Free Any Minute I Can Split by Judith Rossner

too big or too small or just wrong, and if you weren’t a . . . but De Witt was in the room, prying the crates off the table and replacing them with padded wicker laundry baskets . . . and Margaret was afraid to anger him by speaking sharply to his wife. Maybe she wouldn’t have done it anyway. Something in the other woman there was that made it inappropriate to even discuss such matters as infant clothing with her, much less get nasty over it.
    Also, Margaret was tired. It was a pleasant tiredness because here in the midst of these people, most of them friendly and solicitous, there was nothing she had to do but take care of her babies’ immediate needs and that required very little energy. So her tiredness, which inother circumstances might have left her angry and upset, left her instead still and calm, elevating her anger to a philosophical level. A tentative one. It was a When I Come Down from this Mother-Birth-Tired Trip I think 111 Hate You kind of anger, almost pleasant to entertain. How could De Witt have married this creature? True, Mira wasn’t ugly. When Margaret catalogued her features—a high, blank forehead, stupidly huge, dark eyes, a long straight nose, thick lips, all set in a heart-shaped face that was just about as suitable as a Valentine for looking at three hundred and sixty-five days a year—having finished this list, she had to admit that if one did away with the derisive adjectives, a beautiful woman was being described. What was the thing in Mira’s face that negated the rest of it? Margaret wasn’t normally reluctant to grant other women their good looks. Nor did she think it was an automatic balance to her instant worshipful love for De Witt, because it had begun when Mira appeared in the doorway, pretending to see only David. How could De Witt, she started to ask herself again, but stopped, because the question implied some knowledge of De Witt that made him incompatible with Mira, yet she really knew nothing about either of them. She sensed about Mira that the woman’s serene surface could easily crack to reveal hysteria just beneath; she knew about De Witt only that he had a knowledge of childbirth and retained, to understate the case, an impeccable calm in emergencies.
    â€œDe Witt?” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
    â€œMmm,” De Witt said.
    But what could she safely ask him? To some extent the farm represented a new life for anyone who came to it, and when people began a new life it was impolitic to ask what they’d done in the old one.
    â€œHave you ever delivered a baby before?” she finally settled upon.
    â€œNo,” he said. “I’ve wanted to but the chance hadn’t arisen.”
    â€œHow long have you been here?”
    â€œTwo years.”
    â€œHave the others been here just as long?” Margaret asked him.
    â€œNot most of them,” De Witt said. “Carol and Leonard were friends of ours and I wrote to them when I’d finished getting the place to a point where it could be occupied, and they came a while later, and then Paul and Starr were friends of theirs, and then I happened to hear from Dolores, who was a close friend from years ago . . . we were married for a brief time, actually . . . and she was looking for a place and came up toward the end of that first winter. The kids we picked up all at once, not Butterscotch, she just wandered in one day, but the others . . . they’re in Canada now but they’ll be back in a few weeks. Anyway, they were part of a political house up near the Canadian border and while the six of them were away, all the others got busted for possession, and one of them was a friend of a friend of Starr’s and asked if we could take them in. That was last spring. They worked with us through the summer but they got . . . restless before harvest and took off. We’ll put them to work when they