Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  "We just happened to be driving past," Ira told him.

  "Hmm," Lamont said in an unfriendly tone, and then, turning again to his uncle, "Now let's see what you telling me. Your car is out on the highway someplace ..." "It was Mrs. here caught on to it," Mr. Otis said, and he gestured toward Maggie, who beamed up at Lamont trustfully. A slender thread of soft-drink foam traced her upper lip; it'made Ira feel protective.

  "I won't offer you my hand," she told Lamont. "This Pepsi has just fizzed all over me." Lamont merely studied her, with the corners of his mouth pulled down.

  "She lean out her window and call, 'Your wheel!' " Mr. Otis said. " 'Your front wheel is falling off!' " "Really that was a fabrication," Maggie told Lamont. "I made it up." Sweet Jesus.

  Lamont said, "Say what?" "I fibbed," Maggie said blithely. "We admitted as much to your uncle, but I don't know, it was kind of hard to convince him." "You saying you told him a lie?" Lamont asked.

  "Right." Mr. Otis smiled self-consciously down at his shoes.

  "Well, actually-" Ira began.

  "It was after he almost stopped dead in front of us," Maggie said. "We had to veer off the road, and I was so mad that as soon as we caught up with him I said that about his wheel. But I didn't know he was old! I didn't know he was helpless!" "Helpless?" Mr. Otis asked, his smile growing less certain.

  "And besides, then it did seem his wheel was acting kind of funny," Maggie told Lament. "So we brought him here to the Texaco." Lamont looked no more threatening than he'd seemed all along, Ira was relieved to see. In fact, he dismissed the two of them entirely. He turned instead to his uncle. "Hear that?" he asked. "See there? Now it comes to you running folks off the road." "Lamont, I'll tell you the truth," Mr. Otis said. "I do believe when I think back on it that wheel has not been acting properly for some days now.'' "Didn't I say you ought to give up driving? Didn't we all say that? Didn't Florence beg you to hand in your license? Next time you might not be so lucky. Some crazy white man going to shoot your head off next time." Mr. Otis appeared to shrink, standing there quietly with his hat brim shielding his face.

  "If you'd've stayed home with Aunt Duluth where you belong, none of this wouldn't be happening," Lamont told him. "Cruising about on the interstate! Sleeping here and there like some hippie!" "Well, I had thought I was driving real cautious and careful," Mr. Otis said.

  Ira cleared his throat. "So about the wheel-" he said.

  "You just got to go on back home and make up," Lamont told Mr. Otis. "Quit drawing this thing out and apologize to Aunt Duluth and get that rust heap out of folkses' way." "I can't apologize! I ain't done nothing to be sorry for," Mr. Otis said.

  "What's the difference, man? Apologize even so." "See, I couldn 't have done it; it was only in her dream. Duluth went and had this dream, see-" "You been married fifty-some years to that woman," Lamont said, "and half of those years the two of you been in a snit about something. She ain't speaking to you or you ain't speaking to her or she moves out or you moves out. Shoot, man, one time you both moves out and leaves your house standing empty. Plenty would give their right arms for a nice little house like you-all's, and what do you do? Leave it stand empty while you off careening about in your Chevy and Aunt Duluth's sleeping on Florence's couch discommoding her family." A reminiscent smile crossed Mr. Otis's face. "It's true," he said. "I had thought I was leaving her, that time, and she thought she was leaving me." "You two act like quarrelsome children," Lamont told him.

  "Well, at least I'm still married, you notice!" Mr. Otis said. "At least I'm still married, unlike some certain others I could name!" Ira said, "Well, at any rate-" "Even worse than children," Lamont went on, as if he hadn't heard. "Children at least got the time to spare, but you two are old and coming to the end of your lives. Pretty soon one or the other of you going to die and the one that's left behind will say, 'Why did I act so ugly? That was who it was; that person was who I was with; and here we threw ourselves away on spitefulness,' you'll say." "Well, it's probably going to be me that dies first," Mr. Otis said, "so I just ain't going to worry about that." "I'm serious, Uncle." "I'm serious. Could be what you throw away is all that really counts; could be that's the whole point of things, wouldn't that be something? Spill it! Spill it all, I say! No way not to spill it. And anyhow, just look at the times we had. Maybe that's what I'll end up thinking. 'My, we surely did have us a time. We were a real knock-down, drag-out, heart-and-soul type of couple,' I'll say. Something to reflect on in the nursing home." Lament rolled his eyes heavenward.

  Ira said, "Well, not to change the subject, but is this wheel business under control now?" Both men looked over at him. "Oh," Mr. Otis said finally. "I reckon you two will want to be moving on." "Only if you're sure you're all right," Maggie told him.

  "He'll be fine," Lament said. "Get on and go." "Yes, don't you give me another thought," Mr. Otis said. "Let me squire you to your car." And he walked off between the two of them. Lament stayed behind, looking disgusted.

  "That boy is just so cranky," Mr. Otis told Ira. "I don't know who he takes after." "You think he'll be willing to help you?" "Oh, surely. He just want to rant and carry on some first." They reached the Dodge, and Mr. Otis insisted on opening Maggie's door for her. It took longer than if she had done it herself; he had to get positioned just right and gain some leverage. Meanwhile he was saying to Ira, "And it ain't like he had room to criticize. A divorced man! Handing out advice like a expert!" He closed the door after Maggie with a loose, ineffectual sound so that she had to reopen it and give it a good slam. "A man who ups and splits at the first little setback," he told Ira. "Lives alone all pruned and pucker-ish, drying out like a raisin. Sets alone in front of the TV, night after night, and won't go courting nobody new for fear she'll do him like his wife did." "Tsk!" Maggie said, looking up at him through her window. "That is always so sad to see." "But do you think he sees it?" Mr. Otis asked. "Naw." He followed Ira around to the driver's side of the car. "He believe that's just a regular life," he told Ira.

  "Well, listen," Ira said as he slid behind the wheel. "If there's any kind of expense with the tow truck I want to hear about it, understand?" He shut the door and leaned out the window to say, "I'd better give you our address." "There won't be no expense," Mr. Otis said, "but I appreciate the thought." He tipped his hat back slightly and scratched his head. "You know I used to have this dog," he said. "Smartest dog I ever owned. Bessie. She just loved to chase a rubber ball. I would throw it for her and she would chase it. Anytime the ball landed on a kitchen chair, though, Bessie would poke her nose through the spindles of the chair-back and whine and moan and whimper, never dreaming she could just walk around and grab the ball from in front." Ira said, "Urn ..." "Puts me in mind of Lament," Mr. Otis said.

  "Lament." "Blind in spots." "Oh! Yes, Lamont!" Ira said. He was relieved to find the connection.

  "Well, I don't want to hold you up," Mr. Otis told him, and he offered Ira his hand. It felt very light and fragile, like the skeleton of a bird. "You-all take care driving now, hear?" He bent forward to tell Maggie, "Take care!" "You too," she told him. "And I hope things work out with Duluth." "Oh, they will, they will. Sooner or later." He chuckled and stepped back as Ira started the engine. Like a host seeing off his guests, he stood there gazing after them till they pulled out onto the road and he disappeared from Ira's rearview mirror.

  "Well!" Maggie said, bouncing into a more comfortable position in her seat. "So anyhow . . ." As if that whole excursion had been only a little hiccup in the midst of some long story she was telling.

  Ira turned on the radio but all he could find was the most local kind of news-crop prices, a fire in a Knights of Columbus building. He turned it off. Maggie was rooting through her purse. "Now, where on earth?" she said.

  "What're you looking for?" "My sunglasses." "On the dashboard." "Oh, right." She reached for them and perched them on the end of her nose. Then she rotated her face, staring all around as if testing their effectiveness. "Doesn't the sunlight bot
her your eyes?" she asked him finally.

  "No, I'm fine." "Maybe / should drive." "No, no . . ." "I haven't taken a single turn this whole day," she said.

  "That's all right. Thanks anyhow, sweetheart." "Well, you just let me know if you change your mind," she told him, and she sank back in her seat and gazed out at the view.

  Ira cocked an elbow on the window ledge. He started whistling a tune.

  Maggie stiffened and looked over at him.

  "You just think I'm some sort of harum-scarum lady driver," she told him.

  "Huh?" he said.

  "You're just wondering what kind of fool you are even to consider allowing me behind the wheel." He blinked. He had assumed the subject was concluded. "Lord, Maggie," he said, "why do you always take things so personally?" "I just do, that's why," she told him, but she spoke without heat, as if uninterested in her own words, and then returned to studying the scenery.

  Once they were back on Route One, Ira picked up speed. Traffic had grown heavier, but it was moving briskly. The farms gave way to patches of commercial land-a mountain of bald tires, a stepped, angular cliff of cinder blocks, a field of those windowed enclosures that fit over the beds of pickup trucks and turn them into campers. Ira wasn't sure what those were called. It bothered him; he liked to know the names of things, the specific, accurate term that would sum an object up.

  "Spruce Gum," Maggie said.

  "Pardon?" She was twisted around in her seat, gazing behind her. She said, "Spruce Gum! That was the cutoff to Fiona's! We just now passed it." "Oh, yes, Spruce Gum," he said. It did ring a bell.

  "Ira," Maggie said.

  "Hmm?" "It's not so far out of the way." He glanced at her. She had her hands pressed together, her face set toward him, her mouth bunched up a little as if she were willing certain words from him (the way she used to will the right answer out of Jesse when she was drilling him on his multiplication tables).

  "Is it?" she said.

  "No," he said.

  She misunderstood him; she drew in a breath to start arguing. But he said, "No, I guess it's not." "What: You mean you'll take me there?" "Well," he said. And then he said, "Oh, well, we've already pretty much shot the day, right?" And he flicked his blinker on and looked for a place to turn the car around.

  "Thank you, Ira," she told him, and she slid over as far as her seat belt allowed and planted a little brush stroke of a kiss below his ear.

  Ira said, "Hmf," but he sounded more grudging than he really felt.

  After he'd reversed the car in a lumberyard, he headed back up Route One and took a left onto Spruce Gum Road. They were facing into the sun now. Dusty shafts of light filmed the windshield. Maggie pushed her glasses higher on her nose, and Ira flipped his visor down.

  Was it the haze on the windshield that made him think again of their trip to Harborplace? At any rate, for some reason he suddenly remembered why Dorrie had started crying that day.

  Standing at the water's edge, hemmed in by fog, she had been moved to open her suitcase and show him its contents. None of what she'd brought was much different from any other time. There were the usual two or three comic books, he recalled, and probably a snack for her sweet tooth-a squashed Hostess cupcake perhaps, with the frosting smashed into the cellophane-and of course the rhinestone hatband that had once belonged to their mother. And finally her greatest treasure: a fan magazine with Elvis Presley on the cover. King of Rock, the title read. Dorrie worshiped Elvis Presley. Ordinarily Ira humored her, even bought her posters whenever he came across them, but on that particular morning he was feeling so burdened, he just hadn't had the patience. "Elvis," Dorrie said happily, and Ira said, "For God's sake, Dorrie, don't you know the guy is dead and buried?" Then she had stopped smiling and her eyes had filled with tears, and Ira had felt pierced. Everything about her all at once saddened him-her skimpy haircut and her chapped lips and her thin face that was so homely and so sweet, if only people would see. He put an arm around her. He hugged her bony little body close and gazed over her head at the Constellation floating in the fog. The tops of the masts had dwindled away and the ropes and chains had dissolved and the old ship had looked its age for once, swathed in clouds of mist you could mistake for the blurring of time. And Junie had pressed close to his other side and Maggie and Sam had watched steadfastly, waiting for him to say what to do next. He had known then what the true waste was; Lord, yes. It was not his having to support these people but his failure to notice how he loved them. He loved even his worn-down, defeated father, even the memory of his poor mother who had always been so pretty and never realized it because anytime she approached a mirror she had her mouth drawn up lopsided with shyness.

  But then the feeling had faded (probably the very next instant, when Junie started begging to leave) and he forgot what he had learned. And no doubt he would forget again, just as Dorrie had forgotten, by the time they reached home, that Elvis Presley was no longer King of Rock.

  Three I Maggie had a song that she liked to sing with Ira when they were traveling. "On the Road Again," it was called-not the Willie Nelson chestnut but a blues-sounding piece from one of Jesse's old Canned Heat albums, stomping and hard-driving. Ira did the beat: "Boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom! boom!" Maggie sang the melody. " 'Take a hint from me, Mama, please! don't you cry no more,' " she sang. The telephone poles appeared to be flashing by in rhythm. Maggie felt rangy and freewheeling. She tipped her head back against the seat and swirled one ankle, keeping time, In the old days, when she'd driven this road alone, the countryside had seemed unwelcoming-enemy territory. Among these woods and stony pastures her only grandchild was being held hostage, and Maggie (smothered in scarves, or swathed in an anonymous trench coat, or half obscured by Junie's bubbly red wig) had driven as if slipping between something. She'd had a sense of slithering, evading. She had fixed her mind on that child and held her face firmly before her: a bright baby face as round as a penny, eyes that widened with enthusiasm whenever Maggie walked into the room, dimpled fists revving up at the sight of her. I'm coming, Leroy! Don't forget me! But then over and over again those trips had proved so unsatisfactory, ending with that last awful time, when Leroy had twisted in her stroller and called, "Mom-Mom?"-hunting her other grandmother, her lesser grandmother, her pretender grandmother; and Maggie had finally given up and limited herself thereafter to the rare official visits with Ira. And even those had stopped soon enough. Leroy had begun to fade and dwindle, till one day she was no larger than somebody at the wrong end of a telescope-still dear, but very far removed.

  Maggie thought of last summer when her old cat, Pumpkin, had died. His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence-the lack of his furry body twining between her ankles whenever she opened the refrigerator door, the lack of his motorboat purr in her bed whenever she woke up at night. Stupidly, she had been reminded of the time Leroy and Fiona had left, although of course there was no comparison. But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards. What on earth was wrong with her? she had wondered. Would she spend the rest of her days grieving for every loss equally-a daughter-in-law, a baby, a cat, a machine that dries the air out?

  Was this how it felt to grow old?

  Now the fields were a brassy color, as pretty as a picture on a calendar. They held no particular significance. Maybe it helped that Ira was with her-an ally. Maybe it was just that sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

  " 'But I ain't going down that long old lonesome road all by myself,' " she sang automatically, and Ira sang, "Boom-da-da, boom-da-da-" If Fiona remarried she would most likely acquire a new mother-in-law. Maggie hadn't considered that. She won- dered if Fiona and this woman would be close. Would they spend their every free moment together, as cozy as t
wo girlfriends?

  "And suppose she has another baby!" Maggie said.

  Ira broke off his boom-das to ask, "Huh?" "I saw her through that whole nine months! What will she do without me?" "Who're you talking about?" "Fiona, of course. Who do you think?" "Well, I'm sure she'll manage somehow," Ira said.

  Maggie said, "Maybe, and maybe not." She turned away from him to look out at the fields again. They seemed unnaturally textureless. "I drove her to her childbirth classes," she said. "I drilled her in her exercises. I was her official labor coach." "So now she knows all about it," Ira said.

  "But it's something you have to repeat with each pregnancy," Maggie told him. "You have to keep at it." She thought of how she had kept at Fiona, whom pregnancy had turned lackadaisical and vague, so that if it hadn't been for Maggie she'd have spent her entire third trimester on the couch in front of the TV. Maggie would clap her hands briskly-"Okay!"-and snap off the Love Boat rerun and fling open the curtains, letting sunshine flood the dim air of the living room and the turmoil of rock magazines and Fresca bottles. "Time for your pelvic squats!" she would cry, and Fiona would shrink and raise one arm to shield her eyes from the light.

  "Pelvic squats, good grief," she would say. "Abdominal humps. It all sounds so gross." But she would heave to her feet, sighing. Even in pregnancy, her body was a teenager's-slender and almost rubbery, reminding Maggie of those scantily clad girls she'd glimpsed on beaches who seemed to belong to a completely different species from her own. The mound of the baby was a separate burden, a kind of package jutting out in front of her.

  "-really," she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. "Don't they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?" "Oh, honey, you're just lucky they offer such things," Maggie told her. "My first pregnancy, there wasn't a course to be found, and I was scared to death. I'd have loved to take lessons! And afterward: I remember leaving the hospital with Jesse and thinking, 'Wait. Are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this. Ira and I are just amateurs.' I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things-piano-playing, typing. You're givea years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being." Which had not been the most reassuring notion, perhaps; for Fiona had said, "Jiminy," and dropped her head in her hands.