The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (33 page)

“Let’s get out of here,” Maggie said, and she fought her way free of the huddle to grab his arm and steer him away.

How that baby took over the house! Her cries of fury and her mourning-dove coos, her mingled smells of powder and ammonia, her wheeling arms and legs. She had Fiona’s coloring but Jesse’s spirit and his feistiness (no Lady-Baby this time). Her small, fine features were scrunched very close together low down in her face, so when Fiona combed her bit of hair into a sprout on top of her head she resembled a Kewpie doll; and like a doll she was trundled everywhere by the enchanted little girls, who would have cut school if permitted, just to lug her about by the armpits and shake her rattle too close to her eyes and hang over her, breathing heavily, while Maggie bathed her. Even Ira showed some interest, although he pretended not to. “Let me know when she’s big enough to play baseball,” he said, but as early as the second week, Maggie caught him taking sidelong peeks into the bureau drawer where Leroy slept, and by the time she had learned to sit up, the two of them were deep in those exclusive conversations of theirs.

And Jesse? He was devoted—always offering to help out, sometimes making a nuisance of himself, to hear Fiona tell it. He walked Leroy during her fussy spells, and he left his warm bed to burp her and then carry her back to Maggie’s room after the two o’clock feeding. And once, when Maggie took Fiona shopping, he spent a whole Saturday morning solely in charge, returning
Leroy none the worse for wear, although the careful way he had dressed her—with her overall straps mistakenly clamping down her collar, severely mashing the double row of ruffles—made Maggie feel sad, for some reason. He claimed that he had never wanted a boy at all; or if he had, he couldn’t remember why. “Girls are perfect,” he said. “Leroy is perfect. Except, you know …”

“Except?” Maggie asked.

“Well, it’s just that … shoot, before she was born I had this sort of, like, anticipation. And now I’ve got nothing to anticipate, you know?”

“Oh, that’ll pass,” Maggie said. “Don’t worry.”

But later, to Ira, she said, “I never heard of a father getting postpartum blues.”

Maybe if the mother didn’t, the father did; was that the way it worked? For Fiona herself was cheerful and oblivious. Often as she flitted around the baby she seemed more like one of the enchanted little girls than like a mother. She paid too much heed to Leroy’s appurtenances, Maggie felt—to her frilly clothes, her ribboned sprout of hair. Or maybe it just seemed so. Maybe Maggie was jealous. It was true that she hated to relinquish the baby when she went off to work every morning. “How can I leave her?” she wailed to Ira. “Fiona doesn’t know the first little bit about child care.”

“Well, only one way she’s ever going to learn,” Ira said. And so Maggie left, hanging back internally, and called home several times a day to see how things were going. But they were always going fine.

In the nursing home one afternoon she heard a middle-aged visitor talking to his mother—a vacant, slack-jawed woman in a wheelchair. He told her how his wife was, how the kids were. His mother smoothed her lap robe. He told her how his job was. His mother plucked at a bit
of lint and flicked it onto the floor. He told her about a postcard that had come for her at the house. The church was holding an Easter bazaar and they wanted her to check off which task she would volunteer for. This struck the son as comical, in view of his mother’s disabilities. “They offered you your choice,” he said, chuckling. “You could clerk at the needlework booth or you could tend the babies.” His mother’s hands grew still. She raised her head. Her face lit up and flowered. “Oh!” she cried softly. “I’ll tend the babies!”

Maggie knew just how she felt.

Leroy was a long, thin infant, and Fiona worried she was outgrowing the bureau drawer she slept in. “When are you going to get started on that cradle?” she asked Jesse, and Jesse said, “Any day now.”

Maggie said, “Maybe we should just buy a crib. A cradle’s for a newborn; she wouldn’t fit it for long.”

But Fiona said, “No, I set my heart on a cradle.” She told Jesse. “You promised.”

“I don’t remember promising.”

“Well, you did,” she said.

“All right! I’ll get to it! Didn’t I tell you I would?”

“You don’t have to shout at me,” she said.

“I’m not shouting.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Children! Children!” Maggie said, pretending she was joking.

But only pretending.

Once, Fiona spent the night at her sister’s, snatching up the baby and stomping out after a fight. Or not a fight exactly but a little misunderstanding: The band was playing at a club in downtown Baltimore and Fiona planned to come along, as usual, till Jesse worried aloud that Leroy
had a cold and shouldn’t be left. Fiona said Maggie would tend her just fine and Jesse said a baby with a cold needed her mother and then Fiona said it was amazing how he was so considerate of that baby but so inconsiderate of his wife and then Jesse said …

Well.

Fiona left and did not come back until morning; Maggie feared she was gone for good, endangering that poor sick baby, who needed much more nursing than Fiona could provide. She must have been planning to desert them all along, in fact. Why, just look at her soapbox! Wasn’t it odd that for almost a year now she had borne off to the bathroom twice daily a tortoiseshell soapbox, a tube of Aim toothpaste (
not
the Morans’ brand), and a toothbrush in a plastic cylinder? And that her toilet supplies were continually stored in a clear vinyl travel case on the bureau? She might as well be a guest. She had never meant to settle in permanently.

“Go after her,” Maggie told Jesse, but Jesse asked, “Why should I? She’s the one who walked out.” He was at work when Fiona returned the next day, wan and puffy-eyed. Strands of her uncombed hair mingled with the fake-fur trim of her windbreaker hood, and Leroy was wrapped clumsily in a garish daisy-square afghan that must have belonged to the sister.

What Maggie’s mother said was true: The generations were sliding downhill in this family. They were descending in every respect, not just in their professions and their educations but in the way they reared their children and the way they ran their households. (“How have you let things get so
common
?” Maggie heard again in her memory.) Mrs. Daley stood over the sleeping Leroy and pleated her lips in disapproval. “They would put an infant in a bureau drawer? They would let her stay in here with you and Ira? What can they be thinking of? It must
be that Fiona person. Really, Maggie, that Fiona is so … Why, she isn’t even a Baltimore girl! Anyone who would pronounce Wicomico as Weeko-Meeko! And what is that racket I’m hearing?”

Maggie tilted her head to listen. “It’s Canned Heat,” she decided.

“Candide? I’m not asking the name of it; I mean why is it playing? When you children were small I played Beethoven and Brahms, I played all of Wagner’s operas!”

Yes, and Maggie could still recall her itch of boredom as Wagner’s grandiose weight crashed through the house. And her frustration when, beginning some important story with “Me and Emma went to—” she had been cut short by her mother. (“ ‘Emma and I,’ if you please.”) She had sworn never to do that to her own children, preferring to hear what it was they had to say and let the grammar take care of itself. Not that it had done so, at least not in Jesse’s case.

Maybe her own downhill slide was deliberate. If so, she owed Jesse an apology. Maybe he was just carrying out her secret scheme for revolution, and would otherwise—who knows?—have gone on to be a lawyer like Mrs. Daley’s father.

Well, too late now.

Leroy learned to crawl and she crawled right out of her bureau drawer, and the next day Ira came home with a crib. He assembled it, without comment, in his and Maggie’s bedroom. Without comment, Fiona watched from the doorway. The skin beneath her eyes had a sallow, soiled look.

On a Saturday in September, they celebrated Ira’s father’s birthday. Maggie had made it a tradition to spend his birthday at the Pimlico Race Track—all of them together, even though it meant closing the frame shop.
They would take a huge picnic lunch and a ten-dollar bill for each person to bet with. In times past the whole family had squeezed into Ira’s car, but of course that was no longer possible. This year they had Jesse and Fiona (who had been away on their honeymoon the year before), and Leroy too, and even Ira’s sister Junie decided she might brave the trip. So Jesse borrowed the van that his band used to transport their instruments.
SPIN THE CAT
was lettered across its side, the S and the C striped like tigers’ tails. They loaded the back with picnic hampers and baby supplies, and then they drove to the shop to pick up Ira’s father and sisters. Junie wore her usual going-out costume, everything cut on the bias, and carried a parasol that wouldn’t collapse, which caused some trouble when she climbed in. And Dorrie was hugging her Hutzler’s coat box, which caused even more trouble. But everyone acted good-natured about it—even Ira’s father, who always said he was way too old to make a fuss over birthdays.

It was a beautiful day, the kind that starts out cool until sunlight gently warms your outer layers and then your inner layers. Daisy was trying to get them to sing “Camptown Races,” and Ira’s father wore a grudging, self-conscious smile. This was how families ought to be, Maggie thought. And in the bus that carried them in from the parking lot—a bus they half filled, if you counted the picnic hampers balanced on empty seats and the diaper bag and folded stroller blocking the aisle—she felt sorry for their fellow passengers who sat alone or in pairs. Most of them had a workaday attitude. They wore sensible clothes and stern, purposeful expressions, and they were here to win. The Morans were here to celebrate.

They spread out over one whole row of bleachers, parking Leroy alongside in her stroller. Then Mr. Moran,
who prided himself on his knowledge of horseflesh, went off to the paddocks to size things up, and Ira went too, to keep him company. Jesse found a couple he knew—a man in motorcycle gear and a slip of a girl in fringed buckskin pants—and disappeared with them; he wasn’t much of a gambler. The women settled down to select their horses by the ring of their names, which was a method that seemed to work about as well as any other. Maggie favored one called Infinite Mercy, but Junie disagreed. She said that didn’t sound to her like a horse with enough fight to it.

Because of the baby, who was teething or something and acted a little fretful, they staggered their trips to the betting window. Fiona went first with Ira’s sisters, while Maggie stayed behind with Leroy and Daisy. Then the others came back and Maggie and Daisy went, Daisy bristling with good advice. “What you do,” she said, “is put two dollars to show. That’s safest.” But Maggie said, “If I’d wanted
safe
I’d be sitting at home,” and bet all ten dollars on Number Four to win. (In the past she’d argued for the family to pool every bit of their money and head straight for the fifty-dollar-minimum window, a dangerous and exciting spot she’d never so much as approached, but she knew by now not to bother trying.) Along the way they ran into Ira and his father, who were discussing statistics. The jockeys’ weights, their previous records, the horses’ fastest times and what kind of turf they did best on—there was plenty to consider, if you cared. Maggie bet her ten dollars and left, while Daisy joined the men, and the three of them stood deliberating.

“This kid is wearing me out,” Fiona said when Maggie got back. Leroy evidently didn’t want to be carried and she kept straining toward the ground, which was littered with beer-can tabs and cigarette butts. Dorrie, who was
supposed to be helping, had opened her coat box instead and was laying an orderly row of marshmallows from one end of the bleacher to the other. Maggie said, “Here, I’ll take her, poor lamb,” and she bore Leroy off to the railing to admire the horses, which were just assembling at the starting gate with skittery, mincing steps. “What do horses say?” Maggie asked. “
Nicker-nicker-nicker
!” she supplied. Ira and his father returned, still arguing. Their subject now was the sheet of racing tips that Mr. Moran had purchased from a man with no teeth. “Which ones did you vote for?” Maggie asked them.

“You don’t
vote
, Maggie,” Ira told her. The horses took off, looking somehow quaint and toylike. They galloped past with a sound that reminded her of a flag ruffling in the wind. Then, just like that, the race was finished. “So soon!” Maggie lamented. She never could get over how quickly it all happened; there was hardly anything to watch. “Really baseball gives a better sense of time,” she told the baby.

The results lit up the electric billboard: Number Four was nowhere to be seen. That struck Maggie as a relief, in a way. She wouldn’t need to make any more choices. In fact, the only person who came out ahead was Mr. Moran. He had won six dollars on Number Eight, a horse his tip sheet had recommended. “See there?” he asked Ira. Daisy hadn’t bet at all; she was saving for a race she felt surer of.

Maggie gave the baby to Daisy and started unpacking their lunch. “There’s ham on rye, turkey on white, roast beef on whole wheat,” she announced. “There’s chicken salad, deviled eggs, potato salad, and cole slaw. Peaches, fresh strawberries, and melon balls. Don’t forget to save room for the birthday cake.” The people nearby were munching on junk food bought right there at the track. They stared curiously at the hampers, each one of which
Daisy had lined with a starched checkered cloth tucked into little pleats around the edges. Maggie passed out napkins. “Where’s Jesse?” she asked, searching the crowd.

“I have no idea,” Fiona said. Somehow, she had ended up with Leroy again. She jiggled her sharply against her shoulder, while Leroy screwed up her face and made fussing noises. Well, Maggie could have predicted as much. You don’t use such a rapid rhythm with a baby; shouldn’t Fiona have learned that by now? Wouldn’t simple instinct have informed her? Maggie felt an edgy little poke of irritation in the small of her back. To be fair, it wasn’t Fiona who annoyed her so much as the fussing—Leroy’s jagged “eh, eh.” If Maggie weren’t loading paper plates she could have taken over herself, but as it was, all she could do was make suggestions. “Try putting her in the stroller, Fiona. Maybe she’ll fall asleep.”