Any Minute I Can Split Read online

  “My family has a house there,” she said. “I’m on my way there now. You can come along, if you feel like it.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve only got seventy-two cents.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “But we better sleep for another hour or two. It’s a little early to buzz into Sandwich.”

  “My name is David,” he said. She told him hers and was about to add that she was pregnant with twins but changed her mind. David was watching her expectantly and it was finally borne upon her that he was waiting for her to adopt her previous position so that he could resume his. Thinking that she was too numb for it to matter, anyway, she did so; immediately, wordlessly, he took his place in what, for want of a more specific way to describe something that was presumed to sometimes exist, would have to be called her lap.

  A combination of discomfort and a mild feeling of being aroused prevented her from going back to sleep, as David did immediately, so she amused herself with mental pictures of the various ways, all of them ludicrous, that he could actually get into her if he ever chose to try, and then, when those pictures ran out, by imagining conversations between the twins (whom she thought of variously as Amos and Andy, Gargantua and Pantagruel and Trick ’n Treat) during such a sexual congress, beginning with “Hey, what’s goin’ on here, Kingfish?” and ending with the twins’ various attempts to define the identity of the intruder through the elastic barrier walls of the amniotic sac.

  Finally David woke up and they started out, he on the motorcycle because her ass was in far worse condition than her feet, she trudging after him, assuring him when he stopped every few hundred yards that she wasn’t ready to ride yet. Thoughts of Roger filled her mind, mingled with thoughts of this strange boy, so comfortable in her lap, so strange to the rest of her. Was he like other kids? How different were she and Roger from these kids? Was there really some change, deep as genes, that occurred in children born after Hiroshima, or was that just some bit of horseshit the liberal weeklies had picked up and would drop just when they had her convinced? The only thing that gave the idea currency was the fact that the kids themselves, the papers they put out and so on, seldom if ever mentioned it. Did David ever think about the bomb and if not, was it only because he was born knowing about it and so took it for granted? Or maybe because he never thought about anything? But if he never thought about anything, was it because of the bomb? Did Trick ’n Treat know about the bomb? If not, when would they find out? If they did, how could she possibly raise them? She, who didn’t for a minute believe with her brain that the world would last another twenty years, yet persisted in planting trees that wouldn’t come into full flower for nearly that long, in knitting sweaters because handmade sweaters lasted forever, in doing, in short, all those things that people didn’t do who really believed in the end of the world? How with a straight face did you teach your kid the charm of manners, the virtues of abstention, the reconciliation to loss? Manners were symbols and there wasn’t time for symbols any more; abstention might turn out in this century to be the virtue of the frigid and foolish; and loss, well, loss might be all there was left. Roger pointed out that these were excellent reasons not to have children; she agreed that this was so and stopped taking her pills, from which time she had become fond of referring to herself as an unintegrated personality.

  She had expected Roger to be angry with her for being pregnant but all he’d said was, “Fine, fine, Keep you off the streets.” By which it turned out he’d meant that it would keep her out of his way, since he would be in the streets more than ever, it being his notion that he had discharged, so to speak, any obligation he had to her in the way of friendship by creating some live company for her for the next few years. Roger, who’d thought he wanted another wife and should’ve just rented an orgone box.

  DAVID parked the cycle in the lot next to the house. The key turned easily in the lock; the house was vacant but not stale, messy but not terribly messy, just enough to tell her that it was the younger cousins who’d been there last. Even the cousins were better here than at home, their training having taken better here simply because they couldn’t be barred from their own homes, while in this house Great-Aunt Margaret reigned. Still, there were signs that it hadn’t been Aunt Margaret who closed up the house. Dust on the beach bottles, sand on the floor, clamshells full of butts so tiny as to suggest some instant biological compensation by which everyone under twenty-one had been born with asbestos lips. Automatically she collected the fullest shells and brought them into the kitchen. When she came back she found David sitting in Great-Aunt Sabina’s needlepoint-seat rocker, on which she herself had been sitting when Roger suggested that the weather being what it was, they ought to drive down to Virginia and get married.

  “I never heard you say anything good about marriage,” she’d pointed out. Nothing that suggested that his first marriage had been anything more than a bad joke. Nevertheless she’d lost track of the number of pink stitches she’d counted in the rose on the padded arm.

  “Mmm,” he’d replied. “Well you met me just after one. This is before.”

  And she’d gone with him. Why? She no more knew than she knew why she’d gone to bed with practically every man or boy who ever asked her, except that it usually seemed the easiest and pleasantest thing to do. So much easier than saying no. He was the first to ask her to marry, although she’d had no shortage of boyfriends in those prehistoric days when only Antioch and a few, tiny liberal arts colleges had a decent percentage of girls who put out at random. Actually, far from thinking of sex as a concession, she was always pleasantly surprised when someone wanted to get into her, having grown up with an image of herself as a provider of fun and games, as opposed to the more sensual forms of pleasure.

  “I was sitting in that chair when my husband proposed to me,” she told David.

  “Where was he sitting?” David asked.

  Startled, she asked what difference it made.

  He shrugged. “What difference does it make where you were?”

  “None,” she had to admit. “I just . . . it’s this house. It makes me think of things like that. Do you have a place like that, that sets you off on childhood memories and stuff?”

  “I don’t remember anything past last year,” he said calmly.

  Horrified, never doubting that what he said was true, she asked, “How about your parents?”

  He said, “I saw them a few months ago.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I don’t remember everything . . . but there are certain things. Certain places and times. This house has been in my mother’s family—I guess I should say they’ve been in it—for nearly a hundred years. Those bottles . . .” lined up on the window sills, culled from the ocean, their sheen clouded by sand and water, many with ancient brand names still visible, different names becoming quaint with succeeding generations, “they were collected on the beach by my mother when she was a child, and my aunts and uncles, and my great-aunts and great-uncles and their parents. When I’m in this house I have a physical sense of history. Like being in a time tunnel.”

  He couldn’t have cared less.

  “My mother killed herself this past spring,” she said. That grabbed him just a little. “And this summer I couldn’t make myself come here. I didn’t even know if I’d make it now. Maybe I wouldn’t’ve if . . .”

  “How’d she kill herself?” he asked with interest.

  “Pills,” Margaret said. “Hundreds of pills.”

  “Oh.” Letdown. “The way you said kill, I thought maybe she did something violent.”

  Irritated, she started to tell him that the word kill didn’t necessarily . . . then she stopped. Reminded herself that if things he said bothered her it wasn’t because he meant them to but because he was at worst indifferent, at best, unknowing. Unlike Roger, who in a mood of yawning indifference toward her could still come up with the one remark most certain to drive her screaming out of her skin, this boy was not tuned to her or her skin or the thin
gs that could separate them.

  “My father,” she told David, “said she put herself to sleep, but I thought of that as a cop-out.” A cop’s out. “I figured it was that he couldn’t face what she really did because he’s a Catholic.”

  “But that’s what she really did do, isn’t it?” he demanded.

  “I guess so. As a matter of fact, that was a very important part of it. She had a thing about sleep, she was crazy for sleep, she had the most terrible insomnia I’ve ever—”

  He stood up abruptly. “Don’t talk about insomnia.”

  “All right.”

  He walked around the living room, stopped to look through the window at the beach and the ocean.

  “Is there anything to eat around here?”

  “There must be,” she said, and on the kitchen shelves she found chowder crackers, S. S. Pierce tea bags, S. S. Pierce marmalade, several cans of S. S. Pierce soups left from the cases Great-Aunt Margaret would have stocked at the beginning of the season, a few cans of S. S. Pierce fruits. After dropping out of Sarah Lawrence she’d taken an apartment on the Lower East Side of New York where her first Jewish friend had explained the meaning of kosher after she’d seen her hundredth delicatessen sign and immediately she’d nodded with recognition: S. S. Pierce. No one in her family had ever known what food was supposed to taste like and food had been her major discovery in those early months of perpetual excitement and wonder. Garlic, this incredible bud she’d first thought of as a fruit, so rich as to change the taste of anything it touched. Herbs and spices. At home there’d been salt, an occasional dash of pepper, parsley to decorate fish dinners and sage for the turkey stuffing at Thanksgiving, one little box of sage per lifetime. In New York she discovered basil and oregano and made tomato sauces so thick with them as to turn brown without meat. She found rosemary and used half a bottle to coat her first leg of lamb, along with garlic and a bit of flour, salt and pepper, the result being a thick and pungent crust that her roommate found inedible but she herself adored and ate between slices of bread the next day. She discovered chives and mangoes, avocadoes, Chinese cabbage and custard apples, none of them put up by S. S. Pierce, and came to know that all bread that wasn’t white bread was not necessarily Italian bread. (Her father hated Italian food, in which he included Italian bread; none of it was allowed in the house.) She ground her own coffee beans and waited while an old man ground the cashews that would ruin her for commercial peanut butter forever. In restaurants she ordered tripe and sweetbreads and kashe varnishkes; after having kidneys in a French restaurant she lost a new boyfriend by attempting to duplicate them at home but ignorantly buying beef kidneys instead of lamb or veal.

  She heated up two cans of chowder and served them to David with crackers. He didn’t comment but she told him the store would be open in an hour or so and then she could get something else. As a matter of fact, if they were going to stay at the house for a while she might as well go to a real supermarket and stock up. He nodded.

  “Do you want to stay for a while?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to take you for granted.” She smiled. “I mean, I don’t want you to feel as if you can’t take off if you feel like being alone or something.”

  “I don’t like being alone,” he said.

  Why hadn’t she been prepared for it, this simple admission of dependency? When she was his age saying you were lonely had been confessing to a social disease that might be contagious.

  “Have you been alone all this—during all the time you’ve been on the road?”

  “Most of it.”

  “I could never stand being alone until I got pregnant,” she said.

  “Pregnant?” he repeated.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m pregnant now. Very pregnant. Can’t you tell?”

  “I thought you were just fat,” David said.

  “Well I am fat,” she said. “But I’m not just fat. I’m going to have twins in a few weeks.”

  “Aren’t you too old for that?” David asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not even thirty. I just look old because I’m fat.” For this she had left Roger. The same old birdshit dropped from a different tree.

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “At home.”

  “You separated?”

  “Well, we don’t exactly seem to be together.”

  “You going back before you have your babies?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet. I only left on impulse, a few days ago. I got mad and I got out on the bike and left.”

  “Did you ever think about going to a commune?” David asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “I think it’s one of those things everyone thinks about nowadays.”

  “Someone told me about one in Vermont,” he said. “I was thinking of heading up there . . . when I ran into you.”

  Why did he make her feel defensive? She was sure it Wasn’t anything he was doing on purpose. He’d been heading out on the Cape when they met, not inland.

  “You can still go,” she pointed out. And then, not wanting him to feel she was chasing him away, “I’ll go with you, if you want me to.”

  “You want to?” he asked, but of course she hadn’t thought about that yet, she’d only been responding to his need.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess so. I mean, why not? If I don’t go home I have to go someplace else. Do you think they take babies at that commune?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not everyone likes having babies around.”

  “At the communes they’re supposed to love everyone,” David said. “That’s the whole thing with the communes.”

  “Have you ever been to one?” she asked. “While you were on the road?”

  He shook his head. “A few times I almost did,” he said. “But then I didn’t feel like it.”

  Why not? For her the idea actually had enormous appeal. She didn’t want to go back to Roger, yet. Couldn’t go back. Couldn’t face him in this condition. If it was true that Roger had a natural mean streak a yard wide and very purple, it was also true that her very appearance was an incitement to riot, a monstrous joke on him as well as herself, her visible willingness to be a moving target. A statement of need constantly filled and never fulfilled. Being fat was like being suicidal, there was that element of reproach that made people uncomfortable. And when Roger was uncomfortable he was nasty. Furthermore, it was a strange fact that while Roger’s indifference might arouse her sarcasm, on any occasion when Roger was outright angry or viciously critical of her, she became paralyzed. Stopped speechless. As though magnetic force had pulled together their two complementary views of her and in the process, locked her tongue between. No, she wouldn’t face Roger again until she loved herself so much that his view of her had become irrelevant.

  “But do they have Blue Cross?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was kidding. I guess we’d have to get a car, it’s hard to see how we’d make it with the bike.”

  “What, do you have a lot of money?” David asked.

  “No, I’ve only got about forty dollars, but I can cash a check up here easily. Everyone knows my family. And I’ll trade in the bike. We should be able to get some kind of jalopy, and I’ve got plenty of credit cards for gas and stuff.”

  Aside from his allowance, Roger’s family paid any large bills forwarded to them. They hadn’t done so until he’d appeared at their home in Ardmore with his second reasonable choice for a wife. A few years earlier they might have entertained a less kindly view of a Sarah Lawrence dropout with a Roman Catholic cop for a father, but two years before that Roger had without prior notice brought home his new first wife, a colored dancer, and that single act had expanded their awareness of the possibilities to the point of making anything else he might do for the rest of his life relatively acceptable to them. Roger
’s wife had left him after only a year, her ego, though Roger claimed it had the size and strength of a California redwood, apparently unable to take the outrageous verbal slings and arrows that were the daily fortune of anyone living with him. His family had readily agreed to pay her alimony, and a couple of years later Roger had served up Margaret and ever since, as he was fond of saying, the checks had flowed smoothly from checkbook square.

  Would Roger send her money now if she asked for it? That would be like becoming a remittance man’s remittance man. Roger’s father liked her, flirted with her outrageously as a matter of fact, but she wouldn’t like to ask him directly for money, would never do it unless the children’s needs were involved. It had taken her quite a while to get adjusted to the idea that they were supported by Roger’s parents; he’d complained of her lack of sophistication in this respect, pointing out that only people with no family money were supposed to be possessed of such theoretical qualms. But always until her pregnancy she’d made it a point to keep some kind of job, full time, part time, producing little dresses to be sold in Village boutiques, producing letters with carbons, food for hungry people (when she met Roger she’d been working in a Jewish dairy restaurant on Second Avenue; he had just abandoned sculpture for film making and was doing a documentary on an old people’s day center upstairs from the restaurant), producing change from cash registers, her need to produce being laughed at by Roger, who subsequent to their marriage spent a year producing intestinal-looking collages of such a size and hideousness as to create an emotional ordeal for anyone who had to enter a room containing one of them. He filled their bedroom walls with them except that it wasn’t just the walls because at points they were six inches deep, and when the walls were covered he suspended one from the ceiling over their bed so that whatever her eyes might light upon, if she happened to open them for a moment while they were making love, she became convulsed at the sight of some acid-green ruptured appendix, Day-Glow headcheese or illuminated testicle descending, which convulsions, Roger took pains to tell her, constituted a singular improvement over her normal passive-reclining style of love-making.