The second was that as Itchy in his years with the Adamses lost his education, so did he lose the second striking aspect of his persona, his physical ailments. The asthma that had plagued him since childhood; the arthritis that had overtaken him in his teens; the nervous stomach that had prevented him from digesting well—all gradually disappeared, to be replaced by strong capabilities in fields like carpentry, plumbing and electric work. So that Margaret, meeting Ichabod years later, had assumed him to have become the family retainer by virtue of lowly birth and lack of education combined with strength and know-how.

  Ichabod led them into the parlor. Outside it was still hot and sunny but the house was cool. She found herself wondering what time it was and realized that at the farm they never thought about time. There was the clock-timer on the stove for cooking and baking and a clock-radio in De Witt’s room which was occasionally set for some special reason.

  The parlor had been redone since their last visit, or maybe just for the warm weather; everything was lovely and light and airy. A pale Chinese rug on the floor, pale yellow silk upholstery on the sofa and chairs, sheer white curtains at the windows. The clock on the white mantelpiece said it was five-thirty.

  Where did you put the babies in a room like this? She held Rosie, who was still sleeping. Roger put down Rue on the rug.

  “You’re looking just fine, Margaret,” Ichabod said. “And I see you’ve got yourself two beautiful girls.”

  She kissed his cheek. He blushed.

  “How you been, Rodge?” he asked.

  “Okay, okay, Itch,” said Roger. “How’s things?”

  “Just about the same as ever,” said Ichabod.

  “Where’s Sillsy?” asked Roger.

  “Sarah’s taking a shower, I believe.”

  You swam in the pool to wash off the sun and took a shower to wash off the chlorine.

  “How about Cowpey?”