Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race's wastefulness. People were squandering their lives, it seemed to him. They were splurging their energies on petty jealousies or vain ambitions or longstanding, bitter grudges. It was a theme that emerged wherever he turned, as if someone were trying to tell him something. Not that he needed to be told. Didn't he know well enough all he himself had wasted?

He was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence. Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point instead.

His son, who couldn't carry a tune, had dropped out of high school in hopes of becoming a rock star. His daughter was one of those people who fritter themselves away on unnecessary worries; she chewed her fingernails to nubbins and developed blinding headaches before exams and agonized so over hr grades that their doctor had warned of ulcers.

And-his wife! He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular-side trips, random detours.

Like today, for instance: this Fiona business. Fiona was no longer any relation, not their daughter-in-law and not even an acquaintance, in Ira's opinion. But here Maggie sat, trailing a hand out the window as they whizzed down Route One toward home, and what did she return to (just when he was hoping she'd forgotten) but her whim to pay Fiona a visit.

Bad enough they'd lost their Saturday to Max Gill's funeral-a kind of side trip in itself-but now she wanted to plunge off in a whole new direction. She wanted to swing by Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, just so she could offer to baby-sit while Fiona went on her honeymoon. A completely pointless proposal; for Fiona did have a mother, didn't she, who'd been tending Leroy all along and surely could be counted on for the next little bit as well. Ira pointed that out. He said, "What's the matter with what's-her-name? Mrs. Stuckey?"

"Oh, Mrs. Stuckey," Maggie said, as if that were answer enough. She brought in her hand and rolled up the window. Her face glowed in the sunlight, round and pretty and intense. The breeze had ruffled her hair so it stood out in loops all over her head. It was a hot, gasoline-smelling breeze and Ira wasn't sorry to have lost it. However, this constant opening and shutting of the window was getting on his nerves.

She operated from second to second, he thought. She never looked any distance ahead. A spasm of irritation darted raggedly through his temples.

Here was a woman who had once let a wrong number consume an entire evening. "Hello?" she'd said into the phone, and a man had said, "Laverne, stay right there safe in your house. I just talked to Dennis and he's coming to fetch you." And then had hung up. Maggie cried, "Wait!"-speaking into a dead receiver; typical. Whoever it was, Ira had told her, deserved what he got. If Dennis and Laverne never managed to connect, why, that was their problem, not hers. But Maggie had gone on and on about it. "

'Safe,' " she moaned. " 'Safe in the house,' he told me. Lord only knows what that poor Laverne is going through." And she had spent the evening dialing all possible variations of their own number, every permutation of every digit, hoping to find Laverne. But never did, of course.

Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, was so close it could practically reach out and grab them, to hear her talk. "It's on that cutoff right above the state line. I forget the name," she was saying. "But I couldn't see it anywhere on that map you got at the service station."

No wonder she'd been so little help navigating; she'd been hunting Cartwheel instead.

Traffic was surprisingly sparse for a Saturday. Mostly it was trucks-small, rusty trucks carrying logs or used tires, not the sleek monsters you'd see on -. They were traveling through farm country at this point, and each truck as it passed left another layer of dust on the wan, parched, yellowing fields that lined the road.

"Here's what we'll do," Maggie told him. "Stop by Fiona's just for an instant. A teeny, eeny instant. Not accept even a glass of iced tea. Make her our offer and go."

"That much you could handle by telephone," Ira said.

"No, I couldn't!"

"Telephone when we get back to Baltimore, if you're so set on baby-sitting."

"That child is not but seven years old," Maggie told him, "and she must just barely remember us. We can't take her on for a week just cold! We have to let her get reacquainted first."

"How do you know it's a week?" Ira asked.

She was riffling through her purse now. She said, "Hmm?"

"How do you know the honeymoon will last a week, Maggie?"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe it's two weeks. Maybe even a month, I don't know."

He wondered, all at once, if this whole wedding was a myth-something she'd invented for her own peculiar reasons. He wouldn't put it past her.

"And besides!" he said. "We could never stay away that long. We've got jobs."

"Not away: in Baltimore. We'd take her back down to Baltimore."

"But then she'd be missing school," he said.

"Oh, that's no problem. We'll let her go to school near us," Maggie said.

"Second grade is second grade, after all, the same all over."

Ira had so many different arguments against that that he was struck speechless.

Now she dumped her purse upside down in her lap. "Oh, dear," she said, studying her billfold, her lipstick, her comb, and her pack of Kleenex.

"I wish I'd brought that map from home."

It was another form of wastefulness, Ira thought, to search yet again through a purse whose contents she already knew by heart. Even Ira knew those contents by heart. And it was wasteful to continue caring about Fiona when Fiona obviously had no feeling for them, when she had made it very clear that she just wanted to get on with her life. Hadn't she stated that, even? "I just want to get on with my life"-it had a familiar ring. Maybe she had shouted it during that scene before she left, or maybe later during one of those pathetic visits they used to pay after the divorce, with Leroy bashful and strange and Mrs. Stuckey a single accusatory eye glaring around the edge of the living room door. Ira winced. Waste, waste, and more waste, all for nothing. The long drive and the forced conversation and the long drive home again, for absolutely nothing.

And it was wasteful to devote your working life to people who forgot you the instant you left their bedsides, as Ira was forever pointing out. Oh, it was also admirably selfless, he supposed. But he didn't know how Maggie endured the impermanence, the lack of permanent results-those feeble, senile patients who confused her with a long-dead mother or a sister who'd insulted them back in .

It was wasteful too to fret so over the children. (Who were no longer children anyhow-not even Daisy.) Consider, for instance, the cigarette papers that Maggie had found last spring on Daisy's bureau. She had picked them up while she was dusting and come running to Ira. "What'll we do? What are we going to do?" she had wailed. "Our daughter's smoking marijuana; this is one of the telltale clues they mention in that pamphlet that the school gives out." She'd got Ira all involved and distressed; that happened more often than he liked to admit. Together they had sat up far into the night, discussing ways of dealing with the problem. "Where did we go wrong?" Maggie cried, and Ira hugged her and said, "There now, dear heart. I promise you we'll see this thing through." All for nothing yet again, it turned out. Turned out the cigarette papers were for Daisy's flute. You slid them under the keys whenever they started sticking, Daisy explained offhandedly. She hadn't even bothered to take umbrage.