Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  Why, Mr. Gabriel was just another Ira, was all. He had Ira's craggy face and Ira's dignity, his aloofness, that could still to this day exert a physical pull on her. He was even supporting that unmarried sister, she would bet, just as Ira supported his sisters and his deadbeat father: a sign of a noble nature, some might say. All Mr. Gabriel was, in fact, was Maggie's attempt to find an earlier version of Ira. She'd wanted the version she had known at the start of their marriage, before she'd begun disappointing him.

  She hadn't been courting Mr. Gabriel; she'd been courting Ira.

  Well, she helped Mr. Gabriel out of his wheelchair and into the armchair next to his bed, and then she left to check the other patients, and life went on the same as ever. In fact, Mr. Gabriel still lived at the home, although they didn't talk as much as they used to. Nowadays he seemed to prefer Joelle. He was perfectly friendly, though. He'd probably forgotten all about Maggie's ride in the laundry cart.

  But Maggie remembered, and sometimes, feeling the glassy sheet of Ira's disapproval, she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We're all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.

  She picked up a box of Fig Newtons and read the nutrition panel on the back. "Sixty calories each," she said out loud, and Ira said, "Ah, go ahead and splurge." "Stop undermining my diet," she told him. She replaced the box on the shelf, not turning.

  "Hey, babe," he said, "care to accompany me to a funeral?" She shrugged and didn't answer, but when he hung an arm around her shoulders she let him lead her out to the car.

  To find any place in Deer Lick, you just stopped at the one traffic light and looked in all four directions. Barbershop, two service stations, hardware, grocery, three churches-everything revealed itself at a glance. The buildings were set about as demurely as those in a model-railroad village. Trees were left standing, and the sidewalks ended after three blocks. Peer down any cross street; you'd see greenery and cornfields and even, in one case, a fat brown horse dipping his nose into a pasture.

  Ira parked on the asphalt next to Fenway Memorial Church, a grayish-white frame cube with a stubby little steeple like a witch's hat. There were no other cars on the lot. He'd guessed right, as it turned out: Continuing on Route One had been quicker, which wasn't all that fortunate, since it meant they'd arrived in Deer Lick thirty minutes early. Still, Maggie had expected to find some sign of the other mourners.

  "Maybe it's the wrong day," she said.

  "It couldn't be. 'Tomorrow,' Serena told you. No way you could mix that up." "You think we should go on in?" "Sure, if it's not locked." When they got out of the car, Maggie's dress stuck to the back of her legs. She felt shellacked. Her hair was knotted from the wind, and the waistband of her panty hose had folded over on itself so it was cutting into her stomach.

  They climbed a set of wooden steps and tried the door. It swung open with a grudging sound. Immediately inside lay a long, dim room, uncarpeted, the raftered ceiling towering above dark pews. Massive floral arrangements stood on either side of the pulpit, which Maggie found reassuring. Only weddings and'funerals called for such artificial-looking bouquets.

  "Hello?" Ira tried.

  His voice rang back.

  They tiptoed up the aisle, creaking the floorboards. "Do you suppose there's a ... side or something?" Maggie whispered.

  "Side?" "I mean a groom's side and a bride's side? Or rather-" Her mistake sent her into a little fit of giggles. To tell the truth, she hadn't had much experience with funerals. No one really close to her had died yet, knock on wood. "I mean," she said, "does it make any difference where we sit?" "Just not in the front row," Ira told her.

  "Well, of course not, Ira. I'm not a total fool." She dropped into a right-hand pew midway up the aisle and slid over to make room for him. "You'd think at least some kind of music would be playing," she said.

  Ira checked his watch.

  Maggie said, "Maybe next time you should follow Se-rena's directions." "What, and wander some cow path half the morning?" "It's better than being the first people here." "I don't mind being first," Ira said.

  He reached into the left pocket of his suit coat. He brought out a deck of cards secured with a rubber band.

  "Ira Moran! You're not playing cards in a house of worship!" He reached into his right pocket and brought out another deck.

  "What if someone comes?" Maggie asked.

  "Don't worry; I have lightning reflexes," he told her.

  He removed the rubber bands and shuffled the two decks together. They rattled like machine-gun fire.

  "Well," Maggie said, "I'm just going to pretend that I don't know you." She gathered the straps of her purse and slid out the other end of the pew.

  Ira laid down cards where she'd been sitting.

  She walked over to a stained-glass window. IN MEMORY OF VIVIAN DEWEY, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, a plaque .beneath it read. A husband named Vivian! She stifled a laugh. She was reminded of a thought she'd often had back in the sixties when the young men wore their hair so long: Wouldn't it feel creepy to run your fingers through your lover's soft, trailing tresses?

  Churches always put the most unseemly notions in her head.

  She continued toward the front, her heels clicking sharply as if she knew where she was going. She stood on tiptoe beside the pulpit to smell a waxy white flower she couldn't identify. It didn't have any scent at all, and it gave off a definite chill. In fact, she was feeling a little chilly herself. She turned and walked back down the center aisle toward Ira.

  Ira had his cards spread across half the length of the pew. He was shifting them around and whistling between his teeth. "The Gambler," that was the name of the song. Disappointingly obvious. You 've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them . . . The form of solitaire he played was so involved it could last for hours, but it started simply and he was rearranging the cards almost without hesitation. "This is the part that's dull," he told Maggie. "I ought to have an amateur work this part, the way the old masters had their students fill in the backgrounds of their paintings." She shot him a glance; she hadn't known they'd done that. It sounded to her like cheating. "Can't you put that five on the six?" she asked.

  "Butt out, Maggie." She wandered on down the aisle, swinging her purse loosely from her fingers.

  What kind of church was this? The sign outside hadn't said. Maggie and Serena had grown up Methodist, but Max was some other denomination and after they married, Serena had switched over. She was married Methodist, though. Maggie had sung at her wedding; she'd sung a duet with Ira. (They were just starting to date then.) The wedding had been one of Serena's wilder inventions, a mishmash of popular songs and Kahlil Gibran in an era when everyone else was still clinging to "O Promise Me." Well, Serena had always been ahead of her time. No telling what kind of funeral she would put on.

  Maggie pivoted at the door and walked back toward Ira. He had left his pew and was leaning over it from the pew behind so he could study the full array of cards. He must have reached the interesting stage by now. Even his whistling was slower. You never count your money when you 're sitting at the table . . . From here he looked like a scarecrow: coat-hanger shoulders, spriggy black cowlick, his arms set at wiry angles.

  "Maggie! You came!" Serena called from the doorway.

  Maggie turned, but all she saw was a silhouette against a blur of yellow light. She said, "Serena?" Serena rushed toward her, arms outstretched. She wore a black shawl that completely enveloped her, with long satiny fringes swinging at the hem, and her hair was black too, untouched by gray. When Maggie hugged her she got tangled in the tail of hair that hung down straight between Serena's shoulder blades. She had to shake her fingers loose, laughing slightly, as she stepped back. Se-rena could have been a Spanish senora, Maggie
always thought, with her center part and her full, oval face and vivid coloring.

  "And Ira!" Serena was saying. "How are you, Ira?" Ira stood up (having somehow spirited his cards out of sight), and she kissed his cheek, while he endured it. "Mighty sad to hear about Max," he told her.

  "Well, thank you," Serena said. "I'm so grateful to you for making the trip; you have no idea. All Max's relatives are up at the house and I'm feeling outnumbered. Finally I slipped away; told them I had things to see to at the church ahead of time. Did you two eat breakfast?" "Oh, yes," Maggie said. "But I wouldn't mind finding a bathroom." "I'll take you. Ira?" "No, thanks." "We'll be back in a minute, then," Serena said. She hooked her arm through Maggie's and steered her down the aisle. "Max's cousins came from Virginia," she said, "and his brother George, of course, and George's wife and daughter, and Linda's been here since Thursday with the grandchildren. ..." Her breath smelled of peaches, or maybe that was her perfume. Her shoes were sandals with leather straps that wound halfway up her bare brown legs, and her dress (Maggie was not surprised to see) was a vibrant red chiffon with a rhinestone sunburst at the center of the V neckline. "Maybe it's a blessing," she was saying. "All this chaos keeps my mind off things." "Oh, Serena, has it been just terrible?" Maggie asked.

  "Well, yes and no," Serena said. She was leading Maggie through a little side door to the left of the en- trance, and then down a flight of narrow stairs. "I mean it went on so long, Maggie; in an awful way it was kind of a relief, at first. He'd been sick since February, you know. Only back then we didn't realize. February is such a sick month anyhow: colds and flu and leaky roofs and the furnace breaking down. So we didn't put two and two together at the time. He was feeling off a little, was all he said. Touch of this, touch of that . . . Then he turned yellow. Then his upper lip disappeared. I mean, nothing you can report to a doctor. You can't exactly phone a doctor and say . . . but I looked at him one morning and I thought, 'My Lord, he's so old! His whole face is different.' And by that time it was April, when normal people feel wonderful." They were crossing an unlit, linoleum-floored basement overhung with pipes and ducts. They picked their way between long metal tables and folding chairs. Maggie felt right at home. How often had she and Serena traded secrets in one or another Sunday-school classroom? She thought she could smell the coated paper that was used for Bible-study leaflets.

  "One day I came back from the grocery store," Serena said, "and Max wasn't there. It was a Saturday, and when I'd left he was working in the yard. Well, I didn't think much about it, started putting away the groceries-" She ushered Maggie into a bathroom tiled in white. Her voice took on an echo. "Then all at once I look out the window and there's this totally unknown woman leading him by the hand. She was sort of ... hovering; you could tell she thought he was handicapped or something. I went running out. She said, 'Oh! Is he yours?' " Serena leaned back against a sink, arms folded, while Maggie entered a booth. "Was he mine!" Serena said. "Like when a neighbor comes dragging your dog who's dripping garbage from every whisker and she asks, 'Is he yours?' But I said yes. Turns out this woman found him SS wandering Dunmore Road with a pair of pruning shears, and he didn't seem to know where he was headed. She asked if she could help and all he said was: 'I'm not certain. I'm not certain.' But he recognized me when he saw me. His face lit up and he told her, 'There's Serena.' So I took him inside and sat him down. I asked him what had happened and he said it was the oddest feeling. He said that out of the blue, he just seemed to be walking on Dunmore Road. Then when the woman turned him back toward where he'd come from he said he saw our house, and he knew it was ours, but at the time it was like it had nothing to do with him. He said it was like he had stepped outside his own life for a minute." MARCY + DAVE, read the chalked words above the toilet paper dispenser. SUE HARDY WEARS A PADDED BRA. Maggie tried to adjust to this new version of Max-vague and bewildered and buckling at the knees, no doubt, like one of her patients at the home. But what she came up with was the Max she'd always known, a hefty football-player type with a prickle of glinting blond hair and a broad, good-natured, freckled face; the Max who'd run naked into the surf at Carolina Beach. She'd seen him only a few times in the past ten years, after all; he was not the world's best at holding down a job and had moved his family often. But he had struck her as the type who stays boyish forever. It was hard to imagine him aging.

  She flushed the toilet and emerged to find Serena considering one of her sandals, twisting her foot this way and that. "Have you ever done such a thing?" Serena asked her. "Stepped outside your own life?" Maggie said, "Well, not that I can recall," and turned on the hot water.

  "What would it be like, I wonder,"- Serena said. "Just to look around you one day and have it all amaze you-where you'd arrived at, who you'd married, what kind of person you'd grown into. Say you suddenly came to while you were-oh, say, out shopping with your daughter-but it was your seven- or eight-year-old self observing all you did. 'Why!' you'd say. 'Can this be me? Driving a car? Taking charge? Nagging some young woman like I knew what I was doing?' You'd walk into your house and say, 'Well, I don't think all that much of my taste.' You'd go to a mirror and say, 'Goodness, my chin is starting to slope just the way my mother's did.' I mean you'd be looking at things without their curtains. You'd say, 'My husband isn't any Einstein, is he?' You'd say, 'My daughter certainly could stand to lose some weight.' " Maggie cleared her throat. (All those observations were disconcertingly true. Serena's daughter, for instance, could stand to lose a lot of .weight.) She reached for a paper towel and said, "I thought on the phone you said he died of cancer." "He did," Serena said. "But it was everywhere before we knew about it. Every part of him, even his brain." "Oh, Serena." "One day he was out selling radio ads the same as always and next day he was flat on his back. Couldn't walk right, couldn't see right; everything he did was onesided. He kept saying he smelled cookies. He'd say, 'Serena, when will those cookies be done?' I haven't baked cookies in years! He'd say, 'Bring me one, Serena, as soon as they're out of the oven.' So I would make a batch and then he'd look surprised and tell me he wasn't hungry." "I wish you'd called me," Maggie said.

  "What could you have done?" Well, nothing, really, Maggie thought. She couldn't even say for certain that she knew what Serena was going through. Every stage of their lives, it seemed, Serena had experienced slightly ahead of Maggie; and every stage she'd reported on in her truthful, startling, bald-faced way, like some foreigner who didn't know the etiquette. Talk about stripping the curtains off! It was Serena who'd told Maggie that marriage was not a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie. It was Serena who'd said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort. Now this: to have your husband die. It made Maggie nervous, although she knew it wasn't catching.

  She frowned into the jnirror and caught sight of the squinched blue chicory flower lolling above one ear. She plucked it off and dropped it in the wastebasket. Serena hadn't mentioned it-sure proof of her distracted state of mind.

  "At first I wondered, 'How are we going to do this?' " Serena said. " 'How will the two of us manage?' Then I saw that it was only me who would manage. Max was just assuming that I would see him through it. Did the tax people threaten to audit us; did the car need a new transmission? That was my affair; Max had left it all behind him. He'd be dead by the time the audit rolled around, and he didn't have any further use for a car. Really it's laughable, when you stop to think. Isn't there some warning about your wishes coming true? 'Be careful what you set your heart on'-isn't there some such warning? Here I'd vowed since I was a child that I wouldn't be dependent on a man. You'd never find me waiting around for some man to give me the time of day! I wanted a husband who'd dote on me and stick to me like glue, and that's exactly what I got. Exactly. Max hanging on to the sight of me and following me with his eyes around the room. When he had to go to the hospital finally, he begged me not to leave him and so I stayed there day and night. But I started feeling mad at him. I remembered how I'd
always been after him to exercise and take better care of his health, and he'd said exercise was nothing but a fad. Claimed jogging gave people coronaries. To hear him talk, the sidewalks were just littered with the piled-up corpses of joggers. I'd look at him in his bed and I'd say, 'Well, which do you prefer, Max: sudden death in a snazzy red warm-up suit or lying here stuck full of needles and tubes?' I said that, right out loud! I acted horrible to him." "Oh, well," Maggie said unhappily, "I'm sure you didn't intend-" "I intended every word," Serena said. "Why do you always have to gloss things over, Maggie? I acted horrible. Then he died." "Oh, dear," Maggie said.

  "It was nighttime, Wednesday night. I felt someone had lifted a weight off my chest, and I went home and slept twelve hours straight. Then Thursday Linda came down from New Jersey and that was nice; her and our son-in-law and the kids. But I kept feeling I ought to be doing something. There was something I was forgetting. I ought to be over at the hospital; that was it. I felt so restless. It was like that trick we used to try as children, remember? Where we'd stand in a doorway and press the backs of both hands against the frame and then when we stepped forward our hands floated up on their own as if all that pressure had been, oh, stored for future use; operating retroactively. And then Linda's kids started teasing the cat. They dressed the cat in their teddy bear's pajamas and Linda didn't even notice. She's never kept them properly in line. Max and I used to bite our tongues not to point that out. Anytime they'd come we wouldn't say a word but we'd give each other this look across the room: just trade a look, you know how you do? And all at once I had no one to trade looks with. It was the first I'd understood that I'd truly lost him." She drew her tail of hair over one shoulder and examined it. The skin beneath her eyes was shiny. In fact, she was crying, but she didn't seem to realize that. "So I drank a whole bottle of wine," she said, "and then I phoned everyone I ever used to know, all the friends we had when Max and I were courting. You, and Sissy Par-ton, and the Barley twins-" "The Barley twins! Are they coming?" "Sure, and Jo Ann Dermott and Nat Abrams, whom she finally did end up marrying, you'll be interested to hear-" "I haven't thought of Jo Ann in years!" "She's going to read from The Prophet. You and Ira are singing." "We're what?" "You're singing 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.' " "Oh, have mercy, Serena! Not 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.' " "You sang it at our wedding, didn't you?" "Yes, but-" "That was what they were playing when Max first told me how he felt about me," Serena said. She lifted a corner of her shawl and delicately blotted the shiny places beneath her eyes. "October twenty-second, nineteen fifty-five. Remember? The Harvest Home Ball. I came with Terry Simpson, but Max cut in." "But this is a funeral!" Maggie said.