Breathing Lessons (34 page)

"?ba kept it after she left," Maggie told him. "I saw you with it. There was a t>ar of soap inside, remember? That dear kind of soap you can see through." **h, yes," Jesse said, letting go of Iris forelock.
"You remember it?" "Sure." Maggie relaxed. She flashed a bracing smile at Leroy, who had lowered her foot to the floor now and was looking uncertain.
"So where is it?" Fiona asked. "Where's my soapbox, Jesse?" "Well, uh, didn't your sister take it?" "No." "I thought she packed it up along with your other things." "No," Fiona said. "You had it in your bureau." Jesse said, "Gosh, Fiona. In that case maybe it's thrown out by now. But look, if it means so much to you, then I'd be glad to-" "But you kept it, because it reminded you of me," Fiona told him. ' 'It smelled like me! You closed your eyes and held my soapbox to your nose." Jesse's gaze swiveled to Maggie again. He said, "Ma? Is that what you told her?" "You mean it's not true?" Fiona asked him.
"You said I went around sniffing soapboxes, Ma?" "You did!" Maggie said. Although she hated having to repeat it to his face. She had never meant to shame him. She turned to Ira (who was wearing exactly the shocked, reproachful expression she had expected) and said, "He kept it in his top drawer." "Your treasure drawer," Fiona told Jesse. "Do you suppose I'd come all the way down here like any ordinary . . . groupie if your mother hadn't told me that? I didn't have to come! I was getting along just fine! But your mother says you hung on to my soapbox and wouldn't let Crystal pack it, you closed your eyes and took this big whiff, you've kept it to this day, she said, you've never let it go, you sleep with it under your pillow at night." Maggie cried, "I never said-!" "What do you think I am? Some kind of loser?" Jesse asked Fiona.
"Now, listen," Ira said.
Everyone seemed glad to turn to him.
BREA"THING LESSONS "Let me get this straight," he said. "You're talking about a plastic soapbox." "Afy plastic soapbox," Fiona told him, "that Jesse sleeps every night with." "Well, there seems to be some mistake," Ira said. "How would Maggie even know such a thing? Jesse has his own apartment now. All he sleeps with that I've ever heard of is an auto greeter." "A what?" "Oh, nevermind." "What's an auto greeter?" There was a pause. Then Ira said, "You know: the person who stands at the door when you go in to buy a car. She makes you give your name and address before she'll call a salesman." "She? You mean a woman?" "Right." "Jesse sleeps with a woman?" "Right." Maggie said, "You just had to spoil things, Ira, didn't you." "No," Ira told her, "it's the simple truth that's spoiled things, Maggie, and the truth is, Jesse's involved with somebody else now." "But that woman's no one important! I mean they're not engaged or married or anything! She's no one he really cares about!" She looked to Jesse to back her up, but he was studiously examining the toe of his left boot.
"Oh, Maggie, admit it," Ira said. "This is the way things are. This is how he's going to be. He never was fit husband material! He passes from girlfriend to girlfriend and he can't seem to hold the same job for longer than a few months; and every job he loses, it's somebody else's fault. The boss is a jerk, or the customers are jerks, or the other workers are-" "Now, hold on," Jesse began, while Maggie said, "Oh, why do you always, always exaggerate, Ira! He worked in the record shop a full year, have you forgotten that?" "Everyone in Jesse's acquaintance," Ira finished calmly, "by some magical coincidence ends up being a jerk." Jesse turned and walked out of the house.
It made things more disturbing, somehow, that he didn't slam the door but let it click shut very gently behind him.
Maggie said, "He'll be back." She was speaking to Fiona, but when Fiona didn't respond (her face was almost wooden; she was staring after Jesse), she told Leroy instead. "You saw how glad he was to see you, didn't you?" Leroy just gaped.
' 'He's upset at what Ira said about him, is all," Maggie told her. And then she said, "Ira, I will never forgive you for this." "Me!" Ira said.
Fiona said, "Stop it." They turned.
"Just stop, bom of you," she said- "I'm tired to death of it. I'm tired ^rf Jesse Moran and I\n tired of the two of you, repeating your same dumb arguments and niggling and bickering, Ira forever so righteous and Maggie so willing to be wrong," "Why . , . J?iona?" Maggie said. Her feelings were hurt. Maybe it was silly of her, out she had always secretly believed that outsiders regarded her marriage with jenvy. **We^e not bickering; we're just discussing," she said. "We're compiling oar two views of tilings." Fiona said, "Oh, forget it. I don't know why I thought anything would be any different here," And she stepped into die living room and hugged Leroy, whose eyes were wide and startled. She said, "There, fliere, Ironey," and she buried her face in the crook of Leroy's neck. Plainly, Fiona herself was the one who needed consoling.
Maggie glanced at Ira. She looked elsewhere.
"Soapbox?" Ira asked. "How could you invent such a story?" She didn't answer. (Anything she said might look like bickering.) Instead she walked away from him. She headed toward the kitchen in what she hoped was a dignified silence, but Ira followed, saying, "Look here, Maggie, you can't keep engineering other people's lives this way. Face facts! Wake up and smell the coffee!" Ann Landers's favorite expression: Wake up and smell the coffee. She hated it when he quoted Ann Landers. She went over to the counter and started dropping chicken parts into the paper bag.
"Soapbox!" Ira marveled to himself.
"You want peas with your chicken?" she asked. "Or green beans." But Ira said, "I'm going to go wash up." And he left.
So here she was alone. Well! She brushed a tear from her lashes. She was in trouble with everybody in this house, and she deserved to be; as usual she had acted pushy and meddlesome. And yet it hadn't seemed like meddling while she was doing it. She had simply felt as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus, the colors not quite within the lines-something like a poorly printed newspaper ad-and if she made the smallest adjustment then everything would settle perfectly into place.
"Stupid!" she told herself, rattling the chicken parts far the bag. "Stupid aid nosy-bones!" She slammed a skillet onto the stove and poured in too much oil. She twisted a knob savagely and then stood back and waited for the burner to heat. Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn't even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht's, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow.
The oil wasn't hot enough yet, but she started adding the chicken. Unfortunately, there was quite a lot of it. Too much, it appeared now. (Unless they could coax Jesse back before suppertime.) She had to push the pieces too close together in order to fit in the last few drumsticks.
Peas, or green beans? That still hadn't been settled. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and went out to the living room to check. "Leroy," she said, "what would-?" But the living room was empty. Leroy's record had a worn sound now, as if it were playing for the second or third time. "Truckin', got my chips cashed in ..." an assortment of men sang doggedly. No one sat on the sofa or in either of the armchairs.
Maggie crossed the hallway to the front porch and called, "Leroy? Fiona?" No answer. Four vacant rockers faced out toward the streetlight.
"Ira?" "Upstairs," he called, his voice muffled-sounding.
She turned away from the door. Fiona's suitcase, thank goodness, still stood at the foot of the Stairs; so she couldn't have gone far. "Ira, is Leroy with you?" Maggie called.
He appeared on the landing with a towel draped around his neck. Still drying his face, he looked down at her.
"I can'-t find her," she told him. "I can't find either one of them." "Did you look on die porch?" " He came downstairs, carrying the towel. "Well, maybe they went out back," he said.
She followed him through the front door and around the side of the house. The night air was warm and humid. A gnat or mosquito whined in her ear and she waved it away. Who would want to be out here at this hour? Not Leroy or Fiona, evidently. The backyard, when they reached it, was a small, empty square of darkness.
"They've gone," Ira told her.
"Gone? You mean for good?" "They must have." "But their suitcase is still in the hall." "Well, it was pretty heavy," he said, and he took her arm and steered her up the back porch steps. "If they were traveling on foot, they most likely didn't want to carry it." "On foot," she said.
In the kitchen, the chicken was crackling away. Maggie paid no attention, but Ira turned the burner down.
"If they're on foot, we can catch them," Maggie said.
"Wait, Maggie-" Too late; she was off. She sped through the hall again, out the door, down the steps to the street. Fiona's sister lived somewhere west of here, near Broadway. They would have turned left, therefore. Shading her eyes beneath the glare of the streetlight, Maggie peered up the stretch of deserted sidewalk. She saw a white cat walking alone in that high-bottomed, hesitant manner that cats take on in unfamiliar surroundings. A moment later a girl with long dark hair flew out of an alley and scooped it up, crying "Turkey! There you are!" She vanished with a flounce of her skirt. A car passed, leaving behind a scrap of a ball game: ". . . no outs and the bases loaded and it's hot times on Thirty-third Street tonight, folks ..." The sky glowed a grayish pink over the industrial park.
Anne Tyter Ira came up and set a hand on her shoulder. "Maggie, honey," he said.
But she shook him off and started back oward the house.
When she was upset she lost all sense of dkection, and she concentrated now on her path like a blind man, reaching out falteringly to touch the little boxwood hedge by the walk, stumbling twice as she climbed the steps to the porch. "Sweetheart," Ira said behind her. She crossed the hallway to the foot of the stairs. She laid Fiona's suitcase flat and knelt to unfasten the latches.
Inside she found a pink cotton nightgown and a pair of child's pajamas and some lacy bikini underpants-none of these folded but scrunched instead like wrung-out dishcloths. And beneath those, a zippered cosmetics case, two stacks of tattered comic books, half a dozen beauty magazines, a box of dominoes, and a giant, faded volume of horse stories. All objects Fiona and Leroy could easily do without. What they couldn't do widiout-Fiona's purse and Leroy's baseball glove-had gone with them.
Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope.
There was an old man in Maggie's nursing home who believed that once he reached heaven, all he had lost in his lifetime would be given back to him. "Oh, yes, what a good idea!" Maggie had said when he told her about it. She had assumed he meant intangibles-youthful energy, for instance, or that ability young people have to get swept away and impassioned. But then as he went on talking she saw that he had something more concrete in mind. At the Pearly Gates, he said, Saint Peter would hand everything to him in a gunnysack: The little red sweater his mother had knit him just before she died, that he had left on a bus in fourth grade and missed with all his heart ever since. The special pocketknife his older brother had flung into a cornfield out of spite. The diamond ring his first sweetheart had failed to return to him when she broke off their engagement and ran away with the minister's son.
Then Maggie thought of what she might find in her own gunnysack-the misplaced compacts, single earrings, and umbrellas, some of which she hadn't noticed losing at the time but recollected weeks or months afterward. ("Didn't I used to have a . . . ?" "Whatever became of my ...?") Objects freely given up, even, which later she wished back again-for example, those s skirts she had donated to Goodwill, now that lower hemlines were once more in fashion. And she had said, "Oh, yes," again, but a shade less certainly, for it didn't seem that she had suffered losses quite as bitter as the old man's.
Now, though (sorting leftover fried chicken into plastic containers for Ira's lunches), she reconsidered that gunny-sack, and this time it bulged much fuller. She remembered a green dress that her brother Josh's wife, Natalie, had admired one day. Maggie had said, "Take it, it matches your eyes," for it truly did, and she had been glad for Natalie to have it; she had loved her like a sister. But then Josh and Natalie had divorced and Natalie moved away and didn't keep in touch anymore, as if she'd divorced Maggie as well, and now Maggie wanted that dress returned. It used to move so fluidly when she walked! It was one of those dresses that go anywhere, that feel right for every occasion.
And she would like that funny little kitten, Thistledown, who'd been Ira's very first present to her in their courting days. She was a jokey, mischievous creature, forever battling imaginary enemies with her needle teetn and soft gray paws, and Maggie and Ira used to spend hours playing with her. But then Maggie had unintentionally murdered the poor thing by running her mother's dryer without-checking inside first, and when she'd gone to pull the domes out there was Thistle, as limp and frowsy and boneless as her namesake, and Maggie had cried and cried. After that there had been a whole string of other cats-Lucy and Chester and Pumpkin-but now all at once Maggie wanted Thistle back again. Surely Saint Peter allowed animals in that gunnysack, didn't he? Would he allow all the lean, unassuming dogs of Mulraney Street, .those part-this-part-thats whose distant voices had barked her to sleep every night of her childhood? Would he allow the children's little gerbil, tirelessly plodding the years away on his wire treadmill till Maggie set him free out of pity and Pumpkin caught him and ate him?
And that corny key chain she used to have, a metal disk that rotated on an axle, with LOVES ME on one side and LOVES ME NOT on the other. Boris Drumm had given her that, and when Jesse got his license she had sentimentally passed it on to him. She had dropped it into his palm after chauffeuring him home from his driver's test, but unfortunately the car was still in gear and it had started rolling as she climbed out. "Oh, great going, Ma," Jesse had said, reaching for the brake; and something about his lofty amusement had made her see him for the first time as a man. But now he carried his keys in a little leather case-snakeskin, she believed. She would like that key chain back again. She could actually feel it between her fingers-the lightweight, cheap metal and the raised lettering, the absentminded spin she used to give it as she stood talking with Boris: Loves me, loves me not. And once again she saw Boris rising up before her car as she practiced braking. Why, all he'd been trying to say was: Here I am! Pay me some notice! Also, her clear brown bead necklace that looked something like dark amber. Antique plastic, the girl at the thrift shop had called it. A contradiction in terms, you would think; but Maggie had loved that necklace. So had Daisy, who in her childhood often borrowed it, along with a pair of Maggie's high-heeled shoes, and finally lost it in the alley out back of the house. She had worn it jumping rope on a summer evening and come home in tears because it had vanished. Definitely that would be in the gunnysack. And the summer evening as well, why not-the children smelling of sweat and fireflies, the warm porch floorboards sticking slightly to your chair rockers, the voices ringing from the alley: "Call that a strike?" and "Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, dressed all in black, black, black . . ." She stowed the containers of chicken at the front of the refrigerator, where Ira couldn't overlook them, and she pictured Saint Peter's astonishment as he watched what spilled forth: a bottle of wind, a box of fresh snow, and one of those looming moonlit clouds that used to float overhead like dirigibles as Ira walked her home from choir practice.