Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [93]
This Don Burnham was a perfectly nice, well-raised boy who had transferred to Jesse's school at the start of eleventh grade. When Jesse first brought him home, Don had made conversation with Maggie (not something you would take for granted, in a boy that age) and sat politely through Daisy's exhibit of her state-capitals postcard collection. "Next time I come," he'd told Maggie out of the blue, "I'll bring you my Doonesbury scrapbook." Maggie had said, "Oh, why, I'll look forward to that." But the next time he came he had his acoustic guitar along, and Jesse sang one of his songs for him while Don strummed beneath it. Seems like this old world is on fast forward nowadays . . . Then Don told Jesse he ought to sing in public, and from that moment ever afterward (or so it seemed in retrospect), Jesse was gone.
He formed a band called Spin the Cat-he and a bunch of older boys, high-school dropouts mostly. Maggie had no idea where he'd found them. He began to dress more heavily, as if for combat; he wore black denim shirts and black jeans and crumpled leather motorcycle boots. He came in at all hours smelling of beer and tobacco or, who knows, maybe worse than tobacco. He developed a following of a whole new type of girl, crisper and flashier, who didn't bother making up to Maggie or sitting in her kitchen. And in the spring it emerged that he hadn't attended school in some time, and would not be promoted from junior year to senior.
Seventeen and a half years old and he'd thrown away his future, Ira said, all for a single friendship. Never mind that Don Burnham wasn't even part of Jesse's band, and had passed smoothly on to senior year himself. In Ira's version of things, Don's one piece of advice had landed with a pingl and life had never been the same again. Don was some kind of providential instrument, fate's messenger. In Ira's version of things.
Shape up or ship out, Ira told Jesse. Earn the missing credits in summer school, or otherwise find a job and move to his own apartment. Jesse said he'd had a bellyful of school. He would be glad to get a job, he said, and he couldn't wait to move to his own apartment, where he could come and go as he pleased, with nobody breathing down his neck. Ira said, "Good riddance," and went upstairs without another word. Jesse left the house, tramping across the porch in his motorcycle boots. Maggie started crying.
How could Ira imagine Jesse's life? Ira was one of those people who are born competent. Everything came easy to him. There was no way he could fully realize how Jesse used to feel plodding off to school every morning-his shoulders already hunched against defeat, his jacket collar standing up crooked, and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. What it must be like to be Jesse! To have a perfectly behaved younger sister, and a father so seamless and infallible! Really his only saving grace was his mother, his harum-scarum klutzy mother, Maggie said to herself. She was making one of her wry private jokes but she meant it, all the same. And she wished he'd taken more from her. Her ability to see the best in things, for instance. Her knack for accepting, for adapting.
But no. Slit-eyed and wary, all his old light-heartedness gone, Jesse prowled the city in search of work. He was hoping for a job in a record store. He didn't even have pocket money (at this point that band of his still played for free-for the "exposure," was how they put it) and was forced to borrow bus fare from Maggie. And each day he came back glummer than the day before, and each evening he and Ira fought. ' 'If you showed up for your interviews dressed like a normal person-" Ira told him.
"A place puts that much stock in appearance, I wouldn't want to work there anyhow," Jesse said.
"Fine,