Breathing Lessons

  “You see what’s at work here,” Maggie said of Junie. “When she’s in costume it’s not she who’s going out; it’s someone else. Her real self is safe at home.”

  Evidently she was right. Clinging to Ira’s arm with both hands, Junie walked to the pharmacy and requested a copy of Soap Opera Digest. She walked to the grocery store and placed an order for chicken livers in an imperious, brazen manner as if she were another kind of woman entirely—a flamboyant, maybe even trampish woman who didn’t care what people thought of her. Then she collapsed into giggles again and asked Ira how she was doing. Well, Ira was pleased at her progress, of course, but after a while the whole thing got to be a nuisance. She wanted to venture this place and that, and always it was such a production—the preparations, the dress and the makeup, the assurances he was forced to offer. And those ridiculous heels hampered her so. She walked like someone navigating a freshly mopped floor. Really it would have been simpler if she’d gone on staying home, he reflected. But he was ashamed of himself for the thought.

  Then she got this urge to visit Harborplace. She had watched on TV when Harborplace first opened and she had somehow come to the conclusion that it was one of the wonders of the world. So naturally, after she’d gained some confidence, nothing would do but that she must see it in person. Only Ira didn’t want to take her. To put it mildly, he was not a fan of Harborplace. He felt it was un-Baltimorean—in fact, a glorified shopping mall. And parking would be bound to cost an arm and a leg. Couldn’t she settle for somewhere else? No, she couldn’t, she said. Couldn’t just Maggie take her, then? No, she needed Ira. He knew she needed him; how could he suggest otherwise? And then their father wanted to come too, and then Dorrie, who was so excited that she already had her “suitcase” (a Hutzler’s coat box) packed for the occasion. Ira had to set his teeth and agree to it.

  They scheduled the trip for a Sunday—Ira’s only day off. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a misty, lukewarm morning, with showers predicted for afternoon. Ira suggested a postponement but no one would hear of it, not even Maggie, who had become as fired up as the others. So he drove them all downtown, where by some miracle he found a parking spot on the street, and they got out and started walking. It was so foggy that buildings just a few yards away were invisible. When they reached the corner of Pratt and Light streets and looked across to Harborplace they couldn’t even see the pavilions; they were merely dense patches of gray. The traffic signal, turning green, was the one little pinprick of color. And nobody else was in sight except for a single balloon man, who took shape eerily on the opposite corner as they approached.

  It was the balloons that snagged Junie’s attention. They seemed made of liquid metal; they were silver-toned and crushy, puckered around the edges like sofa cushions. Junie cried, “Oh!” She stepped up onto the curb, gaping all the while. “What are those?” she cried.

  “Balloons, of course,” Ira said. But when he tried to lead her past, she craned back to look at them and so did Dorrie, who was hanging on his other arm.

  He could see what the problem was. TV had kept Junie informed of the world’s important developments but not the trivial ones, like Mylar; so those were what stopped her in her tracks. It was perfectly understandable. At that moment, though, Ira just didn’t feel like catering to her. He didn’t want to be there at all, and so he rushed them forward and around the first pavilion. Junie’s hand was like a claw on his arm. Dorrie, whose left leg had been partially paralyzed after her latest seizure, leaned on his other arm and hobbled grotesquely, her Hutzler’s coat box slamming against her hip at every step. And behind them, Maggie murmured encouragement to his father, whose breathing was growing louder and more effortful.

  “But those are not any balloons I have had experience of!” Junie said. “What material is that? What do they call it?”

  By then they had reached the promenade around the water’s edge, and instead of answering, Ira gazed pointedly toward the view. “Isn’t this what you were dying to see?” he reminded her.

  But the view was nothing but opaque white sheets and a fuzzy-edged U.S.S. Constellation riding on a cloud, and Harborplace was a hulking, silent concentration of vapors.

  Well, the whole trip ended in disaster, of course. Junie said everything had looked better on TV, and Ira’s father said his heart was flapping in his chest, and then Dorrie somehow got her feelings hurt and started crying and had to be taken home before they’d set foot inside a pavilion. Ira couldn’t remember now what had hurt her feelings, but what he did remember, so vividly that it darkened even this glaringly sunlit Texaco, was the sensation that had come over him as he stood there between his two sisters. He’d felt suffocated. The fog had made a tiny room surrounding them, an airless, steamy room such as those that house indoor swimming pools. It had muffled every sound but his family’s close, oppressively familiar voices. It had wrapped them together, locked them in, while his sisters’ hands dragged him down the way drowning victims drag down whoever tries to rescue them. And Ira had thought, Ah, God, I have been trapped with these people all my life and I am never going to be free. And he had known then what a failure he’d been, ever since the day he took over his father’s business.

  Was it any wonder he was so sensitive to waste? He had given up the only serious dream he’d ever had. You can’t get more wasteful than that.

  “Lamont!” Maggie said.

  She was looking toward a revolving yellow light over by the gas pumps—a tow truck, towing nothing. It stopped with a painful screeching sound and the engine died. A black man in a denim jacket swung out of the cab.

  “That’s him, all right,” Mr. Otis said, rising by inches from his seat.

  Lamont walked to the rear of the truck and examined something. He kicked a tire and then started toward the cab. He was not as young as Ira had expected—no mere boy but a solidly built, glowering man with plum-black skin and a heavy way of walking.

  “Well, hey there!” Mr. Otis called.

  Lamont halted and looked over at him. “Uncle Daniel?” he said.

  “How you been, son?”

  “What you doing here?” Lamont asked, approaching.

  When he reached the wall, Maggie and Ira stood up, but Lamont didn’t glance in their direction. “Ain’t you gone back to Aunt Duluth yet?” he asked Mr. Otis.

  “Lamont, I’m going to need that truck of yourn,” Mr. Otis said.

  “What for?”

  “Believe my left front wheel is loose.”

  “What? Where’s it at?”

  “Out on Route One. This here fellow kindly give me a lift.”

  Lamont briefly skimmed Ira with his eyes.

  “We just happened to be driving past,” Ira told him.

  “Hmm,” Lamont said in an unfriendly tone, and then, turning again to his uncle, “Now let’s see what you telling me. Your car is out on the highway someplace …”

  “It was Mrs. here caught on to it,” Mr. Otis said, and he gestured toward Maggie, who beamed up at Lamont trustfully. A slender thread of soft-drink foam traced her upper lip; it made Ira feel protective.

  “I won’t offer you my hand,” she told Lamont. “This Pepsi has just fizzed all over me.”

  Lamont merely studied her, with the corners of his mouth pulled down.

  “She lean out her window and call, ‘Your wheel!’ ” Mr. Otis said. “ ‘Your front wheel is falling off!’ ”

  “Really that was a fabrication,” Maggie told Lamont. “I made it up.”

  Sweet Jesus.

  Lamont said, “Say what?”

  “I fibbed,” Maggie said blithely. “We admitted as much to your uncle, but I don’t know, it was kind of hard to convince him.”

  “You saying you told him a lie?” Lamont asked.

  “Right.”

  Mr. Otis smiled self-consciously down at his shoes.

  “Well, actually—” Ira began.

  “It was after he almost stopped dead in front of us,” Maggie said. “We had to vee
r off the road, and I was so mad that as soon as we caught up with him I said that about his wheel. But I didn’t know he was old! I didn’t know he was helpless!”

  “Helpless?” Mr. Otis asked, his smile growing less certain.

  “And besides, then it did seem his wheel was acting kind of funny,” Maggie told Lamont. “So we brought him here to the Texaco.”

  Lamont looked no more threatening than he’d seemed all along, Ira was relieved to see. In fact, he dismissed the two of them entirely. He turned instead to his uncle. “Hear that?” he asked. “See there? Now it comes to you running folks off the road.”

  “Lamont, I’ll tell you the truth,” Mr. Otis said. “I do believe when I think back on it that wheel has not been acting properly for some days now.”

  “Didn’t I say you ought to give up driving? Didn’t we all say that? Didn’t Florence beg you to hand in your license? Next time you might not be so lucky. Some crazy white man going to shoot your head off next time.”

  Mr. Otis appeared to shrink, standing there quietly with his hat brim shielding his face.

  “If you’d’ve stayed home with Aunt Duluth where you belong, none of this wouldn’t be happening,” Lamont told him. “Cruising about on the interstate! Sleeping here and there like some hippie!”

  “Well, I had thought I was driving real cautious and careful,” Mr. Otis said.

  Ira cleared his throat. “So about the wheel—” he said.

  “You just got to go on back home and make up,” Lamont told Mr. Otis. “Quit drawing this thing out and apologize to Aunt Duluth and get that rust heap out of folkses’ way.”

  “I can’t apologize! I ain’t done nothing to be sorry for,” Mr. Otis said.

  “What’s the difference, man? Apologize even so.”

  “See, I couldn’t have done it; it was only in her dream. Duluth went and had this dream, see—”

  “You been married fifty-some years to that woman,” Lamont said, “and half of those years the two of you been in a snit about something. She ain’t speaking to you or you ain’t speaking to her or she moves out or you moves out. Shoot, man, one time you both moves out and leaves your house standing empty. Plenty would give their right arms for a nice little house like you-all’s, and what do you do? Leave it stand empty while you off careening about in your Chevy and Aunt Duluth’s sleeping on Florence’s couch discommoding her family.”

  A reminiscent smile crossed Mr. Otis’s face. “It’s true,” he said. “I had thought I was leaving her, that time, and she thought she was leaving me.”

  “You two act like quarrelsome children,” Lamont told him.

  “Well, at least I’m still married, you notice!” Mr. Otis said. “At least I’m still married, unlike some certain others I could name!”

  Ira said, “Well, at any rate—”

  “Even worse than children,” Lamont went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “Children at least got the time to spare, but you two are old and coming to the end of your lives. Pretty soon one or the other of you going to die and the one that’s left behind will say, ‘Why did I act so ugly? That was who it was; that person was who I was with; and here we threw ourselves away on spitefulness,’ you’ll say.”

  “Well, it’s probably going to be me that dies first,” Mr. Otis said, “so I just ain’t going to worry about that.”

  “I’m serious, Uncle.”

  “I’m serious. Could be what you throw away is all that really counts; could be that’s the whole point of things, wouldn’t that be something? Spill it! Spill it all, I say! No way not to spill it. And anyhow, just look at the times we had. Maybe that’s what I’ll end up thinking. ‘My, we surely did have us a time. We were a real knock-down, drag-out, heart-and-soul type of couple,’ I’ll say. Something to reflect on in the nursing home.”

  Lamont rolled his eyes heavenward.

  Ira said, “Well, not to change the subject, but is this wheel business under control now?”

  Both men looked over at him. “Oh,” Mr. Otis said finally. “I reckon you two will want to be moving on.”

  “Only if you’re sure you’re all right,” Maggie told him.

  “He’ll be fine,” Lamont said. “Get on and go.”

  “Yes, don’t you give me another thought,” Mr. Otis said. “Let me squire you to your car.” And he walked off between the two of them. Lamont stayed behind, looking disgusted.

  “That boy is just so cranky,” Mr. Otis told Ira. “I don’t know who he takes after.”

  “You think he’ll be willing to help you?”

  “Oh, surely. He just want to rant and carry on some first.”

  They reached the Dodge, and Mr. Otis insisted on opening Maggie’s door for her. It took longer than if she had done it herself; he had to get positioned just right and gain some leverage. Meanwhile he was saying to Ira, “And it ain’t like he had room to criticize. A divorced man! Handing out advice like a expert!”

  He closed the door after Maggie with a loose, ineffectual sound so that she had to reopen it and give it a good slam. “A man who ups and splits at the first little setback,” he told Ira. “Lives alone all pruned and puckerish, drying out like a raisin. Sets alone in front of the TV, night after night, and won’t go courting nobody new for fear she’ll do him like his wife did.”

  “Tsk!” Maggie said, looking up at him through her window. “That is always so sad to see.”

  “But do you think he sees it?” Mr. Otis asked. “Naw.” He followed Ira around to the driver’s side of the car. “He believe that’s just a regular life,” he told Ira.

  “Well, listen,” Ira said as he slid behind the wheel. “If there’s any kind of expense with the tow truck I want to hear about it, understand?” He shut the door and leaned out the window to say, “I’d better give you our address.”

  “There won’t be no expense,” Mr. Otis said, “but I appreciate the thought.” He tipped his hat back slightly and scratched his head. “You know I used to have this dog,” he said. “Smartest dog I ever owned. Bessie. She just loved to chase a rubber ball. I would throw it for her and she would chase it. Anytime the ball landed on a kitchen chair, though, Bessie would poke her nose through the spindles of the chair-back and whine and moan and whimper, never dreaming she could just walk around and grab the ball from in front.”

  Ira said, “Um …”

  “Puts me in mind of Lamont,” Mr. Otis said.

  “Lamont.”

  “Blind in spots.”

  “Oh! Yes, Lamont!” Ira said. He was relieved to find the connection.

  “Well, I don’t want to hold you up,” Mr. Otis told him, and he offered Ira his hand. It felt very light and fragile, like the skeleton of a bird. “You-all take care driving now, hear?” He bent forward to tell Maggie, “Take care!”

  “You too,” she told him. “And I hope things work out with Duluth.”

  “Oh, they will, they will. Sooner or later.” He chuckled and stepped back as Ira started the engine. Like a host seeing off his guests, he stood there gazing after them till they pulled out onto the road and he disappeared from Ira’s rearview mirror.

  “Well!” Maggie said, bouncing into a more comfortable position in her seat. “So anyhow …”

  As if that whole excursion had been only a little hiccup in the midst of some long story she was telling.

  Ira turned on the radio but all he could find was the most local kind of news—crop prices, a fire in a Knights of Columbus building. He turned it off. Maggie was rooting through her purse. “Now, where on earth?” she said.

  “What’re you looking for?”

  “My sunglasses.”

  “On the dashboard.”

  “Oh, right.”

  She reached for them and perched them on the end of her nose. Then she rotated her face, staring all around as if testing their effectiveness. “Doesn’t the sunlight bother your eyes?” she asked him finally.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Maybe I should drive.”

/>   “No, no …”

  “I haven’t taken a single turn this whole day,” she said.

  “That’s all right. Thanks anyhow, sweetheart.”

  “Well, you just let me know if you change your mind,” she told him, and she sank back in her seat and gazed out at the view.

  Ira cocked an elbow on the window ledge. He started whistling a tune.

  Maggie stiffened and looked over at him.

  “You just think I’m some sort of harum-scarum lady driver,” she told him.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “You’re just wondering what kind of fool you are even to consider allowing me behind the wheel.”

  He blinked. He had assumed the subject was concluded. “Lord, Maggie,” he said, “why do you always take things so personally?”

  “I just do, that’s why,” she told him, but she spoke without heat, as if uninterested in her own words, and then returned to studying the scenery.

  Once they were back on Route One, Ira picked up speed. Traffic had grown heavier, but it was moving briskly. The farms gave way to patches of commercial land—a mountain of bald tires, a stepped, angular cliff of cinder blocks, a field of those windowed enclosures that fit over the beds of pickup trucks and turn them into campers. Ira wasn’t sure what those were called. It bothered him; he liked to know the names of things, the specific, accurate term that would sum an object up.

  “Spruce Gum,” Maggie said.

  “Pardon?”

  She was twisted around in her seat, gazing behind her. She said, “Spruce Gum! That was the cutoff to Fiona’s! We just now passed it.”

  “Oh, yes, Spruce Gum,” he said. It did ring a bell.

  “Ira,” Maggie said.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s not so far out of the way.”