Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

In August the home started admitting a few patients, although not all the work was finished yet. Of course they were settled in those rooms where the windows were fully scraped, but Maggie got in the habit of taking a break from time to time and going visiting. She would stop at one bed or another to see how people were doing. "Could you move my water pitcher a little closer, doll?" a woman would ask, or, "Would you mind pulling that curtain?" While performing these tasks, Maggie felt valuable and competent. She began attracting a following of those patients who were mobile. Someone in a wheelchair would discover which room she was working in and suddenly there'd be three or four patients sitting around her talking. Their style of conversation was to ignore her presence and argue heatedly among themselves. (Was it the blizzard of ' or the blizzard of

'? And which number counted more in the blood pressure reading?) But they conveyed an acute awareness of their audience; she knew it was all for lier benefit. She would laugh at appropriate moments or make sounds of sympathy, and the old people would take on gratified expressions.

No one in her family understood when she announced that she wanted to forget about college and become an aide in the nursing home instead. Why, an aide was no better than a servant, her mother pointed out; no better than a chambermaid. And here Maggie had such a fine mind and had graduated at the top of her class. Did she want to be just ordinary? Her brothers, who had made the same kind of choice themselves (three were involved in some phase of the construction business, while the fourth welded locomotives at the Mount Clare railyards), claimed they had been looking to her to go further. Even her father wondered half audibly whether she knew what she was doing. But Maggie remained firm. What did she want with college? What did she want with those pointless, high-flown bits of information like the ones she'd learned in high school-Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny and Synecdoche is the use of the part to symbolize the whole? She enrolled in a Red Cross training program, which in those days was all that was needed, and took a job at Silver Threads.

So there she was, eighteen and a half years old, working among old people and living with two elderly parents and her one unmarried brother, who was elderly himself, in a way. Boris Drumm had to earn his own school expenses, so he came back to Baltimore only at Christmas and spent the other holidays selling menswear in a shop near his campus. He wrote lengthy letters describing how his studies were altering his perceptions of the universe. The world was so full of injustice! he wrote. He had never realized. Writing back was hard because Maggie had very little to report. She didn't run into many of their friends anymore. Some had gone away to college, and when they returned they had changed. Some had married, which caused an even bigger change. Pretty soon the only people she saw regularly were Sugar and the Barley twins-just because they still sang in the choir-and, of course, Serena, her best friend. But Boris had never thought much of Serena, so Maggie seldom mentioned her in her letters.

Serena worked in a lingerie shop, clerking. She brought home translucent, lacy underwear in colors that made no sense. (Wouldn't a bright-red bra advertise itself through almost any piece of clothing you owned?) Modeling a black nightgown with a see-through bodice, she announced that she and Max were marrying in June, after he had finished his freshman year at UNC. UNC was a deal he had made with his parents. He had promised to try one year of college and then if he really, truly hated it they would let him drop out. What they were hoping, of course, was that he would meet a nice Southern girl and get over his infatuation with Serena.

Not that they would admit it.

Max said that after they were married she could quit her job at the lingerie shop and never work again, Serena said; and also, she said (languorously lowering a black lace strap and admiring her own creamy shoulder), he was pleading with her to accompany him to the Blue Hen Motel the next time he came home.

They wouldn't do anything, he said; just be together. Maggie was impressed and envious. It sounded very romantic to her. "You're going, aren't you?" she asked, but Serena said, "What do you think: I'm insane?

I'd have to be out of my mind."

"But, Serena-" Maggie began. She was about to say that this was nothing like Anita's situation, nothing whatsoever, but Serena's fierce expression stopped her.

"I'm no sucker," Serena said.

Maggie wondered what she herself would do if Boris ever invited her to the Blue Hen Motel. She didn't think that would occur to him, though.

Maybe it was just because she was forced to rely on his long, stuffy letters for any sense of him these days, but lately Boris had begun to seem less . . . crisp, you might say; less hard-edged. In his letters now he was talking about entering law school after college and then going into politics. Only in politics, he said, did you have the power to right the world's wrongs. But it was funny: Maggie had never seen politicians as powerful. She saw them as beggars. They were always begging for votes, altering themselves to satisfy their public, behaving spinelessly and falsely in a pathetic bid fof popularity. She hated to think that Boris was that way.

She wondered if Serena ever had second thoughts about Max. No, probably not. Serena and Max seemed perfectly suited. Serena was so lucky.

Maggie's nineteenth birthday-Valentine's Day, - fell on a Thursday, which was choir practice night. Serena brought a cake and after practice she passed out slices, along with paper cups of ginger ale, and everyone sang

"Happy Birthday." Old Mrs. Britt, who really should have retired from singing years before but no one had the heart to suggest it, looked around her and sighed. "Isn't it sad,*' she said, "how the young folks are drifting away. Why, Sissy hardly comes at all since she married, and Louisa's moving to Montgomery County, and now I hear the Moran boy's gone and got himself killed."

"Killed?" Serena said. "How did that happen?"

"Oh, one of those freak training accidents," Mrs. Britt said. "I don't know the details."

Sugar, whose fiance' was at Camp Lejeune, said, "Lord, Lord, all I want is for Robert to come back safe and in one piece' '-as if he were off waging hand-to-hand combat someplace, which of course he wasn't. (It happened to be one of those rare half-minutes in history when the country was not engaged in any serious hostilities.) Then Serena offered seconds on the birthday cake, but everyone had to go home.

That night in bed Maggie started thinking about the Moran boy, for some reason. Although "she hadn't known him well, she found she had a clear mental picture of him: a sloucher, tall and high-cheekboned, with straight, oily black hair. She should have guessed he was doomed to die young. He'd been the only boy in the choir who didn't horse around while Mr. Nichols was talking to them. He had had an air of self-possession.

She remembered too that he drove a car that ran on pure know-how, on junkyard parts and friction tape. Now that she thought of it, she believed she could envision his hands on the steering wheel. They were tanned and leathery, unusually wide across the base of the thumb, and the creases of his knuckles were deeply ingrained with mechanic's grease. She saw him in an army uniform with knife-sharp creases down the front of the trousers-a man who drove headlong to his death without even changing expression.

It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.

Boris wrote and said he would try his very best to come home for spring vacation. Maggie wished he wouldn't sound so effortful. He had none of Ira Moran's calm assurance.