Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) Page 25

  "If you knew this all along," Maggie demanded of Ira, "why didn't you say something?" "I didn't feel right about it. I for one don't hold with changing people's worlds around," Ira said. And then (just as Maggie was getting ready to hate him) his face sagged and he dropped wearily onto the bleacher. "I shouldn't have done it now, either," he said.

  He had dislodged a whole section of marshmallows, but Dorrie, who could be sensitive to atmospheres, merely bent in silence to collect them.

  Fiona held out her palm. "Give me the keys," she told Jesse.

  "Huh?" "The keys to the van. Hand them over." "Where are you going?" Jesse asked her.

  "I don't know! How would I know? I just have to get out of here." "Fiona, I only ever talked to that girl because she didn't think I was some kind of clod like everyone else seems to do. You've got to believe me, Fiona." "The keys," Fiona said.

  Ira said, "Let her have them, Jesse." "But-" "We'll take a bus." . Jesse reached into the rear pocket of his jeans. He brought out a cluster of keys attached to a miniature black rubber gym shoe. "So will you be at the house? Or what," he said.

  "I have no idea," Fiona told him, and she snapped the keys out of his grasp.

  "Well, where will you be? At your sister's?" "Anywhere. None of your business. / don't know where. I just want to get on with my life," she said.

  And she hoisted the baby higher on her hip and stalked off, leaving behind the diaper bag and the stroller and her paper plate of lunch with the potato salad turning a pathetic shade of ivory.

  "She'll come around," Maggie told Jesse. Then she said, "I will never forgive you for this, Ira Moran." She felt another tug on her sleeve and she turned. Ira's father was still holding up his ticket. ' 'I was right to buy that tip sheet," he said. "What does Ira know about tip sheets?" "Nothing," Maggie said furiously, and she started re-wrapping Fiona's sandwich.

  All around her she heard murmuring, like ripples widening across a pond: "What'd he say?" "Tip sheet." "What'd she say?" "Nothing." "She did say something, I saw her lips move." "She said, 'Nothing.' " "But I thought I saw-" Maggie straightened and faced the rows of people on the bleachers. "I said, 'Nothing,' is what I said," she called out clearly.

  Somebody sucked in a breath. They all looked elsewhere.

  It was amazing, Ira often said, how people fooled themselves into believing what they wanted to. (How Maggie fooled herself, he meant.) He said it when Maggie threatened to sue the Police Department that time they charged Jesse with Drunk and Disorderly. He said it when she swore that Spin the Cat sounded better than the Beatles. And he said it again when she refused to accept that Fiona was gone for good.

  That evening after the races Maggie sat up late with Jesse, pretending to be knitting although she ripped out as much as she added. Jesse drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. "Can't you sit still for once?" Maggie asked him, and then she said, "Maybe you should try calling her sister again." "I already tried three times, for God's sake. They must be just letting it ring." "Maybe you should go in person." "That would be worse," Jesse said. "Pounding on the door while they hid inside and listened. I bet they'd be laughing and looking over at each other and making these goggly eyes." "They wouldn't do that!" "I guess I'll take the van back to Dave," Jesse said.

  He rose to leave. Maggie didn't try to stop him, because she figured he was secretly going to the sister's place after all.

  The van had been parked out front when they returned from Pimlico. For one relieved moment, everyone assumed Fiona was in the house. And the keys were on top of the bookcase just inside the door, where the family always left keys and stray gloves and notes saying when they'd be back. But there wasn't any note from Fiona. In the room she shared with Jesse, the unmade bed had a frozen look. Every hillock of the sheets appeared to have hardened. In Maggie's and Ira's room the crib was empty and desolate. However, this couldn't be a permanent absence. Nothing was packed; nothing was missing. Even Fiona's toilet articles still sat on the bureau in their travel case. "See there?" Maggie told Jesse, because he was worried too, she could tell; and she pointed to the travel case. "Oh. Right," he said, reassured. She crossed the hall to the bathroom and found the usual fleet of rubber ducks and tugboats. "You people," she said happily. Emerging, passing Jesse's room once more, she found him standing in front of the bureau with his eyes half shut and his nose buried deep in Fiona's soapbox. She understood him perfectly. Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures, even; didn't she know that?

  When the night stretched on and Jesse didn't return, she told herself that he must have found Fiona. They must be having a nice long talk. She ripped out all her garbled rows of knitting and rewound her ball of yarn and went to bed. In the dark, Ira mumbled, "Jesse back yet?" "No, nor Fiona, either one," she said.

  "Oh, well, Fiona," he said. "Fiona's gone for good." There was a sudden clarity to his voice. It was the voice of someone talking in his sleep, which made his words seem oracular and final. Maggie felt a clean jolt of anger. Easy for him to say! He could toss off people without a thought.

  It struck her as very significant that Ira's idea of entertainment was those interminable books about men who sailed the Atlantic absolutely alone.

  He was right, though: In the morning, Fiona was still missing. Jesse came down to breakfast with that same stunned expression on his face. Maggie hated to ask, but finally she said, "Honey? You didn't find her?" "No," he said shortly, and then he requested the marmalade in a way that shut oif all further questions.

  Not till that afternoon did the notion of foul play occur to her. How could they have missed it? Of course: No one traveling with an infant would leave behind all Fiona had left-the diaper bag, the stroller, the pink plastic training cup Leroy liked to drink her juice from. Someone must have kidnapped them, or worse: shot them during a street crime. The police would have to be notified this instant. She said as much to Ira, who was reading the Sunday paper in the living room. Ira didn't even look up. "Spare yourself the embarrassment, Maggie," he said quietly.

  "Embarrassment?" "She's walked out of her own free will. Don't bother the police with this." "Ira, young mothers do not walk out with just their purses. They pack. They have to! Think," she said. "Remember all she took with her on a simple trip to Pimlico. You know what I suspect? I suspect she came back here, parked the van, carried Leroy to the grocery store for teething biscuits-I heard her say yesterday morning she was low on teething biscuits-and stepped smack into a holdup scene. You've read how robbers always choose women and children for hostages! It's more effective that way. It gets results." Ira regarded her almost absently over the top of his paper, as if he found her just marginally interesting.

  "Why, she's even left behind her soap! Her toothbrush!" she told Ira.

  "Her travel case," Ira pointed out.

  "Yes, and if she'd gone of her own free will-" "Her travel case, Maggie, like she'd use in a hotel. But now she's back at, I don't know, her sister's or her mother's, where her real belongings are, and she doesn't need a travel case." "Oh, that's nonsense," Maggie said. "And just look at her closet. It's full of clothes." "Are you sure of that?" "Of course. It's the first thing I checked." "Are you sure there's nothing missing? Her favorite sweater? That jacket she's so keen on?" Maggie considered a moment. Then she stood up and went down the hall to Jesse's room.

  Jesse lay on the bed, fully dressed, with his arms folded behind his head. He glanced over at her as she entered. "Excuse me a moment," she told him, and she opened the door of his closet.

  Fiona's clothes hung inside, all right, but not her wind-breaker or that big striped duster she liked to wear around the house. There were only two or three skirts (she hardly ever wore skirts), a few blouses, and a ruffled dress that she'd always claimed made her look fat. Maggie spun around and went to Fiona's bureau. Jesse watched from the bed. She jerked open a drawer and found a single pair of blue jeans (artificially whitened with bleach, a process that was no longer stylish) and below them two turtle-necks from
last winter and below those a pair of maternity slacks with an elastic panel in front. It was like the layers in an archaeological dig. Maggie had the fleeting fantasy that if she delved farther she would find cheerleader sweaters, then grade-school pinafores, then Fiona's baby clothes. She smoothed the layers down again and shut the drawer.

  "But where would she be?" she asked Jesse.

  It seemed for a long while that he wasn't going to answer. Finally, though, he said, "I guess her sister's." "You said you didn't find her there." "I didn't go there." She thought that over. Then she said, "Oh, Jesse." "I'll be damned if I make a fool of myself." "Jesse, honey-" "If I have to beg her then I'd sooner not have her," he said.

  And he turned over with his face to the wall, ending the conversation.

  It was two or three days afterward that Fiona's, sister called. She said, "Mrs. Moran?" in that braying voice that Maggie instantly recognized. "This is Crystal Stuckey," she said. "Fiona's sister?" "Oh, yes!" "And I want to know if you'll be home for the next little bit so we can come by and pick up her things." "Yes, of course, come right away," Maggie said. Because Jesse was home too, as it happened-lying on his bed again. She went to find him as soon as she hung up. "That was Fiona's sister," she said. "Christina?" He slid his eyes toward her. "Crystal," he said.

  "Crystal. They're coming to get her things." He sat up slowly and swung his boots over the side of the bed.

  "I'll go out and do some shopping," Maggie told him.

  "What? No, wait." "You'll have the place to yourselves." "Wait, don't go. How will I-? Maybe we'll need you." "Need me? What for?" "I don't want to say the wrong thing to her," he said.

  "Honey, I'm sure you won't say the wrong thing." "Ma. Please," he said.

  So she stayed, but she went to her own room, out of the way. Her room was at the front of the house, which was why, when a car drove up, she was able to draw aside the curtain and see who was coming. It was Crystal and a beefy young man, no doubt the famous boyfriend Fiona was always referring to. That was whom Crystal had meant by "we"; Fiona was nowhere in evidence. Maggie dropped the curtain. She heard the doorbell ring; she heard Jesse shout, "Coming!" and clatter down the stairs two at a time. Then, after a pause, she heard a brief mumble. The door slammed shut again. Had he kicked them out, or what? She lifted the curtain once more and peered down, but it was Jesse she saw, not the guests-Jesse tearing off down the sidewalk, shrugging himself into his black leather jacket as he went. In the downstairs hall, Crystal called, "Mrs. Moran?"-her voice less braying now, more tentative.

  "Just a minute," Maggie said.

  Crystal and her boyfriend had brought cartons from the liquor store, and Maggie helped fill them. Or tried to help. She slid a blouse from a hanger and folded it slowly, regretfully, but Crystal said, "You can just give those blouses to the veterans. Don't bother with nothing synthetic, Fiona told me. She's living back at home now and she hasn't got much closet room." Maggie said, "Ah," and laid the blouse aside. She felt a twinge of envy. Wouldn't it be wonderful to save only what was first-class and genuine and pure, and walk out on everything else! When Crystal and the boyfriend drove off, all they left behind was the chaff.

  Then Jesse found a job at a record store and stopped lying around on his bed so much of the time; and Daisy and the enchanted little girls returned to Mrs. Perfect, Maggie was on her own again. Just like that, she was deprived of all the gossip and eventfulness and the peeks into other households that children can provide. It was then she started making her spy trips to Cartwheel, not that those were ever very satisfying; or sometimes after work she would choose to walk to the frame shop rather than continue sitting in an empty house. But then she would wonder why she had come, for Ira was usually too busy to talk to her and anyhow, he said, he'd be home in just a couple of hours, wouldn't he? What was it she was hanging about for?

  So she would climb the stairs to his family's apartment, and she'd pass a bit of time listening to his sisters recount the latest soap opera or his father list his aches and pains. In addition to his so-called weak heart, Mr. Moran suffered from arthritis and his vision was failing. He was over eighty, after all. The men in that family had traditionally fathered their children so late in life that when Mr. Moran talked about his great-grandfather, he was referring to a man who'd been born in the s. That had never struck Maggie before, but now it seemed positively creepy. What an elderly, faltering atmosphere she lived in! Her mornings at the nursing home, her afternoons at the Morans', her evenings with Ira's solitaire games . . . She drew her sweater more tightly around her and clucked at news of her father-in-law's indigestion. "Used to be I could eat anything," he told her. "What has happened here?" He peered at her with his glintless eyes, as if expecting an answer. Lately his upper lids had developed heavy, pouched folds; his Cherokee grandmother emerged more clearly year by year. "Rona never had the remotest inkling," he told Maggie. Rona was Ira's mother. "She died before she went through all this," he 'aid. "Wrinkles and gnarls and creaky joints and heartburn-she missed out on it." "Well, but she had other pains," Maggie reminded him. "Maybe worse ones." "It's like she didn't live a real life," he said, not listening. "I mean all of life, the whole messy kit and caboodle that comes at the end." He sounded peevish; he seemed to think his wife had got away with something. Maggie clucked again and patted his hand. It felt the way she imagined an eagle's foot would feel.

  Eventually she would go back downstairs to Ira, coax him to close shop a few minutes early and walk her home. He would slouch along in a kind of dark fog, something inward-turned in his gaze. When they passed the Larkin sisters' house, Maggie always glanced toward it and then looked quickly away. In the old days, wheeling Leroy homeward in her stroller, they would find a rocking horse waiting hopefully on the Larkins's front porch. It would have appeared by magic at the top of the steps where earlier there'd been nothing: a tiny, faded wooden animal with a bashful smile and long black lowered lashes. But now there was no sign of it; even those two ancient ladies knew somehow that the Morans hadn't managed to keep their family together.

  Oh, how would Fiona summon the constant vigilance that child required? It wasn't merely a matter of feeding her and changing her. Leroy was one of those dauntless babies who fling themselves brazenly off stair landings and chair edges, trusting someone will be there to catch them. Fiona was nowhere near alert enough. And she had hardly any sense of smell, Maggie had noticed. Why, Maggie could scent a fire before it started, almost. Maggie could walk through a mall and unerringly detect the smell of foods improperly handled-a musty, etherish sharpness not unlike the smell of a child with a fever. Everybody else would be oblivious, but, "Stop!" Maggie would call, holding up a palm as the others drifted toward a sandwich stand. "Not there! Anywhere but there!" She had so much to offer, if only someone would take it.

  It seemed pointless to cook a real supper now. Jesse was always out and Daisy most often ate at Mrs. Perfect's, or if forced to eat at home would sulk so that it wasn't worth having her around. So Maggie just heated a couple of frozen dinners or a can of soup. Sometimes she didn't even do that. One evening, when she had sat two hours at the kitchen table staring into space instead of making the trip to the frame shop, Ira walked in and said, "What's for supper?" and she said, "I can't deal with supper! I mean look at this!" and she waved at the can of soup in front of her. "Two and three quarters servings," she read out. "What do they expect, I have two and three quarters people to feed? Or three, and I'll just give one of them less? Or maybe I'm supposed to save the rest for another meal, but do you know how long it would take me to come out even? First I'd have an extra three quarters of a serving and then six quarters and then nine. I'd have to open four cans of soup before I had leftovers that weren't in fractions. Four cans, I tell you! Four cans of the same single flavor!" She started crying, letting the tears roll down her cheeks luxuriously. She felt the way she had felt as a child when she knew she was behaving unreasonably, knew she was shocking the grownups and acting like a perfect horro
r, but all at once wanted to behave unreasonably and even took some pleasure in it.

  Ira might have turned on his heel and walked out; she was half expecting that. Instead, he sank into a chair across from her. He put his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands.

  Maggie stopped crying. She said, "Ira?" He didn't answer.

  "Ira, what is it?" she asked him.

  She rose and bent over him and hugged him. She squatted next to him and tried to peer-up into his face. Had something happened to his father? To one of his sisters? Was he just so disgusted with Maggie that he couldn't endure it? What was it?

  The answer seemed to arrive through his back-through the ripple of knobby vertebrae down his C-shaped, warm, thin back. Her fingers felt the answer first.

  He was just as sad as Maggie was, and for just the same reasons. He was lonely and tired and lacking in hope and his son had not turned out well and his daughter didn't think much of him, and he still couldn't figure where he had gone wrong.

  He let his head fall against her shoulder. His hair was thick and rough, strung through with threads of gray that she had never noticed before, that pierced her heart in a way that her own few gray hairs never had. She hugged him tightly and nuzzled her face against his cheekbone. She said, "It will be all right. It will be all right." And it was, eventually. Don't ask her why. Well, for one thing, Jesse really liked his new job, and he seemed bit by bit to recover some of his old spirit. And then Daisy announced at last that Mrs. Perfect was "too tennis-y" and returned to her place in the family. And Maggie gave up her spy trips, as if Leroy and Fiona had been put to rest in her mind somehow. But none of those reasons was the most important one. It was more to do with Ira, she believed-that moment with Ira in the kitchen. Although they never referred to it afterward, and Ira didn't act any diiferent, and life continued just the same as always.

  She straightened in her seat and peered through the windshield, looking for the others. They should be about ready by now. Yes, here came Leroy, just backing out of the house with a suitcase bigger than she was. Ira thudded among things in the trunk and whistled a cheerful tune. "King of the Road," that's what he was whistling. Maggie got out to open the rear door. It seemed to her now that unknowingly, she'd been aiming ever since she woke up this morning toward this single purpose: bringing Leroy and Fiona home at last.