Any Minute I Can Split by Judith Rossner Page B

the crate, gazed at it for a moment, turned back to David. Her expression was tragic. She seemed about to thank Margaret but then decided against it—after all, such a small gesture might prove to be another unwitting step toward damnation. Her body sagging with defeat, Butterscotch turned and left the room.
    Margaret watched David. If he felt any satisfaction at having destroyed the girl, his face didn’t show it; he looked about as emotionally involved as if he’d just ordered a BLT down. Roger never attempted to conceal his satisfaction after having put Margaret down insome cunning new way; his smile would become benign and expansive and his posture, as he moved around the house, briefly changed from caged beast to lord of the manor.
    â€œI wonder,” she said, “what Roger is doing now.”
    â€œRoger?” David repeated.
    â€œMy husband.”
    â€œWhere is he?” David asked.
    â€œAt home,” she said. “In the suburbs.” My husband’s name is Roger, we live in Realestatesville and he sells Rorschachs. Or vice versa. “He’s a film maker.”
    â€œYou miss him?”
    â€œI don’t know. We haven’t slept together since I got pregnant, practically.”
    â€œAre you allowed to?”
    Are you allowed to? By that Great Obstetrician in the Sky?
    She nodded. “There are men who like it better that way.” Remembering Howie Ard, the Pregnant Lady Freak she’d slept with once around her fourth month, who’d begged her to keep in touch.
    David took another lick.
    She’d thought about Howie for a long time, trying to decide whether she had reason to feel rejected at his nocturnal admission that he had no interest in seeing her after the baby was born. She’d thought of Howie before she thought of Roger, when the doctor told her she was having twins; Howie would go wild, was her thought.
    They’d met at a party given by old friends of Roger’s in a huge loft on Broome Street full of inflatable furniture and representational paintings which had repelled and upset Roger; when they were in school together this friend had been the most far-out of his painting friends, and now the guy had deteriorated into someone cranking out this traditional garbage. In Roger’s lexicon the word traditional was invariably followed by the word garbage. For him the only thing the past had to offer was money, a philosophically difficult situationfor Margaret, to whom tradition meant the house at the Cape and beach bottles and a fire burning all day in the hearth at the aunts’ and uncles’ houses on holidays. She and Roger had had one of their most bitter arguments when somewhere near the beginning of their marriage he’d insisted that what all the pleasant things represented by the cousins and the past really came down to was that the cousins had been richer than she. Margaret had refused to let it go by although she had let other far less reasonable arguments go by. It was unbearable to her to have the pleasure taken out of those particular memories and it was unbearable to him, a permanent thorn in his paw, that she should remember the past fondly. He claimed that he had parents who were no worse than most and a filthy rich childhood and if he hadn’t enjoyed being young, nobody could have. If she didn’t remember how miserable she’d been it was because she was a mass of repression. She’d asked if it wasn’t equally possible that he was repressing the times he’d had fun and he’d called her a dumb vapid cow and said he was going to buy her a block of salt for Christmas.
    Roger had never been addicted to the small amenities like introducing her to other people they met, and in the months of her pregnancy he seemed to have developed a specific resistance to letting anyone know they were related, so that she was pretty much on her own at parties unless someone paid attention to her, at which point