Breathing Lessons

by Anne Tyler

  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. “Lamont 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 modern style (something boys never did in Ira’s day) and that had made him seem even more vulnerable, and 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 further 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 Daisy as a version of Maggie’s mother—accomplished, efficient—and she fluttered around her, looking inadequate. 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 that 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 so easily disturbed as all that, you can just go read in the library.”

  So Daisy had withdrawn, pinch-faced once again, and Maggie had buried her head in her hands.

  “Same old song and dance”—that was how Jesse had once referred to marriage. This was one morning when Fiona had left the breakfast table in tears, and Ira had asked Jesse what was wrong. “You know how it is,” Jesse had answered. “Same old song and dance as always.” Then Ira (who had asked not out of empty curiosity but as a means of implying This matters, son; pay her some heed) had wondered what that “you know” signified. Was Jesse saying that Ira’s marriage and his own had anything in common? Because if so, he was way out of line. They were two entirely different institutions. Ira’s marriage was as steady as a tree; not even he could tell how wide and deep the roots went.

  Still, Jesse’s phrase had stuck in his memory: same old song and dance. Same old arguments, same recriminations. The same jokes and affectionate passwords, yes, and abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations no one else knew how to offer; but also the same old resentments dragged up year after year, with nothing ever totally forgotten: the time Ira didn’t act happy to hear Maggie was pregnant, the time Maggie failed to defend Ira in front of her mother, the time Ira refused to visit Maggie in the hospital, the time Maggie
forgot to invite Ira’s family to Christmas dinner.

  And the unvaryingness—ah, Lord; who could blame Jesse for chafing against that? Probably the boy had been watching his parents sideways all the years of his childhood, swearing he would never put up with such a life: plugging along day after day, Ira heading to his shop every morning, Maggie to the nursing home. Probably those afternoons that Jesse had spent helping out at the shop had been a kind of object lesson. He must have recoiled from it—Ira sitting endlessly on his high wooden stool, whistling along with his easy-listening radio station as he measured a mat or sawed away at his miter box. Women came in asking him to frame their cross-stitched homilies and their amateur seascapes and their wedding photos (two serious people in profile gazing solely at each other). They brought in illustrations torn from magazines—a litter of puppies or a duckling in a basket. Like a tailor measuring a half-dressed client, Ira remained discreetly sightless, appearing to form no judgment about a picture of a sad-faced kitten tangled in a ball of yarn. “He wants a pastel-colored mat of some kind, wouldn’t you say?” the women might ask. (They often used personal pronouns, as if the pictures were animate.)

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ira would answer.

  “Maybe a pale blue that would pick up the blue of his ribbon.”

  “Yes, we could do that.”

  And through Jesse’s eyes he would see himself all at once as a generic figure called The Shopkeeper: a drab and obsequious man of indeterminate age.

  Above the shop he could usually hear the creak, pause, creak of his father’s rocking chair, and the hesitant footsteps of one of his sisters crossing the living room floor. Their voices, of course, weren’t audible, and for this reason Ira had fallen into the habit of imagining that his family never spoke during the day—that they were keeping very still till Ira came. He was the backbone of their lives; he knew that. They depended on him utterly.

  In his childhood he had been extraneous—a kind of afterthought, half a generation younger than his sisters. He had been so much the baby that he’d called every family member “honey,” because that was how all those grownups or almost-grown-ups addressed him and he’d assumed it was a universal term. “I need my shoes tied, honey,” he would tell his father. He didn’t have the usual baby’s privileges, though; he was never the center of attention. If any of them could be said to occupy that position it was his sister Dorrie—mentally handicapped, frail and jerky, bucktoothed, awkward—although even Dorrie had a neglected air and tended to sit by herself on the outskirts of a room. Their mother suffered from a progressive disease that killed her when Ira was fourteen, that left him forever afterward edgy and frightened in the presence of illness; and anyhow she had never shown much of a talent for mothering. She devoted herself instead to religion, to radio evangelists and inspirational pamphlets left by door-to-door missionaries. Her idea of a meal was saltines and tea, for all of them. She never got hungry like ordinary mortals or realized that others could be hungry, but simply took in sustenance when the clock reminded her. If they wanted real food it was up to their father, for Dorrie was not capable of anything complicated and Junie was subject to some kind of phobia that worsened over the years till she refused to leave the house for so much as a quart of milk. Their father had to see to that when he was finished down at the shop. He would trudge upstairs for the grocery list, trudge out again, return with a few tin cans, and putter around the kitchen with the girls. Even after Ira was old enough, his assistance was not required. He was the interloper, the one rude splash of color in a sepia photograph. His family gave him a wide berth while addressing him remotely and kindly. “You finish your homework, honey?” they would ask, and they asked this even in the summer and over the Christmas holidays.

  Then Ira graduated—had already paid his deposit at the University of Maryland, with dreams of going on to medical school—and his father suddenly abdicated. He just … imploded, was how Ira saw it. Declared he had a weak heart and could not continue. Sat down in his platform rocker and stayed there. Ira took over the business, which wasn’t easy because he’d never played the smallest part in it up till then. All at once he was the one his family turned to. They relied on him for money and errands and advice, for transportation to the doctor and news of the outside world. It was, “Honey, is this dress out of style?” and, “Honey, can we afford a new rug?” In a way, Ira felt gratified, especially at the beginning, when this seemed to be just a temporary, summer-vacation state of affairs. He was no longer on the sidelines; he was central. He rooted through Dorrie’s bureau drawers for the mate to her favorite red sock; he barbered Junie’s graying hair; he dumped the month’s receipts into his father’s lap, all in the knowledge that he, Ira, was the only one they could turn to.

  But summer stretched into fall, and first the university granted him a semester’s postponement and then a year’s postponement, and then after a while the subject no longer came up.

  Well, face it, there were worse careers than cutting forty-five-degree angles in strips of gilded molding. And he did have Maggie, eventually—dropping into his lap like a wonderful gift out of nowhere. He did have two normal, healthy children. Maybe his life wasn’t exactly what he had pictured when he was eighteen, but whose was? That was how things worked, most often.

  Although he knew that Jesse didn’t see it that way.

  No compromises for Jesse Moran, no, sir. No modifications, no lowering of sights for Jesse. “I refuse to believe that I will die unknown,” he had said to Ira once, and Ira, instead of smiling tolerantly as he should have, had felt slapped in the face.

  Unknown.

  Maggie said, “Ira, did you happen to notice a soft-drink machine inside the station?”

  He looked at her.

  “Ira?”

  He pulled himself together and said, “Why, yes, I think so.”

  “With diet soft drinks?”

  “Um …”

  “I’ll go check,” Maggie said. “Those pretzels made me thirsty. Mr. Otis? Want something to drink?”

  “Oh, no, I’m doing all right,” Mr. Otis told her.

  She tripped off toward the building, her skirt swinging. Both men watched her go.

  “A fine, fine lady,” Mr. Otis said.

  Ira let his eyes close briefly and rubbed the ache in his forehead.

  “A real angel of mercy,” Mr. Otis said.

  In stores sometimes Maggie would bring her selections to a clerk and say, “I suppose you expect me to pay for these,” in the fake-tough tone that her brothers used when they were joking. Ira always worried she had overstepped, but the clerk would laugh and say something like: “Well, that thought had occurred to me.” So the world was not as Ira had perceived it, evidently. It was more the way Maggie perceived it. She was the one who got along in it better, collecting strays who stuck to her like lint and falling into heart-to-heart talks with total strangers. This Mr. Otis, for instance: his face alight with enthusiasm, his eyes stretched into crepe-edged triangles. “She puts me in mind of the lady with the chimney,” he was telling Ira. “I knew it was someone; just couldn’t think who.”

  “Chimney?”

  “White lady I did not know from Adam,” Mr. Otis said. “She was leaking round her chimney she say and she call me to come give a estimate. But I misstepped somehow and fell right off her roof while I was walking about. Only knocked the wind out as it happened, but Lordy, for a while there I thought I was a goner, laid there on the ground not able to catch my breath, and this lady she insist on driving me to the hospital. On the way, though, my breath come back to me and so I say, ‘Mrs., let’s not go after all, they’ll only take my life savings to say I got nothing wrong with me,’ so she say fine but then has to buy me a cup of coffee and some hash browns at McDonald’s, which happen to lie next to a Toys R Us, so she axes would I mind if we run in afterwards and bought a little red wagon for her nephew whose birthday it was tomorrow? And I say no and in fact she buy two, one for my niece’s son Elbert also, and next to t
hat is this gardening place—”

  “Yes, that is Maggie, all right,” Ira said.

  “Not a straight-line kind of person.”

  “No indeedy,” Ira said.

  That seemed to use up all their topics of conversation. They fell silent and focused on Maggie, who was returning with a soft-drink can held at arm’s length. “Darn thing just bubbled up all over me,” she called cheerfully. “Ira? Want a sip?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Mr. Otis?”

  “Oh, why, no, I don’t believe I do, thanks anyhow.”

  She settled between them and tipped her head back for a long, noisy swig.

  Ira started wishing for a game of solitaire. All this idleness was getting to him. Judging from the way those balloons were bobbing about, though, he guessed his cards might blow away, and so he tucked his hands in his armpits and slouched lower on the wall.

  They sold balloons like that at Harborplace, or next to it. Lone, grim men stood on street corners with trees of Mylar lozenges floating overhead. He remembered how entranced his sister Junie had been when she first saw them. Poor Junie: in a way more seriously handicapped than Dorrie, even—more limited, more imprisoned. Her fears confounded them all, because nothing very dreadful had ever befallen her in the outside world, at least not so far as anyone knew. In the beginning they tried to point that out. They said useless things like: “What’s the worst that could happen?” and “I’ll be with you.” Then gradually they stopped. They gave up on her and let her stay where she was.

  Except for Maggie, that is. Maggie was too obstinate to give up. And after years of failed attempts, one day she conceived the notion that Junie might be persuaded to go out if she could go in costume. She bought Junie a bright-red wig and a skin-tight dress covered with poppies and a pair of spike-heeled patent-leather shoes with ankle straps. She plastered Junie’s face with heavy makeup. To everyone’s astonishment, it worked. Giggling in a terrified, unhappy way, Junie allowed Maggie and Ira to lead her to the front stoop. The next day, slightly farther. Then finally to the end of the block. Never without Ira, though. She wouldn’t do it with just Maggie; Maggie was not a blood relation. (Ira’s father, in fact, wouldn’t even call Maggie by name but referred to her as “Madam.” “Will Madam be coming too, Ira?”—a title that exactly reflected the mocking, skeptical attitude he had assumed toward her from the start.)