Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

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 comer 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 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 Lament 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 veer 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 Lament. "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."