Breathing Lessons (26 page)

"She's got an appointment the first thing Monday morning, at this clinic over on Whitside Avenue. Monday is her sister's day off; her sister's going with her. See there? She doesn't invite me to go with her. And I have talked to her till I'm blue in the face. There's nothing more I can say. So here's what I'm asking: You be the one. You go to the clinic'and stop her." "Me?" "You always get along so well with my girlfriends. You can do it; I know you can. Tell her about my job. I'm quitting at the envelope factory. I've applied at this computer store, where they'll train me to fix computers, pay me while I'm learning. They said I have a good chance of getting hired. And also Dave in the band, his mother owns a house in Waverly near the stadium and the whole top floor's an apartment that'll be vacant by November, cheap as dirt, Dave says, with a little room for the baby. You're supposed to let the baby sleep in a separate room from its parents; I've been reading up on that. You'd be amazed how much I know! I've decided I'm for pacifiers. Some people don't like the looks of them, but if you give a baby a pacifier he won't suck his thumb later on. Also, it is absolutely not true that pacifiers push their front teeth out of line." He hadn't talked so much in months, but the sad part was that the more he talked, the younger he seemed. His hair was tangled where he'd run his fingers through it, and his body was all sharp angles as he tore around the kitchen. Maggie said, "Jesse, honey, I know you're going to make a wonderful father someday, but the fact of the matter is, this really has to be the girl's decision. It's the girl who has to go through the pregnancy." "Not alone, though. I would support her. I would comfort her. I would take care of her. I want to do this, Ma." She didn't know what more to say, and Jesse must have realized that. He stopped his pacing. He stood squarely in front of her. He said, "Look. You're my only hope. All I'm asking is, you let her know how I feel. Then she can decide whichever way she likes. What could be the harm in that?" "But why can't you let her know how you feel?" Maggie said.
"Don't you think I've tried? I've talked till I'm blue in the face. But everything I say seems to come out wrong. She takes offense, I take offense; we just get all tangled in knots, somehow. By now we're used up. We're worn down into the ground." Well, she certainly knew what that felt like.
"Couldn't you just consider it?" he asked.
She tilted her head.
"Just consider the possibility?" "Oh," she said, "the possibility, maybe . . ." He said, "Yes! That's all I'm asking! Thanks, Ma. Thanks a million." "But, Jesse-" "And you won't tell Dad yet, will you?" "Well, not for the time being," she said lamely.
"You can picture what he would say," he said.
Then he gave her one of his quick hugs, and he was gone.
For the next few days she felt troubled, indecisive. Examples came to mind of Jesse's fickleness-how (like most boys his age) he kept moving on to new stages and new enthusiasms, leaving the old ones behind. You couldn't leave a wife and baby behind! But then other pictures came too: for instance, the year they'd all got the flu except for Jesse, and he had had to take care of them. She had glimpsed him blurrily through a haze of fever; he had sat on the edge of the bed and fed her a bowl of chicken soup, spoonful by spoonful, and when she fell asleep between swallows he had waited without complaint until she jerked awake, and then he fed her another spoonful.
"You haven't forgotten, have you?" Jesse asked now whenever he met up with her. And, "You won't go back on vour promise, will you?" "No, no . , ." she would say. And then, "What promise?" What had she let herself hi for, exactly? He tucked a slip of paper into her palm one evening-an address on Whitside Avenue. The clinic, she supposed. She dropped it in her skirt pocket. She said, "Now you realize I can't-" But Jesse had already evaporated, dexterous as a cat burglar.
Ira was in a good mood those days, because he'd heard about the computer job. It had come through, as Jesse had foreseen, and he was due to start training in September. "This is more like it," Ira told Maggie. "This is something with a future. And who knows? Maybe after a bit he'll decide to go back to school. I'm sure they'll want him to finish school before they promote him." Maggie was quiet, thinking.
She had to work on Saturday, so that kept her mind off things, but Sunday she sat a long time on the porch. It was a golden hot day and everyone seemed to be out walking infants. Carriages and strollers wheeled past, and men lunged by with babies in backpacks. Maggie wondered if a backpack was one of the pieces of equipment Jesse considered essential. She would bet it was. She cocked her head toward the house, listening. Ira was watching a ball game on TV and Daisy was away at Mrs. Perfect's. Jesse was still asleep, having come in late from playing at a dance in Howard County. She'd heard him climb the stairs a little after three, singing underneath his breath. Girlie if I could I would put you on defrost , . .
"Music is so different now," she had said to Jesse once. "It used to be 'Love Me Forever" and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' " "Aw, Ma," he had said, "don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' " A line came to her from a song that was popular back when Jesse was a little boy. / must think of a way, it went, tactfully, tentatively, into your heart . . .
When Jesse was a little boy he liked to tell her stories while she cooked; he seemed to believe she needed entertaining. "Once there was a lady who never fed her children anything but doughnuts," he might begin, or, "Once there was a man who lived on top of a Ferris wheel." All of his stories were whimsical and inventive, and now that she considered, she saw that they had had in common the theme of joyousness, of the triumph of sheer fun over practicality. He strung one particular story out for weeks, something about a retarded father who bought an electric organ with the grocery money. The retarded part came from his aunt Dome, she supposed. But the way he told it, the father's handicap was a kind of virtue. The father said, "What do we need food for anyhow? I like better for my children to hear nice music." Maggie laughed when she repeated the story to Ira, but Ira hadn't seen the humor. He took offense first on Dome's account (he didn't like the word "retarded") and then on his own. Why was it the father who was retarded? Why not the mother, was probably what he meant-much more realistic, given Maggie's shortcomings. Or maybe he didn't mean that at all, but Maggie imagined he did, and it developed into a quarrel.
They had quarreled over Jesse ever since he was born, it seemed now, always taking the same stances. Ira criticized, Maggie excused. Ira claimed that Jesse wouldn't keep a civil tongue in his head, refused *o wipe that obstinate expression off his face, acted hopelessly inept when helping out at the shop. He just had to come into his own, Maggie said. For some it took longer than for others. "Decades longer?" Ira asked. She said, "Have a little patience, Ira." (A switch. Ira was the one with the patience. Maggie was the rusher-in.) How was it that she had never realized the power of the young back when she was young herself? She saw it now as a missed opportunity. In her girlhood she'd been so easily cowed; she hadn't dreamed that children were capable of setting up such storms in a family.
She and Ira tried to keep their own storms private, but no doubt Jesse overheard at least a little. Or maybe he just sensed how they felt; for more and more, as he entered his teens, it was to Maggie that he offered his few crumbs of conversation, while he grew steadily more distant from Ira. By the time he told her about the baby, Maggie felt fairly distant from Ira herself. They'd been through too many arguments, rehashed the subject of Jesse too many thousand times. It wasn't merely her promise that kept Maggie from telling Ira about the baby; it was battle fatigue. Ira would hit the roof! And rightly so, of course.
But she thought of how Jesse had nudged her lips with the soup spoon, coaxing her to eat. Sometimes, at the height of her fever, she had wakened to hear thin, sad, faraway music emerging from the earphones on his head, and she had been convinced that they were the sounds of his innermost thoughts made clear to her at long last.
Monday morning she went to work as usual at seven but begged off sick at a quarter till nine and drove to Whitside Avenue. The clinic was a remodeled store of some kind, with a curtained plate-glass window. She spotted it first not by its street number but by the knot of picketers outside. There were three women, several children, and a small, dapper man. THIS CLINIC MURDERS THE INNOCENT, one sign said, and another showed a blown-up photo of a beautiful smiling baby with GIVE HER A CHANCE printed in white across her mop of black curls. Maggie parked in front of an insurance agency next door. The picketers glanced over at her and then went back to watching the clinic.
A car drew up and a girl in jeans got out, followed by a young boy. The girl bent to say something to the driver, after which she waved and the car moved on. The couple walked briskly toward the clinic, while the picketers swarmed around them. "God sees what you're about to do!" one woman called, and another blocked the girl's path, but she veered away. "Where is your conscience?" the man shouted after her. She and the boy vanished behind the door. The picketers straggled back to their places. They were discussing something heatedly; they appeared to be disagreeing. Maggie had the impression that some of them felt they should have been more forceful.
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.