Breathing Lessons Read online

  “We never see her anyhow,” Ira said mildly. He braked for a red light.

  “For all we know, this new husband could be a molester,” Maggie said.

  “I’m sure Fiona would choose better than that, Maggie.”

  She shot him a look. (It wasn’t like him to say anything good about Fiona.) He was peering up at the traffic light. Squint lines radiated from the corners of his eyes. “Well, of course she would try to choose well,” Maggie said carefully, “but even the most sensible person on God’s earth can’t predict every single problem, can she? Maybe he’s somebody smooth and suave. Maybe he’ll treat Leroy just fine till he’s settled into the family.”

  The light changed. Ira drove on.

  “Leroy,” Maggie said reflectively. “Do you think we’ll ever get used to that name? Sounds like a boy’s name. Sounds like a football player. And the way they pronounce it: Lee-roy. Country.”

  “Did you bring that map I set out on the breakfast table?” Ira asked.

  “Sometimes I think we should just start pronouncing it our way,” Maggie said. “Le-roy.” She considered.

  “The map, Maggie. Did you bring it?”

  “It’s in my purse. Le Rwah,” she said, gargling the R like a Frenchman.

  “It’s not as if we still had anything to do with her,” Ira said.

  “We could, though, Ira. We could visit her this very afternoon.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look at where they live: Cartwheel, Pennsylvania. It’s practically on the road to Deer Lick. What we could do,” she said, digging through her purse, “is go to the funeral, see, and … Oh, where is that map? Go to the funeral and then head back down Route One to … You know, I don’t think I brought that map after all.”

  “Great, Maggie.”

  “I think I left it on the table.”

  “I asked you when we were setting out, remember? I said, ‘Are you going to bring the map, or am I?’ You said, ‘I am. I’ll just stick it in my purse.’ ”

  “Well, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss about it,” Maggie said. “All we’ve got to do is watch the road signs; anyone could manage that much.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Ira said.

  “Besides, we have those directions Serena gave me over the phone.”

  “Maggie. Do you honestly believe any directions of Serena’s could get us where we’d care to go? Ha! We’d find ourselves in Canada someplace. We’d be off in Arizona!”

  “Well, you don’t have to get so excited about it.”

  “We would never see home again,” Ira said.

  Maggie shook her billfold and a pack of Kleenex from her purse.

  “Serena’s the one who made us late for her own wedding reception, remember that?” Ira said. “At that crazy little banquet hall we spent an hour locating.”

  “Really, Ira. You always act like women are such flibbertigibbets,” Maggie said. She gave up searching through her purse; evidently she had mislaid Serena’s directions as well. She said, “It’s Fiona’s own good I’m thinking of. She’ll need us to baby-sit.”

  “Baby-sit?”

  “During the honeymoon.”

  He gave her a look that she couldn’t quite read.

  “She’s getting married next Saturday,” Maggie said. “You can’t take a seven-year-old on a honeymoon.”

  He still said nothing.

  They were out beyond the city limits now and the houses had thinned. They passed a used-car lot, a scratchy bit of woods, a shopping mall with a few scattered early-bird cars parked on a concrete wasteland. Ira started whistling. Maggie stopped fiddling with her purse straps and grew still.

  There were times when Ira didn’t say a dozen words all day, and even when he did talk you couldn’t guess what he was feeling. He was a closed-in, isolated man—his most serious flaw. But what he failed to realize was, his whistling could tell the whole story. For instance—an unsettling example—after a terrible fight in the early days of their marriage they had more or less smoothed things over, patted them into place again, and then he’d gone off to work whistling a song she couldn’t identify. It wasn’t till later that the words occurred to her. I wonder if I care as much, was the way they went, as I did before.…

  But often the association was something trivial, something circumstantial—“This Old House” while he tackled a minor repair job, or “The Wichita Lineman” whenever he helped bring in the laundry. Do, do that voodoo … he whistled unknowingly, five minutes after circling a pile of dog do on the sidewalk. And of course there were times when Maggie had no idea what he was whistling. This piece right now, say: something sort of croony, something they might play on WLIF. Well, maybe he’d merely heard it while shaving, in which case it meant nothing at all.

  A Patsy Cline song; that’s what it was. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

  She sat up sharply and said, “Perfectly sane people baby-sit their grandchildren, Ira Moran.”

  He looked startled.

  “They keep them for months. Whole summers,” she told him.

  He said, “They don’t pay drop-in visits, though.”

  “Certainly they do!”

  “Ann Landers claims drop-in visits are inconsiderate,” he said.

  Ann Landers, his personal heroine.

  “And it’s not like we’re blood relatives,” he said. “We’re not even Fiona’s in-laws anymore.”

  “We’re Leroy’s grandparents till the day we die,” Maggie told him.

  He didn’t have any answer for that.

  This stretch of road was such a mess. Things had been allowed to just happen—a barbecue joint sprouting here, a swim-pool display room there. A pickup parked on the shoulder overflowed with pumpkins: ALL U CAN CARRY $1.50, the hand-lettered sign read. The pumpkins reminded Maggie of fall, but in fact it was so warm now that a line of moisture stood out on her upper lip. She rolled down her window, recoiled from the hot air, and rolled it up again. Anyway, enough of a breeze came from Ira’s side. He drove one-handed, with his left elbow jutting over the sill. The sleeves of his suit had rucked up to show his wristbones.

  Serena used to say Ira was a mystery. That was a compliment, in those days. Maggie wasn’t even dating Ira, she was engaged to someone else, but Serena kept saying, “How can you resist him? He’s such a mystery. He’s so mysterious.” “I don’t have to resist him. He’s not after me,” Maggie had said. Although she had wondered. (Serena was right. He was such a mystery.) But Serena herself had chosen the most open-faced boy in the world. Funny old Max! Not a secret in him. “This here is my happiest memory,” Max had said once. (He’d been twenty at the time, just finishing his freshman year at UNC.) “Me and these two fraternity brothers, we go out partying. And I have a tad bit too much to drink, so coming home I pass out in the back seat and when I wake up they’ve driven clear to Carolina Beach and left me there on the sand. Big joke on me: Ha-ha. It’s six o’clock in the morning and I sit up and all I can see is sky, layers and layers of hazy sky that just kind of turn into sea lower down, without the least dividing line. So I stand up and fling off my clothes and go racing into the surf, all by my lonesome. Happiest day of my life.”

  What if someone had told him then that thirty years later he’d be dead of cancer, with that ocean morning the clearest picture left of him in Maggie’s mind? The haze, the feel of warm air on bare skin, the shock of the first cold, briny-smelling breaker—Maggie might as well have been there herself. She was grateful suddenly for the sunlit clutter of billboards jogging past; even for the sticky vinyl upholstery plastered to the backs of her arms.

  Ira said, “Who would she be marrying, I wonder.”

  “What?” Maggie asked. She felt a little dislocated.

  “Fiona.”

  “Oh,” Maggie said. “She didn’t say.”

  Ira was trying to pass an oil truck. He tilted his head to the left, peering for oncoming traffic. After a moment he said, “I’m surprised she didn’t announce
that too, while she was at it.”

  “All she said was, she was marrying for security. She said she’d married for love once before and it hadn’t worked out.”

  “Love!” Ira said. “She was seventeen years old. She didn’t know the first thing about love.”

  Maggie looked over at him. What was the first thing about love? she wanted to ask. But he was muttering at the oil truck now.

  “Maybe this time it’s an older man,” she said. “Someone sort of fatherly. If she’s marrying for security.”

  “This guy knows perfectly well I’m trying to pass and he keeps spreading over into my lane,” Ira told her.

  “Maybe she’s just getting married so she won’t have to go on working.”

  “I didn’t know she worked.”

  “She got a job, Ira. You know that! She told us that! She got a job at a beauty parlor when Leroy started nursery school.”

  Ira honked at the oil truck.

  “I don’t know why you bother sitting in a room with people if you can’t make an effort to listen,” she said.

  Ira said, “Maggie, is something wrong with you today?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How come you’re acting so irritable?”

  “I’m not irritable,” she said. She pushed her sunglasses higher. She could see her own nose—the small, rounded tip emerging below the nosepiece.

  “It’s Serena,” he said.

  “Serena?”

  “You’re upset about Serena and that’s why you’re snapping my head off.”

  “Well, of course I’m upset,” Maggie said. “But I’m certainly not snapping your head off.”

  “Yes, you are, and it’s also why you’re going on and on about Fiona when you haven’t given a thought to her in years.”

  “That’s not true! How do you know how often I think about Fiona?”

  Ira swung out around the oil truck at last.

  By now, they had hit real country. Two men were splitting logs in a clearing, watched over by a gleaming black dog. The trees weren’t changing color yet, but they had that slightly off look that meant they were just about to. Maggie gazed at a weathered wooden fence that girdled a field. Funny how a picture stayed in your mind without your knowing it. Then you see the original and you think, Why! It was there all along, like a dream that comes drifting back in pieces halfway through the morning. That fence, for instance. So far they were retracing the road to Cartwheel and she’d seen that fence on her spy trips and unconsciously made it her own. “Rickrack,” she said to Ira.

  “Hmm?”

  “Don’t they call that kind of fence ‘rickrack’?”

  He glanced over, but it was gone.

  She had sat in her parked car some distance from Fiona’s mother’s house, watching for the teeniest, briefest glimpse of Leroy. Ira would have had a fit if he’d known what she was up to. This was back when Fiona first left, following a scene that Maggie never liked to recall. (She thought of it as That Awful Morning and made it vanish from her mind.) Oh, those days she’d been like a woman possessed; Leroy was not but a baby then, and what did Fiona know about babies? She’d always had Maggie to help her. So Maggie drove to Cartwheel on a free afternoon and parked the car and waited, and soon Fiona stepped forth with Leroy in her arms and set off in the other direction, walking briskly, her long blond hair swinging in sheets and the baby’s face a bright little button on her shoulder. Maggie’s heart bounded upward, as if she were in love. In a way, she was in love—with Leroy and Fiona both, and even with her own son as he had looked while clumsily cradling his daughter against his black leather jacket. But she didn’t dare show herself—not yet, at least. Instead she drove home and told Jesse, “I went to Cartwheel today.”

  His face flew open. His eyes rested on her for one startled, startling instant before he looked away and said, “So?”

  “I didn’t talk to her, but I could tell she misses you. She was walking all alone with Leroy. Nobody else.”

  “Do you think I care about that?” Jesse asked. “What do you think I care?”

  The next morning, though, he borrowed the car. Maggie was relieved. (He was a loving, gentle, warmhearted boy, with an uncanny gift for drawing people toward him. This would be settled in no time.) He stayed gone all day—she phoned hourly from work to check—and returned as she was cooking supper. “Well?” she asked.

  “Well, what?” he said, and he climbed the stairs and shut himself in his room.

  She realized then that it would take a little longer than she had expected.

  Three times—on Leroy’s first three birthdays—she and Ira had made conventional visits, prearranged grandparent visits with presents; but in Maggie’s mind the real visits were her spy trips, which continued without her planning them as if long, invisible threads were pulling her northward. She would think she was heading to the supermarket but she’d find herself on Route One instead, already clutching her coat collar close around her face so as not to be recognized. She would hang out in Cartwheel’s one playground, idly inspecting her fingernails next to the sandbox. She would lurk in the alley, wearing Ira’s sister Junie’s bright-red wig. At moments she imagined growing old at this. Maybe she would hire on as a crossing guard when Leroy started school. Maybe she’d pose as a Girl Scout leader, renting a little Girl Scout of her own if that was what was required. Maybe she’d serve as a chaperon for Leroy’s senior prom. Well. No point in getting carried away. She knew from Jesse’s dark silences, from the listlessness with which Fiona pushed the baby swing in the playground, that they surely couldn’t stay apart much longer. Could they?

  Then one afternoon she shadowed Fiona’s mother as she wheeled Leroy’s stroller up to Main Street. Mrs. Stuckey was a slatternly, shapeless woman who smoked cigarettes. Maggie didn’t trust her as far as she could throw her, and rightly so, for look at what she did: parked Leroy outside the Cure-Boy Pharmacy and left her there while she went in. Maggie was horrified. Leroy could be kidnapped! She could be kidnapped by any passerby. Maggie approached the stroller and squatted down in front of it. “Honey?” she said. “Want to come away with your granny?” The child stared at her. She was, oh, eighteen months or so by then, and her face had seemed surprisingly grown up. Her legs had lost their infant chubbiness. Her eyes were the same milky blue as Fiona’s and slightly flat, blank, as if she didn’t know who Maggie was. “It’s Grandma,” Maggie said, but Leroy began squirming and craning all around. “Mom-Mom?” she said. Unmistakably, she was looking toward the door where Mrs. Stuckey had disappeared. Maggie stood up and walked away quickly. The rejection felt like a physical pain, like an actual wound to the chest. She didn’t make any more spy trips.

  When she’d driven along here in springtime, the woods had been dotted with white dogwood blossoms. They had lightened the green hills the way a sprinkle of baby’s breath lightens a bouquet. And once she’d seen a small animal that was something other than the usual—not a rabbit or a raccoon but something slimmer, sleeker—and she had braked sharply and adjusted the rearview mirror to study it as she left it behind. But it had already darted into the underbrush.

  “Depend on Serena to make things difficult,” Ira was saying now. “She could have phoned as soon as Max died, but no, she waits until the very last minute. He dies on Wednesday, she calls late Friday night. Too late to contact Triple A about auto routes.” He frowned at the road ahead of him. “Um,” he said. “You don’t suppose she wants me to be a pallbearer or something, do you?”

  “She didn’t mention it.”

  “But she told you she needed our help.”

  “I think she meant moral support,” Maggie said.

  “Maybe pallbearing is moral support.”

  “Wouldn’t that be physical support?”

  “Well, maybe,” Ira said.

  They sailed through a small town where groups of little shops broke up the pastures. Several women stood next to a mailbox, talking. Maggie turned her head to watch them. She had a lef
t-out, covetous feeling, as if they were people she knew.

  “If she wants me to be a pallbearer I’m not dressed right,” Ira said.

  “Certainly you’re dressed right.”

  “I’m not wearing a black suit,” he said.

  “You don’t own a black suit.”

  “I’m in navy.”

  “Navy’s fine.”

  “Also I’ve got that trick back.”

  She glanced at him.

  “And it’s not as if I was ever very close to him,” he said.

  Maggie reached over to the steering wheel and laid a hand on his. “Never mind,” she told him. “I bet anything she wants us just to be sitting there.”

  He gave her a rueful grin, really no more than a tuck of the cheek.

  How peculiar he was about death! He couldn’t handle even minor illness and had found reasons to stay away from the hospital the time she had her appendix out; he claimed he’d caught a cold and might infect her. Whenever one of the children fell sick he’d pretended it wasn’t happening. He’d told her she was imagining things. Any hint that he wouldn’t live forever—when he had to deal with life insurance, for instance—made him grow set-faced and stubborn and resentful. Maggie, on the other hand, worried she would live forever—maybe because of all she’d seen at the home.

  And if she were the one to die first, he would probably pretend that that hadn’t happened, either. He would probably just go on about his business, whistling a tune the same as always.