Any Minute I Can Split (13 page)

Carol, tears in her eyes, said, “You're both so wonderful. This is the first time I ever had a good mother image and a good father image going at the same time!”

To David that night, as she lay on her side nursing Rue, Margaret said, “How come you don't want to do anything in the school?”

“You don't need a reason for not doing something,” David said fiercely. “You need a reason for
doing
it.”

“Do you like Hannah?”

“Don't be dumb.”

“You don't like her.”

“Why should I?”

“You don't need a reason for liking someone,” she suggested tentatively. “You need a reason for disliking them.”

“Ha ha.”

“Is it because she's aggressive?” Prepared to give him a lengthy reasoned defense of aggression, a history of its suppression in women—most recently, herself.

“What does that mean?”

“Aggressive? You know what it means, David. Domineering.
Takeoverish.” Strange words for a defense, Margaret.

“You
don't like her, that's
your
problem.”

“I
do,”
Margaret protested. “I just can see why someone else might not.”

“Bullshit,” David said. “You're just afraid to say you don't like anybody. You think you'd get kicked out of here or something.”

It was so patently unfair and so true at the same time.

“I tend not to dislike many people,” she said. “I think it has to do with being an only child, you're lonely a lot of the time and you place more of a value on each person you meet.”

“You're not a child, you're a grownup,” David said. “That's just a lot of bullshit.”

H
ANNAH
told De Witt she had a couple of marvelous biology texts and teaching aids in the trailer that he might like to look at if he was going to do botany with the kids. He said he'd very much like to see them and after lunch they went back to the trailer together. Margaret, half an eye on the clock anyway because she was rising bread for the next day, noticed that they were there a long time. When he came back he had two books and a box of teaching cards.

“I really think I was doing Hannah an injustice,” he said.

“Mmmm,” Margaret replied, knowing she should be glad to hear him say this.

“There's a tendency, when you meet a woman like her, to be, well, frightened off. But it doesn't make sense because that whole strength thing is only a front. Underneath she's just as soft and frightened and needing as anyone else.”

“How could you tell?” Margaret asked, not bothering to conceal her jealousy from herself now.

De Witt laughed. “She told me. I mean, she admitted it.”

Now it's my turn to laugh.

“The funny thing,” De Witt mused, “is that I had an argument with Linda yesterday almost exactly about that.” Linda was his girlfriend in Brattleboro. “She said I couldn't stand it when a woman was independent and didn't need me. I guess she was right . . . She was very bitter, actually. As a matter of fact, we split up.”

“You and Linda?” Mixed feelings. Pleasure and the anticipation of pain.

He nodded. “She did it, actually. She said I was sapping her strength by forcing her to need me.”

“Everyone wants to be needed,” Margaret pointed out.

De Witt smiled, rumpled her hair. “Of course,” he said. Then, “Do you know that you're a very lovely girl—woman—Margaret? And I'm very fond of you?”

Pure pleasure.

B
UT
during the next couple of weeks he spent all his free time with Hannah. Talking, talking, talking, whenever you saw them they were talking animatedly together, or rather mostly Hannah was talking and De Witt was nodding, commenting. She looked very animated and beautiful. Her whole body moved when she spoke. Mira's initial cordiality toward Hannah disappeared to be replaced by a cold, formal appreciation for her efforts to get the school started.

D
E
W
ITT
, with a forged teaching license from Ohio, was able to get a Vermont license. Carol, who had a primary grades license from New York although she'd never taught, also had one. School got off to a fumbling start the week before Christmas. Carol asked if maybe they shouldn't wait until after Christmas as long as they'd waited this long but Hannah convinced her that Christmas was just another American consumer myth. De Witt said that he dug Christmas as a midwinter pagan rite and they compromised to the extent of killing two of the geese and having a royal feast with candles and a tree, but school had already begun.
Monday to Friday. Mornings, mostly, except that provisions were made for the kids to be on call in case they should be visited by some nosy bureaucrat. They were all a bit paranoid on the subject of being closed down by some petty cog of the bureaucracy, and kept expecting once they began, although they'd seldom worried before, to be surprised by hostile inspectors. They followed carefully the state prescriptions for bathrooms and kilowatts and each day someone was responsible for supervising the children in a thorough cleanup. (The supervisor usually ended up doing the cleaning rather than get into an authority trip with the kids.)

J
ORDAN
was away on a selling trip and for a while you always saw the three of them together, Carol, Hannah and De Witt, unless it was just Hannah and De Witt, but then De Witt and Hannah seemed to have had some kind of falling out because suddenly it was just Carol and Hannah. Margaret tried in various sly ways to get De Witt to talk about it, but the most he would say was that Hannah's trip was too heavy for him. He remained extremely polite and pleasant to Hannah but she began to be sharp with him and critical of his classes and the next thing they all knew, it had been decided by Daisy and Mario that they didn't really dig the way De Witt was approaching the botany class and wanted their materials back so they could do the work under their mother's supervision.

Margaret and David took silent walks together on the road that led through the farm and out a mile or so to the highway. The snow-whitened countryside was very beautiful and she found herself wishing she could identify more of the trees and shrubs, so once she brought along a paperback tree guide but David refused to be drawn into speculation over which leafless tree was which. She put away the book in the pocket of the old Mackinaw De Witt had loaned her. Aside from these walks, or brief outings with the twins, she stayed indoors. Gradually the twins stayed awake for a little
more of each day. She found it possible to just sit and watch them lying on their backs, looking at their swaddled toes or playing with their fingers, but if David saw her doing this he glowered and she felt guilty.

A
T
the beginning of February Margaret went into Brattleboro for the first time with De Witt on his weekly trip. The twins were a little more than three months old. The first thing she did after leaving De Witt was to weigh herself on a drugstore scale; she'd lost every pound of her pregnancy weight. She'd known all along she was losing a lot but without a scale or full-length mirror it had been difficult to say how much. In an orgy of self-congratulation she bought purple eye shadow, pink lipstick, three sweaters, two pairs of pants and a ski jacket so she could return De Witt's coat. (As soon as she'd left the store she took back the ski jacket, finding herself desolate at the thought of giving up De Witt's symbolic protection.) Also two flannel nightgowns and some long underwear. Having put all of which in the parked jeep, she bought a snowsuit and stuffed bear for each of the twins, some heavy blue wool to make a sweater for David, a mohair shawl for Butterscotch and for De Witt, on last-minute on-the-way-out-of-the-store impulse, an incredibly soft rust-suede tobacco pouch. Purchased while assuring herself that she would now of course have to buy something for Mira, which she somehow had failed to do before it was time to meet De Witt back at the truck. It wasn't much past four but it was already quite dark.

“De Witt,” she said as they drove out of town, “I'm embarrassed. I bought you something . . . not a big deal, I mean, I just felt like it, but the thing is I didn't get anything for . . . hardly anyone else . . . and now I won't have a chance and, oh God I sound like an idiot. It's just this little thing but all of a sudden it seems as if I can't . . .” She broke off helplessly.