Breathing Lessons (32 page)

When you're a stay-at-home, play-at-home, eight-o 'clock Sleepytime gal. . .
All at once she looked down at her wrist and saw that she wore two watches. One was her regular watch, a little Timex, and the other was a big old chunky man's watch with a wide leather band. In fact, it belonged to her father, but it had been lost or broken years ago. The face was a rectangle, pinkish, and the numerals were a pale blue that would glow in the dark. She cupped her hand over her wrist and bent close, making a little cave of darkness so she could see the numbers light up. Her fin- gers smelled of bubble gum. Beside her, Serena said, "Just another five minutes, that's all I ask. If nothing happens by then, I promise we can go." Maggie raised her head and stared through the leaves at the two stone lions across the street. Between them lay a white sidewalk, curving across an immaculate lawn and arriving finally at a stately brick colonial house, and within the house lived the man who was Serena's father. The front door was the kind without a window, without even those tiny glass panes that are placed too high to be useful. Maggie wondered how Serena could stare so intently at something so blank and ungiving. They were crouched uncomfortably among the twisted branches of a rhododendron bush. Maggie said, "That's what you told me half an hour ago. No one's going to come." Serena laid a hand on her arm, hushing her. The door was swinging open. Mr. Barrett stepped out and then turned back to say something. His wife appeared, tugging at her gloves. She wore a slim brown dress with long sleeves, and Mr. Barren's suit was almost the same shade of brown. Neither Maggie nor Serena had even seen him in anything but a suit, not even on weekends. He was like a dollhouse doll, Maggie thought-one of those jointed plastic figures with the clothes painted on, nonremovable, and a clean-cut, anonymous face. He shut the door and took his wife's elbow and they moved down the sidewalk, their heels gritty-sounding. When they passed between the stone lions they seemed to be looking directly at Maggie and Serena; Maggie could see the needles of silver in Mr. Barrett's crew cut. But his expression told her nothing, and neither did his wife's. They turned sharply to their left and headed toward a long blue Cadillac parked at the curb. Serena let her breath out. Maggie felt a sense of frustration that was almost suffocating. How sealed off these people were! You could study them all day and still not know them. (Or any other married couple either, maybe.) There were moments-the first time they had made love, say, or say a conversation they'd once had when one of them woke up frightened in the middle of the night-that nobody else in the world had any inkling of.
Maggie turned to Serena and said, "Oh, Serena, I'm so sorry for your loss." Serena wore her red funeral dress and she was blotting her tears on the fringe of her black shawl. "Dear heart, I am so sorry," Maggie said, and when she woke up, she was crying too. She thought she was home in bed and Ira was asleep beside her, his breath as steady as tires hissing past on a pavement and his warm bare arm supporting her head, but that was the back of the car seat she felt. She sat up and brushed at her eyes with her fingertips.
The light had slipped yet another notch downward into dusk and they had reached that long, tangled commercial stretch just, above Baltimore. Blazing signs streaked by, HI-Q PLUMBING SUPPLIES and CECIL'S GRILL and EAT EAT EAT. Ira was just a gray profile, and when Maggie turned to see Leroy and Fiona she found all the color washed out of them except for what flashed across their faces from the neon. "I must have been asleep," she told them, and they nodded. She asked Ira, "How much further?" "Oh, another fifteen minutes or so. We're already inside the Beltway." "Don't forget we need to stop at a grocery store." She was cross with herself for missing out on part of the conversation. (Or hadn't there been any? That would be worse.) Her head felt cottony and nothing seemed completely real. They passed a house with a lighted, glassed-in porch on which drum sets were displayed, smaller drums stacked on top of larger, some gold-spangled like a woman's Iam evening gown and all of them glittering with chrome, and she wondered if she were dreaming again. She turned to follow the house with her eyes. The drums grew smaller but stayed eerily bright, like fish in an aquarium.
"I had the weirdest dream," she said after a moment.
"Was I in it?" Leroy wanted to know.
"Not that I can remember. But you might have been." "Last week my friend Valerie dreamed I had died," Leroy said.
"Ooh, don't even say such a thing!" "She dreamed I got run over by a tractor trailer," Leroy said with satisfaction.
Maggie swiveled to catch Fiona's eye. She wanted to assure her that such a dream meant nothing, or maybe she wanted the assurance for herself. But Fiona wasn't listening. She was gazing at the clutter of convenience stores and pizza parlors.
"Mighty Value Supermarket," Ira said. He flicked his left turn signal on.
Maggie said, "Mighty what? I never heard of it." "It's handy, is what counts," Ira told her. He was delayed by a stream of oncoming traffic, but finally he found an opening and darted across the street and into a lot littered with abandoned shopping carts. He parked beside a panel truck and switched off the engine.
Leroy said she wanted to come too. Maggie said, "Well, of course," and then Ira, who had just started to slouch down behind the wheel, straightened and opened his door as if he'd been planning to go with them all along. This made Maggie smile. (Don't try and tell her he didn't care about his grandchild!) Fiona said, "Well, I certainly don't want to sit here by myself," and she stepped out of the car to follow them. She had never been fond of grocery shopping, as Maggie recalled.
The Mighty Value turned out to be one of those vast, cold, white, shiny places with rank upon rank of checkout counters, most of them closed. Some syrupy love song was playing over the loudspeaker. Against her will, Mag- gie slowed down, keeping time with the music. She drifted past the fruits and vegetables, dreamily swinging her pocketbook, while the others went ahead. Leroy took a run with an empty cart and then hopped on the back and coasted until she caught up with Ira, who had already reached the poultry counter. He turned and smiled at her. From Maggie's angle his profile looked sharp and wolfish-hungry, really. It was something about the way he jutted his face toward Leroy. Maggie bypassed Fiona and arrived next to him. She slipped her arm through his and lightly brushed her cheek against his shoulder.
"Dark meat or white?" Ira was asking Leroy.
"Dark," Leroy said promptly. "Me and Ma like drumsticks." "Us too," Ira told her, and he picked out a pack and dropped it into her cart.
"And sometimes me and Ma eat thighs, but we don't think wings are worth the bother," Leroy said.
"Me and Ma" this, "me and Ma" that-how long had it been since Maggie herself was so central to anyone's world? And this "Ma" was only Fiona, fragile-boned Fiona sashaying up the aisle in her cutoff shorts.
Humming along with the loudspeaker music, Ira placed a pack of thighs on top of the drumsticks in the cart. "Now for the ice cream," he said. Leroy coasted away on the cart and Maggie and Ira followed. Maggie still had her arm linked through Ira's. Fiona trailed behind.
In the freezer section they had no trouble deciding on fudge ripple, but then there were so many different fudge ripples to choose from: Mighty Value's house brand and the standard brands and then the fancy, foreign-sounding brands that Ira called "designer desserts." He was opposed to designer desserts on principle; he wanted to get the Mighty Value. Fiona, who had discovered the Hair Care section, offered no opinion, but Leroy said that she and Ma had always favored Breyer's. And Maggie voted to go all out and choose something foreign. They could have discussed it forever, except that by now the loudspeaker was playing "Tonight You Belong to Me," and halfway through the song Ira began muttering along with it. " 'Way down,' " he rumbled absently, " 'by the stream . . .' "So then Maggie couldn't resist chiming in on that airy little soprano part: " 'How sweet, it will seem It started as a spoof, but it developed into a real production. " 'Once more, just to dream, in the moonlight!' " Their voices braided together on the chorus and then sailed apart, only to reunite and twine around each other once again. Fiona forgot the box of hair dye she was studying; Leroy clasped her hands admiringly under her chin; an old woman paused in the aisle to smile at them. It was the old woman who brought Maggie back to earth. All at once she imagined some deception in this scene, some lie that she and Ira were collaborating in with their compliant harmonizing and the romantic gaze they trained upon each other. She broke off in the middle of a solo line. "Patience and Prudence," she informed Leroy briskly. "Nineteen fifty-seven." "Fifty-six," Ira said.
Maggie said, "Whatever." They turned their attention back to the ice cream.
In the end they decided on Breyer's, with chocolate sauce from the shelf above the freezer. "Hershey's chocolate sauce, or Nestle's?" Ira asked.
"I'll leave it up to you two." "Or here's a Mighty Value brand. What do you say we go for that?" "Just not Brown Cow," Leroy told him. "I can't abide Brown Cow." "Definitely not Brown Cow," Ira said.
"Brown Cow smells like candle wax," Leroy told Maggie.
Maggie said, "Ah." She looked down at Leroy's pointy little face and smiled.
Fiona asked Maggie, "Have you ever considered using a mousse?" "A what?" "A styling mousse. On your hair." "Oh, on my hair," Maggie said. She had thought they were talking about some kind of ice-cream sauce. "Why, no, I don't believe I have." "A lot of our beauticians recommend it." Was Fiona recommending it to Maggie? Or maybe she was only speaking generally. "Just what would it do for a person?" Maggie asked.
"Well, in your case it would give your hair a little, I don't know, a little shape or something. It would kind of organize it." "I'll buy some," Maggie decided.
She picked up a silvery container, along with a bottle of Affinity shampoo since she still had that coupon. (Brings back that fullness that time has taken away, a display card promised.) Then they all went to the express lane, rushed along by Maggie because it was after six, according to her watch, and she had told Jesse six-thirty. Ira said, "Do you have enough money? I could go get the car while you're paying." She nodded, and he left them. Leroy laid their purchases neatly on the counter. The customer in front of them was buying nothing but breads. Rye bread, white bread, biscuits, whole wheat rolls. Maybe he was trying to fatten up his wife. Say he was the jealous type, and his wife was very thin and beautiful. The customer departed, taking his breads with him. Leroy said, "Double bags, please," in a bossy, experienced voice. The boy at the cash register grunted without looking. He was muscular and good-looking, deeply tanned, and he wore a gold razor blade on a chain inside the open collar of his shirt.
What on earth could that mean? He rang up their items swiftly, his fingers stabbing the keys. Last came the shampoo. Maggie dug through her purse for the coupon and handed it to him. "Here," she said, "this is for you." He took it and turned it over. He read it narrowly, not quite moving his lips. Then he gave it back to her. He said, "Well, uh, thanks," and then, "That'll be sixteen forty-three." Maggie felt confused, but she counted out the money and picked up the bag. As they left the register she asked Fiona, "Does Mighty Value not accept coupons, or what?" "Coupons? I wouldn't know," Fiona said.
"Maybe it's expired," Maggie said. She shifted her grocery bag in order to peer at the expiration date. But the print was covered over at right angles by Durwood Clegg's heavy blue script: Hold me close, hold me tight, make me thrill with delight . . .
Maggie's face grew hot. She said, "Well! Of all the conceit!" "Pardon?" Fiona asked, but Maggie didn't answer. She screwed up the coupon and dropped it into the grocery bag.
Outside, it was much darker now. The air was a deep, transparent blue and insects were flitting around the lights high above the parking lot. Ira leaned against the car by the curb. "You want to put the groceries in the trunk?" he asked Maggie, but she said, "No, I'll just hold them." She suddenly felt old and weary. It seemed they would never reach home. She got into the car and sat down hard, with the grocery bag slumped any which way on her knees.
St. Michael the Archangel. Charlie's Fine Liquors. Used-car dealers, one after the other. Gatch Memorial Church. Dead Man's Fingers Crab House. HAPPY HOUR NITELY, with red and blue neon bubbles fizzing above a neon cocktail glass. Cemeteries and shabby frame houses and fast-food restaurants and empty playgrounds. They took a right off Belair Road-finally, finally leaving Route One-and headed down their own street. The frame houses grew more numerous. Their windows were squares of yellow light, some gauzy with curtains and some fully exposed, revealing ornate decorative lamps or china figurines meticulously centered on the sills. For no good reason, Maggie was reminded of rides she had taken with Ira during their courtship, driving past houses where every other couple in the world, it seemed, had a space to be alone in. What she would have given, back then, for even the smallest of those houses, even just four walls and a bed! She felt a sweet, sad fullness in her chest now, remembering that long-ago ache.
They passed the Seeing Eye Palmistry Parlor, really just a private home with a sign propped in the living room window. A girl was sitting out on the steps, maybe waiting her turn; she had a small, heart-shaped face and she was dressed all in black except for her purple suede shoes, which showed up clearly in the light from the porch. A man trudged down the sidewalk with a little girl riding his shoulders and clutching two handfuls of his hair. It seemed the scenery had grown more intimate, more specific. Maggie turned toward Leroy and said, "I don't suppose any of this is familiar." "Oh, I've seen it," Leroy said.
"You have?" "Only in passing," Fiona corrected her quickly.
"When was that?" Leroy looked at Fiona, who said, "We might have driven by here once or twice." Maggie said, "Is that so." In front of their own house, Ira parked. It was one of those bouses that appear to be mostly front porch, at least from the street-squat and low-browed, not at all impres- sive, as Maggie was the first to admit. She wished at least the lights were on. That would have made it seem more welcoming. But every window was dark. "Well!" she said, too heartily. She opened her door and got out of the car, clutching the groceries. "Come on in, everyone!" There was something befuddled about the way they milled around on the sidewalk. They had been traveling for too long. When Ira started up the steps, he accidentally banged Fiona's suitcase against the railing, and he fumbled awhile with the key before he got the door unlocked.