Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [92]
So then it was girls, girls, girls-a jostling parade of girls, all of them fair and slender and pretty, with soft, unformed faces and a tidy style of dressing. They called him on the phone and sent letters reeking of perfume and sometimes simply arrived on the doorstep, treating Maggie with a deference that made her feel ancient. They paid her vivacious compliments-"Oh, Mrs. Moran, I love that blouse!"-meanwhile searching behind her for Jesse. Maggie had to fight down the urge to bristle, to bar their entrance. Who would know better than she how deviously girls could behave? Why, a boy didn't stand a chance! But then Jesse would saunter out, not even rearranging his face at the sight of them, making no effort whatsoever, his T-shirt giving off the yeasty smell of fresh sweat and his hair obscuring his eyes. The girls would grow positively swaybacked with perkiness, and Maggie knew it was they who didn't stand a chance. She felt rueful and proud, both. She was ashamed of herself for feeling proud, and to make up for it she acted especially kind to every girl who came. Sometimes she acted so kind that the girls continued to visit her for months after Jesse had dropped them. They'd sit in the kitchen and confide in her, not just about Jesse but about other things as well, problems with their parents and such. Maggie enjoyed that. Usually Daisy would be sitting there too, her head bent over her homework, and Maggie had the feeling they were all three part of a warm community of females, a community she had missed out on when she was growing up with her brothers.
Was it about that time that the music began? Loud music, with a hammering beat. One day it just flooded the house, as if Jesse's turning adolescent had opened a door through which the drums and electric guitars suddenly poured in. Let him merely duck into the kitchen for a sandwich and the clock radio would start blaring out "Lyin' Eyes." Let him dash up to his room for his catcher's mitt and his stereo would swing into "Afternoon Delight." And of course he never turned anything off again, so long after he'd left the house the music would still be playing. Maybe he intended it that way. It was his signature, his footprint on their lives. "I'll be out in the world now, but don't forget me," he was saying, and there they sat, two stodgy grownups and a prim little girl, while "When Will I Be Loved" jangled through the emptiness he left behind him.
Then he stopped liking what his classmates liked and he claimed the Top Forty was dentist music, elevator music. ("Oh," Maggie said sadly, for she had enjoyed that music-or some of it, at least.) The songs that filled the house grew whining and slippery or downright ill-tempered, and they were sung by scroungy, beatnik-looking groups dressed in rags and tags and bits of military uniforms. (Meanwhile the old albums filtered downstairs to line the shelf beneath the living room hi-fi, each new stage Jesse entered adding to Maggie's collection of castoffs, which she sometimes played secretly when she was all alone in the house.) And then he started writing his own songs, with peculiar modern names like "Microwave Quartet" and "Cassette Recorder Blues." A few of these he sang for Maggie when Ira wasn't around. He had a nasal, deadpan style of singing that was more like talking. To Maggie it sounded very professional, very