Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  He was twenty-one when that movie was filmed. Maggie was nineteen. Where they'd met, she had no idea, because at the time it hadn't mattered. They had probably passed each other in the halls in high school, maybe even elementary school. He might have visited her house, hanging out with her brothers. (He and her brother Josh were nearly the same age.) Certainly he'd sung with her at church; she knew that much. His family were members there, and Mr. Nichols, always short on male voices, had somehow talked Ira into joining the choir. But he hadn't lasted long. About the time he graduated from high school, he quit. Or maybe it was the year after. Maggie hadn't noticed exactly when it was he'd stopped appearing.

  Her boyfriend in high school had been a classmate named Boris Drumm. He was short and dark, with rough skin and a frizz of cropped black hair-manly even at that age, everything she'd been looking for. It was Boris who taught Maggie to drive, and one of his exercises involved her speeding alone across the Sears, Roebuck parking lot till he loomed suddenly in front of the car to test her braking skills. Her clearest picture of him, to this day, was the determined stance he had taken in her path: arms straight out, feet wide apart, jaw set. Rock-hard, he'd seemed. Indestructible. She had had the feeling she could run him over, even, and he'd have bobbed up again untouched, like one of those plastic toy men weighted with lead at the base.

  He planned on attending a college in the Midwest after graduation, but it was understood that as soon as he got his degree he and Maggie would marry. Meanwhile Maggie would live at home and go to Goucher. She wasn't much looking forward to it; it was her mother's idea. Her mother, who had taught English before she married, filled out all the application forms and even wrote Maggie's essay for her. It was very important to her that her children should rise in the world. (Maggie's father installed garage doors and had not had any college at all.) So Maggie resigned herself to four years at Goucher. In the meantime, to help with tuition, she took a summer job washing windows.

  This was at the Silver Threads Nursing Home, which hadn't yet officially opened. It was a brand-new, modern building off Erdman -Avenue, with three long wings and one hundred and eighty-two windows. Each of the larger windows had twelve panes of glass; the smaller windows /had six. And in the left-hand corner of each pane was a white paper snowflake reading KRYSTAL KLEER MFG. co. These snowflakes clung to the glass with a force that Maggie had never seen before or since. Whatever substance held them on, she thought later, should have been adopted by NASA. If you peeled off the top layer of paper a lower, fuzzy layer remained, and if you soaked that in hot water and then scraped it with a razor blade there were still gray shreds of rubbery glue, and after those were gone the whole pane, of course, was a mess, fingerprinted and streaky, so it had to be sprayed with Win-dex and buffed with a chamois skin. For one whole summer, from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon, Maggie scraped and soaked and scraped again. The tips of her fingers were continually sore. She felt her nails had been driven back into their roots. She didn't have anyone to talk to while she worked, because she was the only window-washer they'd hired. Her sole company was the radio, playing "Moonglow" and "I Almost Lost My Mind." In August the home started admitting a few patients, although not all the work was finished yet. Of course they were settled in those rooms where the windows were fully scraped, but Maggie got in the habit of taking a break from time to time and going visiting. She would stop at one bed or another to see how people were doing. "Could you move my water pitcher a little closer, doll?" a woman would ask, or, "Would you mind pulling that curtain?" While performing these tasks, Maggie felt valuable and competent. She began attracting a following of those patients who were mobile. Someone in a wheelchair would discover which room she was working in and suddenly there'd be three or four patients sitting around her talking. Their style of conversation was to ignore her presence and argue heatedly among themselves. (Was it the blizzard of ' or the blizzard of '? And which number counted more in the blood pressure reading?) But they conveyed an acute awareness of their audience; she knew it was all for lier benefit. She would laugh at appropriate moments or make sounds of sympathy, and the old people would take on gratified expressions.

  No one in her family understood when she announced that she wanted to forget about college and become an aide in the nursing home instead. Why, an aide was no better than a servant, her mother pointed out; no better than a chambermaid. And here Maggie had such a fine mind and had graduated at the top of her class. Did she want to be just ordinary? Her brothers, who had made the same kind of choice themselves (three were involved in some phase of the construction business, while the fourth welded locomotives at the Mount Clare railyards), claimed they had been looking to her to go further. Even her father wondered half audibly whether she knew what she was doing. But Maggie remained firm. What did she want with college? What did she want with those pointless, high-flown bits of information like the ones she'd learned in high school-Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny and Synecdoche is the use of the part to symbolize the whole? She enrolled in a Red Cross training program, which in those days was all that was needed, and took a job at Silver Threads.

  So there she was, eighteen and a half years old, working among old people and living with two elderly parents and her one unmarried brother, who was elderly himself, in a way. Boris Drumm had to earn his own school expenses, so he came back to Baltimore only at Christmas and spent the other holidays selling menswear in a shop near his campus. He wrote lengthy letters describing how his studies were altering his perceptions of the universe. The world was so full of injustice! he wrote. He had never realized. Writing back was hard because Maggie had very little to report. She didn't run into many of their friends anymore. Some had gone away to college, and when they returned they had changed. Some had married, which caused an even bigger change. Pretty soon the only people she saw regularly were Sugar and the Barley twins-just because they still sang in the choir-and, of course, Serena, her best friend. But Boris had never thought much of Serena, so Maggie seldom mentioned her in her letters.

  Serena worked in a lingerie shop, clerking. She brought home translucent, lacy underwear in colors that made no sense. (Wouldn't a bright-red bra advertise itself through almost any piece of clothing you owned?) Modeling a black nightgown with a see-through bodice, she announced that she and Max were marrying in June, after he had finished his freshman year at UNC. UNC was a deal he had made with his parents. He had promised to try one year of college and then if he really, truly hated it they would let him drop out. What they were hoping, of course, was that he would meet a nice Southern girl and get over his infatuation with Serena. Not that they would admit it.

  Max said that after they were married she could quit her job at the lingerie shop and never work again, Serena said; and also, she said (languorously lowering a black lace strap and admiring her own creamy shoulder), he was pleading with her to accompany him to the Blue Hen Motel the next time he came home. They wouldn't do anything, he said; just be together. Maggie was impressed and envious. It sounded very romantic to her. "You're going, aren't you?" she asked, but Serena said, "What do you think: I'm insane? I'd have to be out of my mind." "But, Serena-" Maggie began. She was about to say that this was nothing like Anita's situation, nothing whatsoever, but Serena's fierce expression stopped her.

  "I'm no sucker," Serena said.

  Maggie wondered what she herself would do if Boris ever invited her to the Blue Hen Motel. She didn't think that would occur to him, though. Maybe it was just because she was forced to rely on his long, stuffy letters for any sense of him these days, but lately Boris had begun to seem less . . . crisp, you might say; less hard-edged. In his letters now he was talking about entering law school after college and then going into politics. Only in politics, he said, did you have the power to right the world's wrongs. But it was funny: Maggie had never seen politicians as powerful. She saw them as beggars. They were always begging for votes, altering themselves to satisfy their public, behaving spinelessly a
nd falsely in a pathetic bid fof popularity. She hated to think that Boris was that way.

  She wondered if Serena ever had second thoughts about Max. No, probably not. Serena and Max seemed perfectly suited. Serena was so lucky.

  Maggie's nineteenth birthday-Valentine's Day, - fell on a Thursday, which was choir practice night. Serena brought a cake and after practice she passed out slices, along with paper cups of ginger ale, and everyone sang "Happy Birthday." Old Mrs. Britt, who really should have retired from singing years before but no one had the heart to suggest it, looked around her and sighed. "Isn't it sad,*' she said, "how the young folks are drifting away. Why, Sissy hardly comes at all since she married, and Louisa's moving to Montgomery County, and now I hear the Moran boy's gone and got himself killed." "Killed?" Serena said. "How did that happen?" "Oh, one of those freak training accidents," Mrs. Britt said. "I don't know the details." Sugar, whose fiance' was at Camp Lejeune, said, "Lord, Lord, all I want is for Robert to come back safe and in one piece' '-as if he were off waging hand-to-hand combat someplace, which of course he wasn't. (It happened to be one of those rare half-minutes in history when the country was not engaged in any serious hostilities.) Then Serena offered seconds on the birthday cake, but everyone had to go home.

  That night in bed Maggie started thinking about the Moran boy, for some reason. Although "she hadn't known him well, she found she had a clear mental picture of him: a sloucher, tall and high-cheekboned, with straight, oily black hair. She should have guessed he was doomed to die young. He'd been the only boy in the choir who didn't horse around while Mr. Nichols was talking to them. He had had an air of self-possession. She remembered too that he drove a car that ran on pure know-how, on junkyard parts and friction tape. Now that she thought of it, she believed she could envision his hands on the steering wheel. They were tanned and leathery, unusually wide across the base of the thumb, and the creases of his knuckles were deeply ingrained with mechanic's grease. She saw him in an army uniform with knife-sharp creases down the front of the trousers-a man who drove headlong to his death without even changing expression.

  It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.

  Boris wrote and said he would try his very best to come home for spring vacation. Maggie wished he wouldn't sound so effortful. He had none of Ira Moran's calm assurance.

  Serena got an engagement ring with a diamond shaped like a heart. It was dazzling. She began to plan and replan a great involved wedding production scheduled for the eighth of June, a date toward which she moved majestically, like a ship, with all her girlfriends fluttering in her wake. Maggie's mother said it was absurd to make such a fuss about a wedding. She said that people who lived for their weddings experienced a big letdown afterward, and then she said, changing her tone, "That poor, sad child, going to such lengths; I have to say I pity her." Maggie was shocked. (Pity! It seemed to her that Serena was already beginning her life, while she, Maggie, waited on a side rail.) Meanwhile Serena chose an ivory lace wedding dress but then changed her mind and decided white satin would be better, and she selected first an assortment of sacred music and then an assortment of secular music, and she notified all her friends that her kitchen would have a strawberry motif.

  Maggie tried to remember what she knew of Ira Moran's family. They must be devastated by their loss. His mother, she seemed to recall, was dead. His father was a vague, seedy man with Ira's stooped posture, and there had been some sisters-two or three, perhaps. She could point exactly to which pew they'd always occupied in church, but now that she thought to look, she found they weren't there anymore. She watched for them all the resi of February and most of March, but they never showed up.

  Boris Drumm came home for spring break and accompanied her to church that Sunday. Maggie stood in the choir section looking down at where he sat, between her father and her brother Elmer, and it occurred to her that he fit in very well. Too well. Like all the men in her family, he assumed a sort of hangdog expression during hymns and muttered them rather than sang them, or perhaps merely mouthed the words, letting his eyes skate to one side as if hoping not to be noticed. Only Maggie's mother actually sang, jutting her chin forward and enunciating clearly.

  After Sunday dinner with her family, Maggie and Boris went out on the porch. Maggie lazily toed the porch swing back and forth while Boris discussed his political aspirations. He said he figured he would start small, maybe just get on the school board or something. Then he would work up to senator. "Hmm," Maggie said. She swallowed a yawn.

  Then Boris gave a little cough and asked if she had ever thought of going to nursing school. That might be a good plan, he said, if she was so all fired up about taking care of old people. Probably this too had some connection with his career; senators' wives didn't empty bedpans. She said, "But I don't want to be a nurse." "You were always so smart at your studies, though," he told her.

  "I don't want to stand at a nursing station filling out forms; I want to deal with folks!" Maggie said.

  Her voice was sharper than she had intended. He drew away.

  "Sorry," she said.

  She felt too big. She was taller than he when they were seated, especially when he hunkered down, as he was doing now.

  He said, "Is something troubling you, Maggie? You haven't seemed yourself all spring vacation." "Well, I'm sorry," she said, "but I've had a ... loss. A very close friend of mine has passed away." She didn't feel she was exaggerating. It did seem, by now, that she and Ira had been close. They just hadn't consciously understood that.

  "Well, why didn't you say so?" Boris asked. "Who was it?" "No one you knew." "You can't be sure of that! Who was it?" "Oh, well," she said, "his name was Ira." "Ira," Boris said. "You mean Ira Moran?" She nodded, keeping her eyes down.

  "Skinny guy? Couple of classes ahead of us?" She nodded.

  "Wasn't he part Indian or something?" She hadn't been aware of this but it sounded right. It sounded perfect.

  "Of course I knew him," Boris said. "Just to say hello to, I mean. I mean, he wasn't actually a friend or anything. I didn't realize he was your friend, either." Where does she get these characters, his beetled expression was saying. First Serena Palermo and now a red Indian.

  "He was one of my favorite people," she said.

  "He was? Oh. Is that right. Well. Well, you have my condolences, Maggie," Boris said. "I just wish you'd told me earlier." He considered a minute. He said, "How did it happen, anyway?" "It was a training accident," Maggie said.

  "Training?" "In boot camp." "I didn't even know he'd enlisted," Boris said. "I thought he worked in his father's frame shop. Isn't that where I got our prom photo framed? Sam's Frame Shop? Seems to me Ira was the one who waited on me." "Really?" Maggie said, and she thought of Ira behind a counter, another image to add to her small collection.

  "Well, he did," she said. "Enlist, I mean. And then he had this accident." "I'm sorry to hear that," Boris said.

  A few minutes later she told him she'd prefer to spend the rest of the day alone, and Boris said that of course he understood.

  That night in bed she started crying. Speaking of Ira's death out loud was what had done it. She hadn't mentioned it before, not even to Serena, who would say, "What are you talking about? You barely knew the guy." She and Serena were growing apart, Maggie realized. She cried harder, blotting her tears on the hem of her sheet.

  The next day Boris went back to school. Maggie had the morning off and so she was the one who drove him to the bus station. She felt lonesome after she had said goodbye. It suddenly seemed very sad that he had come all this way just to see her. She wished she had been nicer to him.

  At home, her mother was spring cleaning. She had already rolled up the carpets and laid down the sisal mats for summer, and now she stripped the curtains from the windows with a snapping sound. A bleak white light gradually fill
ed the house. Maggie climbed the stairs to her room and flung herself on her bed. For the rest of her life, probably, she was doomed to live on unmarried in this tedious, predictable family.

  After a few minutes, she got up and went to her parents' room. She took the yellow pages from under the telephone. Frames, no. Picture frames, yes. Sam's Frame Shop. She had thought she just wanted to see it in print, but eventually she scribbled the address on a memo pad and took it back to her room.

  She owned no black-bordered stationery, so she chose the plainest of what she'd been given for graduation- white with a single green fern in one corner. Dear Mr. Moran, she wrote.

  / used to sing in the choir with your son and I had to let you know how sad I am to hear of his death. I'm not writing just out of politeness. I thought Ira was the most wonderful person I've ever met. There was something special about him and I wanted to tell you that as long as I live, I'm going to remember him fondly.

  With deepest sympathy, Margaret M. Daley She sealed and addressed the envelope and then, before she could change her mind, she walked to the corner and dropped it in the mailbox.

  At first she didn't think about Mr. Moran's answering, but later on, at work, it occurred to her that he might. Of course: People were supposed to answer sympathy notes. Maybe he would say something personal about Ira that she could store up and treasure. Maybe he would say that Ira had mentioned her name. That wasn't completely impossible. Or, seeing how she had been one of the few who had properly valued his son, he might even send her some little memento-maybe an old photo. She would love a photo. She wished now she had thought to ask for one.

  Since she'd mailed the letter Monday, it would probably reach Ira's father Tuesday. So his answer could come on Thursday. She hurried through her work Thursday morning in a fever of impatience. At lunch hour she phoned home, but her mother said the mail hadn't arrived yet. (She also said, "Why? What are you expecting?" which was the kind of thing that made Maggie long to get married and move out.) At two she phoned again, but her mother said there'd been nothing for her.