Breathing Lessons (17 page)

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 m'eet 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 do? Show me what I did. Show me where I ever trampled 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.
Ira sighed and sat down on the wall next to Maggie. The pretzels were the varnished kind that stuck in his teeth, but he was so hungry that he went on eating them.
Now the ponytailed boy walked toward them, so direct and purposeful in his tap-heeled leather boots that Ira stood up again, imagining they had some business to discuss. But all the boy did was coil the air hose that had been hissing on the concrete all this time without their noticing. In order not to look indecisive, Ira went on over to him anyhow. "So!" he said. "What's the story on this Lamont?" "He's out," the boy told him.
"No chance we could get you to come, I guess. Run you over to the highway in our car and get you to look at Mr. Otis here's wheel for us." "Nope," the boy said, hanging the hose on its hook.
Ira said, "I see." He returned to the wall, and the boy walked back to the station.
"I think it might be Moose Run," Maggie was telling Mr. Otis. "Is that the name? This cutoff that leads into Cartwheel." "Now, I don't know about no Moose Run," Mr. Otis said, "but I have heard tell of Cartwheel. Just can't say right off exactly how you'd get there. See, they's so many places hereabouts that sound like towns, call theyselves towns, but really they ain't much more than a grocery store and a gas pump." "That's Cartwheel, all right," Maggie said. "One main street. No traffic lights. Fiona lives on a skinny little road that doesn't even have a sidewalk. Fiona's our daughter-in-law. Ex-daughter-in-law, I suppose I should say. She used to be our son Jesse's wife, but now they're divorced." "Yes, that is how they do nowadays," Mr. Otis said. "Lament is divorced too, and my sister Florence's girl Sally. I don't know why they bother getting married." Just as if his own. marriage were in perfect health.
"Have a pretzel," Ira said. Mr. Otis shook his head absently but Maggie dug down deep in the bag and came up with half a dozen.
"Really it was all a misunderstanding," she told Mr. Otis. She bit into a pretzel. "They were perfect for each other. They even looked perfect: Jesse so dark and Fiona so blond. It's just that Jesse was working musician's hours and his life was sort of, I don't know, unsteady. And Fiona was so young, and inclined to fly off the handle. Oh, I used to just ache for them. It broke Jesse's heart when she left him; she took their little daughter and went back home to her mother. And Fiona's heart was broken too, I know, but do you think she would say so? And now they're so neatly divorced you would think they had never been married." All true, as far as it went, Ira reflected; but there was a lot she'd left out. Or not left out so much as slicked over, somehow, like that image of their son-the "musician" plying his trade so busily that he was forced to neglect his "wife" and his "daughter." Ira had never thought of Jesse as a musician; he'd thought of him as a high-school dropout in need of permanent employment. And he had never thought of Fiona as a wife but rather as Jesse's teenaged sidekick-her veil of gleaming blond hair incongruous above a skimpy T-shirt and tight jeans- while poor little Leroy had not been much more than their pet, their stuffed animal won at a carnival booth.
He had a vivid memory of Jesse as he'd looked the night he was arrested, back when he was sixteen. He'd been picked up for public drunkenness with several of his friends-a onetime occurrence, as it turned out, but Ira had wanted to make sure of that and so, intending to be hard on him, he had insisted Maggie stay home while he went down alone to post bail. He had sat on a bench in a public waiting area and finally there came Jesse, walking doubled over between two officers. Evidently his wrists had been handcuffed behind his back and he had attempted, at some point, to step through the circle of his own arms so as to bring his hands in front of him. But he had given up or been interrupted halfway through the maneuver, and so he hobbled out lopsided, twisted like a sideshow freak with his wrists trapped between his legs. Ira had experienced the most complicated mingling of emotions at the sight: anger at his son and anger at the authorities too, for exhibiting Jesse's humiliation, and a wild impulse to laugh and an aching, flooding sense of pity. Jesse's jacket sleeves had been pushed up his forearms in the modem style (something boys never did in Ira's day) and that had made him seem even more vulnerable, and so had his expression, once he was unlocked and could stand upright, although it was a fiercely defiant expression and he wouldn't acknowledge Ira's presence. Now when Ira thought of Jesse he always pictured him as he'd been that night, that same combination of infuriating and pathetic. He wondered how Maggie pictured him. Maybe she delved even farther into the past. Maybe she saw him at age four or age six, a handsome, uncommonly engaging little kid with no more than the average kid's problems. At any rate, she surely didn't view him as he really was.
No, nor their daughter, either, he thought. Maggie saw )aisy as a version of Maggie's mother-accomplished, ficient-and she fluttered around her, looking inade- quate. She had fluttered ever since Daisy was a little girl with an uncannily well-ordered room and a sheaf of color-coded notebooks for her homework. But Daisy was pitiable too, in her way. Ira saw that clearly, even though she was the one he felt closer to. She seemed to be missing out on her own youth-had never even had a boyfriend, so far as Ira could tell. .Whenever Jesse got into mischief as a child Daisy had taken on a pinch-faced expression of disapproval, but Ira would almost rather she had joined in the mischief herself. Wasn't mat how it was supposed to work? Wasn't that how it worked in other families, those jolly, noisy families Ira used to watch wistfully when he was a little boy? Now she was packed for college- had been packed for weeks-and had no clothes left but the throwaways that she wasn't taking with her; and she walked around the house looking bleak and joyless as a nun in her limp, frayed blouses and faded skirts. But, Maggie thought she was admirable. "When I was her age I hadn't even begun to decide what I wanted to be," she said. Daisy wanted to be a quantum physicist. "I'm just so impressed with that," Maggie said, till Ira said, "Maggie, just what is a quantum physicist?"-honestly wanting to know. "Do you have the foggiest inkling?" he asked. Then Maggie thought he was belittling her and she said, "Oh, I admit I'm not scientific! I never said I was scientific! I'm just a geriatric nursing assistant, I admit it!" and Ira said, "All I meant was- Jesus! All I meant was-" and Daisy poked her head in the door and said, "Would you please, please not have another one of your blowups; I'm trying to read." "Blowup!" Maggie cried. "I make the simplest little remark-" And Ira told Daisy, "Listen here, miss, if you're si easily disturbed as all that, you can just go read in th library." So Daisy had withdrawn, pinch-faced once again, and Maggie had buried her head in her hands.
"Same old song and dance"-that was how Jesse had once referred to marriage. This was one morning when Fiona had left the breakfast table in tears, and Ira had asked Jesse what was wrong. "You know how it is," Jesse had answered. "Same old song and dance as always." Then Ira (who had asked not out of empty curiosity but as a means of implying This matters, son; pay her some heed) had wondered what that "you know" signified. Was Jesse saying that Ira's marriage and his own had anything in common? Because if so, he was way out of line. They were two entirely different institutions. Ira's marriage was as steady as a tree; not even he could tell how wide and deep the roots went.
Still, Jesse's phrase had stuck in his memory: same old song and dance. Same old arguments, same recriminations. The same jokes and affectionate passwords, yes, and abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations no one else knew how to offer; but also the same old resentments dragged up year after year, with nothing ever totally forgotten: the time Ira didn't act happy to hear Maggie was pregnant, the time Maggie failed to defend Ira in front of her mother, the time Ira refused to visit Maggie in the hospital, the time Maggie forgot to invite Ira's family to Christmas dinner.
And the unvaryingness-ah, Lord; who could blame Jesse for charing against that? Probably the boy had been watching his parents sideways all the years of his childhood, swearing he would never put up with such a life: plugging along day after day, Ira heading to his shop every morning, Maggie to the nursing home. Probably those afternoons that Jesse had spent helping out at the shop had been a kind of object lesson. He must have recoiled from it-Ira sitting endlessly on his high wooden stool, whistling along with his easy-listening radio station as he measured a mat or sawed away at his miter box. Women came in asking him to frame their cross-stitched homilies and their amateur seascapes and their wedding photos (two serious people in profile gazing solely at each other). They brought in illustrations torn from magazines-a litter of puppies or a duckling in a basket. Like a tailor measuring a half-dressed client, Ira remained discreetly sightless, appearing to form no judgment about a picture of a sad-faced kitten tangled in a ball of yarn. "He wants a pastel-colored mat of some kind, wouldn't you say?" the women might ask. (They often used personal pronouns, as if the pictures were animate.) "Yes, ma'am," Ira would answer.
"Maybe a pale blue that would pick up the blue of his ribbon." "Yes, we could do that." And through Jesse's eyes he would see himself all at once as a generic figure called The Shopkeeper: a drab and obsequious man of indeterminate age.
Above the shop he could usually hear the creak, pause, creak of his father's rocking chair, and the hesitant footsteps of one of his sisters crossing the living room floor. Their voices, of course, weren't audible, and for this reason Ira had fallen into the habit of imagining that his family never spoke during the day-that they were keeping very still till Ira came. He was the backbone of their lives; he knew that. They depended on him utterly.
In his childhood he had been extraneous-a kind of afterthought, half a generation younger than his sisters. He had been so much the baby that he'd called every family member "honey," because that was how all those grownups or almost-grownups addressed him and he'd assumed it was a universal term. "I need my shoes tied, honey," he would tell his father. He didn't have the usual baby's privileges, though; he was never the center of attention. If any of them could be said to occupy that po- sition it was his sister Dorrie-mentally handicapped, frail and jerky, bucktoothed, awkward-although even Dorrie had a neglected air and tended to sit by herself on the outskirts of a room. Their mother suffered from a progressive disease that killed her when Ira was fourteen, that left him forever afterward edgy and frightened in the presence of illness; and anyhow she had never shown much of a talent for mothering. She devoted herself instead to religion, to radio evangelists and inspirational pamphlets left by door-to-door missionaries. Her idea of a meal was saltines and tea, for all of them. She never got hungry like ordinary mortals or realized that others could be hungry, but simply took in sustenance when the clock reminded her. If they wanted real food it was up to their father, for Dorrie was not capable of anything complicated and Junie was subject to some kind of phobia that worsened over the years till she refused to leave the house for so much as a quart of milk. Their father had to see to that when he was finished down at the shop. He would trudge upstairs for the grocery list, trudge out again, return with a few tin cans, and putter around the kitchen with the girls. Even after Ira was old enough, his assistance was not required. He was the interloper, the one rude splash of color in a sepia photograph. His family gave him a wide berth while addressing him remotely and kindly. "You finish your homework, honey?" they would ask, and they asked this even in the summer and over the Christmas holidays.