Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize)

by Anne Tyler

  Maybe it would have been better if he'd got angry.

  She moved past him, keeping her smile. "Leroy, honey, your mother wants you," she called. "She needs you to help her pack.'' Leroy was less easily surprised than Ira, evidently. She said, "Oh. Okay," and gave the Frisbee an expert flip in Ira's direction before skipping toward the house. The Frisbee ricocheted off Ira's left knee and landed in the dirt. He gazed down at it absently.

  "We should have cleaned the car out," Maggie told him. "If I'd known we would be riding so many passengers today ..." She went over to the Dodge, which was blocked now by a red Maverick that must be Mrs. Stuckey's. You could tell the Dodge had recently traveled some distance. It had a beaten-down, dusty look. She opened a rear door and tsked. A stack of library books slumped across the back seat, and a crocheted sweater that she had been hunting for days lay there all squinched and creased, no doubt from being sat upon by Otis. The floor was cobbled with cloudy plastic lids from soft-drink cups. She reached in to gather the books-major, important novels by Dos-toevsky and Thomas Mann. She had checked them out in a surge of good intentions at the start of the summer and was returning them unread and seriously overdue. "Open the trunk, will you?" she asked Ira.

  He moved slowly toward the trunk and opened it, not changing his expression. She dumped in the books and went back for the sweater.

  "How could this happen?" Ira asked her.

  "Well, we were discussing her soapbox, see, and-" "Her what? I mean it came about so quickly. So all of a sudden. I leave you alone for a little game of Frisbee and the next thing I know you're out here with beer on your breath and a whole bunch of unexpected house-guests." "Why, Ira, I would think you'd be glad," she told him. She folded the sweater and laid it in the trunk.

  "But it's like the second I shut the door behind me, you two got down to business," he said. "How do you accomplish these things?" Maggie started collecting soft-drink lids from the floor of the car. "You can close the trunk now," she told him.

  She carried a fistful of lids around to the rear of the house and dropped them in a crumpled garbage can. The cover was only a token cover, a battered metal beret that she replaced crookedly on top. And the house's siding was speckled with mildew, and rust stains trailed from a fuel tank affixed beneath the window.

  "How long will they be staying?" Ira asked when she returned.

  "Just till tomorrow." "We have to take Daisy to college tomorrow, did you forget?" "No, I didn't forget." "Aha," he said. "Your fiendish plot: Throw Jesse and Fiona together on their own. I know you, Maggie Mo-ran." "You don't necessarily know me at all," she told him.

  If things went the way she hoped they would this evening, she would have no need of plots for tomorrow.

  She opened the front door of her side of the Dodge and sank onto the seat. Inside, the car was stifling. She blotted her upper lip on the hem of her skirt.

  "So how do we present this?" Ira asked " 'Surprise, surprise, Jesse boy! Here's your ex-wife, here's your long-lost daughter. Never mind that you legally parted company years ago; we've decided you're getting back together now.' " "Well, for your information," she said, "I've already told him they're coming, and he'll be at our house for supper." Ira bent to look in on her. He said, "You told him?" "Right." "How?" he asked.

  "By phone, of course." "You phoned him? You mean just now?" "Right." "And he'll be there for supper?" "Right." He straightened up and leaned against the car. "I don't get it," he said finally.

  "What's to get?" "There's something too simple about it." All she could see of him was his midsection-a hollow- looking white shirt wilting over a belt. Wouldn't he be baking? This metal must radiate heat like a flatiron. Although it was true that the air had grown cooler now and the sun was slightly less direct, already starting to slip behind a faraway scribble of trees.

  "I'm worried about that Maverick," she said, speaking to Ira's belt buckle.

  "Hmm?" "Mrs. Stuckey's Maverick. I'd hate to ask her to move it, and I'm not sure we have room to get around it." That caught him, as she'd guessed it would-a question of logistics. He left, abruptly; she felt the car rock. He wandered off to check the Maverick's position, and Maggie tipped her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

  Why was Ira so negative about Jesse? Why did he always have that skeptical twist to his voice when he discussed him? Oh, Jesse wasn't perfect-good heavens, no-but he had all kinds of endearing qualities. He was so generous and affectionate. And if he lost his temper easily, why, he regained it easily too, and had never been known to bear a grudge, which was more than you could say for Ira.

  Was it plain old envy-a burdened, restrained man's envy of someone who was constitutionally carefree?

  When Jesse was just a baby Ira- was always saying, "Don't pick him up every time he cries. Don't feed him every time he's hungry. You'll spoil him." "Spoil him?" Maggie had asked. "Feeding him when he's hungry is spoiling him? That's nonsense." But she had sounded more confident than she'd felt. Was she spoiling him? This was her very first experience with an infant. She had been the youngest in her family and never had the casual contact with babies that some of her friends had had. And Jesse was such a puzzling baby-colicky, at the start, giving no hint of the merry little boy he would later turn out to be. He had flown into tiny, red-faced rages for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Maggie had had to walk him endlessly, wearing an actual path in the rug around the dining room table. Was it possible, she had wondered, that this baby just plain didn't like her? Where was it written that a child was always compatible with his parents? When you thought about it, it was amazing that so many families got along as well as they did. All they had to rely on was luck-the proper personality genes turning up like dice. And in Jesse's case, maybe the luck had been poor. She felt he was chafing against his parents. They were too narrow, too sedate, too conservative.

  Once, carrying a squalling Jesse down the aisle of a city bus, Maggie had been surprised to feel him suddenly relax in her arms. He had hushed, and she had looked at his face. He was staring at a dressed-up blonde in one of the seats. He started smiling at her. He held out his arms. His kind of person, at last! Unfortunately, though, the blonde was reading a magazine and she never gave him so much as a glance.

  And then the minute he discovered other children-all of whom instantly loved him-why, he hit the streets running and was hardly seen at home anymore. But that, too, Ira found fault with, for Jesse missed his curfews, forgot to appear for dinner, neglected his schoolwork in favor of a pickup basketball game in the alley. Mr. Moment-by-Moment, Ira used to call him. And Maggie had to admit the name was justified. Were some people simply born without the ability to link one moment to the next? If so, then Jesse was one of them: a disbeliever in consequences, mystified by others' habit of holding against him things that had happened, why, hours ago! days ago! way last week, even! He was genuinely perplexed that someone could stay angry at something he himself had immediately forgotten.

  Once when he was eleven or twelve he'd been horsing around with Maggie in the kitchen, punching his catcher's mitt while he teased her about her cooking, and the telephone rang and he answered and said, "Huh? Mr. Bunch?" Mr. Bunch was his sixth-grade teacher, so Maggie assumed the call was for Jesse and she turned back to her work. Jesse said, "Huh?" He said, "Wait a minute! You can't blame me for that!" Then he slammed the phone down, and Maggie, glancing over, saw those telltale dark rings beneath his eyes. "Jesse? Honey? What's the matter?" she had asked. "Nothing," he told her roughly, and he walked out. He left his catcher's mitt on the table, worn and deeply pocketed and curiously alive. The kitchen echoed.

  But not ten minutes later she noticed him in the front yard with Herbie Albright, laughing uproariously, crashing through the little boxwood hedge as he'd been told not to a hundred times.

  Yes, it was his laughter that she pictured when she thought of him-his eyes lit up and dancing, his teeth very white, his head thrown back to show the clean brown line of his throat. (And why
was it that Maggie remembered the laughter while Ira remembered the tantrums?) In a family very nearly without a social life, Jesse was intensely, almost ridiculously social, knee-deep in friends. Classmates came home with him from school every afternoon, and sometimes as many as seven or eight stayed over on weekends, their sleeping bags taking up all the floor space in his room, their cast-off jackets and six-guns and model airplane parts spilling out into the hallway. In the morning when Maggie went to wake them for pancakes the musky, wild smell of boy hung in the doorway like curtains, and she would blink and back off and return to the safety of the kitchen, where little Daisy, swathed to her toes in one of Maggie's aprons, stood on a chair earnestly stirring batter.

  He took up running one spring and ran like a maniac, throwing himself into it the way he did with everything that interested him, however briefly. This was when he was fifteen and not yet licensed to drive, so he sometimes asked Maggie for a lift to his favorite track, the Ralston School's cedar-chip-carpeted oval in the woods out in Baltimore County. Maggie would wait for him in the car, reading a library book and glancing up from time to time to check his progress. She could always spot him, even when the track was crowded with middle-aged ladies in sweat suits and Ralston boys in numbered uniforms. Jesse wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, but it wasn't only his clothes that identified him; it was his distinctive style of running. His gait was free and open, as if he were holding nothing in reserve for the next lap. His legs flew out and his arms made long reaching motions, pulling in handfuls of the air in front of him. Every time Maggie located him, her heart would pinch with love. Then he would vanish into the forested end of the track and she would go back to her book.

  But one day he didn't come out of the forest. She waited but he didn't appear. And yet the others came, even the slowest, even the silly-looking Swedish-walker people with their elbows pumping like chicken wings. She got out of the car finally and went over to the track, shading her eyes. No Jesse. She followed the bend of the oval into the woods, her crepe-soled work shoes sinking into the cedar chips so her calf muscles felt weighted. People pounded past her, glancing over momentarily, giving her the impression they were leaving their faces behind. In the woods to her left, she noticed a flash of white. It was a girl in a white shirt and shorts, lying on her back in the leaves, and Jesse was lying on top of her. He was fully clothed but, yes, smack on top of her, and the girl's white arms were twined around his neck. "Jesse, I have to be getting home soon," Maggie called. Then she turned and walked back toward the car, feeling plain and clumsy. A moment later cedar chips crunched behind her and Jesse overtook her and sped past, his amazingly long gym shoes landing deftly, plop-plop, and his muscular brown arms scooping the air.

  So then it was girls, girls, girls-a jostling parade of girls, all of them fair and slender and pretty, with soft, unformed faces and a tidy style of dressing. They called him on the phone and sent letters reeking of perfume and sometimes simply arrived on the doorstep, treating Maggie with a deference that made her feel ancient. They paid her vivacious compliments-"Oh, Mrs. Moran, I love that blouse!"-meanwhile searching behind her for Jesse. Maggie had to fight down the urge to bristle, to bar their entrance. Who would know better than she how deviously girls could behave? Why, a boy didn't stand a chance! But then Jesse would saunter out, not even rearranging his face at the sight of them, making no effort whatsoever, his T-shirt giving off the yeasty smell of fresh sweat and his hair obscuring his eyes. The girls would grow positively swaybacked with perkiness, and Maggie knew it was they who didn't stand a chance. She felt rueful and proud, both. She was ashamed of herself for feeling proud, and to make up for it she acted especially kind to every girl who came. Sometimes she acted so kind that the girls continued to visit her for months after Jesse had dropped them. They'd sit in the kitchen and confide in her, not just about Jesse but about other things as well, problems with their parents and such. Maggie enjoyed that. Usually Daisy would be sitting there too, her head bent over her homework, and Maggie had the feeling they were all three part of a warm community of females, a community she had missed out on when she was growing up with her brothers.

  Was it about that time that the music began? Loud music, with a hammering beat. One day it just flooded the house, as if Jesse's turning adolescent had opened a door through which the drums and electric guitars suddenly poured in. Let him merely duck into the kitchen for a sandwich and the clock radio would start blaring out "Lyin' Eyes." Let him dash up to his room for his catcher's mitt and his stereo would swing into "Afternoon Delight." And of course he never turned anything off again, so long after he'd left the house the music would still be playing. Maybe he intended it that way. It was his signature, his footprint on their lives. "I'll be out in the world now, but don't forget me," he was saying, and there they sat, two stodgy grownups and a prim little girl, while "When Will I Be Loved" jangled through the emptiness he left behind him.

  Then he stopped liking what his classmates liked and he claimed the Top Forty was dentist music, elevator music. ("Oh," Maggie said sadly, for she had enjoyed that music-or some of it, at least.) The songs that filled the house grew whining and slippery or downright ill-tempered, and they were sung by scroungy, beatnik-looking groups dressed in rags and tags and bits of military uniforms. (Meanwhile the old albums filtered downstairs to line the shelf beneath the living room hi-fi, each new stage Jesse entered adding to Maggie's collection of castoffs, which she sometimes played secretly when she was all alone in the house.) And then he started writing his own songs, with peculiar modern names like "Microwave Quartet" and "Cassette Recorder Blues." A few of these he sang for Maggie when Ira wasn't around. He had a nasal, deadpan style of singing that was more like talking. To Maggie it sounded very professional, very much like what you might hear on the radio, but then, of course, she was only his mother. Although his friends were impressed, too; she knew that. His friend Don Burnham, whose second cousin had come this close to being hired as a roadie for the Ramones, said Jesse was good enough to form a group of his own and sing in public.

  This Don Burnham was a perfectly nice, well-raised boy who had transferred to Jesse's school at the start of eleventh grade. When Jesse first brought him home, Don had made conversation with Maggie (not something you would take for granted, in a boy that age) and sat politely through Daisy's exhibit of her state-capitals postcard collection. "Next time I come," he'd told Maggie out of the blue, "I'll bring you my Doonesbury scrapbook." Maggie had said, "Oh, why, I'll look forward to that." But the next time he came he had his acoustic guitar along, and Jesse sang one of his songs for him while Don strummed beneath it. Seems like this old world is on fast forward nowadays . . . Then Don told Jesse he ought to sing in public, and from that moment ever afterward (or so it seemed in retrospect), Jesse was gone.

  He formed a band called Spin the Cat-he and a bunch of older boys, high-school dropouts mostly. Maggie had no idea where he'd found them. He began to dress more heavily, as if for combat; he wore black denim shirts and black jeans and crumpled leather motorcycle boots. He came in at all hours smelling of beer and tobacco or, who knows, maybe worse than tobacco. He developed a following of a whole new type of girl, crisper and flashier, who didn't bother making up to Maggie or sitting in her kitchen. And in the spring it emerged that he hadn't attended school in some time, and would not be promoted from junior year to senior.

  Seventeen and a half years old and he'd thrown away his future, Ira said, all for a single friendship. Never mind that Don Burnham wasn't even part of Jesse's band, and had passed smoothly on to senior year himself. In Ira's version of things, Don's one piece of advice had landed with a pingl and life had never been the same again. Don was some kind of providential instrument, fate's messenger. In Ira's version of things.

  Shape up or ship out, Ira told Jesse. Earn the missing credits in summer school, or otherwise find a job and move to his own apartment. Jesse said he'd had a bellyful of school. He would be g
lad to get a job, he said, and he couldn't wait to move to his own apartment, where he could come and go as he pleased, with nobody breathing down his neck. Ira said, "Good riddance," and went upstairs without another word. Jesse left the house, tramping across the porch in his motorcycle boots. Maggie started crying.

  How could Ira imagine Jesse's life? Ira was one of those people who are born competent. Everything came easy to him. There was no way he could fully realize how Jesse used to feel plodding off to school every morning-his shoulders already hunched against defeat, his jacket collar standing up crooked, and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. What it must be like to be Jesse! To have a perfectly behaved younger sister, and a father so seamless and infallible! Really his only saving grace was his mother, his harum-scarum klutzy mother, Maggie said to herself. She was making one of her wry private jokes but she meant it, all the same. And she wished he'd taken more from her. Her ability to see the best in things, for instance. Her knack for accepting, for adapting.

  But no. Slit-eyed and wary, all his old light-heartedness gone, Jesse prowled the city in search of work. He was hoping for a job in a record store. He didn't even have pocket money (at this point that band of his still played for free-for the "exposure," was how they put it) and was forced to borrow bus fare from Maggie. And each day he came back glummer than the day before, and each evening he and Ira fought. ' 'If you showed up for your interviews dressed like a normal person-" Ira told him.

  "A place puts that much stock in appearance, I wouldn't want to work there anyhow," Jesse said.

  "Fine, then you'd better learn how to dig ditches, because that's the only job where they don't put stock in appearance." Then Jesse would slam out of the house once again, and how flat things seemed after he left! How shallow, how lacking in spirit! Maggie and Ira gazed at each other bleakly across the living room. Maggie blamed Ira; he was too harsh. Ira blamed Maggie; she was too soft.