Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

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 much like what you might hear on the radio, but then, of course, she was only his mother. Although his friends were impressed, too; she knew that. His friend Don Burnham, whose second cousin had come this close to being hired as a roadie for the Ramones, said Jesse was good enough to form a group of his own and sing in public.

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, then you'd better learn how to dig ditches, because that's the only job where they don't put stock in appearance."

Then Jesse would slam out of the house once again, and how flat things seemed after he left! How shallow, how lacking in spirit! Maggie and Ira gazed at each other bleakly across the living room. Maggie blamed Ira; he was too harsh. Ira blamed Maggie; she was too soft.

Sometimes, deep down inside, Maggie blamed herself too. She saw now that there was a single theme to every decision she had made as a parent: The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

She dreamed that Jesse was dead-that in fact he had died years ago, back when he was still a sunny, prankish little boy, and she had somehow failed to realize it. She dreamed she was sobbing uncontrollably; there was no way to survive such a loss. Then she saw in the crowd on deck (for she was taking a boat trip, all at once) a child who resembled Jesse, standing with his parents, whom she had never seen before. He glanced over at her and looked quickly away, but she could tell that he thought she seemed familiar. She smiled at him. He glanced at her again and then looked away again. She edged a few inches closer, meanwhile pretending to study the horizon. He had come back to life in another family; that was how she explained it to herself. He wasn't hers now, but never mind, she would start over. She would win him to her side. She felt his eyes alight on her once more and she sensed how puzzled he was, half remembering her and half not; and she knew it meant that underneath, he and she would always love each other.