Breathing Lessons

by Anne Tyler

  He glanced at her. She had her hands pressed together, her face set toward him, her mouth bunched up a little as if she were willing certain words from him (the way she used to will the right answer out of Jesse when she was drilling him on his multiplication tables).

  “Is it?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  She misunderstood him; she drew in a breath to start arguing. But he said, “No, I guess it’s not.”

  “What: You mean you’ll take me there?”

  “Well,” he said. And then he said, “Oh, well, we’ve already pretty much shot the day, right?” And he flicked his blinker on and looked for a place to turn the car around.

  “Thank you, Ira,” she told him, and she slid over as far as her seat belt allowed and planted a little brush stroke of a kiss below his ear.

  Ira said, “Hmf,” but he sounded more grudging than he really felt.

  After he’d reversed the car in a lumberyard, he headed back up Route One and took a left onto Spruce Gum Road. They were facing into the sun now. Dusty shafts of light filmed the windshield. Maggie pushed her glasses higher on her nose, and Ira flipped his visor down.

  Was it the haze on the windshield that made him think again of their trip to Harborplace? At any rate, for some reason he suddenly remembered why Dorrie had started crying that day.

  Standing at the water’s edge, hemmed in by fog, she had been moved to open her suitcase and show him its contents. None of what she’d brought was much different from any other time. There were the usual two or three comic books, he recalled, and probably a snack for her sweet tooth—a squashed Hostess cupcake perhaps, with the frosting smashed into the cellophane—and of course the rhinestone hatband that had once belonged to their mother. And finally her greatest treasure: a fan magazine with Elvis Presley on the cover. King of Rock, the title read. Dorrie worshiped Elvis Presley. Ordinarily Ira humored her, even bought her posters whenever he came across them, but on that particular morning he was feeling so burdened, he just hadn’t had the patience. “Elvis,” Dorrie said happily, and Ira said, “For God’s sake, Dorrie, don’t you know the guy is dead and buried?”

  Then she had stopped smiling and her eyes had filled with tears, and Ira had felt pierced. Everything about her all at once saddened him—her skimpy haircut and her chapped lips and her thin face that was so homely and so sweet, if only people would see. He put an arm around her. He hugged her bony little body close and gazed over her head at the Constellation floating in the fog. The tops of the masts had dwindled away and the ropes and chains had dissolved and the old ship had looked its age for once, swathed in clouds of mist you could mistake for the blurring of time. And Junie had pressed close to his other side and Maggie and Sam had watched steadfastly, waiting for him to say what to do next. He had known then what the true waste was; Lord, yes. It was not his having to support these people but his failure to notice how he loved them. He loved even his worn-down, defeated father, even the memory of his poor mother who had always been so pretty and never realized it because anytime she approached a mirror she had her mouth drawn up lopsided with shyness.

  But then the feeling had faded (probably the very next instant, when Junie started begging to leave) and he forgot what he had learned. And no doubt he would forget again, just as Dorrie had forgotten, by the time they reached home, that Elvis Presley was no longer King of Rock.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Maggie had a song that she liked to sing with Ira when they were traveling. “On the Road Again,” it was called—not the Willie Nelson chestnut but a blues-sounding piece from one of Jesse’s old Canned Heat albums, stomping and hard-driving. Ira did the beat: “Boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom! boom!” Maggie sang the melody. “ ‘Take a hint from me, Mama, please! don’t you cry no more,’ ” she sang. The telephone poles appeared to be flashing by in rhythm. Maggie felt rangy and freewheeling. She tipped her head back against the seat and swirled one ankle, keeping time.

  In the old days, when she’d driven this road alone, the countryside had seemed unwelcoming—enemy territory. Among these woods and stony pastures her only grandchild was being held hostage, and Maggie (smothered in scarves, or swathed in an anonymous trench coat, or half obscured by Junie’s bubbly red wig) had driven as if slipping between something. She’d had a sense of slithering, evading. She had fixed her mind on that child and held her face firmly before her: a bright baby face as round as a penny, eyes that widened with enthusiasm whenever Maggie walked into the room, dimpled fists revving up at the sight of her. I’m coming, Leroy! Don’t forget me! But then over and over again those trips had proved so unsatisfactory, ending with that last awful time, when Leroy had twisted in her stroller and called, “Mom-Mom?”—hunting her other grandmother, her lesser grandmother, her pretender grandmother; and Maggie had finally given up and limited herself thereafter to the rare official visits with Ira. And even those had stopped soon enough. Leroy had begun to fade and dwindle, till one day she was no larger than somebody at the wrong end of a telescope—still dear, but very far removed.

  Maggie thought of last summer when her old cat, Pumpkin, had died. His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence—the lack of his furry body twining between her ankles whenever she opened the refrigerator door, the lack of his motorboat purr in her bed whenever she woke up at night. Stupidly, she had been reminded of the time Leroy and Fiona had left, although of course there was no comparison. But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards. What on earth was wrong with her? she had wondered. Would she spend the rest of her days grieving for every loss equally—a daughter-in-law, a baby, a cat, a machine that dries the air out?

  Was this how it felt to grow old?

  Now the fields were a brassy color, as pretty as a picture on a calendar. They held no particular significance. Maybe it helped that Ira was with her—an ally. Maybe it was just that sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

  “ ‘But I ain’t going down that long old lonesome road all by myself,’ ” she sang automatically, and Ira sang, “Boom-da-da, boom-da-da—”

  If Fiona remarried she would most likely acquire a new mother-in-law. Maggie hadn’t considered that. She wondered if Fiona and this woman would be close. Would they spend their every free moment together, as cozy as two girlfriends?

  “And suppose she has another baby!” Maggie said.

  Ira broke off his boom-das to ask, “Huh?”

  “I saw her through that whole nine months! What will she do without me?”

  “Who’re you talking about?”

  “Fiona, of course. Who do you think?”

  “Well, I’m sure she’ll manage somehow,” Ira said.

  Maggie said, “Maybe, and maybe not.” She turned away from him to look out at the fields again. They seemed unnaturally textureless. “I drove her to her childbirth classes,” she said. “I drilled her in her exercises. I was her official labor coach.”

  “So now she knows all about it,” Ira said.

  “But it’s something you have to repeat with each pregnancy,” Maggie told him. “You have to keep at it.”

  She thought of how she had kept at Fiona, whom pregnancy had turned lackadaisical and vague, so that if it hadn’t been for Maggie she’d have spent her entire third trimester on the couch in front of the TV. Maggie would clap her hands briskly—“Okay!”—and snap off the Love Boat rerun and fling open the curtains, letting sunshine flood the dim air of the living room and the turmoil of rock magazines and Fresca bottles. “Time for your pelvic squats!” she would cry, and Fiona would shrink and raise one arm to shield her eyes from the light.

  “Pelvic squats, good grief,” she would say. “Abdominal humps. It all sounds
so gross.” But she would heave to her feet, sighing. Even in pregnancy, her body was a teenager’s—slender and almost rubbery, reminding Maggie of those scantily clad girls she’d glimpsed on beaches who seemed to belong to a completely different species from her own. The mound of the baby was a separate burden, a kind of package jutting out in front of her. “Breathing lessons—really,” she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. “Don’t they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?”

  “Oh, honey, you’re just lucky they offer such things,” Maggie told her. “My first pregnancy, there wasn’t a course to be found, and I was scared to death. I’d have loved to take lessons! And afterward: I remember leaving the hospital with Jesse and thinking, ‘Wait. Are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don’t know beans about babies! I don’t have a license to do this. Ira and I are just amateurs.’ I mean you’re given all these lessons for the unimportant things—piano-playing, typing. You’re given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.”

  Which had not been the most reassuring notion, perhaps; for Fiona had said, “Jiminy,” and dropped her head in her hands.

  “Though I’m certain you’ll do fine,” Maggie said in a hurry. “And of course you have me here to help you.”

  “Oh, jiminy,” Fiona said.

  Ira turned down a little side road called Elm Lane—a double string of tacky one-story cottages with RVs in most of the driveways and sometimes a sloping tin trailer out back. Maggie asked him, “Who will wake up in the night now and bring her the baby to nurse?”

  “Her husband, one would hope,” Ira said. “Or maybe she’ll keep the baby in her room this time, the way you should have had her do last time.” Then he gave his shoulders a slight shake, as if ridding himself of something, and said, “What baby? Fiona’s not having a baby; she’s just getting married, or so you claim. Let’s put first things first here.”

  Well, but first things weren’t put first the time before; Fiona had been two months pregnant when she married Jesse. Not that Maggie wanted to remind him of that. Besides, her thoughts were on something else now. She was caught by an unexpected, piercingly physical memory of bringing the infant Leroy in to Fiona for her 2 a.m. feeding—that downy soft head wavering on Maggie’s shoulder, that birdlike mouth searching the bend of Maggie’s neck inside her bathrobe collar, and then the close, sleep-smelling warmth of Jesse’s and Fiona’s bedroom. “Oh,” she said without meaning to, and then, “Oh!” For there in Mrs. Stuckey’s yard (hard-packed earth, not really a yard at all) stood a wiry little girl with white-blond hair that stopped short squarely at her jawline. She had just let go of a yellow Frisbee, which sailed shuddering toward their car and landed with a thump on the hood as Ira swung into the driveway.

  “That’s not—” Maggie said. “Is that—?”

  “Must be Leroy,” Ira told her.

  “It’s not!”

  But of course, it had to be. Maggie was forced to make such a leap across time, though—from the infant on her shoulder to this gawky child, all in two seconds. She was experiencing some difficulty. The child dropped her hands to her sides and stared at them. Frowning gave her forehead a netted look. She wore a pink tank top with some kind of red stain down the front, berry juice or Kool-Aid, and baggy shorts in a blinding Hawaiian print. Her face was so thin it was triangular, a cat’s face, and her arms and legs were narrow white stems.

  “Maybe it’s a neighbor girl,” Maggie told Ira—a last-ditch effort.

  He didn’t bother replying.

  As soon as he switched the ignition off, Maggie opened the door and stepped out. She called “Leroy?”

  “What.”

  “Are you Leroy?”

  The child deliberated a moment, as if uncertain, and then nodded.

  “So,” Maggie said. “Well, hi there!” she cried.

  Leroy went on staring. She didn’t seem one grain less suspicious.

  Actually, Maggie reflected (already adjusting to new developments), this was one of the most interesting ages. Seven and a half—old enough to converse with but not yet past willing to admire a grownup, provided the grownup played her cards right. Cagily, Maggie rounded the car and approached the child with her purse in both hands, resisting the urge to fling out her arms for a hug. “I guess you must not remember me,” she said, stopping a measured distance away.

  Leroy shook her head.

  “Why, sweetie, I’m your grandma!”

  “You are?” Leroy said. She reminded Maggie of someone peering through a veil.

  “Your other grandma. Your Grandma Moran.”

  It was crazy to have to introduce herself to her own flesh and blood. And crazier still, Maggie thought, that Jesse would have needed to do the same thing. He had not laid eyes on his daughter since—when? Since just after he and Fiona split up—before Leroy was a year old, even. What a sad, partitioned life they all seemed to be living!

  “I’m from your father’s side of the family,” she told Leroy, and Leroy said, “Oh.”

  So at least she did know she had a father.

  “And this is your grandpa,” Maggie said.

  Leroy shifted her gaze to Ira. In profile, her nose was seen to be tiny and extremely pointed. Maggie could have loved her for her nose alone.

  Ira was out of the car by now, but he didn’t come over to Leroy immediately. Instead he reached for the Frisbee on the hood. Then he crossed the yard to them, meanwhile studying the Frisbee and turning it around and around in his hands as if he’d never seen one before. (Wasn’t this just like him? Allowing Maggie to rush in while he hung back all reserved, but you notice he did tag along, and would share the benefit of anything she accomplished.) When he arrived in front of Leroy he tossed the Frisbee toward her lightly, and both her hands came up like two skinny spiders to grab it.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Maggie wished she had thought of the Frisbee.

  “We don’t seem familiar at all?” she asked Leroy.

  Leroy shook her head.

  “Why! I was standing by when you were born, I’ll have you know. I was waiting in the hospital for you to be delivered. You stayed with us the first eight or nine months of your life.”

  “I did?”

  “You don’t remember staying with us?”

  “How could she, Maggie?” Ira asked.

  “Well, she might,” Maggie said, for she herself had a very clear memory of a scratchy-collared dress she used to hate being stuffed into as an infant. And besides, you would think all that loving care had to have left some mark, wouldn’t you? She said, “Or Fiona might have told her about it.”

  “She told me I lived in Baltimore,” Leroy said.

  “That was us,” Maggie said. “Your parents lived with us in your daddy’s old boyhood room in Baltimore.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then you and your mother moved away.”

  Leroy rubbed her calf with the instep of her bare foot. She was standing very straight, militarily straight, giving the impression she was held there only by a sense of duty.

  “We visited on your birthdays afterward, remember that?”

  “Nope.”

  “She was just a little thing, Maggie,” Ira said.

  “We came for your first three birthdays,” Maggie persisted. (Sometimes you could snag a memory and reel it in out of nowhere, if you used the proper hook.) “But your second birthday you were off at Hershey Park, and so we didn’t get to see you.”

  “I’ve been to Hershey Park six times,” Leroy said. “Mindy Brant has only been twice.”

  “Your third birthday, we brought you a kitten.”

  Leroy tilted her head. Her hair wafted to one side—corn silk, light
er than air. “A tiger kitten,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “Stripy all over, even on its tummy.”

  “You do remember!”

  “That was you-all brought me that kitten?”

  “That was us,” Maggie said.

  Leroy looked back and forth between the two of them. Her skin was delicately freckled, as if dusted with those sugar sprinkles people put on cakes. That must come from the Stuckey side. Maggie’s family never freckled, and certainly Ira’s didn’t, with their Indian connections. “And then what happened?” she was asking.

  “What happened when?”

  “What happened to the kitten! You must’ve took it back.”

  “Oh, no, honey, we didn’t take it back. Or rather, we did but only because you turned out to be allergic. You started sneezing and your eyes got teary.”

  “And after that, what?” Leroy asked.

  “Well, I wanted to visit again,” Maggie said, “but your grandpa told me we shouldn’t. I wanted to with all my heart, but your grandpa told me—”

  “I meant, what did you do with the kitten,” Leroy said.

  “Oh. The kitten. Well. We gave it to your grandpa’s two sisters, your … great-aunts, I suppose they’d be; goodness.”

  “So have they still got it?”

  “No, actually it was hit by a car,” Maggie said.

  “Oh.”

  “It wasn’t used to traffic and somehow it slipped out when someone left the door open.”

  Leroy stared ahead, fixedly. Maggie hoped she hadn’t upset her. She said, “So tell me! Is your mother home?”

  “My mother? Sure.”

  “Could we see her, maybe?”

  Ira said, “Maybe she’s busy.”

  “No, she’s not busy,” Leroy said, and she turned and started toward the house. Maggie didn’t know if they were supposed to follow or not. She looked over at Ira. He was standing there slouched with his hands in his trouser pockets, so she took her cue from him and stayed where she was.

  “Ma!” Leroy called, climbing the two front steps. Her voice had a certain mosquito quality that went with her thin face. “Ma? You in there?” She opened the screen door. “Hey, Ma!”