Breathing Lessons

by Anne Tyler

  “Well, that’s a whole different problem,” Ira said. “The tire may be underinflated. But that wheel is on tight as a drum, I swear it. I could feel it. I can’t believe you’re doing this, Maggie.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said stubbornly, “but I refuse to say I didn’t see what I saw with my own two eyes. I just think we’re going to have to take him to that Texaco.”

  Ira looked at Mr. Otis. “You got a lug wrench?” he asked.

  “A … sir?”

  “If you’ve got a lug wrench, I could tighten that wheel myself.”

  “Oh, why … Is a lug wrench like a ordinary wrench?”

  “You probably have one in your trunk,” Ira told him, “where you keep your jack.”

  “Oh! But where do I keep my jack, I wonder,” Mr. Otis said.

  “In your trunk,” Ira repeated doggedly, and he reached inside the car for the keys and handed them over. He was keeping his face as impassive as possible, but inwardly he felt the way he felt anytime he stopped by Maggie’s nursing home: utterly despairing. He couldn’t see how this Mr. Otis fellow made it from day to day, bumbling along as he did.

  “Lug wrench, lug wrench,” Mr. Otis was murmuring. He unlocked the trunk and flung the lid up. “Now let me just …”

  At first glance, the trunk’s interior seemed a solid block of fabric. Blankets, clothes, and pillows had been packed inside so tightly that they had congealed together. “Oh, me,” Mr. Otis said, and he plucked at a corner of a graying quilt, which didn’t budge.

  “Never mind,” Ira told him. “I’ll get mine.”

  He walked back to the Dodge. It suddenly seemed very well kept, if you overlooked what Maggie had done to the left front fender. He took his keys from the ignition and unlocked the trunk and opened it.

  Nothing.

  Where once there’d been a spare tire, tucked into the well beneath the floor mat, now there was an empty space. And not a sign of the gray vinyl pouch in which he kept his tools.

  He called, “Maggie?”

  She turned lazily from her position by the Chevy and tilted her head in his direction.

  “What happened to my spare tire?” he asked.

  “It’s on the car.”

  “On the car?”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “You mean it’s in use?”

  “Right.”

  “Then where’s the original tire?”

  “It’s getting patched at the Exxon back home.”

  “Well, how did …?”

  No, never mind; better not get sidetracked. “So where are the tools, then?” he called.

  “What tools?”

  He slammed the lid down and walked back to the Chevy. There was no point shouting; he could see his lug wrench was not going to be anywhere within reach. “The tools you changed the tire with,” he told her.

  “Oh, I didn’t change the tire. A man stopped and helped me.”

  “Did he use the tools in the trunk?”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “Did he put them back?”

  “Well, he must have,” Maggie said. She frowned, evidently trying to recall.

  “They’re not there, Maggie.”

  “Well, I’m sure he didn’t steal them, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was a very nice man. He wouldn’t even accept any money; he said he had a wife of his own and—”

  “I’m not saying he stole them; I’m just asking where they are.”

  Maggie said, “Maybe on the …” and then mumbled something further, he wasn’t sure what.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, maybe on the corner of Charles Street and Northern Parkway!” she shouted.

  Ira turned to Mr. Otis. The old man was watching him with his eyes half closed; he appeared to be falling asleep on his feet.

  “I guess we’ll have to unpack your trunk,” Ira told him.

  Mr. Otis nodded several times but made no move to begin.

  “Shall we just unload it?” Ira asked.

  “Well, we could do that,” Mr. Otis said doubtfully.

  There was a pause.

  Ira said, “Well? Shall we start?”

  “We could start if you like,” Mr. Otis told him, “but I’d be very much surprised if we was to find a wheel wrench.”

  “Everybody has a wheel wrench. Lug wrench,” Ira said. “It comes with the car.”

  “I never saw it.”

  “Oh, Ira,” Maggie said. “Can’t we just drive him to the Texaco and get his nephew to fix it properly?”

  “And how do you think he would do that, Maggie? He’d take a wrench and tighten the lug nuts, not that they need it.”

  Mr. Otis, meanwhile, had managed to remove a single item from the trunk: a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. He held them up and considered them.

  Maybe it was the dubious expression on his face, or maybe it was the pajamas themselves—crinkled and withered, trailing a frazzled drawstring—but at any rate, Ira all at once gave in. “Oh, what the hell,” he said. “Let’s just go to the Texaco.”

  “Thank you, Ira,” Maggie told him sweetly.

  And Mr. Otis said, “Well, if you sure it ain’t too much trouble.”

  “No, no …” Ira passed a hand across his forehead. “So I guess we’d better lock up the Chevy,” he said.

  Maggie said, “What Chevy?”

  “That’s what kind of car this is, Maggie.”

  “Ain’t hardly no point locking it with a wheel about to fly off,” Mr. Otis said.

  Ira had a brief moment when he wondered if this whole situation might be Mr. Otis’s particularly passive, devilish way of getting even.

  He turned and walked back to his own car. Behind him he heard the Chevy’s trunk lid clanging shut and the sound of their feet on the gravel, but he didn’t wait for them to catch up.

  Now the Dodge was as hot as the Chevy, and the chrome shaft of the gearshift burned his fingers. He sat there with the motor idling while Maggie helped Mr. Otis settle in the back seat. She seemed to know by instinct that he would require assistance; he had to be folded across the middle in some complicated fashion. The last of him to enter was his feet, which he gathered to him by lifting both knees with his hands. Then he let out a sigh and took his hat off. In the mirror Ira saw a bony, plated-looking scalp, with two cottony puffs of white hair snarling above his ears.

  “I surely do appreciate this,” Mr. Otis said.

  “Oh, no trouble!” Maggie told him, flouncing onto the front seat.

  Speak for yourself, Ira thought sourly.

  He waited for a cavalcade of motorcyclists to pass (all male, unhelmeted, swooping by in long S-curves, as free as birds), and then he pulled onto the highway. “So whereabouts are we headed?” he asked.

  “Oh, why, you just drive on past the dairy farm and make a right,” Mr. Otis told him. “It ain’t but three, four miles.”

  Maggie craned around in her seat and said, “You must live in this area.”

  “Back-air a ways on Dead Crow Road,” Mr. Otis told her. “Or used to, till last week. Lately I been staying with my sister Lurene.”

  Then he started telling her about his sister Lurene, who worked off and on at the Kmart when her arthritis wasn’t too bad; and that of course led to a discussion of Mr. Otis’s own arthritis, the sneaky slow manner it had crept up on him and the other things he had thought it was first and how the doctor had marveled and made over his condition when Mr. Otis finally thought to consult him.

  “Oh, if you had seen what I have seen,” Maggie said. “People in the nursing home where I work just knotted over; don’t I know it.” She had a tendency to fall into other people’s rhythms of speech while she was talking to them. Close your eyes and you could almost fancy she was black herself, Ira thought.

  “It’s a evil, mean-spirited ailment; no two ways about it,” Mr. Otis said. “This here is the dairy farm, mister. You want to take your next right.”

  Ira slowed down. They passed a small clump of co
ws moonily chomping and staring, and then they turned onto a road not two full lanes wide. The pavement was patchy, with hand-painted signs tilting off the grassy embankment: DANGER LIVESTOCK MAY BE LOOSE and SLOW THIS MEANS YOU and HOUNDS AND HORSES CROSSING.

  Now Mr. Otis was explaining how arthritis had forced him to retire. He used to be a roofer, he said, down home in North Carolina. He used to walk those ridgepoles as nimble as a squirrel and now he couldn’t manage the lowest rung of a ladder.

  Maggie made a clucking sound.

  Ira wondered why Maggie always had to be inviting other people into their lives. She didn’t feel a mere husband was enough, he suspected. Two was not a satisfactory number for her. He remembered all the strays she had welcomed over the years—her brother who spent a winter on their couch when his wife fell in love with her dentist, and Serena that time that Max was in Virginia hunting work, and of course Fiona with her baby and her mountains of baby equipment, her stroller and her playpen and her wind-up infant swing. In his present mood, Ira thought he might include their own children as well, for weren’t Jesse and Daisy also outsiders—interrupting their most private moments, wedging between the two of them? (Hard to believe that some people had children to hold a marriage together.) And neither one had been planned for, at least not quite so soon. In the days before Jesse was born, Ira had still had hopes of going back to school. It was supposed to be the next thing in line, after paying off his sister’s medical bills and his father’s new furnace. Maggie would keep on working full time. But then she found out she was pregnant, and she had to take leave from her job. And after that Ira’s sister developed a whole new symptom, some kind of seizures that required hospitalization; and a moving van crashed into the shop one Christmas Eve and damaged the building. Then Maggie got pregnant with Daisy, another surprise. (Had it been unwise, perhaps, to leave matters of contraception to someone so accident-prone?) But that was eight years after Jesse, and Ira had more or less abandoned his plans by then anyhow.

  Sometimes—on a day like today, say, this long, hot day in this dusty car—he experienced the most crushing kind of tiredness. It was an actual weight on his head, as if the ceiling had been lowered. But he supposed that everybody felt that way, now and again.

  Maggie was telling Mr. Otis the purpose of their trip. “My oldest, closest friend just lost her husband,” she was saying, “and we had to go to his funeral. It was the saddest occasion.”

  “Oh, gracious. Well, now, I want to offer my sincere condolences,” Mr. Otis said.

  Ira slowed behind a round-shouldered, humble-looking car from the forties, driven by an old lady so hunched that her head was barely visible above the steering wheel. Route One, the nursing home of highways. Then he remembered that this wasn’t Route One anymore, that they had drifted sideward or maybe even backward, and he had a dreamy, floating sensation. It was like that old spell during a change of seasons when you momentarily forget what stage the year is going through. Is it spring, or is it fall? Is the summer just beginning, or is it coming to an end?

  They passed a modern, split-level house with two plaster statues in the yard: a Dutch boy and girl bobbing delicately toward each other so their lips were almost touching. Then a trailer park and assorted signs for churches, civic organizations, Al’s Lawn and Patio Furnishings. Mr. Otis sat forward with a grunt, clutching the back of the seat. “Right up-air is the Texaco,” he said. “See it?”

  Ira saw it: a small white rectangle set very close to the road. Mylar balloons hovered high above the pumps—three to each pump, red, silver, and blue, twining lazily about one another.

  He turned onto the concrete apron, carefully avoiding the signal cord that stretched across it, and braked and looked back at Mr. Otis. But Mr. Otis stayed where he was; it was Maggie who got out. She opened the rear door and set a hand beneath the old man’s elbow while he uncurled himself. “Now, just where is your nephew?” she asked.

  Mr. Otis said, “Somewheres about.”

  “Are you sure of that? What if he’s not working today?”

  “Why, he must be working. Ain’t he?”

  Oh, Lord, they were going to prolong this situation forever. Ira cut the engine and watched the two of them walking across the apron.

  Over by the full-service island, a white boy with a stringy brown ponytail listened to what they asked and then shook his head. He said something, waving an arm vaguely eastward. Ira groaned and slid down lower in his seat.

  Then here came Maggie, clicking along, and Ira took heart; but when she reached the car all she did was lean in through the passenger window. “We have to wait a minute,” she told him.

  “What for?”

  “His nephew’s out on a call but he’s expected back in no time.”

  “Then why can’t we just leave?” Ira asked.

  “I couldn’t do that! I wouldn’t rest easy. I wouldn’t know how it came out.”

  “What do you mean, how it came out? His wheel is perfectly fine, remember?”

  “It wobbled, Ira. I saw it wobble.”

  He sighed.

  “And maybe his nephew won’t show up for some reason,” she said, “so Mr. Otis will be stranded here. Or maybe it will cost money. I want to make sure he’s not out any money.”

  “Look here, Maggie—”

  “Why don’t you fill the tank? Surely we could use some gas.”

  “We don’t have a Texaco credit card,” he told her.

  “Pay cash. Fill the tank and by then I bet Lamont will be pulling into the station.”

  “Lamont,” already. Next thing you knew, she’d have adopted the boy.

  He restarted the engine, muttering, and drew up next to the self-serve island and got out. They had an older style of pump here that Baltimore no longer used—printed flip-over numerals instead of LED, and a simple pivot arrangement to trip the switch. Ira had to readjust, cast his mind back a couple of years in order to get the thing going. Then while the gas flowed into the tank he watched Maggie settle Mr. Otis on a low, whitewashed wall that separated the Texaco from someone’s vegetable garden. Mr. Otis had his hat back on and he was hunkered under it like a cat under a table, peering forth reflectively, chewing on a mouthful of air, as old men were known to do. He was ancient, and yet probably not so many years older than Ira himself. It was a thought to give you pause. Ira heard the jolt as the gas cut off, and he turned back to the car. Overhead, the balloons rustled against each other with a sound that made him think of raincoats.

  While he was paying inside the station he noticed a snack machine, so he walked over to the others to see if they wanted something. They were deep in conversation, Mr. Otis going on and on about someone named Duluth. “Maggie, they’ve got potato chips,” Ira said. “The kind you like: barbecue.”

  Maggie waved a hand at him. “I think you were absolutely justified,” she told Mr. Otis.

  “And bacon rinds!” Ira said. “You hardly ever find bacon rinds these days.”

  She gave him a distant, abstracted look and said, “Have you forgotten I’m on a diet?”

  “How about you, then, Mr. Otis?”

  “Oh, why, no, thank you, sir; thank you kindly, sir,” Mr. Otis said. He turned to Maggie and went on: “So anyways, I axes her, ‘Duluth, how can you hold me to count for that, woman?’ ”

  “Mr. Otis’s wife is mad at him for something he did in her dream,” Maggie told Ira.

  Mr. Otis said, “Here I am just as unaware as a babe and I come down into the kitchen, I axes, ‘Where my breakfast?’ She say, ‘Fix it yourself.’ I say, ‘Huh?’ ”

  “That is just so unfair,” Maggie told him.

  Ira said, “Well, I believe I’ll have a snack,” and he walked back toward the station, hands stuffed into his pockets, feeling left out.

  Dieting too, he thought; dieting was another example of Maggie’s wastefulness. The water diet and the protein diet and the grapefruit diet. Depriving herself meal after meal when in Ira’s opinion she was just exactly right as she
was—not even what you’d call plump; just a satisfying series of handfuls, soft, silky breasts and a creamy swell of bottom. But since when had she ever listened to Ira? He dropped coins glumly into the snack machine and punched the key beneath a sack of pretzels.

  When he got back, Maggie was saying, “I mean think if we all did that! Mistook our dreams for real life. Look at me: Two or three times a year, near-about, I dream this neighbor and I are kissing. This totally bland neighbor named Mr. Simmons who looks like a salesman of something, I don’t know, insurance or real estate or something. In the daytime I don’t give him a thought, but at night I dream we’re kissing and I long for him to unbutton my blouse, and in the morning at the bus stop I’m so embarrassed I can’t even meet his eyes but then I see he’s just the same as ever, bland-faced man in a business suit.”

  “For God’s sake, Maggie,” Ira said. He tried to picture this Simmons character, but he had no idea who she could be talking about.

  “I mean what if I was held to blame for that?” Maggie asked. “Some thirty-year-old … kid I don’t have the faintest interest in! I’m not the one who designed that dream!”

  “No, indeed,” Mr. Otis said. “And anyways, this here of Duluth’s was Duluth’s dream. It weren’t even me that dreamed it. She claim I was standing on her needlepoint chair, her chair seat she worked forever on, so she order me off but when I stepped down I was walking on her crocheted shawl and her embroidered petticoat, my shoes was dragging lace and ruffles and bits of ribbon. ‘If that ain’t just like you,’ she tell me in the morning, and I say, ‘What did I do? Show me what I did. Show me where I ever trompled on a one of them things.’ She say, ‘You are just a mowing-down type of man, Daniel Otis, and if I knew I’d have to put up with you so long I’d have made a more thoughtful selection when I married.’ So I say, ‘Well, if that’s how you feel, I’m leaving,’ and she say, ‘Don’t forget your things,’ and off I go.”

  “Mr. Otis has been living in his car these last few days and moving around among relatives,” Maggie told Ira.

  “Is that right,” Ira said.

  “So it matters quite a heap to me that my wheel not pop off,” Mr. Otis added.