Quotes from Breathing Lessons

 

It was Serena who'd told Maggie that marriage was not a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie. It was Serena who'd said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort. Now this: to have your husband die. It made Maggie nervous, although she knew it wasn't catching.

There's times I think, Shoot, maybe I ought to just fire off another telegram. Jesse, I'd say, / love you still, and it begins to seem I always will. He wouldn't even have to answer; it's just something I want him to know. Or I'll be down in Baltimore at my sister's and I'll think, Why not drop by and visit him? Just walk in on him? Just see what happens?" "Oh, you ought to," Maggie said.

"But he'd say, 'What are you doing here

But Maggie remembered, and sometimes, feeling the glassy sheet of Ira's disapproval, she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We're all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.

 

"And for your information, there's any number of girls who think he's perfectly wonderful and I am not the only one and also it's ridiculous to say he can't get married. You have no right; anyone can get married if they want to." "He wouldn't dare!" Sam told her. "He's got me and his sisters to think of. You want us all in the poorhouse? Ira? Ira, you wouldn't dare to get married!" "Why not?" Ira asked calmly.

"You've got to think of me and your sisters!" "I'm marrying her anyhow," Ira said.

Then he opened the door and stood back to let Maggie walk thr

And even in her imagination, she had always been the most faithful of wives. She had never felt so much as tempted. But now thoughts of Mr. Gabriel consumed her, and she spent hours inventing new ways to be indispensable to him

You goofball, Maggie! What will you get up to next? Most folks just takes baths," she said.

"This was a miscalculation," Maggie told them. She stood up, batting away a towel that draped one shoulder. "Ah, well, I guess I'd better be-" But Sateen said, "Off we goes, girl

"Hey, babe," he said, "care to accompany me to a funeral?" She shrugged and didn't answer, but when he hung an arm around her shoulders she let him lead her out to the car.

"Side?" "I mean a groom's side and a bride's side? Or rather-" Her mistake sent her into a little fit of giggles. To tell the truth, she hadn't had much experience with funerals.

"Ira Moran! You're not playing cards in a house of worship!"

You'd walk into your house and say, 'Well, I don't think all that much of my taste.' You'd go to a mirror and say, 'Goodness, my chin is starting to slope just the way my mother's did.' I mean you'd be looking at things without their curtains. You'd say, 'My husband isn't any Einstein, is he?' You'd say, 'My daughter certainly could stand to lose some weight.' " Maggie cleared her throat. (All those observations were disconcertingly true. Serena's daughter, for instance, could stand to lose a lot of .weight.)

You and Ira are singing." "We're what?" "You're singing 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.' " "Oh, have mercy, Serena! Not 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.' " "You sang it at our wedding, didn't you?" "Yes, but-" "

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boy's lament for a girl who didn't love him back.

He and Durwood started competing: "Sing 'Yellow Rose of Texas.' " "Sing 'Hound Dog.' " "Sing 'Papa Loves Mambo.' " "Will you be serious for a minute?" Sugar said. "I'm going to get up there and open my mouth and nothing's going to come out." "Or how about 'Heartbreak Hotel'?" Ira asked.

 

"Serena, are you sure you ought to be marrying Max?" Serena squawked and wheeled to face her. She said, "Maggie Daley, don't you start with me! I've already got my wedding cake frosted." "But I mean how do you know? How can you be certain you chose the right man?" "I can be certain because I've come to the end of the line," Serena said, turning back to the mirror. Her voice was at normal level now. She patted on liquid foundation, expertly dotting her chin and forehead and cheeks. "It's just time to marry, that's all," she said. "I'm so tired of dating! I'm so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years. It's going to be like getting out of a girdle; that's exactly how I picture it." "What are you saying?" Maggie asked. She was almost afraid of the answer. "Are you telling me you don't really love Max?" "Of course I love him," Serena said. She blended the dots into her skin. "But I've loved other people as much. I loved Terry Simpson our sophomore year-remember him? But it wasn't time to get married then, so Terry is

He thought that over. He gave an abrupt, wheezy chuckle.

"Margaret M. Daley," he said.

She stood her ground.

"So you assumed Ira was dead," he said.

"Is he here?" she asked.

"He's upstairs, dressing."

How did you suppose he'd died?" he asked her.

"I mistook him for someone else. Monty Rand," she said, mumbling the words. "Monty got killed in boot camp." "Boot camp!" "Could you call Ira for me, please?" "You'd never find Ira in boot camp

"Me and your little friend here was just discussing you going into the army." "Army?" "Ira couldn't join the army, I told her. He's got us." Ira said, "Well, anyhow, Pop, I ought to be back from this thing in a couple of hours." "You really have to take that long? That's most of the morning!" Sam turned to Maggie and said, "Saturday's our busiest day at work." Maggie wondered why, in that case, the shop was empty. She said, "Yes, well, we should

Really it was all a misunderstanding," she told Mr. Otis. She bit into a pretzel. "They were perfect for each other. They even looked perfect: Jesse so dark and Fiona so blond. It's just that Jesse was working musician's hours and his life was sort of, I don't know, unsteady. And Fiona was so young, and inclined to fly off the handle. Oh, I used to just ache for them. It broke Jesse's heart when she left him; she took their little daughter and went back home to her mother. And Fiona's heart was broken too, I know, but do you think she would say so? And now they're so neatly divorced you would think they had never been married." All true, as far as it went, Ira reflected; but there was a lot she'd left out. Or not left out so much as slicked over, somehow, like that image of their son-the "musician" plying his trade so busily that he was forced to neglect his "wife" and his "daughter." Ira had never thought of Jesse as a musician; he'd thought of him as a high-school dropout in need of permanent employment. And he had never thought of Fiona as a wife but rather as Jesse's teenaged sidekick-her veil of gleaming blond hair incongruous above a skimpy T-shirt and tight jeans- while poor little Leroy had not been much more than their pet, their stuffed animal won at a carnival booth.

He had a vivid

But Daisy was pitiable too, in her way. Ira saw that clearly, even though she was the one he felt closer to. She seemed to be missing out on her own youth-had never even had a boyfriend, so far as Ira could tell. .Whenever Jesse got into mischief as a child Daisy had taken on a pinch-faced expression of disapproval, but Ira would almost rather she had joined in the mischief herself. Wasn't mat how it was supposed to work? Wasn't that how it worked in other families, those jolly, noisy families Ira used to watch wistfully when he was a little boy? Now she was packed for college- had been packed for weeks-and had no clothes left but the throwaways that she

This was one morning when Fiona had left the breakfast table in tears, and Ira had asked Jesse what was wrong. "You know how it is," Jesse had answered. "Same old song and dance as always." Then Ira (who had asked not out of empty curiosity but as a means of implying This matters, son; pay her some heed) had wondered what that "you know" signified. Was Jesse saying that Ira's marriage and his own had anything in common? Because if so, he was way out of line. They were two entirely different institutions. Ira's marriage was as steady as a tree; not even he could tell how wide and deep the roots went.

Ira sitting endlessly on his high wooden stool, whistling along with his easy-listening radio station as he measured a mat or sawed away at his miter box. Women came in asking him to frame their cross-stitched homilies and their amateur seascapes and their wedding photos (two serious people in profile gazing solely at each other). They brought in illustrations torn from magazines-a litter of puppies or a duckling in a basket. Like a tailor measuring a half-dressed client, Ira remained discreetly sightless, appearing to form no judgment about a picture of a sad-faced kitten tangled in a ball of yarn. "He wants a pastel-colored mat of some kind, wouldn't you say?" the women m

"Maybe a pale blue that would pick up the blue of his ribbon." "Yes, we could do that." And through Jesse's eyes he would see himself all at once as a generic figure called The Shopkeeper: a drab and obsequious man of indeterminate age

n his childhood he had been extraneous-a kind of afterthought, half a generation younger than his sisters. He had been so much the baby that he'd called every family member "honey," because that was how all those grownups or almost-grownups addressed him and he'd assumed it was a universal term. "I need my shoes tied, honey," he would tell his father. He didn't have the usual baby's privileges, though; he was never the center of attention. If any of them could be said to occupy that po- sition it was his sister Dorrie-mentally handicapped, frail and jerky, bucktoothed, awkward-although even Dorrie had a neglected air and tended to sit by herself on the outskirts of a room.

Maybe not since Leroy was a baby. Back then (she recalled as she waved away the potato chips), she sometimes drank as many as two or three cans a day, keeping Fiona company because beer was good for her milk supply, they'd heard. Now that would probably be frowned upon, but at the time they had felt dutiful and virtuous, sipping their Miller High Lifes while the baby drowsily nursed. Fiona used to say she could feel the beer zinging directly to her breasts. She and Maggie would start drinking when Maggie came home from work-midafternoon or so, just the two of them. They would grow all warm and confiding together. By the time Maggie got around to fixing supper she would be feeling, oh, not drunk or anything but filled with optimism, and then later at the table she might act a bit more talkative than usual. It was nothing the others would notice, though. Except perhaps for Daisy. "Really, Mom. Honestly," Daisy would say. But then, she was always saying that.

Fiona said, " 'She's so what, Jesse?' I ask him. 'She's so what? How dare you come tramping in here telling me she's so something or other when the last time you sent us a check was December? And instead you waste your money on this trash, this junk,' I tell him, 'this poochy-faced baby doll when the only doll she'll bother with is G.I. Joe.' " "Oh, Fiona," Maggie said.

'I mean,' he said, 'did it sound to you like maybe she was expecting me to stay on over the weekend? Because if so then I might borrow Dave's van and drive up separately from you and Dad.' And I said, 'Well, you could do that, Jesse. Yes, what a good idea; why don't you.' He said, 'But how did she word it, is what I'm asking,' and I said, 'Oh, I forget,' and he said, 'Think.' I said, 'Well, as a matter of fact . . .' I said, 'Um, in fact, she didn't actually word it any way, Jesse, not directly straight out,' and he said, 'Wait. I thought she told you it would mean a lot to her if I came.' I said, 'No, it was me who said that, but I know it's true. I know it would mean a great deal to her.' He said, 'What's going on here? You told me clearly that it was Fiona who said that.' I said, 'I never told you any such thing! Or at least I don't think I did; unless maybe perhaps by accident I-' He said, 'Are you saying she didn't ask for me?' 'Well, I just know she would have,' I told him, 'if the two of you were not so all-fired careful of your dignity. I just know she wanted to, Jesse-' But by then he was gone. Slammed out

"So then he calls me on the phone. I knew that was why he called me. Says, 'Fiona? Hon?' I could hear it in his voice that he was sorry for me. I knew what you must have told him. I say, 'What do you want? Are you calling for a reason?' He says, 'No, um, no reason . . .' I say, 'Well, then, you're wasting your money, aren't you?' and I hang up." "Fiona, for Lord's sake," Maggie said. "Didn't it occur to you he might have called because he missed you?" Fiona said, "Ha!" and took another swig of beer.

but that soapbox seemed to have vanished. And I couldn't ask Jesse because he had walked out as soon as your sister walked in, so I started opening his bureau drawers and that's where I found it, in his treasure drawer among the things he never throws away-his old-time baseball cards and the clippings about his band. But I didn't give it to your sister. I just shut the drawer again. In fact, I believe he has kept that soapbox to this day, F