Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [107]
"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