Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

And on such a staticky, inadequate radio; she'd known perfectly well how inadequate it was, with those dinky little auto speakers that didn't begin to approach high fidelity.

She braced herself for Ira's I-told-you-so. He still seemed absorbed in the appliance, though, which was nice of him.

"I guess I made a mistake," she said finally.

"I guess you did," Fiona said.

And Leroy said, "Married!" and uttered a little hiss of amusement and wiggled her toes. Each toenail, Maggie saw, bore the tiniest dot of red polish, almost completely chipped off.

"So who was the lucky guy?" Fiona asked.

"You didn't say," Maggie told her.

"What: I just came on the air and announced my engagement?"

"It was a call-in talk show," Maggie said. She spoke slowly; she was rearranging her thoughts. All at once Fiona was not getting married.

There was still a chance, then! Things could still be worked out! And yet in some illogical way Maggie continued to believe the wedding really had been planned, so that she wondered at the girl's inconsistency. "People called in to discuss their marriages with the host," she said.

Fiona knit her pale brows, as if considering the possibility that she might have been one of them.

She was so pretty, and Leroy was so endearingly spiky and unusual; Maggie felt how thirsty her eyes were, drinking them in. It was like the early days with her children, when every neck-crease, every knuckle-dent, could send her into a reverie. Look at Fiona's hair shining like ribbons, like bands of crinkle gift ribbon! Look at the darling little gold studs in Leroy's earlobes!

Ira, speaking into the grille of the appliance, said, "This thing really do much good?" His voice rang back at them tinnily.

"So far as I know," Fiona said.

"Fairly energy-efficient?"

She lifted both hands, palms up. "Beats me."

"How many BTUs does it give off?"

' 'That's just something Mom runs in the wintertime to keep her feet warm," Fiona said. "I never have paid it much heed, to tell the truth."

Ira leaned farther forward to read a decal on the appliance's rear.

Maggie seized on a change of subject. She said, "How is your mother, Fiona?"

"Oh, she's fine. Right now she's at the grocery store."

"Wonderful," Maggie said. Wonderful that she was fine, she meant. But it was also wonderful that she was out. She said, "And you're looking well too. You're wearing your hair a little fuller, aren't you?"

"It's crimped," Fiona said. "I use this special iron, like; you know bigger hair has a slimming effect."

"Slimming! You don't need slimming."

"I most certainly do. I put on seven pounds over this past summer."

"Oh, you didn't, either. You couldn't have! Why you're just a-"

Just a twig, she was going to say; or just a stick. But she got mixed up and combined the two words: "You're just a twick!"

Fiona glanced at her sharply, and no wonder; it had sounded vaguely insulting. "Just skin and bones, I mean," Maggie said, fighting back a giggle. She remembered now how fragile their relationship had been, how edgy and defensive Fiona had often seemed. She folded her hands and placed her feet carefully together on the green shag rug.

So Fiona was not getting married after all, "How's Daisy?" Fiona asked.

"She's doing well."

Leroy said, "Daisy who?"

"Daisy Moran," Fiona said. Without further explanation, she turned back to Maggie. "All grown up by now, I bet."

"Daisy is your aunt. Your daddy's little sister," Maggie told Leroy.

"Yes; tomorrow she leaves for college," she said to Fiona.

"College! Well, she always was a brain."

"Oh, no ... but it's true she won a full scholarship."

"Little bitty Daisy," Fiona said. "Just think."

Ira had finished with the appliance, finally. He moved on to the coffee table. The Frisbee rested on a pile of comic books, and he picked it up and examined it all over again. Maggie stole a peek at him. He still had not said, "I told you so," but she thought she detected something noble and forbearing in the set of his spine.

"You know, I'm in school myself, in a way," Fiona said.

"Oh? What kind of school?"

"I'm studying electrolysis."

"Why, that's lovely, Fiona," Maggie said.

She wished she could shake off this fulsome tone of voice. It seemed to belong to someone else entirely-some elderly, matronly, honey-sweet woman endlessly marveling and exclaiming.

"The beauty parlor where I'm a shampoo girl is paying for my course,"

Fiona said. "They want their own licensed operator. They say I'm sure to make heaps of money.''

"That's just lovely!" Maggie said. "Then maybe you can move out and find a place of your own."

And leave the pretender grandma behind, was what she was thinking. But Fiona gave her a blank look.

Leroy said, "Show them your practice kit, Ma."

"Yes, show us," Maggie said.

"Oh, you don't want to see that," Fiona said.

"Yes, we do. Don't we, Ira?"

Ira said, "Hmm? Oh, absolutely." He held the Frisbee up level, like a tea tray, ,and gave it a meditative spin.

"Well, then, wait a sec," Fiona said, and she got up and left the room.

Her sandals made a dainty slapping sound on the wooden floor of the hallway.

"They're going to hang a sign in the beauty parlor window," Leroy told Maggie. "Professionally painted with Ma's name."

"Isn't that something!"

"It's a genuine science, Ma says. You've got to have trained experts to teach you how to do it."

Leroy's expression was cocky and triumphant. Maggie resisted the urge to reach down and cup the complicated small bones of her knee.

Fiona returned, carrying a rectangular yellow kitchen sponge and a short metal rod the size of a ballpoint pen. "First we practice with a dummy instrument," she said. She dropped onto the couch beside Maggie. "We're supposed to work at .getting the angle exactly, perfectly right."

She set the sponge on her lap and gripped the rod between her fingers.

There was a needle at its tip, Maggie saw. For some reason she had always thought of electrolysis as, oh, not quite socially mentionable, but Fiona was so matter-of-fact and so skilled, targeting one of the sponge's pores and guiding the needle into it at a precisely monitored slant; Maggie couldn't help feeling impressed. This was a highly technical field, she realized- maybe something like dental hygiene. Fiona said, "We travel into the follicle, see, easy, easy ..." and then she said, "Oops!" and raised the heel of her hand an inch or two. "If this was a real person I'd have been leaning on her eyeball," she said. "Pardon me, lady," she told the sponge. "I didn't mean to smush you." Mottled black lettering was stamped across the sponge's surface: STABLER'S DARK BEER. MADE WITH MOUNTAIN SPRING WATER.

Ira stood over them now, with the Frisbee dangling from his fingers. He asked, "Does the school provide the sponge?"

"Yes, it's included in the tuition," Fiona said.

"They must get it free," he reflected. "Courtesy of Stabler's.

Interesting.''

"Stabler's? Anyhow, first we practice with the dummy and then with the real thing. Us students all work on each other: eyebrows and mustache and such. This girl that's my partner, Hilary, she wants me to do her bikini line."

Ira pondered that for a moment and then backed off in a hurry.

"You know these high-cut swimsuits nowadays, they show everything you've got," Fiona told Maggie.

"Oh, it's becoming impossible!" Maggie cried. "I'm just making do with my old suit till the fashions change."

Ira cleared his throat and said, "Leroy, what would you say to a game of Frisbee."

Leroy looked up at him.

' 'I could show you how to make it go where you want,'' he told her.

She took so long deciding that Maggie felt a pang for Ira's sake, but finally she said, "Well, okay," and unfolded herself from the floor.