Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

"Great, Maggie."

"I think I left it on the table."

"I asked you when we were setting out, remember? I said, "Are you going to bring the map, or am I?' You said, 'I am. I'll just stick it in my purse.' "

"Well, I don't know why you're making such a fuss about it," Maggie said.

"All we've got to do is watch the road signs; anyone could manage that much."

"It's a little more complicated than that," Ira said.

"Besides, we have those directions Serena gave me over the phone."

"Maggie. Do you honestly believe any directions of Serena's could get us where we'd care to go? Ha! We'd find ourselves in Canada someplace. We'd be off in Arizona!"

"Well, you don't have to get so excited about it."

"We would never see home again," Ira said.

Maggie shook her billfold and a pack of Kleenex from her purse.

"Serena's the one who made us late for her own wedding reception, remember that?" Ira said. "At that crazy little banquet hall we spent an hour locating."

"Really, Ira. You always act like women are such flibbertigibbets,"

Maggie said. She gave up searching through her purse; evidently she had mislaid Serena's directions as well. She said, "It's Fiona's own good I'm thinking of. She'll need us to baby-sit."

"Baby-sit?"

"During the honeymoon."

He gave her a look that she couldn't quite read.

"She's getting married next Saturday," Maggie said. "You can't take a seven-year-old on a honeymoon."

He still said nothing.

They were out beyond the city limits now and the houses had thinned. They passed a used-car lot, a scratchy bit of woods, a shopping mall with a few scattered early-bird cars parked on a concrete wasteland. Ira started whistling. Maggie stopped fiddling with her purse straps and grew still.

There were times when Ira didn't say a dozen words all day, and even when he did talk you couldn't guess what he was feeling. He was a closed-in, isolated man- his most serious flaw. But what he failed to realize was, his whistling could tell the whole story. For instance-an unsettling example-after a terrible fight in the early days of their marriage they had more or less smoothed things over, patted them into place again, and then he'd gone off to work whistling a song she couldn't identify. It wasn't till later that the words occurred to her. / wonder if I care as much, was the way they went, as I did before. . . .

But often the association was something trivial, something circumstantial-"This Old House" while he tackled a minor repair job, or

"The Wichita Lineman" whenever he helped bring in the laundry.. Do, do that voodoo . . . he whistled unknowingly, five minutes after circling a pile of dog do on the sidewalk. And of course there were times when Maggie had no idea what he was whistling. This piece right now, say: something sort of croony, something they might play on WLIF. Well, maybe he'd merely heard it while shaving, in which case it meant nothing at all.

A Patsy Cline song; that's what it was. Patsy Cline's "Crazy."

She sat up sharply and said, "Perfectly sane people baby-sit their grandchildren, Ira Moran."

He looked startled.

"They keep them for months. Whole summers," she told him.

He said, "They don't pay drop-in visits, though."

"Certainly they do!"

"Ann Landers claims drop-in visits are inconsiderate," he said.

Ann Landers, his personal heroine.

"And it's not like we're blood relatives," he said. "We're not even Fiona's in-laws anymore."

"We're Leroy's grandparents till the day we die," Maggie told him.

He didn't have any answer for that.

This stretch of road was such a mess. Things had been allowed to just happen-a barbecue joint sprouting here, a swim-pool display room there. A pickup parked on the shoulder overflowed with pumpkins: ALL u CAN CARRY

$., the hand-lettered sign read. The pumpkins reminded Maggie of fall, but in fact it was so warm now that a line of moisture stood out on her upper lip. She rolled down her window, recoiled from the hot air, and rolled it up again. Anyway, enough of a breeze came from Ira's side. He drove one-handed, with his left elbow jutting over the sill. The sleeves of his suit had rucked up to show his wristbones.

Serena used to say Ira was a mystery. That was a compliment, in those days. Maggie wasn't even dating Ira, she was engaged to someone else, but Serena kept saying, "How can you resist him? He's such a mystery. He's so mysterious." "I don't have to resist him. He's not after me," Maggie had said. Although she had wondered. (Serena was right. He was such a mystery.) But Serena herself had chosen the most open-faced boy in the world. Funny old Max! Not a secret in him. "This here is my happiest memory," Max had said once. (He'd been twenty at die time, just finishing his freshman year at UNC.) "Me and these two fraternity brothers, we go out partying. And I have a tad bit too much to drink, so coming home I pass out in the back seat and when I wake up they've driven clear to Carolina 'Beach and left me there on the sand. Big joke on me: Ha-ha. It's six o'clock in the morning and I sit up and all I can see is sky, layers and layers of hazy sky that just kind of turn into sea lower down, without the least dividing line. So I stand up and fling off my clothes and go racing into the surf, all by my lonesome. Happiest day of my life."

What if someone had told him then that thirty years later he'd be dead of cancer, with that ocean morning the clearest picture left of him in Maggie's mind? The haze, the feel of warm air on bare skin, the phock of the first cold, briny-smelling breaker-Maggie might as well have been there herself. She was grateful suddenly for the sunlit clutter of billboards jogging past; even for the sticky vinyl upholstery plastered to the backs of her arms.

Ira said, "Who would she be marrying, I wonder."

"What?" Maggie asked. She felt a little dislocated.

"Fiona."

"Oh," Maggie said. "She didn't say."

Ira was trying to pass an oil truck. He tilted his head to the left, peering for oncoming traffic. After a moment he said, "I'm surprised she didn't announce that too, while she was at it."

"All she said was, she was marrying for security. She said she'd married for love once before and it hadn't worked out."

"Love!" Ira said. "She was seventeen years old. She didn't know the first thing about love."

Maggie looked over at him. What was the first thing about love? she wanted to ask. But he was muttering at the oil truck now.

"Maybe this time it's an older man," she said. "Someone sort of fatherly. If she's marrying for security."

"This guy knows perfectly well I'm trying to pass and he keeps spreading over into my lane," Ira told her.

"Maybe she's just getting married so she won't have to go on working."

"I didn't know she worked."

"She got a job, Ira. You know that! She told us that! She got a job at a beauty parlor when Leroy started nursery school."

Ira honked at the oil truck.

"I don't know why you bother sitting in a room with people if you can't make an effort to listen," she said.

Ira said, "Maggie, is something wrong with you today?"

"What do you mean?"

"How come you're acting so irritable?"

"I'm not irritable," she said. She pushed her sunglasses higher. She could see her own nose-the small, rounded tip emerging below the nosepiece.

"It's Serena," he said.

"Serena?"

"You're upset about Serena and that's why you're snapping my head off."

"Well, of course I'm upset," Maggie said. "But I'm certainly not snapping your head off."

"Yes, you are, and it's also why you're going on and on about Fiona when you haven't given a thought to her in years."

"That's not true! How do you know how often I think about Fiona?"

Ira swung out around the oil truck at last.