Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize)

by Anne Tyler

  Nor did Maggie; she carefully avoided the subject. In fact, for all she knew, the apartment had fallen through somehow. Maybe the current tenants had changed their plans. At any rate, Jesse and Fiona said nothing about leaving. Fiona followed Maggie around now the way the children had followed her when they were tiny. She trailed her from room to room, asking fractious questions. "Why do I feel so logy?" she asked, and, "Am I ever going to have anklebones again?" She had started attending childbirth classes and wanted Maggie to go with her to the labor room. Jesse, she said, might pass out or something. Maggie said, "Why, Jesse's dying to go with you," but Fiona said, "I don't want him to see me like that! He isn't even kin." Nor was Maggie, Maggie could have said. Although it seemed she really was, in some ways.

  In Jesse's company, Fiona began to take on an aggrieved and nagging tone. She complained about the unfairness-how Jesse got to go off to work every day while she sat home growing fatter. She should have stayed in school after all, she said, at least through fall semester; but no, no, Jesse had to have things his way: homebody wife, the Little Mother act. When she spoke like this there was something old-ladyish in her voice, and Jesse when he answered sounded sullen. "Have you heard one word I've been saying?" Fiona would ask, and Jesse would say, "I heard, I heard." What was it that struck Maggie as so familiar? It was a tune, almost. It was the tune of the arguments Jesse used to have with his parents; that was it. Jesse and Fiona were more like a boy and his mother than husband and wife.

  But Fiona wasn't feeling well; no wonder she was snappish. That early-pregnancy sleepiness never left her, even in her seventh and eighth months, when most women were bundles of energy. Jesse would say, "Put on your clothes! We're booked at the Granite Tavern tonight and they're paying us real money," and she would say, "Oh, I don't know; maybe I'll let you go on without me." "Without you?" he would ask. "You mean alone?" And his face would get all hurt and surprised. But he would go. Once, he didn't even eat supper-just left the minute she told him she wasn't coming with him, although it was barely p.m. Then Fiona didn't eat, either, but sat there at the table playing with her food, a tear slipping down her cheek from time to time, and afterward she put on the hooded windbreaker that didn't button over her stomach anymore and she went for a long, long walk. Or she might have gone to visit her sister; Maggie had no idea. At eight or so Jesse phoned and Maggie had to tell him she was out someplace. "What do you mean, out?" he asked.

  "Just out, Jesse-. I'm sure she'll be coming back soon." "She said she was too tired to go out. She couldn't come to the Granite Tavern because she was too tired." "Oh, maybe she-" But he had already hung up, a metallic clunk in her ear.

  Well, these things happened. (Didn't Maggie know they happened?) And the next morning Jesse and Fiona were fine-had reconciled at some point and acted more loving than ever. Maggie had been anxious for no reason, it turned out.

  The baby was due in early March, but on February first Fiona woke up with a backache. Maggie was excited the instant she heard. "This is it, I bet," she told Fiona.

  "It can't be!" Fiona said. "I'm not ready." "Of course you're ready. You've got your layette; your suitcase is packed-" "But Jesse hasn't built the cradle yet." It was true. Whatever other equipment he'd laid in, that cradle had not materialized. Maggie-said, "Never mind; he can do it while you're in the hospital." "This is a plain old backache anyhow," Fiona said. "I've had this feeling often, before I was pregnant, even." At noon, though, when Maggie phoned from work, Fiona sounded less certain. "I'm getting these cramps, like, in my stomach," she said. "Can you please come home early?" "I'll be there," Maggie told her. "Have you called Jesse yet?" "Jesse? No." "Why don't you call him." "Okay, but promise you'll come home? Start right now." "I'm on my way." Anne Tykr She arrived to find Jesse timing Fiona's contractions, using an official-looking stopwatch he'd bought especially for this occasion. He was jubilant. "We're moving right along!" he told Maggie.

  Fiona looked scared. She kept giving little moans, not during the contractions but between them. "Hon, I don't think you're breathing right," Jesse told her.

  Fiona said, "Lay off about my breathing! I'll breathe any way I choose." "Well, I just want you to be comfortable. Are you comfortable? Is the baby moving?" "I don't know." ' 'Is he moving or isn't he? Fiona? You must have some idea." "I don't know, I tell you. No. He's not." "The baby isn't moving," Jesse told Maggie.

  "Don't worry. He's just getting ready," Maggie said.

  "Something must be wrong." "Nothing's wrong, Jesse. Believe me." But he didn't believe her, which is why they ended up leaving for the hospital far too early. Maggie drove. Jesse said he might crash the car if he drove, but then he spent the whole trip protesting every move Maggie made. "What possessed you to get behind a bus? Switch lanes. Not now, for God's sake! Check your rearview mirror. Oh, God, we'll all be killed and they'll have to cut the baby out of her stomach in the middle of Franklin Street." Fiona shrieked at this, which so unnerved Maggie that she slammed on the brakes and threw all three of them against the windshield. Jesse said, "Let us out! Better we go by foot! Let her give birth on the sidewalk!'' "Fine," Maggie said. "Get out of the car." Fiona said, "What?" "Now, Ma, just cool it," Jesse said. "No need to get hysterical. Depend on Ma to fall apart in any little emergency," he told Fiona.

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Maggie left them at the hospital entrance and went off to park.

  When she located them in Admissions, Fiona was just settling into a wheelchair. "I want my mother-in-law to come with me," she told the nurse.

  "Only Daddy can come with you," the nurse said. "Grandma has to stay in the waiting room." Grandma?

  "I don't want Daddy, I want Grandma!" Fiona cried, sounding about six years old.

  "Here we go now," the nurse said. She wheeled her away. Jesse followed, wearing that hurt, undefended expression Maggie had seen so often lately.

  Maggie went to the waiting room, which was the size of a football field. A vast expanse of beige carpeting was broken up by clustered arrangements of beige vinyl couches and chairs. She settled on an empty couch and chose a ruffle-edged magazine from the beige wooden end table. "How to Keep the Zing! in Your Marriage," the first article was called. It instructed her to be unpredictable; greet her husband after work wearing nothing but a black lace apron. Ira would think she had lost her mind. Not to mention Jesse and Fiona and the five enchanted little girls. She wished she had thought to bring her knitting. She wasn't that much of a knitter-her stitches had a way of galloping along for a few inches and then squinching up in tight little puckers, reminding her of a car that bucks and stalls-but lately she had thrown herself into a purple football jersey for the baby. (It was going to be a boy; everybody assumed so, and only boys' names had been considered.) She set the magazine aside and went over to the flank of pay phones that lined one wall. First she dialed the number at home. When no one answered-not even Daisy, who was usually back from school by three-she checked her watch and discovered it was barely two o'clock. She had thought it was much later. She dialed Ira's work number. "Sam's Frame Shop," he answered.

  "Ira?" she said. "Guess what-I'm at the hospital." "You are? What's wrong?" "Nothing's wrong. Fiona's having her baby." "Oh," he said. "I thought you'd crashed the car or something." "You want to come wait with me? It's going to be a while yet." "Well, maybe I should go home to watch Daisy," Ira said.

  Maggie sighed. "Daisy's at school," she told him. "And anyhow, she hasn't needed watching in years." "You'll want someone to put supper on, though." She gave up on him. (Lord forbid her deathbed should be in a hospital; he would probably not attend it.) She said, "Well, suit yourself, Ira, but I would think you'd want to see your own grandchild." "I'll see him soon enough, won't I?" Ira asked.

  Maggie glimpsed Jesse across the waiting room. "I have to go now," she said, and she hung up. "Jesse?" she said, hurrying toward him. "What's the news?" "Everything's fine. Or so they claim." "How's Fiona?" "She's scared," he said, "and I try to calm her down, but
those hospital people keep shooing me out. Anytime someone official comes they ask me to leave." So much for modern developments, Maggie thought. Men were still being shielded from everything truly important.

  Jesse went back to Fiona but kept Maggie posted, reappearing every half hour or so to speak knowingly of stages and centimeters. "It's going pretty fast now," he said once, and another time, "Many people believe that an eight-months baby is more at risk than a seven-months baby, but that's an old wives' tale. It's just a supersti- tion." His hair stood up in thick tufts, like wind-tossed grass. Maggie restrained herself from reaching out to smooth it. Unexpectedly, he reminded her of Ira. However different the two might be in other ways, they both had this notion that reading up on something, getting equipped for something, would put them in control.

  She considered going home for a while (it was nearly five o'clock) but she knew she would only fret and pace, so she stayed where she was and kept in touch by telephone. Daisy reported that Ira was fixing a pancake supper. "No green vegetable?" Maggie asked. "Where's the green vegetable?" Ira got on the phone to assure her that he was serving spiced crab-apple rings on the side. "Spice crab-apple rings are not green, Ira," Maggie said. She felt herself growing weepy. She ought to be at home supervising her family's nutrition; she ought to be storming the labor room to comfort Fiona; she ought to take Jesse in her arms and rock him because he was nothing but a child still, much too young for what was happening to him. But here she stood, clutching a salty-smelling receiver in a public phone hutch. Her stomach felt all knotted and tight. It hadn't been so long since she was a patient in the labor room herself, and her muscles recalled it exactly.

  She told Ira goodbye and went through the doors where Jesse kept disappearing. She traveled down a corridor, hoping for, oh, at least a nursery full of newborns to cheer her up. She passed another, smaller waiting room, perhaps leading to some lab or private office. An elderly couple sat there on two molded plastic chairs, and across from them sat a burly man in paint-spattered coveralls. As Maggie slowed to glance in, a nurse called, "Mr. Plum?" and the elderly man rose and went toward a back room, leaving behind a brand new magazine. Maggie breezed in as if she had a perfect right to be there and scooped up the magazine, at the same time performing a clumsy half-curtsy to show the old woman she meant no intrusion. She settled beside the man in coveralls. Never mind that this was just another ladies' magazine; at least the pages still gave off a shellacked, unused smell and the movie stars spilling their secrets were wearing up-to-date hairdos. She skimmed an article about a new kind of diet. You picked one favorite food and ate all you wanted, three times a day, nothing else besides. Maggie would have chosen beef-and-bean burritos from Lexington Market.

  In the back room, the nurse said, "Now, Mr. Plum, I'm giving you this jar for urine." "My what?" "Urine." "How's that?" "It's for urine!" "Speak up-I can't hear you." "Urine, I said! You take this jar home! You collect all your urine! For twenty-four hours! You bring the jar back!" In the chair across from Maggie, the wife gave an embarrassed titter. "He's deaf as a doorknob," she told Maggie. "Has to have everything shouted out for all and sundry to hear." Maggie smiled and shook her head, not knowing how else to respond. Then the man in coveralls stirred. He placed his great, furry fists on his knees. He cleared his throat. "You know," he said, "it's the funniest thing. I can catch that nurse's voice all right but I don't understand a single word she's saying." Maggie's eyes filled with ears. She dropped her magazine and groped in her purse for a Kleenex, and the man said, "Lady? You okay?" She couldn't tell him it was his kindness that had undone her-such delicacy, in such an unlikely-looking person-and so she said, "It's my son, he's having a baby. I mean my son's wife is." The man and the old woman waited, their faces prepared to take on the proper look of shock and pity as soon as they heard the bad part. And she couldn't tell them, "It's all my fault, I set everything pell-mell in motion not once considering the consequences," so instead she said, "It's months and months too early, it's nowhere near her due date ..." The man clicked his tongue. His forehead furrowed upon itself like cloth. The old woman said, "Oh, my stars, you must be worried sick. But don't you give up hope, because my nephew Brady's wife, Angela ..." And that was why, when Jesse passed down the corridor from the delivery room a few minutes later, he found his mother in a little side cubicle surrounded by a huddle of strangers. They were patting her and murmuring consolations-an old woman, a workman of some sort, a nurse with a clipboard, and a stooped old man clutching a gigantic empty jar. "Ma?" Jesse said, stepping in. "The baby's here, and both of them are fine." "Praise Jesus!" the old woman shouted, flinging her hands toward the ceiling.

  "The only trouble is," Jesse said, eyeing the woman dubiously, "it's a girl. I wasn't counting on a girl, somehow. '' "You would let a thing like that bother you?" the old woman demanded. "At a moment such as this? That child was snatched from the jaws of death!'' "From . . . ?" Jesse said. Then he said, "No, it's just a superstition that an eight-months-" "Let's get out of here," Maggie said, and she fought her way free of the huddle to grab his arm and steer him away.

  How that baby took over the house! Her cries of fury and her mourning-dove coos, her mingled smells of powder and ammonia, her wheeling arms and legs. She had Fiona's coloring but Jesse's spirit and his feistiness (no Lady-Baby this time). Her small, fine features were scrunched very close together low down in her face, so when Fiona combed her bit of hair into a sprout on top of her head she resembled a Kewpie doll; and like a doll she was trundled everywhere by the enchanted little girls, who would have cut school if permitted, just to lug her about by the armpits and shake her rattle too close to her eyes and hang over her, breathing heavily, while Maggie bathed her. Even Ira showed some interest, although he pretended not to. "Let me know when she's big enough to play baseball," he said, but as early as the second week, Maggie caught him taking sidelong peeks into the bureau drawer where Leroy slept, and by the time she had learned to sit up, the two of them were deep in those exclusive conversations of theirs.

  And Jesse? He was devoted-always offering to help out, sometimes making a nuisance of himself, to hear Fiona tell it. He walked Leroy during her fussy spells, and he left his warm bed to burp her and then carry her back to Maggie's room after the two o'clock feeding. And once, when Maggie took Fiona shopping, he spent a whole Saturday morning solely in charge, returning Leroy none the worse for wear, although the careful way he had dressed her-with her overall straps mistakenly clamping down her collar, severely mashing the double row of ruffles-made Maggie feel sad, for some reason. He claimed that he had never wanted a boy at all; or if he had, he couldn't remember why. "Girls are perfect," he said. "Leroy is perfect. Except, you know ..." "Except?" Maggie asked.

  "Well, it's just that . . . shoot, before she was born I had this sort of, like, anticipation. And now I've got nothing to anticipate, you know?" "Oh, that'll pass," Maggie said. "Don't worry." But later, to Ira, she said, "I never heard of a father getting postpartum blues." Maybe if the mother didn't, the father did; was that the way it worked? For Fiona herself was cheerful and oblivious. Often as she flitted around the baby she seemed more like one of the enchanted little girls than like a mother. She paid too much heed to Leroy's appurtenances, Maggie felt-to her frilly clothes, her ribboned sprout of hair. Or maybe it just seemed so. Maybe Maggie was jealous. It was true that she hated to relinquish the baby when she went off to work every morning. "How can I leave her?" she wailed to Ira. "Fiona doesn't know the first little bit about child care." "Well, only one way she's ever going to learn," Ira said. And so Maggie left, hanging back internally, and called home several times a day to see how things were going. But they were always going fine.

  In the nursing home one afternoon she heard a middle-aged visitor talking to his mother-a vacant, slack-jawed woman in a wheelchair. He lold her how his wife was, how the kids were. His mother smoothed her lap robe. He told her how his job was. His mother plucked at a bit of lint and flicked it onto the floor. He told
her about a postcard that had come for her at the house. The church was holding an Easter bazaar and they wanted her to check off which task she would volunteer for. This struck the son as comical, in view of his mother's disabilities. "They offered you your choice," he said, chuckling. "You could clerk at the needlework booth or you could tend the babies." His mother's hands grew still. She raised her head. Her face lit up and flowered. "Oh!" she cried softly. "I' tend the babies!" Maggie knew just how she felt.

  Leroy was a long, thin infant, and Fiona worried she was outgrowing the bureau drawer she slept in. "When are you going to get started on that cradle?" she asked Jesse, and Jesse said, "Any day now." Maggie said, "Maybe we should just buy a crib. A cradle's for a newborn; she wouldn't fit it for long." But Fiona said, "No, I set my heart on a cradle." She told Jesse. "You promised." "I don't remember promising." "Well, you did," she said.

  "All right! I'll get to it! Didn't I tell you I would?" "You don't have to shout at me," she said.

  "I'm not shouting." "Yes, you are." "Am not." "Are too." "Children! Children!" Maggie said, pretending she was joking.

  But only pretending.

  Once, Fiona spent the night at her sister's, snatching up the baby and stomping out after a fight. Or not a fight exactly but a little misunderstanding: The band was playing at a club in downtown Baltimore and Fiona planned to come along, as usual, till Jesse worried aloud that Leroy had a cold and shouldn't be left. Fiona said Maggie would tend her just fine and Jesse said a baby with a cold needed her mother and then Fiona said it was amazing how he was so considerate of that baby but so inconsiderate of his wife and then Jesse said . . .