Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

"Tell about the professionally painted sign," she told Fiona. Then she followed Ira out of the room. The screen door made a sound like a harmonica chord before it banged shut.

So.

This was the first time Maggie had been alone with Fiona since that awful morning. For once the two of them were free of Ira's hampering influence and the hostile, suspicious presence of Mrs. Stuckey. Maggie edged forward on the couch.

She clasped her hands tightly; she pointed her knees intimately in Fiona's direction.

"The sign's going to read FIONA MORAN," Fiona was saying. "LICENSED

ELECTROLOGIST. PAINLESS REMOVAL OF

SUPERFLUOUS HAIR."

"I can't wait to see it," Maggie said.

She thought about that last name: Moran. If Fiona really hated Jesse, would she have kept his name all these years?

"On the radio," she said, "you told the man you were marrying for security."

"Maggie, I swear to you, the station I listen to is-"

"WXLR," Maggie said. "Yes, I know. But I just had it in my head that that was you, and so I . . ."

She watched Fiona set the sponge and needle in the rowboat ashtray.

"Anyway," she said. "Whoever it was who called, she said the first time she'd married for love and it hadn't worked out. So this time she was aiming purely for security. ''

"Well, what a ninny," Fiona said. "If marriage was such a drag when she loved the guy, Avhat would it be like when she didn't?"

"Exactly," Maggie said. "Oh, Fiona, I'm so glad that wasn't you!"

"Shoot, I don't even have a steady boyfriend," Fiona said.

"You don't?"

But Maggie found the phrasing of that a bit worrisome. She said, "Does that mean . . . you have somebody not steady?"

"I just barely get to date at all," Fiona said.

"Well! What a pity," Maggie said. She put on a sympathetic expression.

"This one guy? Mark Derby? I went out with him for about three months, but then we had a fight. I bashed his car in after I had borrowed it, was the reason. But it really wasn't my fault. I was starting to make a left turn, when these teenage boys came up from behind and passed me on the left and so of course I hit them. Then they had the nerve to claim it was all my doing; they claimed I had my right-turn signal on instead of my left."

"Well, anyone who'd get mad about that you don't want to date anyhow,"

Maggie told her.

"I said, 'I had my left-turn signal on. Don't you think I know my left from my right?' "

"Of course you do," Maggie said soothingly. She lifted her left hand and flicked an imaginary turn signal, testing. "Yes, left is down and right is ... or maybe it's not the same in every model of car."

"It's exactly the same," Fiona told her. "At least, I think it is."

"Then maybe it was the windshield wipers," Maggie said. "I've done that, lots of times: switched on my wipers instead of my blinkers."

Fiona considered. Then she said, "No, because something was lit up.

Otherwise they wouldn't say I was signaling a right turn."

"One time I had my mind elsewhere and I went for my blinkers and shifted gears instead," Maggie said. She started laughing. "Going along about sixty miles an hour and shifted into reverse. Oh, Lord." She pulled the corners of her mouth down, recollecting herself. "Well," she told Fiona, "I'd say you're better off without the man."

"What man? Oh. Mark," Fiona said. "Yes, it's not like we were in love or anything. I only went out with him because he asked me. Plus my mom is friends with his mom. He has the nicest mother; real sweet-faced woman with a little bit of a stammer. I always feel a stammer shows sincerity of feeling, don't you?"

Maggie said, "Why, c-c-certainly I do."

It took Fiona a second to catch on. Then she laughed. "Oh, you're such a card," she said, and she tapped Maggie's wrist. "I'd forgotten what a card you are."

"So is that the end of it?" Maggie asked.

"End of what?"

"This . . . thing with Mark Derby. I mean suppose he asks you out again?"

"No way," Fiona said. "Him and his precious Subaru; no way would I go out with him." - "That's very wise of you," Maggie told her.

"Shoot! I'd have to be a moron."

"He was a moron, not to appreciate you," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "Hey. How's about a beer."

"Oh, I'd love a beer!"

Fiona jumped up, tugging down her shorts, and left the room. Maggie sank lower on the couch and listened to the sounds drifting in through the window-a car swishing past and Leroy's throaty chuckle. If this house were hers, she thought, she would get rid of all this clutter. You couldn't see the surface of the coffee table, and the layers of sofa cushions nudged her lower back uncomfortably.

"Only thing we've got is Bud Light-is that okay?" Fiona asked when she returned. She was carrying two cans and a sack of potato chips.

"It's perfect; I'm on a diet," Maggie said.

She accepted one of the cans and popped the tab, while Fiona settled next to her on the couch. "/ ought to go on a diet," Fiona said. She ripped open the cellophane sack. "Snack foods are my biggest downfall."

"Oh, mine too," Maggie said. She took a sip of her beer. It was crisp-tasting and bitter; it brought memories flooding in the way the smell of a certain perfume will. How long had it been since she'd last had a beer?

Maybe not since Leroy was a baby. Back then (she recalled as she waved away the potato chips), she sometimes drank as many as two or three cans a day, keeping Fiona company because beer was good for her milk supply, they'd heard. Now that would probably be frowned upon, but at the time they had felt dutiful and virtuous, sipping their Miller High Lifes while the baby drowsily nursed. Fiona used to say she could feel the beer zinging directly to her breasts. She and Maggie would start drinking when Maggie came home from work-midafternoon or so, just the two of them. They would grow all warm and confiding together. By the time Maggie got around to fixing supper she would be feeling, oh, not drunk or anything but filled with optimism, and then later at the table she might act a bit more talkative than usual. It was nothing the others would notice, though.

Except perhaps for Daisy. "Really, Mom. Honestly," Daisy would say. But then, she was always saying that.

As was Maggie's mother, come to think of it. "Honestly, Maggie." She had stopped by late one afternoon and caught Maggie lounging on the couch, a beer balanced on her midriff, while Fiona sat next to her singing "Dust in the Wind" to the baby. "How have you let things get so common!" Mrs.

Daley had asked, and Maggie, looking around her, had all at once wondered too. The cheap, pulpy magazines scattered everywhere, the wadded wet diapers, the live-in daughter-in-law-it did look common. How had it happened?

"I wonder if Claudine and Peter ever married," Maggie said now, and she took another sip of her beer.

"Claudine? Peter?" Fiona asked.

"On that soap opera we used to watch. Remember? His sister Natasha was trying to split them up."

"Oh, Lord, Natasha. She was one mean lady," Fiona said. She dug deep into the sack of potato chips.

"They had just got engaged when you left us," Maggie said. "They were planning to throw a big party and then Natasha found out about it-remember?"

"She looked kind of like this girl I always detested in elementary school," Fiona said.

"Then you left us," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "Actually, now that you mention it she must not have managed to split them up after all, because a couple of years later they had this baby that was kidnapped by a demented airline stewardess."

"At first I couldn't believe you had really gone for good," Maggie said.

"Whole months passed by when I'd come home and switch on the TV and check what was happening with Claudine and Peter, just so I could fill you in when you got back."