Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [75]
"Pelvic squats, good grief," she would say. "Abdominal humps. It all sounds so gross." But she would heave to her feet, sighing. Even in pregnancy, her body was a teenager's-slender and almost rubbery, reminding Maggie of those scantily clad girls she'd glimpsed on beaches who seemed to belong to a completely different species from her own. The mound of the baby was a separate burden, a kind of package jutting out in front of her.
"-really," she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. "Don't they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?" "Oh, honey, you're just lucky they offer such things," Maggie told her. "My first pregnancy, there wasn't a course to be found, and I was scared to death. I'd have loved to take lessons! And afterward: I remember leaving the hospital with Jesse and thinking, 'Wait. Are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this. Ira and I are just amateurs.' I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things-piano-playing, typing. You're givea years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being." Which had not been the most reassuring notion, perhaps; for Fiona had said, "Jiminy," and dropped her head in her hands.
"Though I'm certain you'll do fine," Maggie said in a hurry. "And of course you have me here to help you." "Oh, jiminy," Fiona said.
Ira turned down a little side road called Elm Lane-a double string of tacky one-story cottages with RVs in most of the driveways and sometimes a sloping tin trailer out back. Maggie asked him, ' 'Who will wake up in the night now and bring her the baby to nurse?" "Her husband, one would Jiope," Ira said. "Or maybe she'll keep the baby in her room this time, the way you should have had her do last time." Then he gave his shoulders a slight shake, as if ridding himself of something, and said, "What baby? Fiona's not having a baby; she's just getting married, or so you claim. Let's put first things first here." Well, but first things weren't put first the time before; Fiona had been two months pregnant when she married Jesse. Not that Maggie wanted to remind him of that. Besides, her thoughts were on something else now. She was caught by an unexpected, piercingly physical memory of bringing the infant Leroy in to Fiona for her a.m. feeding-that downy soft head wavering on Maggie's shoulder, that birdlike mouth searching the bend of Maggie's neck inside her bathrobe collar, and then the close, sleep-smelling warmth of Jesse's and Fiona's bedroom. "Oh," she said without meaning to, and then, "Oh!" For there in Mrs. Stuckey's yard (hard-packed earth, not really a yard at all) stood a wiry little girl with white-blond hair that stopped short squarely at her jawline. She had just let go of a yellow Frisbee, which sailed shuddering toward their car and landed with a thump on the hood as Ira swung into the driveway.
"That's not-" Maggie said. "Is that-?" "Must be Leroy," Ira told her.
"It's not!" But of course, it had to be. Maggie was forced to make such a leap across time, though-from the infant on her shoulder to this gawky child, all in two seconds. She was