Breathing Lessons

by Anne Tyler

  Tears pricked her eyelids. She took a deep breath. “Daisy just sat there and studied me for the longest time,” she said, “with this kind of … fascinated expression on her face, and then she said, ‘Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?’ ”

  She meant to go on, but her lips were trembling. She laid aside her chips and fumbled in her purse for a Kleenex. Mabel clucked. Ira said, “For God’s sake, Maggie.”

  “I’m sorry,” she told Mabel. “It got to me.”

  “Well, sure it did,” Mabel said soothingly. She slid Maggie’s coffee mug a little closer to her. “Naturally it did!”

  “I mean, to me I’m not ordinary,” Maggie said.

  “No indeedy!” Mabel said. “You tell her, honey! You tell her that. You tell her to stop thinking that way. Know what I said to Bobby, my oldest? This was over a tuna dish too, come to think of it; isn’t that a coincidence. He announces he’s sick to death of foods that are mingled together. I say to him, ‘Young man,’ I say, ‘you can just get on up and leave this table. Leave this house, while you’re at it. Find a place of your own,’ I say, ‘cook your own durn meals, see how you can afford prime rib of beef every night.’ And I meant it, too. He thought I was only running my mouth, but he saw soon enough I was serious; I set all his clothes on the hood of his car. Now he lives across town with his girlfriend. He didn’t believe I would really truly make him move out.”

  “But that’s just it; I don’t want her to move out,” Maggie said. “I like to have her at home. I mean look at Jesse: He brought his wife and baby to live with us and I loved it! Ira thinks Jesse’s a failure. He says Jesse’s entire life was ruined by a single friendship, which is nonsense. All Don Burnham did was tell Jesse he had singing talent. Call that ruining a life? But you take a boy like Jesse, who doesn’t do just brilliantly in school, and whose father’s always at him about his shortcomings; and you tell him there’s this one special field where he shines—well, what do you expect? Think he’ll turn his back on that and forget it?”

  “Well, of course not!” Mabel said indignantly.

  “Of course not. He took up singing with a hard-rock band. He dropped out of high school and collected a whole following of girls and finally one particular girl and then he married her; nothing wrong with that. Brought her to live in our house because he wasn’t making much money. I was thrilled. They had a darling little baby. Then his wife and baby moved out on account of this awful scene, just up and left. It was nothing but an argument really, but you know how those can escalate. I said, ‘Ira, go after her; it’s your fault she went.’ (Ira was right in the thick of that scene and I blame him to this day.) But Ira said no, let her do what she liked. He said let them just go on and go, but I felt she had ripped that child from my flesh and left a big torn spot behind.”

  “Grandbabies,” Mabel said. “Don’t get me started.”

  Ira said, “Not to change the subject, but—”

  “Oh, Ira,” Maggie told him, “just take Highway Ten and shut up about it.”

  He gave her a long, icy stare. She buried her nose in her Kleenex, but she knew what kind of stare it was. Then he asked Mabel, “Have you ever been to Deer Lick?”

  “Deer Lick,” Mabel said. “Seems to me I’ve heard of it.”

  “I was wondering where we’d cut off from Route One to get there.”

  “Now, that I wouldn’t know,” Mabel told him. She asked Maggie, “Honey, can I pour you more coffee?”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Maggie said. In fact, her mug was untouched. She took a little sip to show her appreciation.

  Mabel tore the bill off a pad and handed it to Ira. He paid in loose change, standing up to root through his pockets. Maggie, meanwhile, placed her damp Kleenex in the empty chip sack and made a tidy package of it so as not to be any trouble. “Well, it was nice talking to you,” she told Mabel.

  “Take care, sweetheart,” Mabel said.

  Maggie had the feeling they ought to kiss cheeks, like women who’d had lunch together.

  She wasn’t crying anymore, but she could sense Ira’s disgust as he led the way to the parking lot. It felt like a sheet of something glassy and flat, shutting her out. He ought to have married Ann Landers, she thought. She slid into the car. The seat was so hot it burned through the back of her dress. Ira got in too and slammed the door behind him. If he had married Ann Landers he’d have just the kind of hard-nosed, sensible wife he wanted. Sometimes, hearing his grunt of approval as he read one of Ann’s snappy answers, Maggie felt an actual pang of jealousy.

  They passed the ranch houses once again, jouncing along the little paved road. The map lay between them, crisply folded. She didn’t ask what he’d decided about routes. She looked out the window, every now and then sniffing as quietly as possible.

  “Six and a half years,” Ira said. “No, seven now, and you’re still dragging up that Fiona business. Telling total strangers it was all my fault she left. You just have to blame someone for it, don’t you, Maggie.”

  “If someone’s to blame, why, yes, I do,” Maggie told the scenery.

  “Never occurred to you it might be your fault, did it.”

  “Are we going to go through this whole dumb argument again?” she asked, swinging around to confront him.

  “Well, who brought it up, I’d like to know?”

  “I was merely stating the facts, Ira.”

  “Who asked for the facts, Maggie? Why do you feel the need to pour out your soul to some waitress?”

  “Now, there is nothing wrong with being a waitress,” she told him. “It’s a perfectly respectable occupation. Our own daughter’s been working as a waitress, must I remind you.”

  “Oh, great, Maggie; another of your logical progressions.”

  “One thing about you that I really cannot stand,” she said, “is how you act so superior. We can’t have just a civilized back-and-forth discussion; oh, no. No, you have to make a point of how illogical I am, what a whifflehead I am, how you’re so cool and above it all.”

  “Well, at least I don’t spill my life story in public eating places,” he told her.

  “Oh, just let me out,” she said. “I cannot bear your company another second.”

  “Gladly,” he said, but he went on driving.

  “Let me out, I tell you!”

  He looked over at her. He slowed down. She picked up her purse and clutched it to her chest.

  “Are you going to stop this car,” she asked, “or do I have to jump from a moving vehicle?”

  He stopped the car.

  Maggie got out and slammed the door. She started walking back toward the café. For a moment it seemed that Ira planned just to sit there, but then she heard him shift gears and drive on.

  The sun poured down a great wash of yellow light, and her shoes made little cluttery sounds on the gravel. Her heart was beating extra fast. She felt pleased, in a funny sort of way. She felt almost drunk with fury and elation.

  She passed the first of the ranch houses, where weedy flowers waved along the edge of the front yard and a tricycle lay in the driveway. It certainly was quiet. All she could hear was the distant chirping of birds—their chink! chink! chink! and video! video! video! in the trees far across the fields. She’d lived her entire life with the hum of the city, she realized. You’d think Baltimore was kept running by some giant, ceaseless, underground machine. How had she stood it? Just like that, she gave up any plan for returning. She’d been heading toward the café with some vague notion of asking for the nearest Trailways stop, or maybe hitching a ride back home with a reliable-looking trucker; but what was the point of going home?

  She passed the second ranch house, which had a mailbox out front shaped like a covered wagon. A fence surrounded the property—just whitewashed stumps linked by swags of whitewashed chain, purely ornamental—and she stopped next to one of the stumps and set her purse on it to take inventory. The trouble with dress-up purses was that they
were so small. Her everyday purse, a canvas tote, could have kept her going for weeks. (“You give the line ‘Who steals my purse steals trash’ a whole new meaning,” her mother had once remarked.) Still, she had the basics: a comb, a pack of Kleenex, and a lipstick. And in her wallet, thirty-four dollars and some change and a blank check. Also two credit cards, but the check was what mattered. She would go to the nearest bank and open the largest account the check would safely cover—say three hundred dollars. Why, three hundred dollars could last her a long time! Long enough to find work, at least. The credit cards, she supposed, Ira would very soon cancel. Although she might try using them just for this weekend.

  She flipped through the rest of the plastic windows in her wallet, passing her driver’s license, her library card, a school photo of Daisy, a folded coupon for Affinity shampoo, and a color snapshot of Jesse standing on the front steps at home. Daisy was double-exposed—it was all the rage last year—so her precise, chiseled profile loomed semitransparent behind a full-face view of her with her chin raised haughtily. Jesse wore his mammoth black overcoat from Value Village and a very long red fringed neck scarf that dangled below his knees. She was struck—she was almost injured—by his handsomeness. He had taken Ira’s one drop of Indian blood and transformed it into something rich and stunning: high polished cheekbones, straight black hair, long black lusterless eyes. But the look he gave her was veiled and impassive, as haughty as Daisy’s. Neither one of them had any further need of her.

  She replaced everything in her purse and snapped it shut. When she started walking again her shoes felt stiff and uncomfortable, as if her feet had changed shape while she was standing. Maybe they’d swollen; it was a very warm day. But even the weather suited her purposes. This way, she could camp out if she had to. She could sleep in a haystack. Providing haystacks still existed.

  Tonight she’d phone Serena and apologize for missing the funeral. She would reverse the charges; she could do that, with Serena. Serena might not want to accept the call at first because Maggie had let her down—Serena was always so quick to take offense—but eventually she’d give in and Maggie would explain. “Listen,” she would say, “right now I wouldn’t mind going to Ira’s funeral.” Or maybe that was tactless, in view of the circumstances.

  The café lay just ahead, and beyond that was a low cinderblock building of some sort and beyond that, she guessed, at least a semblance of a town. It would be one of those scrappy little Route One towns, with much attention given to the requirements of auto travel. She would register at a no-frills motel, the room scarcely larger than the bed, which she pictured, with some enjoyment, as sunken in the middle and covered with a worn chenille spread. She would shop at Nell’s Grocery for foods that didn’t need cooking. One thing most people failed to realize was that many varieties of canned soup could be eaten cold straight from the tin, and they made a fairly balanced meal, too. (A can opener: She mustn’t forget to buy one at the grocery.)

  As for employment, she didn’t have much hope of finding a nursing home in such a town. Maybe something clerical, then. She knew how to type and keep books, although she wasn’t wonderful at it. She’d had a little experience at the frame shop. Maybe an auto-parts store could use her, or she could be one of those women behind the grille at a service station, embossing credit card bills and handing people their keys. If worse came to worst she could punch a cash register. She could wait tables. She could scrub floors, for heaven’s sake. She was only forty-eight and her health was perfect, and in spite of what some people might think, she was capable of anything she set her mind to.

  She bent to pick a chicory flower. She stuck it in the curls above her left ear.

  Ira thought she was a klutz. Everybody did. She had developed a sort of clownish, pratfalling reputation, somehow. In the nursing home once, there’d been a crash and a tinkle of glass, and the charge nurse had said, “Maggie?” Just like that! Not even checking first to make sure! And Maggie hadn’t been anywhere near; it was someone else entirely. But that just went to show how people viewed her.

  She had assumed when she married Ira that he would always look at her the way he’d looked at her that first night, when she stood in front of him in her trousseau negligee and the only light in the room was the filmy shaded lamp by the bed. She had unbuttoned her top button and then her next-to-top button, just enough to let the negligee slip from her shoulders and hesitate and fall around her ankles. He had looked directly into her eyes, and it seemed he wasn’t even breathing. She had assumed that would go on forever.

  In the parking lot in front of Nell’s Grocery & Café two men stood next to a pickup, talking. One was fat and ham-faced and the other was thin and white and wilted. They were discussing someone named Doug who had come out all over in swelters. Maggie wondered what a swelter was. She pictured it as a combination of a sweat and a welt. She knew she must make an odd sight, arriving on foot out of nowhere so dressed up and citified. “Hello!” she cried, sounding like her mother. The men stopped talking and stared at her. The thin one took his cap off finally and looked inside it. Then he put it back on his head.

  She could step into the café and speak to Mabel, ask if she knew of a job and a place to stay; or she could head straight for town and find something on her own. In a way, she preferred to fend for herself. It would be sort of embarrassing to confess she’d been abandoned by her husband. On the other hand, maybe Mabel knew of some marvelous job. Maybe she knew of the perfect boardinghouse, dirt cheap, with kitchen privileges, full of kindhearted people. Maggie supposed she ought to at least inquire.

  She let the screen door slap shut behind her. The grocery was familiar now and she moved through its smells comfortably. At the lunch counter she found Mabel leaning on a wadded-up dishcloth and talking to a man in overalls. They were almost whispering. “Why, you can’t do nothing about it,” Mabel was saying. “What do they think you can do about it?”

  Maggie felt she was intruding. She hadn’t counted on having to share Mabel with someone else. She shrank back before she was seen; she skulked in the crackers-and-cookies aisle, hoping for her rival to depart.

  “I been over it and over it,” the man said creakily. “I still can’t see what else I could have done.”

  “Good gracious, no.”

  Maggie picked up a box of Ritz crackers. There used to be a kind of apple pie people made that contained no apples whatsoever, just Ritz crackers. What would that taste like, she wondered. It didn’t seem to her there was the remotest chance it could taste like apple pie. Maybe you soaked the crackers in cider or something first. She looked on the box for the recipe, but it wasn’t mentioned.

  Now Ira would be starting to realize she was gone. He would be noticing the empty rush of air that comes when a person you’re accustomed to is all at once absent.

  Would he go on to the funeral without her? She hadn’t thought of that. No, Serena was more Maggie’s friend than Ira’s. And Max had been just an acquaintance. To tell the truth, Ira didn’t have any friends. It was one of the things Maggie minded about him.

  He’d be slowing down. He’d be trying to decide. Maybe he had already turned the car around.

  He would be noticing how stark and upright a person feels when he’s suddenly left on his own.

  Maggie set down the Ritz crackers and drifted toward the Fig Newtons.

  One time a number of years ago, Maggie had fallen in love, in a way, with a patient at the nursing home. The very notion was comical, of course. In love! With a man in his seventies! A man who had to ride in a wheelchair if he went any distance at all! But there you are. She was fascinated by his austere white face and courtly manners. She liked his stiff turns of speech, which gave her the feeling he was keeping his own words at a distance. And she knew what pain it caused him to dress so formally each morning, his expression magnificently disengaged as he worked his arthritic, clublike hands into the sleeves of his suit coat. Mr. Gabriel, his name was. “Ben” to everyone else, but “Mr. Gabriel”
to Maggie, for she guessed how familiarity alarmed him. And she was diffident about helping him, always asking his permission first. She was careful not to touch him. It was a kind of reverse courtship, you might say. While the others treated him warmly and a little condescendingly, Maggie stood back and allowed him his reserve.

  In the office files, she read that he owned a nationally prominent power-tool company. Yes, she could see him in that position. He had a businessman’s crisp authority, a businessman’s air of knowing what was what. She read that he was widowed and childless, without any close relations except for an unmarried sister in New Hampshire. Until recently he had lived by himself, but shortly after his cook started a minor grease fire in the kitchen he’d applied for admission to the home. His concern, he wrote, was that he was becoming too disabled to escape if his house burned down. Concern! You had to know the man to know what the word concealed: a morbid, obsessive dread of fire, which had taken root with that small kitchen blaze and grown till not even live-in help, and finally not even round-the-clock nursing care, could reassure him. (Maggie had observed his stony, fixed stare during fire drills—the only occasions on which he seemed truly to be a patient.)

  Oh, why was she reading his file? She wasn’t supposed to. Strictly speaking, she shouldn’t read even his medical record. She was nothing but a geriatric nursing assistant, certified to bathe her charges and feed them and guide them to the toilet.

  And even in her imagination, she had always been the most faithful of wives. She had never felt so much as tempted. But now thoughts of Mr. Gabriel consumed her, and she spent hours inventing new ways to be indispensable to him. He always noticed, and he always thanked her. “Imagine!” he told a nurse. “Maggie’s brought me tomatoes from her own backyard.” Maggie’s tomatoes were subject to an unusual ailment: They were bulbous, like collections of little red rubber jack balls that had collided and mashed together. This problem had persisted for several years, through several varieties of hybrids. Maggie blamed the tiny plot of city soil she was forced to confine them to (or was it the lack of sun?), but often she sensed, from the amused and tolerant looks they drew, that other people thought it had something to do with Maggie herself—with the knobby, fumbling way she seemed to be progressing through her life. Yet Mr. Gabriel noticed nothing. He declared her tomatoes smelled like a summer’s day in 1944. When she sliced them they resembled doilies—scalloped around the edges, full of holes between intersections—but all he said was: “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.” He wouldn’t even let her salt them. He said they tasted glorious, just as they were.