Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize)

by Anne Tyler

  Maggie picked up her purse, not looking at Ira. Ira collected his cards. She went through the doorway ahead of him and they walked down the hall to the living room.

  People stood back a little to let them pass. She had no idea how much they had heard. Probably everything; there was something hushed and thrilled about them. She opened the front door and then turned around and said, "Well, bye now!" "Goodbye," they murmured. "Bye, Maggie, bye, Ira . . ." Outside, the sunlight was blinding. She wished they'd driven over from the church. She took hold of Ira's hand when he offered it and picked her way along the gravel next to the road, fixing her eyes on her pumps, which had developed a thin film of dust.

  "Well," Ira said finally, "we certainly livened up that little gathering." "I feel just terrible," Maggie said.

  "Oh, it'll blow over," Ira told her. "You know how she is." Then he gave a snort and said, "Just look on the bright side. As class reunions go-" "But it wasn't a class reunion; it was a funeral," Maggie said. "A memorial service. I went and ruined a memorial service! She probably thinks we were showing off or something, taunting her now that she's a widow. I feel terrible." "She'll forgive us," he told her.

  A car swished by and he changed places with her, setting her to the inside away from the traffic. Now they walked slightly apart, not touching. They were back to their normal selves. Or almost back. Not entirely. Some trick of light or heat blurred Maggie's vision, and the stony old house they were passing seemed to shimmer for a moment. It dissolved in a gentle, radiant haze, and then it regrouped itself and grew solid again.

  For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race's wastefulness. People were squandering their lives, it seemed to him. They were splurging their energies on petty jealousies or vain ambitions or longstanding, bitter grudges. It was a theme that emerged wherever he turned, as if someone were trying to tell him something. Not that he needed to be told. Didn't he know well enough all he himself had wasted?

  He was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence. Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point instead.

  His son, who couldn't carry a tune, had dropped out of high school in hopes of becoming a rock star. His daughter was one of those people who fritter themselves away on unnecessary worries; she chewed her fingernails to nubbins and developed blinding headaches before exams and agonized so over hr grades that their doctor had warned of ulcers.

  And-his wife! He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get Jt right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular-side trips, random detours.

  Like today, for instance: this Fiona business. Fiona was no longer any relation, not their daughter-in-law and not even an acquaintance, in Ira's opinion. But here Maggie sat, trailing a hand out the window as they whizzed down Route One toward home, and what did she return to (just when he was hoping she'd forgotten) but her whim to pay Fiona a visit. Bad enough they'd lost their Saturday to Max Gill's funeral-a kind of side trip in itself-but now she wanted to plunge off in a whole new direction. She wanted to swing by Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, just so she could offer to baby-sit while Fiona went on her honeymoon. A completely pointless proposal; for Fiona did have a mother, didn't she, who'd been tending Leroy all along and surely could be counted on for the next little bit as well. Ira pointed that out. He said, "What's the matter with what's-her-name? Mrs. Stuckey?" "Oh, Mrs. Stuckey," Maggie said, as if that were answer enough. She brought in her hand and rolled up the window. Her face glowed in the sunlight, round and pretty and intense. The breeze had ruffled her hair so it stood out in loops all over her head. It was a hot, gasoline-smelling breeze and Ira wasn't sorry to have lost it. However, this constant opening and shutting of the window was getting on his nerves. She operated from second to second, he thought. She never looked any distance ahead. A spasm of irritation darted raggedly through his temples.

  Here was a woman who had once let a wrong number consume an entire evening. "Hello?" she'd said into the phone, and a man had said, "Laverne, stay right there safe in your house. I just talked to Dennis and he's coming to fetch you." And then had hung up. Maggie cried, "Wait!"-speaking into a dead receiver; typical. Whoever it was, Ira had told her, deserved what he got. If Dennis and Laverne never managed to connect, why, that was their problem, not hers. But Maggie had gone on and on about it. " 'Safe,' " she moaned. " 'Safe in the house,' he told me. Lord only knows what that poor La-veme is going through." And she had spent the evening dialing all possible variations of their own number, every permutation of every digit, hoping to find Laverne. But never did, of course.

  Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, was so close it could practically reach out and grab them, to hear her talk. "It's on that cutoff right above the state line. I forget the name," she was saying. "But I couldn't see it anywhere on that map you got at the service station." No wonder she'd been so little help navigating; she'd been hunting Cartwheel instead.

  Traffic was surprisingly sparse for a Saturday. Mostly it was trucks-small, rusty trucks carrying logs or used tires, not the sleek monsters you'd see on -. They were traveling through farm country at this point, and each truck as it passed left another layer of dust on the wan, parched, yellowing fields that lined the road.

  "Here's what we'll do," Maggie told him. "Stop by Fiona's just for an instant. A teeny, eeny instant. Not accept even a glass of iced tea. Make her our offer and go." "That much you could handle by telephone," Ira said.

  "No, I couldn't!" "Telephone when we get back to Baltimore, if you're so set on baby-sitting." "That child is not but seven years old," Maggie told him, "and she must just barely remember us. We can't take her on for a week just cold! We have to let her get reacquainted first." "How do you know it's a week?" Ira asked.

  She was riffling through her purse now. She said, "Hmm?" "How do you know the honeymoon will last a week, Maggie?" "Well, I don't know. Maybe it's two weeks. Maybe even a month, I don't know." He wondered, all at once, if this whole wedding was a myth-something she'd invented for her own peculiar reasons. He wouldn't put it past her.

  "And besides!" he said. "We could never stay away that long. We've got jobs." "Not away: in Baltimore. We'd take her back down to Baltimore." "But then she'd be missing school," he said.

  "Oh, that's no problem. We'll let her go to school near us," Maggie said. "Second grade is second grade, after all, the same all over." Ira had so many different arguments against that that he was struck speechless.

  Now she dumped her purse upside down in her lap. "Oh, dear," she said, studying her billfold, her lipstick, her comb, and her pack of Kleenex. "I wish I'd brought that map from home." It was another form of wastefulness, Ira thought, to search yet again through a purse whose contents she already knew by heart. Even Ira knew those contents by heart. And it was wasteful to continue caring about Fiona when Fiona obviously had no feeling for them, when she had made it very clear that she just wanted to get on with her life. Hadn't she stated that, even? "I just want to get on with my life"-it had a familiar ring. Maybe she had shouted it during that scene before she left, or maybe later during one of those pathetic visits they used to pay after the divorce, with Leroy bashful and strange and Mrs. Stuckey a single accusatory eye glaring around the edge of the living room door. Ira winced. Waste, waste, and more waste, all for nothing. The long drive and the forced conversation and the long drive home again, for absolutely nothing.

  And it was wasteful to devote your working life to people who forgot you the instant you left their bedsides, as Ira was forever pointing out. Oh, it was also admirably selfless, he supposed. But he didn't know how Maggie endured the impermanence, the lack of permanent results-those feeble, senile patients who confused her with a long-dead mother or a sister who'd insulted them back in .

&nbs
p; It was wasteful too to fret so over'the children. (Who were no longer children anyhow-not even Daisy.) Consider, for instance, the cigarette papers that Maggie had found last spring on Daisy's bureau. She had picked them up while she was dusting and come running to Ira. "What'll we do? What are we going to do?" she had wailed. "Our daughter's smoking marijuana; this is one of the telltale clues they mention in that pamphlet that the school gives out." She'd got Ira all involved and distressed; that happened more often than he liked to admit. Together they had sat up far into the night, discussing ways of dealing with the problem. "Where did we go wrong?" Maggie cried, and Ira hugged her and said, "There now, dear heart. I promise you we'll see this thing through." All for nothing yet again, it turned out. Turned out the cigarette papers were for Daisy's flute. You slid them under the keys whenever they started sticking, Daisy explained offhandedly. She hadn't even bothered to take umbrage.

  Ira had felt ridiculous. He'd felt he had spent something scarce and real-hard currency.

  Then he thought of how a thief had once stolen Maggie's pocketbook, marched right into the kitchen where she was shelving groceries and stolen it off the counter as bold-faced as you please; and she took after him. She could have been killed! (The efficient, the streamlined thing to do was to shrug and decide she was better off without that pocketbook-had never cared for it anyhow, and surely could spare the few limp dollars in the billfold.) It was February and the sidewalks were sheets of glare ice, so running was impossible. Ira, returning from work, had been astonished to see a young boy shuffling toward him at a snail's pace with Maggie's red pocket-book dangling from his shoulder, and behind him Maggie herself came jogging along inch by inch with her tongue between her teeth as she concentrated on her footing. The two of them had resembled those mimes who can portray a speedy stride while making no progress at all. In fact, it had looked sort of comical, Ira reflected now. His lips twitched. He smiled.

  "What," Maggie ordered.

  "You ^vere crazy to go after that pocketbook thief," he told her.

  "Honestly, Ira. How does your mind work?" Exactly the question he might have asked her.

  "Anyhow, I did get it back," she said.

  "Only by chance. What if he'd been armed? Or a little bigger? What if he hadn't panicked when he saw me?" "You know, come to think of it, I believe I dreamed about that boy just a couple of nights ago," Maggie said. "He was sitting in this kitchen that was kind of our kitchen and kind of not our kitchen, if you know what I mean. . . ." Ira wished she wouldn't keep telling her dreams. It made him feel fidgety and restless.

  Maybe if he hadn't gotten married. Or at least had not had children. But that was too great a price to pay; even in his darkest moods he realized that. Well, if he had put his sister Dome in an institution, then-something state-run that wouldn't cost too much. And told his father, "I will no longer provide your support. Weak heart or not, take over this goddamn shop of yours and let me get on with my original plan if I can cast my mind back far enough to remember what it was." And made his other sister venture into the world to find employment. "You think we're not all scared?" he would ask her. "But we go out anyway and earn our keep, and so will you." But she would die of terror.

  He used to lie in bed at night when he was a little boy and pretend he was seeing patients. His drawn-up knees were his desk and he'd look across his desk and ask, kindly, "What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Brown?" At one point he had figured he might be an orthopedist, because bonesetting was so immediate. Like furniture repair, he had thought. He had imagined that the bone would make a clicking sound as it returned to its rightful place, and the patient's pain would vanish utterly in that very instant.

  "Hoosegow," Maggie said.

  "Pardon?" She scooped up her belongings and poured them back in her purse. She set the purse on the floor at her feet. "The cutoff to Cartwheel," she told him. "Wasn't it something like Hoosegow?" "I wouldn't have the faintest idea." "Moose Cow. Moose Lump." "I'm not going there, whatever it's called," Ira told her.

  "Goose Bump." "I would just like to remind you," he said, "about those other visits. Remember how they turned out? Le-roy's second birthday, when you phoned ahead to arrange things, telephoned, and still Fiona somehow forgot you were coming. They went off to Hershey Park and we had to wait on the doorstep forever and finally turn around and come home." Carrying Leroy's gift, he didn't say: a gigantic, blankly smiling Raggedy Ann that broke his'heart.

  "And her third birthday, when you brought*her that kitten unannounced even though I warned you to check with Fiona beforehand, and Leroy started sneezing and Fiona said she couldn't keep it. Leroy cried all afternoon, remember? When we left, she was still crying." "She could have taken shots for that," Maggie said, stubbornly missing the point. "Lots of children take allergy shots and they have whole housefuls of pets." "Yes, but Fiona didn't want her to. She didn't want us interfering, and she really didn't want us visiting, either, which is why I said we shouldn't go there anymore." Maggie cut her eyes over at him in a quick, surmising way. Probably she was wondering if he knew about those other trips, the ones she had made on her own. But if she had cared about keeping them secret you'd think she would have filled the gas tank afterward.

  "What I'm saying is-" he said.

  "I know what you're saying!" she cried. "You don't have to keep hammering at it!" He drove in silence for a while. A row of dotted lines stitched down the highway ahead of him. Dozens of tiny birds billowed up from a grove of trees and turned the blue sky cindery, and he watched them till they disappeared.

  "My Grandma Daley used to have a picture in her parlor," Maggie said. "A little scene carved in something yellowish like ivory, or more likely celluloid. It showed this old couple sitting by the fireplace in their rocking chairs, and the title was etched across the bottom of the frame: 'Old Folks at Home.' The woman was knitting and the man was reading an enormous book that you just knew was the Bible. And you knew there must be grown children away someplace; I mean that was the whole idea, that the old folks were left at home while the children went away. But they were so extremely old! They had those withered-apple faces and potato-sack bodies; they were people you would classify in an instant and dismiss. I never imagined that I would be an Old Folk at Home." "You're plotting to have that child come live with us," Ira said. It hit him with a thump, as clearly as if she had spoken the words. "That's what you've been leading to. Now that you're losing Daisy you're plotting for Leroy to come and fill her place." "I have no such intention!" Maggie said-too quickly, it seemed to him.

  "Don't think I don't see through you," he told her. "I suspected all along there was something fishy about this baby-sitting business. You're counting on Fiona to agree to it, now that she's all caught up with a brand-new husband." "Well, that just shows how little you know, then, because I have no earthly intention of keeping Leroy for good. All I want to do is drop in on them this afternoon and make my offer, which might just incidentally cause Fiona to reconsider a bit about Jesse." "Jesse?" "Jesse our son, Ira." "Yes, Maggie, I know Jesse's our son, but I can't imagine what you think she could reconsider. They're finished. She walked out on him. Her lawyer sent him those papers to sign and he signed them every one and sent them back." "And has never, ever been the same since," Maggie said. "He or Fiona, either. But anytime he makes a move to reconcile, she is passing through a stage where she won't speak to him, and then when she makes a move he has slammed off somewhere with hurt feelings and doesn't know she's trying. It's like some awful kind of dance, some out-of-sync dance where every step's a mistake." "Well? So?" Ira said. "I would think that ought to tell you something." "Tell me what?" "Tell you those two are a lost cause, Maggie." "Oh, Ira, you just don't give enough credit to luck," Maggie said. "Good luck or bad luck, either one. Watch out for that car in front of you." She meant the red Chevy-an outdated model, big as a barge, its finish worn down to the color of a dull red rubber eraser. Ira was already watching it. He didn't like the way it kept drifting from side to side and
changing speeds.

  "Honk," Maggie instructed him.

  Ira said, "Oh, I'll just-" He would just get past the fellow, he was going to say. Some incompetent idiot; best to put such people far behind you. He pressed the accelerator and checked the rearview mirror, but at the same time Maggie reached over to jab his horn. The long, insistent blare startled him. He seized Maggie's hand and returned it firmly to her lap. Only then did he realize that the Chevy driver, no doubt equally startled, had slowed sharply just feet ahead. Maggie made a grab for the dashboard. Ira had no choice; he swerved right and plowed off the side of the road.

  Dust rose around them like smoke. The Chevy picked up speed and rounded a curve and vanished.

  "Jesus," Ira said.

  Somehow their car had come to a stop, although he couldn't recall braking. In fact, the engine had died. Ira was still gripping the wheel, and the keys were still swinging from the ignition, softly jingling against each other.

  "You just had to butt in, Maggie, didn't you," he said.

  "Me? You're blaming this on me? What did I do?" "Oh, nothing. Only honked the horn when I was the one driving. Only scared that fellow so he lost what last few wits he had. Just once in your life, Maggie, I wish you would manage not to stick your nose in what doesn't concern you." "And if I didn't, who would?" she asked him. "And how can you say it doesn't concern me when here I sit in what's known far and wide as the death seat? And also, it wasn't my honking that caused the trouble; it was that crazy driver, slowing down for no apparent reason." Ira sighed. "Anyway," he said. "Are you all right?" "I could just strangle him!" she said.

  He supposed that meant she was fine.

  He restarted the engine. It coughed a couple of times and then took hold. He checked for traffic and pulled out onto the highway again. After the gravelly roadside, the pavement felt too frictionless, too easy. He noticed how his hands were shaking on the steering wheel.