Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  A few minutes later, a woman alighted from a taxi. She was maybe Maggie's age, very well dressed and all by herself. The picketers seemed to feel they had to make up for past defeats. They circled her; they had so much to say that it came to Maggie's ears as a garble of bee sounds. They pressed pamphlets on her. The largest of the women put an arm around her shoulders. The patient, if that was what she was, cried, "Let go of me!" and jabbed an elbow into the picketer's rib cage. Then she was gone too. The picketer bent over-in pain, Maggie thought at first, but she was merely lifting one of the children. They returned to their original positions. In this heat, they moved so slowly that their indignation looked striven-for and counterfeit.

  Maggie rooted through her purse for a piece of paper to fan herself with. She would have liked to get out of the car, but then where would she stand? Alongside the picketers?

  Footsteps approached, a double set, and she glanced up to see Fiona and a slightly older girl, who must have been her sister.

  She had worried she wouldn't recognize Fiona, having caught sight of her only the once. But she knew her right off-the long fair hair, the pale face with nothing yet written upon it. She wore jeans and a bright, shrimp-pink T-shirt. As it happened, Maggie had a prejudice against shrimp pink. She thought it was lower-class. (Oh, how strange it was to remember now that she had once viewed Fiona as lower-class! She had imagined there was something cheap and gimcrack about her; she had mistrusted the bland pallor of her face, and she had suspected that her sister's too-heavy makeup concealed the same unhealthy complexion. Pure narrow-mindedness! Maggie could admit that now, having come to see Fiona's good points.) At any rate, she got out of the car. She walked over to them and said, "Fiona?" The sister murmured, "Told you they'd try something." She must have thought Maggie was a picketer. And Fiona walked on, eyelids lowered so they were two white crescents.

  "Fiona, I'm Jesse's mother," Maggie said.

  Fiona slowed and looked at her. The sister came to a stop.

  "I won't interfere if you're certain you know what you're doing," Maggie said, "but, Fiona, have you considered every angle?" "Not all that many to consider," the sister said bluntly. "She's seventeen years old." Fiona allowed herself to be led away then, still gazing at Maggie over her shoulder.

  "Have you talked about it with Jesse?" Maggie asked. She ran after them. "Jesse wants this baby! He told me so." The sister called back, "Is he going to bear it? Is he going to walk it at night and change its diapers?" "Yes, he is!" Maggie said. "Well, not bear it, of course ..." They had reached the picketers by now. A woman held out one of the pamphlets. On the front was a color photo of an unborn baby who seemed a good deal past the em- bryo stage, in fact almost ready to be delivered. Fiona shrank away. "Leave her alone," Maggie told the woman. She said, "Fiona, Jesse really cares about you. You have to believe me." "I have seen enough of Jesse Moran to last me a lifetime," the sister said. She shoved past a fat woman with two toddlers and an infant in a sling.

  "You're just saying that because you have- him cast in this certain role," Maggie told her, "this rock-band member who got your little sister pregnant. But it's not so simple! It's not so cut-and-dried! He bought a Dr. Spock book-did he mention that, Fiona? He's already researched pacifiers and he thinks you ought to breastfeed." The fat woman said to Fiona, ' 'All the angels in heaven are crying over you." "Listen," Maggie told the woman. "Just because you've got too many children is no reason to wish the same trouble on other people." "The angels call it murder," the woman said.

  Fiona flinched. Maggie said, "Can't you see you're upsetting her?" They had reached the door of the clinic now, but the dapper little man was barring their way. "Get out of here," Maggie told him. "Fiona! Just think it over! That's all I ask of you." The man held his ground, which gave Fiona time to turn to Maggie. She looked a little teary. "Jesse doesn't care," she said.

  "Of course he cares!" "He says to me, 'Don't worry, Fiona, I won't let you down.' Like I am some kind of obligation! Some chari--table cause!" "He didn't mean it that way. You're misreading him. He honestly wants to marry you." "And live on what money?" the sister asked. She had a braying, unpleasant voice, much deeper than Fiona's. "He doesn't even have a decent-paying job." "He's getting one! Computers! Opportunity for advancement!" Maggie said. She was forced to speak so telegraphically because Fiona's sister had somehow cleared the door of picketers and was tugging it open. A woman held a postcard in front of Fiona's face: the curly-haired baby again. Maggie batted it aside. "At least come home with me so you and Jesse can talk it over," she told Fiona. "That won't commit you to anything." Fiona hesitated. Her sister said, "For God's sake, Fiona," but Maggie seized her advantage. She took Fiona by the wrist and led her back through the crowd, keeping up a steady stream of encouragement. "He says he's building a cradle; he's already got the plans. It's enough to break your heart. Leave her alone, dammit! Do I have to call the police? Who gave you the right to pester us?" "Who gave her the right to murder her baby?" a woman called.

  "She has every right in the world! Fiona, this is a natural-born caretaker we're talking about here. You should have seen him during the Hong Kong flu." "The what?" "Or Bangkok, or Sing Sing, or one of those flus . . . Anyway, it's nothing to do with charity. He wants this baby more than anything." Fiona peered into her face. She said, "And he's building a ... ?" "He's building a cradle. A beautiful one, with a hood," Maggie said. If it turned out not to have a hood she could always say she had been mistaken.

  Fiona's sister scurried alongside them, her heels clicking busily. She said, "Fiona, if you don't get back in there this instant I am washing my hands of this whole affair, I tell you. Fiona, they have scheduled you!" And the picketers milled uncertainly a few feet behind. Fiona's wrist was smooth and impossibly thin, like a stalk of bamboo. Maggie released it, reluctantly, in order to open the car door. "Climb in," she said. "Buzz off," she told the picketers. And to the sister she said, "Nice meeting you." The picketers dropped back. One said, "Now look, uh . . ." "We have constitutional permission to do this, I'll have you know," Maggie said. The woman looked confused.

  "I hunt up a clinic," Fiona's sister said, "I take her to be tested. I make the appointment, I sacrifice a perfectly good day off when I could have gone to Ocean City with my boyfriend-" "You could still do that," Maggie said, checking her watch.

  She hurried around to the driver's side, fearful that Fiona would try to escape, but when she got in, Fiona was sitting there limply with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. Her sister bent in through the open window. "Fiona, just tell me this much," she said. "If Jesse Moran was so hot for this baby, how come it wasn't him who came down here to fetch you?" Fiona raised her lids and looked over at Maggie. "Well, he tried," Maggie told her. "He's been trying for days, you know he has, but somehow you're always at cross-purposes." Fiona closed her eyes again. Maggie started the car and drove off.

  The strange part was that having won-at least temporarily-she didn't feel a bit triumphant. Just worn out. And slightly confused, to tell the truth. How was it things had ended up this way, when all along she'd been telling Jesse he was nowhere near old enough? Oh, Lord. What had she gone and done? She glanced secretly at Fiona. Fiona's skin seemed slick, almost glazed. "Are you feeling ill?" Maggie asked her.

  "I believe I might upchuck," Fiona said, barely moving her lips.

  "You want me to stop the car?" "Let's just get there." Maggie drove more carefully, as if transporting a basket of eggs.

  In front of the house she parked, got out, and came around to help Fiona from her seat. Fiona was a dead weight. She leaned heavily against Maggie. But she had a young smell-fresh-ironed cotton and those sugary beginner cosmetics you find in dime stores-and that gave Maggie some reassurance. Oh, this girl was not bad at heart!,She was barely older than Daisy; she was an ordinary, open-face child bewildered by what had happened to her.

  They crossed the sidewalk slowly and climbed the steps to the porch. Their shoes made a hollow sound on the floorboa
rds. "Sit here," Maggie said, and she helped Fiona into the chair where she herself had sat all yesterday afternoon. "You need the air," she said. "Take deep, deep breaths. I'm going to go find Jesse." Fiona closed her eyes.

  Inside, the rooms were cool and dark. Maggie climbed the stairs to Jesse's room and knocked on his door. She poked her head in. "Jesse?" she said.

  "Mmf." His window shades were lowered so she could barely make out the shapes of the furniture. His bed was a tangle of twisted sheets. "Jesse, I've brought Fiona," she said. "Could you come down to the porch?" "Huh?" "Could you come down to the porch and talk with Fiona?" He stirred a little and raised his head, so she knew she could leave him. She went back downstairs and into the kitchen, where she poured a glass of iced tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator. She put the glass on a china plate, encircled it with saltine crackers, and carried it out to Fiona. "Here," she said. "Take little bites of these saltines. Take tiny sips of tea." Fiona was already looking better, sitting upright now in her chair, and she said, "Thank you," when Maggie laid the plate on her knees. She nibbled at a corner of a cracker. Maggie settled in a rocker next to her.

  "When I was expecting Daisy," Maggie said, "I lived on tea and saltines for two solid months. It's a wonder we didn't both get malnutrition. I was so sick with Daisy I thought I would die, but with Jesse I never had a moment's discomfort. Isn't that funny? You'd think it would have been the other way around." Fiona set down her cracker. ' 'I shouldVe stayed at the clinic," she said.

  "Oh, honey," Maggie said. She felt suddenly depressed. She had an instantaneous, chillingly clear vision of how Ira's face would look when he learned what she had done. "Fiona, it's not too late," she said. "You're only here to discuss it all, right? You're not committed to a thing." Although even as she spoke she saw the clinic receding steadily. This was something like rushing toward a jump rope, she imagined. Miss that split second where entry is possible and you've flubbed up everything. She reached out and touched Fiona's arm. "And after all," she said, "you do love each other, don't you? Don't you love each other?" "Yes, but maybe if we got married he would start to hold it against me," Fiona said. "I mean, he's a lead singer! He'll probably want to go to England or Australia or some such after he gets famous. And meanwhile, his band has just barely started earning any money. Where would we live? How would we work this?" "At first you could live here with us," Maggie said.

  ' 'Then in November you can move to an apartment Jesse knows about in Waverly. Jesse has it all figured out." Fiona stared toward the street. "If I had stayed on at the clinic everything would be over by now," she said after a minute.

  "Oh, Fiona. Please. Oh, tell me I didn't do wrong!" Maggie said. She looked around for Jesse. What was keeping him? It shouldn't be up to her to carry on this courtship. "Wait here," she said. She got up and hurried into the house. "Jesse!" she cried. But he didn't answer, and she heard the shower running. That boy would insist on showering first if the house were on fire, she thought. She ran upstairs and pounded on the bathroom door. "Jesse, are you coming?" she called.

  He cut the water off. "What?" he said.

  "Come out, I tell you!" No answer. But she heard the shower curtain screech across the rod.

  She went into his bedroom and snapped up both window shades. She wanted to find his Dr. Spock book. It would serve as a kind of selling point till he came downstairs; or at least it would provide a topic of conversation. But she couldn't find it-just dirty clothes, French-fry cartons, records left out of their jackets. She looked for the cradle plans then. What would they be-blueprints? Not a sign of them. Well, of course, he'd have taken them to the basement, where Ira kept his tools. She tore back down the stairs, calling toward the porch as she passed, "He's on his way!" (She could picture Fiona getting up and leaving.) Through the kitchen, down a set of narrow wooden steps, over to Ira's workbench. No plans there, either. Ira's tools hung neatly on the backboard, each matching its own painted outline-a sure sign Jesse had not been near them. On the workbench itself were two squares of sandpaper and a sheaf of doweling rods still bound together by rubber bands, part of a drying rack that Ira had promised to build into a corner of the back porch. She seized the doweling rods and raced back up the basement steps. "Look," she told Fiona, slamming out the screen door. "Jesse's cradle." Fiona lowered her glass. She accepted the rods and gazed at them. "Cradle?" she said doubtfully.

  "It's going to have . . . spindles; that's what they are," Maggie said. "Antique style." You would think those rods could be read, the way Fiona studied them.

  Then Jesse came out, bringing with him the fragrance of shampoo. His hair was wet and tousled and his skin was radiant. He said, "Fiona? You didn't go through with it?" and she lifted her face, still holding the rods like a kind of scepter, and said, "Well, all right, Jesse, if you want. I guess we could get married if you want." Then Jesse wrapped his arms around her and dropped his head to her shoulder, and something about that picture-his dark head next to her blond one-reminded Maggie of the way she used to envision marriage before she was married herself. She had thought of it as more different than it really was, somehow, more of an alteration in people's lives-two opposites drawn together with a dramatic crashing sound. She had supposed that when she was married all her old problems would fall away, something like when you go on vacation and leave a few knotty tasks incomplete as if you'd never have to come back and face them. And of course, she had been wrong. But watching Jesse and Fiona, she could almost believe that that early vision was the right one. She slipped into the house, shutting the screen door very softly behind her, and she decided everything was going to work out after all.

  They were married in Cartwheel, in Mrs. Stuckey's living room. Just family attended. Ira was grim-faced and silent, Maggie's mother sat stiff with outrage, and Maggie's father seemed befuddled. Only Mrs. Stuckey showed the proper festive attitude. She wore a fuchsia corduroy pantsuit and a corsage as big as her head, and before the ceremony she told everybody that her one regret was that Mr. Stuckey had not lived to see this day. Although maybe, she said, he was here in spirit; and then she went on at some length about her personal theory of ghosts. (They were the completions of the dead's intended gestures, their unfinished plans still hanging in the air-something like when you can't remember what it was you went to the kitchen for and so you pantomime the motion, a twist of the wrist perhaps, and that reminds you you had come out to turn the dripping faucet off. So wasn't there a chance that Mr. Stuckey was right here in the living room, having dreamed of walking both his precious daughters down the aisle someday?) Then she said that to her mind, marriage was just as educational as high school and maybe more so. "I mean I dropped out of school myself," she said, "and have never once regretted it." Fiona's sister rolled her eyes. But it was a good thing Mrs. Stuckey felt that way, since Fiona wouldn't turn eighteen till January and required parental permission for a marriage license.

  Fiona herself wore a beige, loose-waisted dress that she and Maggie had gone shopping for together, and Jesse looked very distinguished in a suit and tie. He looked like a grownup, in fact. Daisy acted shy around him, and kept hanging on to Maggie's arm and looking over at him. "What's the matter with you? Straighten up," Maggie told her. She was feeling very irritable, for some reason. She worried that Ira was going to be angry at her forever. He seemed to be holding her solely accountable for this entire situation.

  After the wedding, Jesse and Fiona went to Ocean City for a week. Then they came home to Jesse's room, where Maggie had moved in an extra bureau and exchanged his old bunks for a double bed from J. C. Penney. The house grew more crowded, of course, but it was a pleasant sort of crowdedness, cheerful and expectant. Fiona seemed to fit right in; she was so agreeable, so ready to let Maggie take charge-more so than Maggie's own children had ever been. Jesse set off happily every morning for his computer job, and returned every evening with some new baby-care gadget-a pack of bunny-shaped diaper pins or an ingenious spouted training cup. He was reading up on child
birth and kept embracing different theories, each more peculiar than the last. (For instance, at one point he proposed that the delivery take place underwater, but he couldn't find a doctor who would agree to it.) Daisy and her friends forgot Mrs. Perfect entirely and camped in Maggie's living room-five dumbstruck, enchanted little girls reverently eyeing Fiona's stomach. And Fiona played up to them, sometimes inviting them to her room to admire her growing layette, after which she might seat them one by one at the mirror and experiment with their hair. (Her sister was a beautician and had taught Fiona everything she knew, Fiona said.) Then in the evening, if Jesse's band had an engagement somewhere, he and Fiona would go out together and not return till or a.m., and Maggie, half waking, would hear their whispers on the stairs. The lock on their bedroom door would click stealthily and Maggie would sink back into sleep, contented.

  Even Ira seemed resigned, after he'd got over the shock. Oh, at first he was so disgusted that Maggie had feared he would walk out of the house forever. For days he had not spoken, and when Jesse entered the room he would leave. But gradually he came around. He was most comfortable, Maggie thought, when he could act tolerant and long-suffering, and surely he had the opportunity for that now. Here all his apprehensions had been confirmed: His son had got a girl in trouble and his wife had meddled unforgivably and now the girl was living in Jesse's bedroom among the Iggy Pop posters. He could sigh and say, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I always warn you?" (Or at least he could give that impression; not that he said it aloud.) Fiona drifted past him into the bathroom every morning, wearing her fluffy pink robe and her big pink powder-puff slippers and carrying her tortoiseshell soapbox, and Ira flattened himself against the wall as if she were .twice as big as she was. But he treated her with unfailing courtesy. He even taught her his complicated brand of solitaire, when the boredom of sitting at home got to be too much for her, and he lent her his Mariner's Library books-a whole row of memoirs by people who had sailed alone around the world and such. He had been trying to press them on his children for years. ("As far as I'm concerned," Fiona told Maggie, "those books are just more of that 'How I took Route So-and-so' that men always think is so fascinating." But she didn't let on to Ira.) And by November, when the Waverly apartment was supposed to become available, Ira didn't ask why they weren't moving out.