Any Minute I Can Split (4 page)

“How long have you been on the road?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I dunno. All summer. Maybe longer.”

“Don't you have to get back to school or anything?”

He shook his head. Nobody had to explain any more why he didn't go to school. It had cost her nearly a year of her life explaining in the fifties why she'd dropped out of her Sarah Lawrence scholarship and gone to work as a waitress in New York, but a few years later everyone had a whole new vocabulary to explain the boredom that had weighed on her like a physical presence, turning the very air of Bronxville into stone.

“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.

D
AVID
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 things 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.”