Any Minute I Can Split (6 page)

“Wow,” she said. “I hope you like pumpkin pie.”

He shrugged. She hung back as he started up the steps to the porch. He knocked and a moment later a skinny, black-haired woman with eyes like a Kaethe Kollwitz child opened the door.

David said, “Hi.”

The woman smiled dreamily.

“Is Mitchell here?” David asked.

The woman shook her head. “He went back to the
city a few weeks ago.” Her voice was musical but the music was from another world.

“Oh . . .” He took a bit of time to consider this. “Can I come in anyhow?” he finally asked.

“Do you have anyone with you?” Margaret could have sworn that the woman had looked directly at her a moment before.

“Her,” David said.

“Oh, dear, I don't know,” the woman said softly. “Ill have to . . . we don't really have that much room, we've agreed that . . . I'll have to check with the . . .” She disappeared from the door.

But it is dark,
Margaret thought.
And I am heavy with childs.
A sudden pitying image of herself trudging from inn to inn looking for a bundle of hay. She'd needed to go to the bathroom for some time and now she felt a terrible cramp in her stomach at the thought of having to keep going. The woman returned with a man. A book-jacket kind of man, very slender with long, straight black hair, glasses and a pipe.

“Here they are, De Witt,” the woman said.

He nodded gravely, raised his hand. “Welcome.”

She felt another cramp in her stomach and decided to climb the stairs. Surely they would let her use their precious communal bathroom. With some difficulty, the cramps getting worse, she climbed the steps to the porch. Saw, without serious interest, that they were as stunned as her father had been at the first full sight of her.

De Witt said, “Welcome.”

“Please,” she said, “may I use your bathroom?”

“Of course,” he said calmly. “Please come in. Both of you. Come in.” They stepped back to allow her to pass through. David followed. She was vaguely aware of people in the rooms to the left and right of the hallway but was much too intent on getting to the bathroom to pay attention to them. De Witt pointed to the stairs and laboriously she climbed them, clutching at the rail with one hand and her stomach with the other. But she
failed to relieve her cramps in the bathroom, although an enormous amount of liquid burst from her, and when she left it, she felt she couldn't manage to get back down the stairs. Blindly, instinctively, she headed for the nearest room and groped her way to a bed, panting with exertion. She stretched out with relief but was immediately seized with another wave of cramps. And then another. Her body was soaked with sweat and the tablecloth clung to her all over. She plucked it away from her arms and breasts, then her stomach, and was reaching to pull to pull it up from her legs when another huge cramp seized her, convulsing her whole body into helplessness, wrenching out of her a scream that was expression of nearly unutterable pleasure and nearly unbearable pain. Her body relaxed. With some difficulty, aware of a commotion on the staircase, she reached out and found a table light, which she switched on. Propping herself up on her elbows, she lifted the bottom of the tablecloth. Lying between her legs, swathed in a little blood and a great deal of some moist filmy substance, framed by excrement, with a head of dark wet hair and an umbilical cord the size of a transatlantic cable still leading to somewhere inside her, was Margaret's first child, a girl.

A voice said, “Oh, my God!”

With enormous difficulty she thrust herself to a sitting position and picked up her child, who immediately began to cry. Gratefully she felt strong hands behind her, propping up her back, heard De Witt's calm mellifluous voice giving orders . . . towels from the kitchen, newspapers . . . sterilize a pair of scissors . . . boil some rags, too . . . lots of newspaper . . . a mop, pillow . . . Margaret tried to bring the baby to her breasts but the cord wasn't long enough and so she let it lie on her stomach instead, its head on its side. It cried for a moment longer, a strange noise, at once furious and subdued, like a performance at the Fillmore with the amplifying equipment turned off. There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room. Still propping her up,
De Witt stuffed more pillows in back of her, then withdrew. The baby stopped crying. Silence, overwhelming in its echoes. Then the first new spasms came and the baby began to cry.

“The scissors'll be here soon,” De Witt said. “I'll tie the cord as soon as the placenta's born.”

“What about the other one?” Margaret asked, holding the baby on her heaving stomach, stroking its wet downy head.

“Other one?” De Witt repeated.

“Didn't David tell you it's twins?” she asked through the contractions.

“David and I didn't get to any of this,” De Witt said, smiling broadly.

She smiled back but the smile was cut short by another contraction. Breathing became difficult; her fever, which had subsided, went up again and she began panting. Someone beside the baby was crying, a woman or a girl, but Margaret couldn't take the trouble to find out who it was.

“Someone help her hold on to the baby,” De Witt ordered. “Get the dirty blanket out from under her.” The calm of his voice was a miracle in itself. “Rip it if you have to, but get rid of all that crap and get down some newspaper.” Somehow it was done. Someone put a white cloth over the baby on her stomach. “You hold on to that one,” De Witt said, “and I'll get the other one when it comes out.” The height of schizophrenia, this combined feeling of supernatural power and utter helplessness. She could do anything but what could she have done without him? A moment or so later one huge convulsion crowned the head of her second child, the rest of whom came out into De Witt's waiting hands with very little labor, wet but without a trace of blood, soundly asleep, still in the middle of the original wet dream, trailing her own thick, wet umbilical rope, another girl. Kneeling beside the bed so as not to stretch the connection between them, De Witt held the new baby upside down and spanked her bottom. She cried
and he turned her back upright, holding her against his sheet-covered chest. She stopped crying immediately. The placenta birthed, plopping down between Margaret's thighs like a battle-scarred jellyfish. Someone said they should fry it and eat it but De Witt said that while Mira could live with the fact that most of them were meat-eaters, he thought that cooked human placenta would really freak her out, and even in her current condition Margaret found a second to be grateful to Mira, whoever she was, for being a vegetarian. He wrapped the second baby, who had no real hair yet, only a light down on her head, and handed her to someone kneeling beside him, then cut the cord from the second baby and covered the spot with a piece of wet cloth someone handed him. On Margaret's stomach, still crying, the first baby was turned over and her cord cut and covered. Margaret lifted it up to her breast then De Witt laid the other one on her other breast. The first one, still crying, flailed her arms frantically and in so doing scratched the cheek of the second one, leaving a surprising red mark on it.

“Oh, dear!” said the musical voice of the woman from the front door. Mira, maybe.

“They scratch themselves sometimes,” De Witt said tranquilly. “It's nothing. Someone get me a manicuring scissors.”

Margaret smiled but she was upset by the mark. The only thing that prevented her from being more upset about it was her tiredness and the continual crying of the first baby.

“Maybe I can nurse her,” she said to De Witt.

“There won't be anything there yet,” he said. “But see what she does.”

“Do you believe in fate?” Margaret asked worshipfully.

“I believe in myself,” he said firmly.

“Well I believe in you, too,” she said, “but that's not what I'm talking about. What if I'd landed someplace else?”

“Most of the farms have someone who can deliver a baby,” De Witt said.

“I can't believe they're like you,” she said.

“Better tend to this one,” De Witt said.

He held the sleeping baby while she brought the crying one to her nipple, squeezing the nipple and letting it brush the baby's lips. Nothing came out, but the baby's mouth immediately opened around the nipple and firmly bit it. The crying stopped. The nipple stayed in the baby's mouth and De Witt told her that some were born knowing how to suck while others took time to learn. She held out her arm for the other baby, who slept on her breast without once opening her eyes.

S
HE
named the girls Rosemary and Rue, in reverse order of birth, and someone said that plant names were so beautiful. Margaret didn't bother to say that Rosemary wasn't after a plant but after her favorite cousin because then she would have had to explain Rue. De Witt had a table brought into the already cramped room, which the previous occupants had insisted upon turning over to Margaret, and he improvised a double cradle by nailing two crates to the top of it, then lining them with hay and sheets. Rosemary slept through the night but Rue was up so much that Margaret simply kept her in the bed, letting the baby suck her breast, now oozing some watery stuff that wasn't milk but which Rue seemed to like, anyway. By early the next morning the angry line on Rosemary's cheek had nearly disappeared.

M
ARGARET
gave De Witt a check for two hundred dollars to cover some of their expenses and to buy for her some of the things she needed from town, asking him also to find out if David needed anything. He would also send a telegram to Roger for her, saying that the girls had been born and she was staying at the farm for a while. Mira went with De Witt. Mira was De Witt's wife. The woman at the door. Margaret was
profoundly disconcerted by Mira although she wasn't sure why. Perhaps it was the contrast between the unchanging, haunted eyes and the serene smiling mouth. (Roger's mother was like that, her eyes never changed no matter what the rest of her face was doing, although the basic expression in that case was different; however weak, frightened or agonized Roger's mother might become, her eyes were always
watchful.
) Perhaps it was the seductive voice combined with the cropped hair and the convent-like, floor-length, osnaburg smock. Or maybe it was just her manner, a Mother Superior already on her way to the better place. She called Margaret
dear.
She called everybody dear, including De Witt, something in her manner suggesting that she was Maria Montessori and the rest of the world was her Italian slum. What had a man like De Witt seen in her?

“Yes, of course,” Mira said, glancing over De Witt's shoulder at Margaret's list.

When they'd left, she lay in bed, tired but comfortable. She had deflated substantially—whatever the twins had weighed, she must have lost another twenty or thirty pounds of water and other stuff so that she again looked like a human being, albeit a soft, fat and somewhat asexual one. Her breasts were swelling and hardening with the new milk, or colostrum, or whatever, and since the twins' appetites were not yet keeping pace with the supply, Margaret frequently overflowed onto the sheet, which by afternoon had acquired a mildly sour smell which she actually found pleasant but which she suspected other people would not.

David came in to see her, a little shyer than he'd been that first time she found him in her lap.

“Hi,” he said with that endearing grin he had that was really half a grimace and half a question mark. “That was great timing.”

She smiled.

“I mean it,” he said. “They wouldn't have let us in. They didn't mean to take any more people, they don't have that much space now.”

“Good,” she said. I'm glad it worked out.”

He wandered aimlessly around the little room, seeming to look at nearly everything but the twins—Rosemary asleep in her crate, Rue asleep on Margaret's breast after a feeding.

“Did you see the babies?” she asked.