by Anne Tyler
“You messed up my marshmallows!”
“I believe I’m going to be ill,” Junie said, speaking upward into the spokes of her parasol.
Leroy’s crying had reached the stage where she had to fight for each breath.
Ira stood up again, dusting off the seat of his pants. He said, “Now listen, folks—”
“Will you stop calling us folks?” Fiona demanded.
Ira halted, looking startled.
Maggie felt a tug on her sleeve and turned. It was Mr. Moran, who had at some point worked around behind her. He held up a ticket. “What?” she asked.
“I won.”
“Won what?”
“I won that last race! My horse came in first.”
“Oh, the race,” she said. “Well, isn’t that …”
But her attention veered toward Fiona, who was reeling off a list of wrongs that she seemed to have been saving up for Jesse all these months. “… knew from the start I’d be a fool to marry you; didn’t I say so? But you were so gung-ho, you and your pacifiers and your Dr. Spock …”
The people in the bleachers behind them were gazing pointedly in different directions, but they sent each other meaningful glances and small, secret smiles. The Morans had turned into spectacles. Maggie couldn’t bear it. She said, “Please! Can’t we just sit down?”
“You and your famous cradle,” Fiona told Jesse, “that you didn’t build one stick of after you promised, you swore to me—”
“I never swore to you! Where do you keep coming up with this cradle business from?”
“You swore on the Bible,” Fiona told him.
“Well, good God Almighty! I mean, maybe it crossed my mind once to build one, but I’d have had to be crazy to go through with it, I can see it now: Dad standing there criticizing every little hammer blow, letting me know what a hopeless clod I am, and you’d be agreeing with him just like always, I bet, by the time I was finished. No way would I let myself in for that!”
“Well, you bought the wood, didn’t you?”
“What wood?”
“You bought those long wooden rods.”
“Rods? For a cradle? I never bought any rods.”
“You mother told me—”
“How would I use rods to build a cradle?”
“Spindles, she told me.”
They both looked at Maggie. Coincidentally, the baby paused just then for a deep, hiccuping breath. A bass voice rumbled over the loudspeaker, announcing that Misappropriation had been scratched.
Ira cleared his throat and said, “Are you talking about doweling rods? Those were mine.”
“Ira, no,” Maggie wailed, because there was still a chance they could smooth things over, if only he wouldn’t insist on spelling out every boring little fact. “They were the spindles for your cradle,” she told Jesse. “You already had the blueprints. Right?”
“What blueprints? All I said was—”
“If I remember correctly,” Ira interrupted in his stuffy way, “those rods were purchased for the drying rack I built on the back porch. You’ve all seen that drying rack.”
“Drying rack,” Fiona said. She continued looking at Maggie.
“Oh, well,” Maggie said, “this cradle business is so silly, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like the dime-store necklace that relatives start quarreling over after the funeral. It’s just a … And besides, Leroy couldn’t even use a cradle anymore! She’s got that nice crib Ira bought.”
Leroy remained quiet, still hiccuping, gazing at Maggie intently.
“I married you for that cradle,” Fiona told Jesse.
“Well, that’s plain ridiculous!” Maggie said. “For a cradle! I never heard such a—”
“Maggie, enough,” Ira said.
She stopped, with her mouth open.
“If you married Jesse for a cradle,” Ira told Fiona, “you were sadly mistaken.”
“Oh, Ira!” Maggie cried.
“Shut up, Maggie. She had no business telling you that,” Ira said to Fiona. “It’s Maggie’s weakness: She believes it’s all right to alter people’s lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them.”
“That’s not one bit true,” Maggie said.
“But the fact is,” Ira told Fiona calmly, “Jesse is not capable of following through with anything, not even a simple cradle. He’s got some lack; I know he’s my son, but he’s got some lack, and you might as well face up to it. He’s not a persevering kind of person. He lost that job of his a month ago and he hangs out every day with his pals instead of looking for work.”
Maggie and Fiona, together, said, “What?”
“They found out he wasn’t a high-school graduate,” Ira told them. And then, as an afterthought: “He’s seeing another girl too.”
Jesse said, “What are you talking about? That girl is just a friend.”
“I don’t know her name,” Ira said, “but she belongs to a rock group called Babies in Trouble.”
“We’re just good friends, I tell you! That girl is Dave’s girl!”
Fiona seemed to be made of china. Her face was dead white and still; her pupils were black pinpoints.
“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. I 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 rewrapping 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 off 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 windbreaker 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 turtlenecks 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 yours
elves.”
“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?