Any Minute I Can Split (2 page)

The fact was that he was a teetotaler, his only addiction being to tea. One of his favorite stories was about his first visit to a restaurant in this country, when he had been served a cup of pale tea with the tea bag still in it and had bellowed at the waitress, “What's this filthy rag doin' in me tea?” Like his other stories, this one had been received with an uncomfortable silence. It wasn't that there was anything exactly wrong with the things he said, it was just that somehow words that
would have sounded perfectly all right on some lips sounded not quite clean on his.

The ruddiness of his cheeks, the loudness of his voice, the roll of his brogue—whatever it was that made his harmless anecdotes sound to them like dirty jokes—his initial reaction had been to become louder and heartier, as though he could break down their defenses so that when he subsided to his natural level of exuberance he would have become magically acceptable to them. Intimidated, he had failed to see that their defenses didn't control warmth but concealed the lack of it. And so, the cycle completed, his jovial offensive failing as it had been doomed to, he had given up and lapsed into a nearly permanent silence, taking on, in point of fact, the general aspect of that poor gray tea bag which had been his introduction to the culinary life style of twentieth-century America.

Maybe she would visit her father. She'd seen him only once since her mother's death—about a month after the funeral. He had taken her and Roger to Howard Johnson's for dinner. (Roger found her parents more tolerable than his own. His manner toward her mother had come as close to courtliness as any manner he'd ever had; to her father he was pleasant if condescending. Like one of the more benevolent uncles.) She'd been a little frightened before that last visit of how her father might be, but her fears had turned out to be groundless for he had undergone no visible change in that month, certainly no change comparable to the one after his forced retirement from the police force, when he had been in a deep and foggy depression for over a year. He had loved being a policeman even when he was pounding a beat and when they'd put him behind a station-house desk to make entries in his beautiful script each night he had loved it even more. He loved to write; even her mother had been unable to fault his penmanship. His fine Italian hand, she had called it, thus managing not to credit even that to his Irishness or his Catholic education.

It was her father who had flashed through Margaret's mind as she stood over the fallen begonia, being stared at by Roger and his old school ties. Nor was it the first time she had identified with him in this connection. She was her father's daughter, after all, and as far back as she could remember some of that tuna-head ambience had washed off on her. No one of her mother's family could imagine a child who, given the alternatives of speaking normally or picking up an Irish brogue, would choose the latter, while that was in fact what Margaret quite unconsciously had done. Nor was it easy for her aunts and uncles to see why a voice should be quite so loud, legs so long, a laugh so raucous, clothes on inside out so often, milk glasses knocked over so frequently, tables bumped into with such regularity, food chewed with such gusto as to give the unfortunate impression that pleasure was involved. Their children, her cousins, adored Margaret for reasons she could only understand much later on. For them her gusto had been the fresh breath blowing through lives which considering their wind-swept seashore ease were remarkably stale and dry. She thought up games that were enough fun to be well worth the trouble they got into for playing them. She made up ghost stories that held them in thrall. Until the boys began reaching their teens, she was the tallest of the cousins, and it was she who was called upon to retrieve kites from trees that no one else could get a foothold to. (Her cousins were even fascinated by her father; their parents' attitude had conveyed the sense of him as a curiosity without passing on the negative quality of their absorption.) When they visited Margaret (a cousin or two was occasionally permitted this treat but was seldom more than dropped at the front door) they were intrigued with something about the way Margaret lived, but Margaret could never understand just what that something was. Was it a strange quality to their possessions or simply their relative lack of them? Was it a special order to her life or the lack of order? Was it her
freedom or the lack of those kinds of freedom that came with money, of which most of their parents had managed to re-accumulate a reasonable amount? Most likely it had to do with the fact that she had been given a great deal of independence from the time she was quite young. With a definite sense of how things were to be done for a child of her particular (fallen) status, Margaret's parents might not have permitted her to roam the streets of Boston on her own as early as she had. With either money or energy, her mother might have sent a nanny or gone along herself. Since they had neither, Margaret had freedom. Her father, when he woke up in the evening to have breakfast and go to work, might sputter some about the dangers to a young girl on the streets of Boston, but he was usually asleep when she left the house and her mother didn't have the will to stop her.

She crossed the border into Massachusetts and began riding east toward Boston. He lived still at the seedy end of Beacon Street, far from every other Irish cop in Boston but within psychological spitting distance of Roxbury, the implicit reminder that he was something more than his wife's family thought him. The street looked the same. Of course. It was only that she in relation to the street was different. She parked the motorcycle in front of the wrought-iron front rail and walked laboriously up the front steps. A young girl answered the doorbell, well maybe not so young but with the smooth, surrealistically rosy cheeks and round near-plumpness one associated with young girls from the old sod a week before they got married. Margaret stared at her blankly. The girl stared at Margaret blankly.

“Who is it, Maggie?” Her father's voice called from inside, causing Margaret great confusion because he'd never called her Maggie before and besides, why would he be asking
her
. . . 

“I'm not cerrtain, Mrrr. McDonough,” the colleen purred gently. A gentle colleen named Maggie, her father had gotten to do for him. To do what for him?
He was as neat as a pin, cleaned up after himself constantly, and the three or four foods that he would eat he knew how to prepare for himself.

She stood paralyzed by hostility and confusion. She could not, would not explain herself to this stranger. This . . . could her father actually be screwing this girl? So soon? Cheeks so rosy, eyes so demure? How many months was it since her mother's death? Was it even half a year? No, not quite. It would be almost funny. Except that irony had its limits. Or should have. Some sort of statute of limitations to keep irony from spilling over into new graves. (Her mother, terrified of burial, had requested cremation; her father had disobeyed.)

She moved through the door; the girl drew back instinctively. She moved past the girl into the half-dark (as always) living room, where her father sat in his easy chair, reading the
Herald,
his feet up on the Ottoman, whose cover was newly embroidered.

Fill in the missing item in this picture.

Her father looked up and startled so hugely that the teacup in its little saucer on the drum table rattled. It was gratifying to see some tangible evidence of a guilty conscience; so little of what went on inside him was visible or had been visible in years. Buried alive, his emanations seldom reached them through the earth of his flesh. He had cried for a week when her mother died. “The poorrrr creaturrre, ahhhh, the pooorrr crreaturre,” was what he'd said the whole time, never moved by the necessity to question what beyond the lack of money had impoverished her, or why he had brushed off Margaret when on her visit to Boston the year before she had asked him if they had to store such an incredible inventory of old sleeping pills when her mother was constantly asking why she should continue to live? It was unthinkable to him, a lapsed but rabid Catholic, that his wife should commit suicide. But in this context, what did unthinkable mean?

Aside from that week his last manifestation of feeling had been upon hearing of the death of John F. Kennedy
and beyond that she could remember only small violent rages at the people upstairs for walking too hard and slamming doors. He had an obsession about slammed doors which Margaret had inherited, like so many other incomprehensible obsessions. When you thought about it, the genes were weighted against her on the matter of slammed doors since her mother was upset by
all
loud noises. She bit off one of her nails, a habit she always thought she'd kicked until she visited home.

“Is that you, then, Margaret?” her father said uncomfortably.

“Of course it's me,” she said. “Who did you think it was? Kate Smith?”

His eyes went to the girl who stood somewhere in back of Margaret, then returned to Margaret.

“What brings you to Boston?” he asked. Not willing to acknowledge any tie between them strong enough to have made him the sole reason for her visit. The way his wife's family had felt about him, he felt about her, that was the truth of it. She'd always made him uncomfortable. If the inhuman standards of behavior they had set were unfair to him, that didn't mean that his daughter shouldn't have naturally abided by them. From the beginning she'd been a disappointment to him, who'd assumed that Wasps were born toilet trained.

“I heard a rumor you had some kind of white-slave business going here, Dad,” she said.

From behind her there was a gasp. The ruddiness of her father's face increased a thousandfold in the space of a second.

“Curb your tongue, Margaret,” her father said.

Curb your tongue, curb your dog, curb your instincts, curb your humor, curb your appetite.
And don't slam the door!
But she was contrite in spite of herself.

“I'm sorry, Dad. You didn't give me a very warm welcome, you know, and your colleen didn't even want to let me into the house.”

“I'm sorry,” the girl whispered. “I didn't know.”

She nodded without turning around. His angry color subsided. She had succeeded in putting him on the defensive, perhaps because of his knowledge that given his own way he would just as leave the colleen hadn't let her in to witness his quickly-found contentment. He belched a deep, easy beefstewy-belch, covering his mouth so that while his body might be racked by it, no sound would disgrace him. The containment theory of digestion etiquette; what didn't actually leave the body could not be proved to have ever been there. Every morning for as far back as she could remember he had locked himself into the bathroom for half an hour and farted fireworks that reverberated spectacularly throughout the apartment, a fact of which he seemed blissfully unaware. But that was the only audible sign ever that all the tea bags and all the meat and bread and potatoes had not taken a one-way journey to the center of his being where they would forever rest in peace.

“Maggie,” he muttered, “this is Margaret.”

“I'm sure I'm pleased to meet you,” the girl said. Not actually curtsying.

“Did you know he had a daughter?” Margaret asked.

“Not living,” the girl said, then put a hand over her mouth and stared at Margaret aghast, a victim of that peasant stupidity that let people believe that saying something could make it retroactively true.

Margaret laughed.

“I mean,” the girl said lamely, “I don't know wherrrre I got that idea . . .”

“I'm having twins,” Margaret said, patting her stomach.

“Oh, how wonderrrful,” the girl said, clapping her hands, her eyes filling with the holy tears of other women's weddings and childbirths.

“Twins,” her father said.

She'd forgotten to tell him.

“You know me, Dad,” she said. “Anything for a laugh.”

“There are things you don't laugh about, Margaret,” her father said.

“Mmmmm.” Once she had asked him for a list of them but of course there was no paper long enough. That there were things you couldn't survive unless you joked about them was an idea utterly foreign to him, humor being linked as it was in his mind with drinking and the other vices.

She bit off another nail.

“I really think it's time you stopped biting your nails, Margaret,” her father said.

“You always did,” Margaret said.

Silence.

“Where's Roger?” her father asked.

“Home,” she said. “I just left him.”

“Left him!” Did her ears deceive her or was that an audible exclamation point? “What kind of craziness are ya tahhhking, Margaret?”

They'd thought she was lucky to get him, the bright white scion of a breakfast-cereal fortune, two years younger than she, a chain smoker who'd arrested lung cancer at the age of seventeen, painter and collagist whose greatest efforts now went into his titles (Madonna with Six Pack; Ivory Soap with Pubic Hair; Campbell's Soup Can from the Inside); still, they didn't know his stuff was dirty and he had a regular look about him that they liked, the look of a choirboy who will be arrested in ten years for multiple murders, and maybe that was what her father in particular had taken to, everything seemed to be safely inside. At least in the beginning. Even then he would pinch her hard or kick her in the shins under the table if they had an argument when her parents were around, coming attractions for his proclivity to hit below the belt. She'd found this strange in an objective way that amused her when she thought about it later on; all the things they saw about each other were strange or amusing and perhaps not entirely desirable and yet never before their marriage were they reasons to consider whether that
marriage should take place. Once you decided to get married there was a kind of impetus that carried you through without leaving room in your thoughts for questions of mistakes. What was she to say now to her father, who thought change was the only serious mistake that could be made in a life?