Breathing Lessons

  So she would climb the stairs to his family’s apartment, and she’d pass a bit of time listening to his sisters recount the latest soap opera or his father list his aches and pains. In addition to his so-called weak heart, Mr. Moran suffered from arthritis and his vision was failing. He was over eighty, after all. The men in that family had traditionally fathered their children so late in life that when Mr. Moran talked about his great-grandfather, he was referring to a man who’d been born in the 1700s. That had never struck Maggie before, but now it seemed positively creepy. What an elderly, faltering atmosphere she lived in! Her mornings at the nursing home, her afternoons at the Morans’, her evenings with Ira’s solitaire games … She drew her sweater more tightly around her and clucked at news of her father-in-law’s indigestion. “Used to be I could eat anything,” he told her. “What has happened here?” He peered at her with his glintless eyes, as if expecting an answer. Lately his upper lids had developed heavy, pouched folds; his Cherokee grandmother emerged more clearly year by year. “Rona never had the remotest inkling,” he told Maggie. Rona was Ira’s mother. “She died before she went through all this,” he said. “Wrinkles and gnarls and creaky joints and heartburn—she missed out on it.”

  “Well, but she had other pains,” Maggie reminded him. “Maybe worse ones.”

  “It’s like she didn’t live a real life,” he said, not listening. “I mean all of life, the whole messy kit and caboodle that comes at the end.”

  He sounded peevish; he seemed to think his wife had got away with something. Maggie clucked again and patted his hand. It felt the way she imagined an eagle’s foot would feel.

  Eventually she would go back downstairs to Ira, coax him to close shop a few minutes early and walk her home. He would slouch along in a kind of dark fog, something inward-turned in his gaze. When they passed the Larkin sisters’ house, Maggie always glanced toward it and then looked quickly away. In the old days, wheeling Leroy homeward in her stroller, they would find a rocking horse waiting hopefully on the Larkins’ front porch. It would have appeared by magic at the top of the steps where earlier there’d been nothing: a tiny, faded wooden animal with a bashful smile and long black lowered lashes. But now there was no sign of it; even those two ancient ladies knew somehow that the Morans hadn’t managed to keep their family together.

  Oh, how would Fiona summon the constant vigilance that child required? It wasn’t merely a matter of feeding her and changing her. Leroy was one of those dauntless babies who fling themselves brazenly off stair landings and chair edges, trusting someone will be there to catch them. Fiona was nowhere near alert enough. And she had hardly any sense of smell, Maggie had noticed. Why, Maggie could scent a fire before it started, almost. Maggie could walk through a mall and unerringly detect the smell of foods improperly handled—a musty, etherish sharpness not unlike the smell of a child with a fever. Everybody else would be oblivious, but, “Stop!” Maggie would call, holding up a palm as the others drifted toward a sandwich stand. “Not there! Anywhere but there!”

  She had so much to offer, if only someone would take it.

  It seemed pointless to cook a real supper now. Jesse was always out and Daisy most often ate at Mrs. Perfect’s, or if forced to eat at home would sulk so that it wasn’t worth having her around. So Maggie just heated a couple of frozen dinners or a can of soup. Sometimes she didn’t even do that. One evening, when she had sat two hours at the kitchen table staring into space instead of making the trip to the frame shop, Ira walked in and said, “What’s for supper?” and she said, “I can’t deal with supper! I mean look at this!” and she waved at the can of soup in front of her. “Two and three quarters servings,” she read out. “What do they expect, I have two and three quarters people to feed? Or three, and I’ll just give one of them less? Or maybe I’m supposed to save the rest for another meal, but do you know how long it would take me to come out even? First I’d have an extra three quarters of a serving and then six quarters and then nine. I’d have to open four cans of soup before I had leftovers that weren’t in fractions. Four cans, I tell you! Four cans of the same single flavor!”

  She started crying, letting the tears roll down her cheeks luxuriously. She felt the way she had felt as a child when she knew she was behaving unreasonably, knew she was shocking the grownups and acting like a perfect horror, but all at once wanted to behave unreasonably and even took some pleasure in it.

  Ira might have turned on his heel and walked out; she was half expecting that. Instead, he sank into a chair across from her. He put his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands.

  Maggie stopped crying. She said, “Ira?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Ira, what is it?” she asked him.

  She rose and bent over him and hugged him. She squatted next to him and tried to peer up into his face. Had something happened to his father? To one of his sisters? Was he just so disgusted with Maggie that he couldn’t endure it? What was it?

  The answer seemed to arrive through his back—through the ripple of knobby vertebrae down his C-shaped, warm, thin back. Her fingers felt the answer first.

  He was just as sad as Maggie was, and for just the same reasons. He was lonely and tired and lacking in hope and his son had not turned out well and his daughter didn’t think much of him, and he still couldn’t figure where he had gone wrong.

  He let his head fall against her shoulder. His hair was thick and rough, strung through with threads of gray that she had never noticed before, that pierced her heart in a way that her own few gray hairs never had. She hugged him tightly and nuzzled her face against his cheekbone. She said, “It will be all right. It will be all right.”

  And it was, eventually. Don’t ask her why. Well, for one thing, Jesse really liked his new job, and he seemed bit by bit to recover some of his old spirit. And then Daisy announced at last that Mrs. Perfect was “too tennis-y” and returned to her place in the family. And Maggie gave up her spy trips, as if Leroy and Fiona had been put to rest in her mind somehow. But none of those reasons was the most important one. It was more to do with Ira, she believed—that moment with Ira in the kitchen. Although they never referred to it afterward, and Ira didn’t act any different, and life continued just the same as always.

  She straightened in her seat and peered through the windshield, looking for the others. They should be about ready by now. Yes, here came Leroy, just backing out of the house with a suitcase bigger than she was. Ira thudded among things in the trunk and whistled a cheerful tune. “King of the Road,” that’s what he was whistling. Maggie got out to open the rear door. It seemed to her now that unknowingly, she’d been aiming ever since she woke up this morning toward this single purpose: bringing Leroy and Fiona home at last.

  Chapter 3

  The way Mrs. Stuckey’s car was parked behind theirs, they had just enough room to maneuver around it. Or so Ira claimed. Maggie thought he was wrong. “You could manage if the mailbox wasn’t there,” she said, “but it is there, and you are going to hit it when you veer out.”

  “Only if I were deaf, dumb, and blind,” Ira said.

  In the back seat, Fiona gave a small sigh.

  “Look,” Ira told Maggie. “You go stand beside the mailbox. Let me know when I come close. All I have to do is swing into the yard a few feet, take a sharp right back onto the driveway—”

  “I’m not going to be responsible for that! You’ll hit the mailbox and blame me.”

  “Maybe we should just ask Mom to move the Maverick,” Fiona suggested.

  Maggie said, “Oh, well,” and Ira said, “No, I’m sure we can make it.”

  Neither one of them wanted Mrs. Stuckey marching out all put-upon.

  “All right, then you get behind the wheel,” Ira told Maggie, “and I’ll direct you.”

  “Then I’ll be the one to hit the mailbox, and I’ll still get blamed.”

  “Maggie. There’s a good ten feet between the mailbox and the Maverick. So once you’re
past the Maverick you just nip back onto the driveway and you’re free and clear. I’ll tell you when.”

  Maggie thought that over. She said, “Promise you won’t yell if I hit the mailbox?”

  “You won’t hit the mailbox.”

  “Promise, Ira.”

  “Lord above! Fine, I promise.”

  “And you won’t look up at the heavens, or make that hissing noise through your teeth—”

  “Maybe I should just go get Mom,” Fiona said.

  “No, no, this is a cinch,” Ira told her. “Any imbecile could handle it; believe me.”

  Maggie didn’t like the sound of that.

  Ira climbed out of the car and went to stand by the mailbox. Maggie slid over on the seat. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and checked the rearview mirror. It was angled wrong, set for Ira’s height instead of hers, and she reached up to adjust it. The top of Leroy’s head flashed toward her, gleaming dully like the back of a watch case, followed by Ira’s lean figure with his elbows cocked and his hands jammed into his rear pockets. The mailbox was a little Quonset hut beside him.

  The driver’s seat had been set for Ira also, way too far back, but Maggie figured it wouldn’t matter for such a short distance. She shifted into reverse. Ira called, “Okay, bring her hard to your left …”

  How come he always referred to difficult tasks as feminine? This car was not a she until it had to perform some complicated maneuver. It was the same for stubborn screws and tight jar lids, and for bulky pieces of furniture as they were being moved.

  She swung onto the packed dirt yard and around the Maverick, proceeding perhaps a bit too fast but still in control. Then she reached with her foot for the brake. There wasn’t one. Or there was, but it was positioned wrong, closer than she had expected, considering that the seat was moved back. Her foot hit the shaft instead of the pedal and the car raced on unimpeded. Ira shouted, “What the—?” Maggie, with her gaze still fixed on the rearview mirror, saw the blur as he dove for cover. Whap! the mailbox said when she hit it. Leroy said, “Golly,” in an awed tone of voice.

  Maggie shifted into Park and poked her head out the window. Ira was hauling himself up from the dirt. He dusted off his hands. He said, “You just had to prove you were right about that mailbox, Maggie, didn’t you.”

  “You promised, Ira!”

  “Left taillight is smashed all to hell,” he said, bending to examine it. He prodded something. There was a clinking sound. Maggie pulled her head in and faced forward.

  “He promised he wouldn’t say a word,” she told Fiona and Leroy. “Watch how he goes back on that.”

  Fiona absently patted Leroy’s bare knee.

  “Smashed to smithereens,” Ira called.

  “You promised you wouldn’t make a fuss!”

  He grunted; she saw that he was righting the mailbox. From here, it didn’t even look dented. “I don’t suppose we need to tell your mother about this,” Maggie said to Fiona.

  “She already knows,” Leroy said. “She’s watching from the house.”

  It was true there was a suspicious slant to one of the venetian blind slats. Maggie said, “Oh, this day has seemed just so … I don’t know …” and she slid down in her seat till she was more or less sitting on her shoulder blades.

  Then Ira appeared in the window. “Try your lights,” he told her.

  “Hmm?”

  “Your lights. I want to see if she works or not.”

  There he went with that “she” again. Maggie reached out wearily, not bothering to sit up straight, and pulled the knob.

  “Just as I thought,” Ira called from the rear. “No left taillight.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Maggie told the ceiling.

  Ira reappeared at the window and motioned for her to move over. “We’ll be ticketed for this—what do you bet?” he said, opening the door and getting in.

  “I really couldn’t care less,” she said.

  “Late as we’re running now,” he said (another reproach), “it’ll be dark before we’re halfway home, and the state police are going to nail us for driving without a taillight.”

  “Stop off and get it fixed, then,” Maggie said.

  “Oh, well, you know those highway service stations,” Ira told her. He shifted gears, pulled forward a little, and then backed smoothly out of the driveway. It didn’t seem to cause him any difficulty whatsoever. “They charge an arm and a leg for something I could pick up almost free at Rudy’s Auto Supply,” he said. “I’m going to take my chances.”

  “You could always explain that your wife was a blithering idiot.”

  He didn’t argue with that.

  As they started down the road, Maggie glanced at the mailbox, which was standing at a slight tilt but otherwise seemed fine. She twisted in her seat till she was looking at Fiona and Leroy—their pale, staring faces unsettlingly alike. “You two all right?” she asked them.

  “Sure,” Leroy answered for both of them. She was hugging her baseball glove to her chest.

  Ira said, “Bet you didn’t expect us to have a wreck before we’d left your driveway, did you?”

  “Didn’t expect you to go asking for a wreck, either,” Fiona told him.

  Ira glanced over at Maggie with his eyebrows raised.

  By now the sun had dropped out of sight and the sky had lost its color. All the pastures were turning up their undersides in a sudden breeze. Leroy said, “How long is this trip going to take us anyhow?”

  “Just an hour or so,” Fiona told her. “You remember how far it is to Baltimore.”

  Maggie said, “Leroy remembers Baltimore?”

  “From visiting my sister.”

  “Oh. Of course,” Maggie said.

  She watched the scenery for a while. Something about the fading light gave the little houses a meek, defeated look. Finally she forced herself to ask, “How is your sister, Fiona?”

  “She’s fine, considering,” Fiona said. “You knew she lost her husband.”

  “I didn’t realize she was married, even.”

  “Well, no, I guess you wouldn’t,” Fiona said. “She married her boyfriend? Avery? And he died not six weeks later in a construction accident.”

  “Oh, poor Crystal,” Maggie said. “What is happening here? Everyone’s losing their husbands. Did I tell you we’ve just come from Max Gill’s funeral?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think I knew him,” Fiona said.

  “You must have known him! He was married to my friend Serena that I went to school with. The Gills. I’m positive you met them.”

  “Well, those people were old, though,” Fiona said. “Or not old, maybe, but you know. Crystal and Avery, there were barely back from their honeymoon. When you’ve been married only six weeks everything is still perfect.”

  And later it is not, was her implication. Which Maggie couldn’t argue with. Still, it saddened her to realize they all took such a thing for granted.

  A stop sign loomed ahead and Ira slowed and then turned onto Route One. After the country roads they had been traveling, Route One seemed more impressive. Trucks were streaming toward them, a few with their headlights already on. Someone had set a hand-lettered signboard on the porch of a little café: SUPPER NOW BEING SERVED. Good farm food, no doubt—corn on the cob and biscuits. Maggie said, “I suppose we should stop for groceries on the way home. Leroy, are you starved?”

  Leroy nodded emphatically.

  “I haven’t had a thing but chips and pretzels since morning,” Maggie said.

  “That and a beer in broad daylight,” Ira reminded her.

  Maggie pretended not to hear him. “Leroy,” she said, “tell me what your favorite food is.”

  Leroy said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “There must be something.”

  Leroy poked a fist into the palm of her baseball glove.

  “Hamburgers? Hot dogs?” Maggie asked. “Charcoaled steaks? Or how about crabs?”

  Leroy said, “Crabs in
their shells, you mean? Ick!”

  Maggie felt suddenly at a loss.

  “She’s partial to fried chicken,” Fiona said. “She asks Mom to fix that all the time. Don’t you, Leroy?”

  “Fried chicken! Perfect,” Maggie said. “We’ll pick up the makings on our way into town. Won’t that be nice?”

  Leroy remained silent, and no wonder; Maggie knew how chirpy and artificial she sounded. An old person, trying too hard. But if only Leroy could see that Maggie was still young underneath, just peering out from behind an older face mask!

  Now all at once Ira cleared his throat. Maggie tensed. Ira said, “Um, Fiona, Leroy … you heard we’re taking Daisy to college tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Maggie told me,” Fiona said. “I can’t believe it: eentsy little Daisy.”

  “I mean, we two are going to be driving her. We’re starting early in the morning.”

  “Not that early,” Maggie said quickly.

  “Well, eight or nine o’clock, Maggie.”

  “What’s your point?” Fiona asked Ira. “You don’t think we ought to be visiting?”

  Maggie said, “Good heavens, no! He didn’t mean that at all.”

  “Well, it sounded to me like he did,” Fiona said.

  Ira said, “I just wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into. That it would have to be such a short stay, I mean.”

  “That’s no problem, Ira,” Maggie told him. “If she wants she can go on over to her sister’s in the morning.”

  “Well, fine then, but it’s getting dark and we’re not even halfway home. I would think—”

  “Maybe we better just stop right here and go back where we came from,” Fiona said.

  “Oh, no, Fiona!” Maggie cried. “We had this all settled!”

  “I can’t remember now why I said we’d come in the first place,” Fiona said. “Lord! What must I have been thinking of?”