Any Minute I Can Split

by Judith Rossner

“Still at the Club, I believe.”

  This could mean that he was at the Club but was also a code phrase used to describe Crowley’s whereabouts on days or nights when he disappeared without letting anyone know where he would be. If Sillsy and Cowpey went to the Club together they went in separate cars so Sillsy could come home earlier if she got tired—or if she’d been away from Mr. Boston too long, as Roger put it.

  “Could someone make us something to eat?”

  “Why surely, Maggie,” Ichabod said, and headed toward the kitchen.

  Her arm was beginning to ache from carrying Rosie, and the crook of her elbow, where the baby’s heavy sleeping head lay, was hot and sweaty. You couldn’t put down a baby on a lemon-silk sofa which would be stained irreparably by a bit of sweat or dribble; the carpet had no softness and would irritate her skin; the chairs had the same light covering as the sofa. In Brattleboro, with an anti-ecology guilt twinge, she’d bought a box of disposable diapers which was all the twins were wearing at the moment. What if they leaked? For the first time she had on the twins’ behalf that sense she’d had on her own so often during her childhood, the sense of not having a fitting place to be, of being rather larger and grimier than a proper human being had a right to be.

  Damn it, she was going to sit on the sofa. Rosie would still be warm in her arms but not nearly as heavy. She tried to remember whether her smock was clean. She’d been wearing it since the day before. In previous times she’d carefully planned what she’d wear in Ardmore but at the farm she’d seldom given a thought to what she was wearing. Would she rise from the sofa to find that the seat of her dress had left on that lemon silk some remnants of flour dust, cooking stains, mucous wiped off her hands onto her ass because no dishrag was available? The hell with it! She would sit down! In her left hand she held the twins’ sleeveless smocks that were cut from the same piece of red floral cotton as her own. At the farm you cut things from the same piece because it was the obvious thing to do; here they were mother-daughter outfits, too corny for words. Then, too, the cotton itself, purchased in Brattleboro for forty-nine cents a yard, had seemed bright and beautiful at the farm, while here she became aware of the coarse grain of the cotton and the gaudy nature of the print.

  Rue was fully awake now and reconnoitering the territory. She stood up, reeled over to the cocktail table, pulled herself up, grabbed a marble cigarette box and was about to bring it crashing down on the shiny wooden surface of the table when Margaret reached forward and grabbed it from her.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. She put the box down next to her on the sofa. “Roger,” she said nervously, “maybe you ought to clear away the ashtray and stuff.”

  “You’re really throwing yourself into it, aren’t you?” Roger said.

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “I’m nervous.”

  Roger looked at her with distaste, an old expression of his she hadn’t seen recently. She pushed the ashtray and bud vase to a point on the table where Rue couldn’t reach them. Roger started to leave the room.

  “Where’re you going?” Margaret asked.

  “To pee, for Christ’s sake. Is that all right?”

  She nodded miserably. Roger left. She tried to sink back into the sofa, which wasn’t that kind of sofa. She closed her eyes. When she opened them Rue was standing at the étagère at the other end of the room, the étagère, full of blown glass and unborn china and gold-framed photos with oval mats—Sillsy and her brother as children on their horses; Crowley in uniform; Sillsy as a very young girl in her pony cart; Roger with his first deer; Crowley and Sillsy washing down the floor of the camp in New Jersey THE YEAR THE COUPLE AND THE MAID ALL QUIT JUST BEFORE SUMMER, proud as punch at their ability to do menial labor although they lacked the calling for it their servants had been born with; and as Margaret sat staring at her utterly paralyzed, Rue leaned against the shelf at her neck level and stretching out one arm in front of her swept off the second shelf every single piece of glass thereon. Rosie started in her sleep; Rue stood motionless, examining the pieces of glass on the floor.

  “Ichabod,” called a tremulous but calm voice at the doorway, “please tell Franchesca to get the broom, there’s been a little accident in here.”

  Sillsy stood in the doorway, her short squat figure resplendent in gray chiffon lounging pajamas, her wispy brown hair piled on her head except for a lock that dangled down artfully on one side, her pleasant freckled complexion at a high sheen after her bath, her mouth smiling as it often did, her gray eyes watching coldly as they always did.

  “The baby,” Margaret said in a strangled voice, “could you please get her away from the glass?”

  “Certainly.” Sillsy walked quickly across the room, picked up Rue, came back to the sofa and sat down next to Margaret and Rosie. The air filled with a perfume so sweet that it would have been nauseating had it been any less expensive.

  My God! What do I smell like? Frantically she tried to remember a shower or a dip in the pond.

  “Sillsy, I’m so sorry about the glass.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sillsy said. “I’m so pleased to see you.” She was looking back and forth from Rosie to Rue. “Look at our beautiful children. Which one is Rosemary?”

  “This one,” Margaret said. “You’re holding Rue. Rosie’s the sleeper, Rue’s the one that gets into trouble.” She laughed nervously. “I guess you know that already.”

  “She’s not in any trouble with us, are you dear?” Sillsy said to Rue.

  She should feel grateful for Sillsy’s graciousness. Why didn’t she feel grateful? Because she didn’t believe it?

  “What color are her eyes?” Sillsy asked.

  “They change,” Margaret said. They were gray.

  “Mmm,” Sillsy said. “They’ll probably end up gray. She looks exactly like my mother.”

  “Now say Rosie looks like your father,” Roger said from the doorway.

  “Hello, dear,” Sillsy said tranquilly. “No, nothing like my father. That’s the Adams nose, not the Walton nose.”

  Roger laughed but Sillsy had learned long ago to ignore Roger’s laughing. Franchesca came in with a teacart and a broom and dustpan.

  “Rue knocked over some glass,” Margaret explained. “On the étagère.”

  “Good,” Roger said. “I hate that stuff.”

  Rosie stirred.

  “You’re staying for dinner, aren’t you?” Sillsy said, eyeing the teacart.

  “Mmm,” Roger said. “But we were hungry.”

  “Fine,” Sillsy said. “We’ll have dinner when we get the children off to bed.”

  But we just got here. You’ve never seen them before. It struck her now that while Sillsy was holding her granddaughter in a perfectly acceptable way, she’d neither hugged nor kissed them. From Sillsy’s lap Rue reached out for the food on the teacart. Rosie sat up and looked around.

  “Such a good-natured baby,” Sillsy said.

  Margaret said, “Sillsy, try touching the back of Rue’s neck, it’s incredibly soft.”

  Sillsy smiled, still looking at Rosie. “Doesn’t she cry when she wakes up?”

  “Hardly ever,” Margaret said.

  Rue succeeded in getting hold of a sandwich.

  “Maybe we should go into the kitchen,” Margaret said. “There’ll be a mess if we eat in here.” Nervous dirty smelly anxious Margaret.

  “Please don’t worry about it, dear.” Franchesca left with the swept-up glass and Sillsy put Rue down on the rug. Margaret put down Rosie and took some iced tea and a half sandwich.

  “So what’s new, Ma?” Roger asked.

  “I do hope you were able to take my letter in the right spirit, Roger,” his mother said, fairly reeking of serenity.

  “What letter?” Roger asked.

  Her brow furrowed slightly. “Didn’t you get my letter? I sent it weeks ago.”

  “Mmm,” Roger said. “The delivery isn’t so good where we are. Some of my checks haven’t been coming.”

  “Oh, dear,
” Sillsy said. Flustered.

  “What’d it say?” Roger asked.

  “Oh, well . . . it’s hard to . . . just a minute, I’ll get the carbon.”

  Roger began walking bouncily around the room, hands in his pockets, whistling because he was having a good time. Sillsy came back with the carbon and handed it to him. He read it quickly, gave it back to her.

  “How long you been seeing this guy?”

  “Almost half a year,” she said. Not without pride. It had taken her only twenty or thirty years to find out that you didn’t have to be Jewish to love psychoanalysis.

  “Well,” Roger said, “don’t be impatient. It takes time for anything to happen.”

  “Things are happening,” she said angrily. “Can’t you see how much more serene I am?”

  Roger stared at her thoughtfully. “No,” he finally said. “But I’ll try harder.”

  Rue wiped the sandwich filling off her fingers onto the sofa.

  “I can see it,” Margaret said quickly. “You really seem different to me, Sillsy.”

  Sillsy’s mouth smiled and she relaxed back in the sofa.

  “All this is beside the point,” Roger said abruptly. “Where’s Cowpey?”

  “At the Club.”

  “Which club?”

  She gestured helplessly. “Ichabod’s trying to locate him.”

  “That could take days,” Roger pointed out.

  “Are you in a hurry about something, dear?” Sillsy asked, her calm restored by his urgency.

  “I need some money.” He always seemed to want them to know it was the reason they were seeing him.

  “But I—” She waved the letter. “I tried to exp—”

  Roger waved the letter away. “Irrelevant. I’m not talking about piddling amounts and that’s a bunch of garbage, anyway. When will you stop trying to deal with things you don’t know a goddamn thing about? There’re all kinds of communes. There’re religious communes where no one does anything but pray, they’re like monasteries, practically, and there’re revolutionary communes where they plan what they’re going to do with houses like this when they liberate Philadelphia, and there’re teeny-bopper communes where they don’t do anything but fuck and fuck and take dope and fuck some more.”

  Sillsy flinched but was mesmerized.

  “Now the thing we’re at,” Roger continued, “isn’t so much a commune . . .”

  “That’s what you wrote me, Roger, you and Margaret were living at a farm commune with—”

  “Let me finish. It’s not so much a commune as a model commune.”

  Margaret gazed at him with uneasy awe; his manner left no room for doubt that there was a difference between the two. Rue was tearing up a magazine; Rosie was eating a plum and wiping her fingers on the rug. Sillsy said she didn’t understand.

  “Well I’m going to explain to you now,” Roger said with relish. “You know what a think tank is?”

  She nodded. “You mean the people who think for the government?”

  “Exactly. Problem solvers. Well the farm we’re at is like a think tank. Nobody’s there to escape the world. Practically everyone’s a sociologist or a scientist, that kind of person. Interested in solving problems like overpopulation and how it’s going to affect the communities of the future. Are you beginning to understand what I’m talking about?”

  “I think so,” Sillsy said.

  “We need to know things like whether it’s possible to break up the cities into small self-sustaining units.”

  “Did you come through Philadelphia, Roger? It’s worse than ever.”

  “We need to know how many people can have their basic needs supplied by how many acres of land, how much livestock, how detailed medical services, etc.”

  “What will you do when you find out?”

  Rosie, this funny lady is your grandma. You are related to her by BLOOD. By blood and gore, as Roger used to say.

  “We’ll publish a book, naturally.”

  Naturally.

  “Not just a book. A series of guides and references. Specific sensible information so that responsible people can be led into these communities instead of just a bunch of wild kids.”

  “That sounds very worthwhile,” Sillsy said.

  “Damn right it’s worthwhile,” Roger said self-righteously.

  “Roger,” Sillsy said in a tremulous—almost flirtatious—voice, “I feel that I may have done you an injustice.”

  “That’s all right,” Roger said. “You have a chance to undo it.”

  Silence.

  “The fact is,” Roger said, “that we’re at a crisis point. The guy we’ve been renting the whole spread from has had an offer for it from a developer and he’s going to sell unless we come up with the cash. Aside from Maggie and me there’s no one there that has any real money, they’re mostly salaried professionals.” Rue tugged at his pants and he picked her up without interrupting himself. “I’m selling the house in Hartsdale to raise some of the money but I need more and I don’t know how long that’ll take.” He was fondling the baby’s head as he spoke.

  Sillsy’s mouth smiled. “I never pictured you that way, Roger,” she said, inclining her head toward the baby’s.

  “The other possibility is a government grant,” Roger said. “Which stinks for a variety of reasons.”

  “Some very fine people have government grants,” his mother said. Thinking. Slowly, because the mechanism was rusty. “Adams Malties had a government grant to develop a new low-bulk nutritious cereal for the Armed Forces.”

  Crowley had been to Vietnam on cereal business two years before and come home with the clap.

  “Just what Adams Malties needed,” Roger muttered.

  “What dear?”

  “It is thought by people who know,” Roger said loftily, “that government grants are to be avoided.”

  “But I don’t see why,” Sillsy persisted.

  “There’s something very funny about this,” Roger boomed suddenly. “The communes are the last stronghold of laissez-faire capitalism and here you are trying to talk me into government control!”

  “No, Roger,” Sillsy protested. “Not control, just—”

  “What do you think they give you the money for? If they pay you, they own you. And if they own you they can decide what they want to do with you. Maybe they’ll decide to use you as a center to study controlled heroin addiction, there’re government people involved in experiments like that right now, Project Head Start, it’s called, I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”

  “You always tell me such frightening stories, Roger.”

  “But I don’t tell you lies, do I!” Blithely.

  “I suppose not,” Sillsy said slowly. “I remember when you told us you wanted the money for the house, to get out of New York because of the guerrilla warfare, and Crowley said it was pretty ridiculous and I said how can we be sure, and now when you read the papers . . . every day . . . bombings, people getting killed, department stores . . . you wonder how anyone can live there.”

  “In ten years,” Roger said, “the suburbs won’t be any better. You’ll be begging us to let you live at the farm.”

  And we’ll be refusing.

  She was upset not by the way she was feeling about Sillsy but by the revulsion she was feeling toward Roger, whom she had recently loved so much. If it was true that his parents had created the foundation for his dishonesty, it was also true that he seemed not just to exercise it but to glory in it. And it was frightening to her that he shouldn’t mind doing this in front of her, although for the life of her she didn’t know why.

  “I’d like to talk to Dr. Pfensig about this, Roger.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, what for?”

  She paused. “He says that I tend to let you manipulate me.”

  “Bullshit,” Roger said. “You’re manipulating me right now. And I’m letting you do it.”

  “I wish he had a phone in Truro. He won’t back for a few weeks.”

 
; “That’s great. If I don’t have the money in two days I lose the farm.”

  “Oh, dear.” Her voice was worried but her eyes were the same as ever. When had Sillsy come to inhabit that face? When she was two years old had her eyes not been upset when the rest of her was? When had she begun to so clearly act out the poles of what she was and what she was expected to be?

  “Look, Mother,” Roger said patiently. “I have a feeling this is a big fuss about nothing. After all, I’m really doing exactly what you want me to do. You don’t want me to live like a hippie and now you know I’m not. I’m ready to become a responsible citizen, work on a model organic farm, maybe supply unpoisoned beef to you and people like Pfensig right here in Philadelphia . . . he’d probably be furious with you if I lost out on this chance. What’ll you tell him?”

  Sillsy smiled shyly. “Did you hear what you called me, Roger?”

  “Huh?”

  “You called me Mother. You haven’t called me Mother in years.” Sounding as much like a little girl as she ever did.

  “Mmmm.” He was slightly disconcerted. “Well, that’s because I’m trying to help Pfensig to get you to act like one.”

  “Roger,” Sillsy said conspiratorially, “you can’t imagine what that man has done for me! I think . . . I think I’m getting ready to give up alcohol!”

  “Holy Moly.”

  Again that girlish smile. “He’s giving me his strength.”

  Ichabod came in to say that he had located Cowpey, who was now on his way home. If Roger was impatient or upset he was concealing it fairly well at the moment.

  “You don’t have a beer in the fridge, do you?” Roger asked.

  “Yes, of course, dear. Dark or light?”

  “One of each.”

  Sillsy went to find Franchesca. A moment later Crowley and his brother Cooper walked in.

  “Ah,” Roger said. “Great white hunters.”

  They had supposedly looked very much alike when they were young. Both were tall and fair but Crowley had grown florid and rotund, balding only slightly by the age of fifty-eight, while Cooper was bald, slender and professorial in manner. Crowley ran Adams Malties while Cooper, a doctor by profession, spent six months of each year in Vietnam and the other six hanging around the Public Library and various favorite places of his brother’s, like a black whorehouse in the city. It was Roger’s theory that his mother had been in love with Cooper for years, a theory based on the rather complicated fact of Sillsy’s confessing to him when he reached maturity that during the war years when both Crowley and Cooper had been overseas, she had been sleeping with Ichabod. Followed by Roger’s realization that his mother often confused the two dissimilar names and had once asked Roger if he didn’t think Cooper and Ichabod resembled each other.