Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize)

by Anne Tyler

  Ira had a brief moment when he wondered if this whole situation might be Mr. Otis's particularly passive, devilish way of getting even.

  He turned and walked back to his own car. Behind him he heard the Chevy's trunk lid clanging shut and the sound of their feet on the gravel, but he didn't wait for them to catch up.

  Now the Dodge was as hot as the Chevy, and the chrome shaft of the gearshift burned his fingers. He sat there with the_motor idling while Maggie helped Mr. Otis settle in the back seat. She seemed to know by instinct that he would require assistance; he had to be folded across the middle in some complicated fashion. The last of him to enter was his feet, which he gathered to him by lifting both knees with his hands. Then he let out a sigh and took his hat off. In the mirror Ira saw a bony, plated-looking scalp, with two cottony puffs of white hair snarling above his ears.

  "I surely do appreciate this," Mr. Otis said.

  "Oh, no trouble!" Maggie told him, flouncing onto the front seat.

  Speak for yourself, Ira thought sourly.

  He waited for a cavalcade of motorcyclists to pass (all male, unhelmeted, swooping by in long S-curves, as free as birds), and then he pulled onto the highway. "So whereabouts are we headed?" he asked.

  "Oh, why, you just drive on past the dairy farm and make a right," Mr. Otis told him. "It ain't but three, four miles." Maggie craned around in her seat and said, "You must live in this area." "Back-air a ways on Dead Crow Road," Mr. Otis told her. "Or used to, till last week. Lately I been staying with my sister Lurene." Then he started telling her about his sister Lurene, who worked off and on at the K Mart when her arthritis wasn't too bad; and that of course led to a discussion of Mr. Otis's own arthritis, the sneaky slow manner it had crept up on him and the other things he had thought it was first and how the doctor had marveled and made over his condition when Mr. Otis finally thought to consult him.

  "Oh, if you had seen what I have seen," Maggie said. "People in the nursing home where I work just knotted over; don't I know it." She had a tendency to fall into other people's rhythms of speech while she was talking to them. Close your eyes and you could almost fancy she was black herself, Ira thought.

  "It's a evil, mean-spirited ailment; no two ways about it," Mr. Otis said. "This here is the dairy farm, mister. You want to take your next right." Ira slowed down. They passed a small clump of cows moonily chomping and staring, and then they turned onto a road not two full lanes wide. The pavement was patchy, with hand-painted signs tilting off the grassy embankment: DANGER LIVESTOCK MAY BE LOOSE and SLOW THIS MEANS YOU and HOUNDS AND HORSES CROSSING.

  Now Mr. Otis was explaining how arthritis had forced him to retire. He used to be a roofer, he said, down home in North Carolina. He used to walk those ridgepoles as nimble as a squirrel and now he couldn't manage the lowest rung of a ladder.

  Maggie made a clucking sound.

  Ira wondered why Maggie always had to be inviting other people into their lives. She didn't feel a mere husband was enough, he suspected. Two was not a satisfactory number for her. He remembered all the strays she had welcomed over the years-her brother who spent a winter on their couch when his wife fell in love with her dentist, and Serena that time that Max was in Virginia hunting work, and of course Fiona with her baby and her mountains of baby equipment, her stroller and her playpen and her wind-up infant swing. In his present mood, Ira thought he might include their own children as well, for weren't Jesse and Daisy also outsiders-interrupting their most private moments, wedging between the two of them? (Hard to believe that some people had children to hold a marriage together.) And neither one had been planned for, at least not quite so soon. In the days before Jesse was born, Ira had still had hopes of going back to school. It was supposed to be the next thing in line, after paying off his sister's medical bills and his father's new furnace. Maggie would keep on working full time. But then she found out she was pregnant, and she had to take leave from her job. And after that Ira's sister developed a whole new symptom, some kind of seizures that required hospitalization; and a moving van crashed into the shop one Christmas Eve and damaged the building. Then Maggie got pregnant with Daisy, another surprise. (Had it been unwise, perhaps, to leave matters of contraception to someone so accident-prone?) But that was eight years after Jesse, and Ira had more or less abandoned his plans by then anyhow.

  Sometimes-on a day like today, say, this long, hot day in this dusty car-he experienced the most crushing kind of tiredness. It was an actual weight on his head, as if the ceiling had been lowered. But he supposed that everybody felt that way, now and again.

  Maggie was telling Mr. Otis the purpose of their trip. "My oldest, closest friend just lost her husband," she was saying, "and we had to go to his funeral. It was the saddest occasion.'' "Oh, gracious. Well, now, I want to offer my sincere condolences," Mr. Otis said.

  Ira slowed behind a round-shouldered, humble-looking car from the forties, driven by an old lady so hunched that her head was barely visible above the steering wheel. Route One, the nursing home of highways. Then he remembered that this wasn't Route One anymore, that they had drifted sideward or maybe even backward, and he had a dreamy, floating sensation. It was like that old spell during a change of seasons when you momentarily forge> what stage the year is going through. Is it spring, or is it fall? Is the summer just beginning, or is it coming to an end?

  They passed a modern, split-level house with two plaster statues in the yard: a Dutch boy and girl bobbing delicately toward each other so their lips were almost touching. Then a trailer park and assorted signs for churches, civic organizations, Al's Lawn and Patio Furnishings. Mr. Otis sat forward with a grunt, clutching the back of the seat. "Right up-air is the Texaco," he said. "See it?" Ira saw it: a small white rectangle set very close to the road. Mylar balloons hovered high above the pumps-three to each pump, red, silver, and blue, twining lazily about one another.

  He turned onto the concrete apron, carefully avoiding the signal cord that stretched across it, and braked and looked back at Mr. Otis. But Mr. Otis stayed where he was; it was Maggie who got out. She opened the rear door and set a hand beneath the old man's elbow while he uncurled himself. "Now, just where is your nephew?" she asked.

  Mr. Otis said, "Somewheres about." "Are you sure of that? What if he's not working today?" "Why, he must be working. Ain't he?" Oh, Lord, they were going to prolong this situation forever. Ira cut the engine and watched the two of them walking across the apron.

  Over by the full-service island, a white boy with a stringy brown ponytail listened to what they asked and then shook his head. He said something, waving an arm vaguely eastward. Ira groaned and slid down lower in his seat.

  Then here came Maggie, clicking along, and Ira took heart; but, when she reached the car all she did was lean in through the passenger window. "We have to wait a minute," she told him.

  "What for?" "His nephew's out on a call but he's expected back in no time." "Then why can't we just leave?" Ira asked.

  "I couldn't do that! I wouldn't rest easy. I wouldn't know how it came out." "What do you mean, how it came out? His wheel is perfectly fine, remember?" "It wobbled, Ira. I saw it wobble." He sighed.

  "And maybe his nephew won't show up for some reason," she said, "so Mr. Otis will be stranded here. Or maybe it will cost money. I want to make sure he's not out any money." '' Look here, Maggie-'' "Why don't you fill the tank? Surely we could use some gas." "We don't have a Texaco credit card," he told her.

  "Pay cash. Fill the tank and by then I bet Lamont will be pulling into the station." "Lamont," already. Next thing you knew, she'd have adopted the boy.

  He restarted the engine, muttering, and drew up next to the self-serve island and got out. They had an older style of pump here that Baltimore no longer used-printed flip-over numerals instead of LED, and a simple pivot arrangement to trip the switch. Ira had to readjust, cast his mind back a couple of years in order to get the thing going. Then while the gas flowed into the tank he watched Maggie settle
Mr. Otis on a low, whitewashed wall that separated the Texaco from someone's vegetable garden. Mr. Otis had his hat back on and he was hunkered under it like a cat under a table, peering forth reflectively, chewing on a mouthful of air, as old men were known to do.

  He was ancient, and yet probably not so many years older than Ira himself. It was a thought to give you pause. Ira heard the jolt as the gas cut off, and he turned back to the car. Overhead, the balloons rustled against each other with a sound that made him think of raincoats.

  While he was paying inside the station he noticed a snack machine, so he walked over to the others to see if they wanted something. They were deep in conversation, Mr. Otis going on and on about someone named Duluth. "Maggie, they've got potato chips," Ira said. "The kind you like: barbecue.'' Maggie waved a hand at him. "I think you were absolutely justified," she told Mr. Otis.

  "And bacon rinds!" Ira said. "You hardly ever find bacon rinds these days." .

  She gave him a distant, abstracted look and said, "Have you forgotten I'm on a diet?" "How about you, then; Mr. Otis?" "Oh, why, no, thank you, sir; thank you kindly, sir," Mr. Otis said. He turned to Maggie and went on: "So anyways, I axes her, 'Duluth, how can you hold me to count for that, woman?' " "Mr. Otis's wife is mad at him for something he did in her dream," Maggie told Ira.

  Mr. Otis said, "Here I am just as unaware as a babe and I come down into the kitchen, I axes, 'Where my breakfast?' She say, 'Fix it yourself.' I say, 'Huh?' " "That is just so unfair," Maggie told him.

  Ira said, "Well, I believe I'll have a snack," and he walked back toward the station, hands stuffed into his pockets, feeling left out.

  Dieting too, he thought; dieting was another example of Maggie's wastefulness. The water diet and the protein diet and the grapefruit diet. Depriving herself meal after meal when in Ira's opinion she was just exactly right as she was-not even what you'd call plump; just a satisfying series of handfuls, soft, silky breasts and a creamy swell of bottom. But since when had she ever listened to Ira? He dropped coins glumly into the snack machine and punched the key beneath a sack of pretzels.

  When he got back, Maggie was saying, "I mean think if we all did that! Mistook our dreams for real life. Look at me: Two or three times a year, near-about, I dream this neighbor and I are kissing. This totally bland neighbor named Mr. Simmons who looks like a salesman of something, I don't know, insurance or real estate or something. In the daytime I don't give him a thought, but at night I dream we're kissing and I long for him to unbutton my blouse, and in the morning at the bus stop I'm so embarrassed I can't even m'eet his eyes but then I see he's just the same as ever, bland-faced man in a business suit." "For God's sake, Maggie," Ira said. He tried to picture this Simmons character, but he had no idea who she could be talking about.

  "I mean what if I was held to blame for that?" Maggie asked. "Some thirty-year-old . . . kid I don't have the faintest interest in! I'm not the one who designed that dream!" "No, indeed," Mr. Otis said. "And anyways, this here of Duluth's was Duluth's dream. It weren't even me that dreamed it. She claim I was standing on her needlepoint chair, her chair seat she worked forever on, so she order me off but when I stepped down I was walking on her crocheted shawl and her embroidered petticoat, my shoes was dragging lace and ruffles and bits of ribbon. 'If that ain't just like you,' she tell me in the morning, and I say, 'What did do? Show me what I did. Show me where I ever trampled on a one of them things.' She say, 'You are just a mowing-down type of man, Daniel Otis, and if I knew I'd have to put up with you so long I'd have made a more thoughtful selection when I married.' So I say, 'Well, if that's how you feel, I'm leaving,' and she say, 'Don't forget your things,' and off I go." "Mr. Otis has been living in his car these last few days and moving around among relatives," Maggie told Ira.

  "Is that right," Ira said.

  "So it matters quite a heap to me that my wheel not pop off," Mr. Otis added.

  Ira sighed and sat down on the wall next to Maggie. The pretzels were the varnished kind that stuck in his teeth, but he was so hungry that he went on eating them.

  Now the ponytailed boy walked toward them, so direct and purposeful in his tap-heeled leather boots that Ira stood up again, imagining they had some business to discuss. But all the boy did was coil the air hose that had been hissing on the concrete all this time without their noticing. In order not to look indecisive, Ira went on over to him anyhow. "So!" he said. "What's the story on this Lamont?" "He's out," the boy told him.

  "No chance we could get you to come, I guess. Run you over to the highway in our car and get you to look at Mr. Otis here's wheel for us." "Nope," the boy said, hanging the hose on its hook.

  Ira said, "I see." He returned to the wall, and the boy walked back to the station.

  "I think it might be Moose Run," Maggie was telling Mr. Otis. "Is that the name? This cutoff that leads into Cartwheel." "Now, I don't know about no Moose Run," Mr. Otis said, "but I have heard tell of Cartwheel. Just can't say right off exactly how you'd get there. See, they's so many places hereabouts that sound like towns, call theyselves towns, but really they ain't much more than a grocery store and a gas pump." "That's Cartwheel, all right," Maggie said. "One main street. No traffic lights. Fiona lives on a skinny little road that doesn't even have a sidewalk. Fiona's our daughter-in-law. Ex-daughter-in-law, I suppose I should say. She used to be our son Jesse's wife, but now they're divorced." "Yes, that is how they do nowadays," Mr. Otis said. "Lament is divorced too, and my sister Florence's girl Sally. I don't know why they bother getting married." Just as if his own. marriage were in perfect health.

  "Have a pretzel," Ira said. Mr. Otis shook his head absently but Maggie dug down deep in the bag and came up with half a dozen.

  "Really it was all a misunderstanding," she told Mr. Otis. She bit into a pretzel. "They were perfect for each other. They even looked perfect: Jesse so dark and Fiona so blond. It's just that Jesse was working musician's hours and his life was sort of, I don't know, unsteady. And Fiona was so young, and inclined to fly off the handle. Oh, I used to just ache for them. It broke Jesse's heart when she left him; she took their little daughter and went back home to her mother. And Fiona's heart was broken too, I know, but do you think she would say so? And now they're so neatly divorced you would think they had never been married." All true, as far as it went, Ira reflected; but there was a lot she'd left out. Or not left out so much as slicked over, somehow, like that image of their son-the "musician" plying his trade so busily that he was forced to neglect his "wife" and his "daughter." Ira had never thought of Jesse as a musician; he'd thought of him as a high-school dropout in need of permanent employment. And he had never thought of Fiona as a wife but rather as Jesse's teenaged sidekick-her veil of gleaming blond hair incongruous above a skimpy T-shirt and tight jeans- while poor little Leroy had not been much more than their pet, their stuffed animal won at a carnival booth.

  He had a vivid memory of Jesse as he'd looked the night he was arrested, back when he was sixteen. He'd been picked up for public drunkenness with several of his friends-a onetime occurrence, as it turned out, but Ira had wanted to make sure of that and so, intending to be hard on him, he had insisted Maggie stay home while he went down alone to post bail. He had sat on a bench in a public waiting area and finally there came Jesse, walking doubled over between two officers. Evidently his wrists had been handcuffed behind his back and he had attempted, at some point, to step through the circle of his own arms so as to bring his hands in front of him. But he had given up or been interrupted halfway through the maneuver, and so he hobbled out lopsided, twisted like a sideshow freak with his wrists trapped between his legs. Ira had experienced the most complicated mingling of emotions at the sight: anger at his son and anger at the authorities too, for exhibiting Jesse's humiliation, and a wild impulse to laugh and an aching, flooding sense of pity. Jesse's jacket sleeves had been pushed up his forearms in the modem style (something boys never did in Ira's day) and that had made him seem even more vulnerable, an
d so had his expression, once he was unlocked and could stand upright, although it was a fiercely defiant expression and he wouldn't acknowledge Ira's presence. Now when Ira thought of Jesse he always pictured him as he'd been that night, that same combination of infuriating and pathetic. He wondered how Maggie pictured him. Maybe she delved even farther into the past. Maybe she saw him at age four or age six, a handsome, uncommonly engaging little kid with no more than the average kid's problems. At any rate, she surely didn't view him as he really was.

  No, nor their daughter, either, he thought. Maggie saw )aisy as a version of Maggie's mother-accomplished, ficient-and she fluttered around her, looking inade- quate. She had fluttered ever since Daisy was a little girl with an uncannily well-ordered room and a sheaf of color-coded notebooks for her homework. But Daisy was pitiable too, in her way. Ira saw that clearly, even though she was the one he felt closer to. She seemed to be missing out on her own youth-had never even had a boyfriend, so far as Ira could tell. .Whenever Jesse got into mischief as a child Daisy had taken on a pinch-faced expression of disapproval, but Ira would almost rather she had joined in the mischief herself. Wasn't mat how it was supposed to work? Wasn't that how it worked in other families, those jolly, noisy families Ira used to watch wistfully when he was a little boy? Now she was packed for college- had been packed for weeks-and had no clothes left but the throwaways that she wasn't taking with her; and she walked around the house looking bleak and joyless as a nun in her limp, frayed blouses and faded skirts. But, Maggie thought she was admirable. "When I was her age I hadn't even begun to decide what I wanted to be," she said. Daisy wanted to be a quantum physicist. "I'm just so impressed with that," Maggie said, till Ira said, "Maggie, just what is a quantum physicist?"-honestly wanting to know. "Do you have the foggiest inkling?" he asked. Then Maggie thought he was belittling her and she said, "Oh, I admit I'm not scientific! I never said I was scientific! I'm just a geriatric nursing assistant, I admit it!" and Ira said, "All I meant was- Jesus! All I meant was-" and Daisy poked her head in the door and said, "Would you please, please not have another one of your blowups; I'm trying to read." "Blowup!" Maggie cried. "I make the simplest little remark-" And Ira told Daisy, "Listen here, miss, if you're si easily disturbed as all that, you can just go read in th library." So Daisy had withdrawn, pinch-faced once again, and Maggie had buried her head in her hands.