Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize)

by Anne Tyler

  That evening, walking to choir practice, she counted up the days once more and realized that Mr. Moran might not have received her letter on Tuesday after all. She hadn't mailed it till nearly noon, she remembered. This, made her feel better. She started walking faster, waving at Serena when she spotted her on the steps of the church.

  Mr. Nichols was late, and the choir members joked and gossiped while they waited for him. They were all a little heady now that spring was here-even old Mrs. Britt. The church windows were open and they could hear the neighborhood children playing out on the sidewalk. The night air smelled of newly cut grass. Mr. Nichols, when he arrived, wore a sprig of lavender in his buttonhole. He must have bought it from the street vendor, who had only that morning appeared with his cart for the first time that year. "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Nichols said. He set his briefcase on a pew and rooted through it for his notes.

  The church door opened again and in walked Ira Mo-ran.

  He was very tall and somber, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and slim black trousers. He wore a stern expression that lengthened his chin, as if there were something lumpy in his mouth. Maggie felt her heart stop. She felt icy at first and then overheated, but she stared through him blankly with dry, wide eyes, keeping her thumb in place in the hymnbook. Even in that first moment, she knew he wasn't a ghost or a mirage. He was as real as the gummy varnished pews, not so flawlessly assembled as she had pictured but more intricately tex-tured-more physical, somehow; more complicated.

  Mr. Nichols said, "Oh, Ira. Glad to see you." "Thanks," Ira said. Then he filed through the folding chairs toward the rear, where the men sat, and he took a seat. But Maggie saw how his gaze first skimmed the women in front, resting finally on her. She could tell he knew about the letter. She felt a flush pass over her face. Ordinarily graceful out of pure caution, pure timidity, she had been caught in an error so clumsy that she didn't believe she could ever again meet another person's eyes.

  She sang numbly, standing and sitting as ordered. She sang "Once to Every Man and Nation" and "Shall We Gather at the River." Then Mr. Nichols had the men do "Shall We Gather at the River" on their own, and then he asked the accompanist to repeat a certain passage. While this was going on, Maggie leaned toward Mrs. Britt and whispered, "Wasn't that the Moran boy? The one who came in late?" "Why, yes, I believe it was," Mrs. Britt said pleasantly.

  "Didn't you tell us he'd been killed?" "I did?" Mrs. Britt asked. She looked surprised and sat back in her chair. A moment later, she sat forward again and said, "That was the Rand boy who was killed. Monty Rand." "Oh," Maggie said.

  Monty Rand had been a little pale dishcloth of a person with an incongruously deep bass voice. Maggie had never much liked him.

  After choir practice she gathered her belongings as quickly as possible and was first out the door, scuttling down the sidewalk with her purse hugged to her chest, but she hadn't even reached the corner when she heard Ira behind her. "Maggie?" he called.

  She slowed beneath a streetlight and then stopped, not looking around. He came up next to her. His legs made a shadow like scissors on the sidewalk.

  "Mind if I walk your way?" he said.

  "Do what you like," she told him shortly. He fell into step beside her.

  "So how've you been?" he asked.

  "I'm okay." "You're out of school now, right?" She nodded. They crossed a street.

  "Got a job?" he asked.

  "I work at the Silver Threads Nursing Home." "Oh. Well, good." He started whistling the last hymn they had practiced: "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." He sauntered beside her with his hands in his pockets. They passed a couple kissing at a bus stop. Maggie cleared her throat and said, "Silly me! I mixed you up with the Rand boy." "Rand?" "Monty Rand; he got killed in boot camp and I thought they said it was you." She still didn't look at him, although he was near enough so she could smell his fresh-ironed shirt. She wondered who had ironed it. One of his sisters, probably. What did that have to do with anything? She tightened her hold on her purse and walked faster, but Ira kept up with her. She was conscious of his dark, hooked presence at her elbow.

  "So now will you write to Monty's father?" he asked her.

  When she risked a sidelong glance she saw the humorous pleat at the corner of his mouth.

  "Go ahead and laugh," she told him.

  "I'm not laughing." "Go ahead! Tell me I made a fool of myself." "Do you hear me laughing?" They had reached her block now. She could see her house up ahead, part of a string of row houses, the porch glowing orange beneath the bugproof light. This time when she stopped she looked directly into his face, and he returned the look without a hint of a smile, keeping his hands shoved in his pockets. She hadn't expected his eyes to be so narrow. He could have been Asian, rather than Indian.

  "Your father must have split his sides," she said.

  "No, he was just ... he just asked me what it could mean." She tried to think what words she had used in the letter. Special, she'd written. Oh, Lord. And worse yet: wonderful. She wished she could disappear.

  "I remember you from choir practice," Ira said. "You're Josh's sister, right? But I guess we never really knew each other." "No, of course not," she said. "Goodness! We were total strangers." She tried to sound brusque and sensible.

  He studied her a moment. Then he said, "So do you think we might get to know each other now?" "Well," she said, "I do go out with someone." "Really? Who?" "Boris Drumm," she said.

  "Oh, yes." She looked off toward her house. She said, "We'll probably get married." "I see," he said.

  "Well, goodbye," she told him.

  He lifted a hand in silence, thought a moment, and then turned and walked away.

  That Sunday, though, he came to sing with the choir at the morning service. Maggie felt relieved, almost lightweight with relief, as if she'd been given a second chance, and then her heart sank when he just melted into the crowd again after church. But Thursday night he was at choir practice again and he walked her home when it was over. They talked about trivial subjects-Mrs. Britt's splintery voice, for instance. Maggie grew more comfortable. When they reached her house she saw her neighbor's dog out front, peeing on Maggie's mother's one rosebush, with the neighbor standing there watching; so she called, "Hey, lady! Get your dog out of our yard, you hear?" She was joking; it was the rough style of humor she had picked up from her brothers. But Ira didn't know that and he looked taken aback. Then Mrs. Wright laughed and said, '^You and who else going to make me, kid?" and Ira relaxed. But Maggie felt she'd been clumsy once again, and she murmured a hasty good night and went inside.

  Soon enough it became a pattern-Thursday nights and Sunday mornings. People started to notice. Maggie's mother said, "Maggie? Does Boris know about this new friendship of yours?" and Maggie snapped, "Of course he knows"-a lie, or at best a half-truth. (Maggie's mother thought Boris was God's gift to women.) But Se-rena said, "Good for you! High time you dumped Mr. Holier-than-Thou." "I haven't dumped him!" "Why not?" Serena asked. "When you compare him to Ira! Ira's so mysterious." "Well, he is part Indian, of course," Maggie said.

  "And you have to admit he's attractive." Oh, Jesse was not the only one who'd been swayed by a single friend! Certainly Serena had more than a little to do with all that happened afterward.

  She asked Maggie and Ira to sing a duet at her wedding, for instance. Out of the blue (for Ira had never been thought to have a particularly striking voice), she took it into her head that they should sing "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" before the exchange of vows. So of course they had to practice; so of course he had to come to her house. They commiserated with each other and they clucked over Serena's musical taste, but it never occurred to them to refuse her. Maggie's mother kept tip-tapping in and out with folded laundry that had no business in the living room. " 'Once,' " they sang, " 'on a high and windy hill,' " and then Maggie sputtered into laughter, but Ira remained sober. Maggie seemed to be turning into someone else, those days-someone giddy and unstable and
accident-prone. Sometimes she imag- ined that that sympathy note had thrown her permanently off balance.

  She knew by then that Ira ran his father's frame shop single-handed-Sam's "weak heart" had got to him the day after Ira's high-school graduation-and that he lived above the shop with his father and his two much older sisters, one of whom was a little slow and the other just shy or retiring or something. He wanted to go to college, though, if he could ever scrape together the money. He'd had hopes since childhood, of becoming a doctor. He told her this in a neutral tone; he didn't seem discouraged about the way his life was turning out. Then he said maybe she'd like to come home with him sometime and meet his sisters; they didn't get to talk to very many people. But Maggie said, "No!" and then flushed and said, "Oh, I guess I'd better not," and pretended not to notice his amusement. She was afraid she'd run into his father. She wondered if his sisters knew about the letter too, but she didn't want to ask.

  Never, not once in all this time, did he act any more than mildly friendly. When necessary he would take her arm-just to steer her through a crowd, say-and his hand felt firm and warm on her bare skin; but as soon as they'd passed the crowd he would release her. She wasn't even sure what he thought of her. She wasn't sure what she thought of him, either. And after all, there was Boris to consider. She went on writing Boris regularly-if anything, a little more often than usual.

  Serena's wedding rehearsal was a Friday evening. It wasn't a very formal rehearsal. Max's parents, for instance, didn't even bother attending, although Serena's mother showed up with her hair in a million pink rollers. And events happened out of order, with Maggie (standing in for the bride, for good luck) coming down the aisle ahead of all the musical selections because Max had a trainload of relatives to meet in half an hour. She walked alongside Anita, which was one of Serena's more peculiar innovations. "Who else could give me away?" Serena asked. "You surely don't imagine my father would do it." Anita herself, however, didn't seem so happy with this arrangement. She teetered and staggered in her spike-heeled shoes and dug her long red nails into Maggie's wrist in order to keep her balance. At the altar Max slung an arm around Maggie and said, shoot, maybe he'd just settle for her instead; and Serena, sitting in a center pew, called, "That'll be quite enough of that, Max Gill!" Max was the same freckled, friendly, overgrown boy he'd always been. It was hard for Maggie to picture him married.

  After the vows Max left for Penn Station and the rest of them practiced the music. They all performed in a fairly amateurish style, Maggie thought, which was fine with her because she and Ira didn't sound their best that night. They started off raggedly, and Maggie forgot that they had planned to split up the middle verse. She sailed right into the first two lines along with Ira, then stopped in confusion, then missed her own cue and fell into a fit .of giggles. At that moment, the laughter not yet faded from her face, she saw Boris Drumm in the foremost pew. He wore a baffled, rumpled frown, as if someone had just awakened him.

  Well, she'd known he was due home for the summer, but he hadn't told her which day. She pretended not to recognize him. She and Ira finished their song, and then she reverted to Serena's role and marched back up the aisle, minus Max, so Sugar could practice the timing on "Born to Be with You." After that Serena clapped her hands and shouted, "Okay, gang!" and they prepared to leave, all talking at once. They were thinking of going out for pizza. They swarmed toward Maggie, who waited at the rear of the church, but Boris stayed where he was, facing forward. He would be expecting Maggie to join him. She studied the back of his head, which was blocklike and immobile. Serena handed her her purse and said, "You've got company, I see." Right behind Serena was Ira. He stopped in front of Maggie and looked down at her. He said, "Will you be going for pizza?" Maggie said, "I guess not." He nodded, blank-faced, and left. But he walked in a different direction from the others, as if he didn't feel they would welcome him without Maggie. Which of course was nonsense.

  Maggie went back up the aisle and sat next to Boris, and they kissed. She said, "How was your trip?" and he said, "Who was that you were singing with?" at exactly the same instant. She pretended she hadn't heard. "How was your trip?" she asked again, and he said, "Wasn't that Ira Moran?" "Who, the one singing?" she asked.

  "That was Ira Moran! You told me he was dead!" "It was a misunderstanding," she said.

  "I heard you say it, Maggie." "I mean I misunderstood that he was dead. He was only, um, wounded." "Ah," Boris said. He turned that over in his mind.

  "It was only a flesh wound, was all," Maggie told him. "A scalp wound." She wondered if the two terms contradicted each other. She riffled quickly through various movies she had seen.

  "So then what? He just comes walking in one day?" Boris asked. "I mean he just pops up, like some kind of ghost? How did it happen, exactly?" "Boris," Maggie said, "I fail to comprehend why you keep dwelling on this in such a tiresome fashion." "Oh. Well. Sorry," Boris said.

  (Had she really sounded so authoritative? She found it hard to imagine, looking back.) On the morning of the wedding, Maggie got up early and walked to Serena's apartment-the second floor of a formstone row house-to help her dress. Serena seemed unruffled but her mother was all in a dither. Anita's habit when she was nervous was to speak very fast and with practically no punctuation, like someone in a hard-sell commercial. "Why she won't roll her hair like everybody else when I told her way last week I said hon nobody wears long hair anymore you ought to go to the beauty shop and get you a nice little flip to peek out under your veil ..." She was rushing around the shabby, sparsely equipped kitchen in a dirty pink satin.bathrobe, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was making a great clatter but not much was getting accomplished. Serena, lazy and nonchalant in one of Max's big shirts, said, "Take it easy, Mom, will you?" She told Maggie, "Mom thinks we ought to change the whole ceremony." "Change it how?" Maggie asked.

  "She doesn't have any bridesmaids!" Anita said. "She doesn't have a maid of honor even and what's worse there's no kind of masculine person to walk her down the aisle!" "She's upset she has to walk me down the aisle," Serena told Maggie.

  "Oh if only your uncle Maynard would come and do it instead!" Anita cried. "Maybe we should move the wedding up a week and give him another chance because the way you have it now is all cockeyed it's too oddball I can just picture how those hoity-toity Gills will be scru-pulizing me and smirking amongst themselves and besides that last perm I got scorched the tip-ends of my hair / can't walk down the aisle." "Let's go get me dressed," Serena told Maggie, and she led her away.

  In Serena's room, which was really just half of Anita's room curtained off with a draggled aqua bed sheet, Serena sat down at her vanity table. She said, "I thought of giving her a belt of whiskey, but I worried it might backfire." Maggie said, "Serena, are you sure you ought to be marrying Max?" Serena squawked and wheeled to face her. She said, "Maggie Daley, don't you start with me! I've already got my wedding cake frosted." "But I mean how do you know? How can you be certain you chose the right man?" "I can be certain because I've come to the end of the line," Serena said, turning back to the mirror. Her voice was at normal level now. She patted on liquid foundation, expertly dotting her chin and forehead and cheeks. "It's just time to marry, that's all," she said. "I'm so tired of dating! I'm so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years. It's going to be like getting out of a girdle; that's exactly how I picture it." "What are you saying?" Maggie asked. She was almost afraid of the answer. "Are you telling me you don't really love Max?" "Of course I love him," Serena said. She blended the dots into her skin. "But I've loved other people as much. I loved Terry Simpson our sophomore year-remember him? But it wasn't time to get married then, so Terry is not the one I'm marrying." Maggie didn't know what to think. Did everybody feel that way? Had the grownups been spreading fairy tales? "The minute I saw Eleanor," her oldest brother had told her once, ' 'I said, 'That girl is going to be my wife someday.' " It ha
dn't occurred to Maggie that he might simply have been ready for a wife, and therefore had his eye out for the likeliest prospect.

  So there again, Serena had managed to color Maggie's view of things. "We're not in the hands of fate after all," - she seemed to be saying. "Or if we are, we can wrest ourselves free anytime we care to." Maggie sat down on the bed and watched Serena applying Tier rouge. In Max's shirt, Serena looked casual and sporty, like anybody's girl next doOr. "When this is over," she told Maggie, "I'm going to dye my wedding dress purple. Might as well get some use out of it." Maggie gazed at her thoughtfully.

  The wedding was due to start at eleven, but Anita wanted to get to the church much earlier, she said, in case of mishaps. Maggie rode with them in Anita's ancient Chevrolet. Serena drove because Anita said she was too nervous, and since Serena's skirt billowed over so much of the seat, Maggie and Anita sat in back. Anita was talking nonstop and sprinkling cigarette ashes across the lap of her shiny peach mother-of-the-bride dress. "Now that I think of it Serena I can't imagine why you're holding your reception in the Angels of Charity building which is so damn far away and every time IVe tried to find it I've gotten all turned around and had to ask directions from passing strangers ..." They came to the Alluring Lingerie Shop, and Serena double-parked and heaved her cascades of satin out of the car in order to go model her dress for Mrs. Knowlton, her employer. While they waited for her, Anita said, "Honestly you'd suppose if you can rent a man to come tend your bar or fix your toilet or check on why your door won't lock it wouldn't be any problem at all to engage one for the five eentsy minutes it takes to walk your daughter down the aisle don't you agree?" "Yes, ma'am," Maggie said, and she dug absently into a hole in the vinyl seat and pulled out a wad of cotton batting.