breathing

Worksheet on Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons (1989) © Prepared by G. B. Smith 1997.

1. Explain the paradoxical title. Suggest alternatives and justify them:

Living Ain't Rehearsing, "Love is a Many Splendored Thing", In Serena's Shadow, Lessons in Being Ordinary, Real Life, Falling in Love Again with Your Husband, ...

2. Profile its characters:

Maggie M. Daley
Ira Moran
Sam Moran, Sam's Frame Shop
Sugar Tilphman
Serena Gill (Palermo) Max Gill
Sissy Parton (87)
Durwood (61)
Silver Threads Nursing Home
Jesse, Daisy
Daniel Otis (139)

3. How are these passages typical of Tyler? Pick out a characteristic for each:

"Well, she must have had a reason, Ira, for telling us Highway Ten."

"A reason? Serena? Serena Gill have a reason?"

She shook out the map with a cackle. He always talked like that about her girlfriends. He acted downright jealous of them. She suspected he thought women got together on the sly and gossiped about their husbands. Typical. He was so self-centered. Although sometimes it did happen, of course. (26)

..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Tears pricked her eyelids. She took a deep breath. "Daisy just sat there and studied me for the longest time," she said, "with this kind of . . fascinated expression on her face, and then she said, "Mom, Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?' " 30

She wasn't crying anymore, but she could sense Ira's disgust as he led the way to the parking lot. It felt like a sheet of something glossy and flat, shutting her out. He ought to have married Ann Landers, she thought. She slid into the car. The seat was so hot it burned through the back of her dress. Ira got in too and slammed the door behind him. If he had married Ann Landers he'd have just the kind of hard-nosed sensible wife he wanted. Sometimes, hearing his grunt of approval as he read one of Ann's snappy answers, Maggie felt an actual pang of jealousy. 33

She had assumed when she married Ira that he would always look at her the way he'd looked at her that first night....... He had looked directly into her eyes, and it seemed he wasn't even breathing. She had assumed that would go on forever. 37

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. 46

"Have you ever done such a thing?" Serena asked her. "Stepped outside your own life?"

Maggie said, "Well, not that I can recall," and turned on the hot water.

"What would it be like, I wonder," Serena said. "Just to look around you one day and have it all amaze you - where you'd arrived at, who you'd married, what kind of person you'd grown into. 53

She couldn't even say for certain that she knew what Serena was going though. Every stage of their lives, it seemed, Serena had experienced slightly ahead of Maggie; and every stage she'd reported on in her truthful. startling, bald-faced way, like some foreigner who didn't know the etiquette. Talk about stripping the curtains off! 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. 54

But wasn't it odd that the boys she went out with were never the sultry types themselves? They were not the dark Lotharios you would expect but the sunny innocents like Max. The plaid-shirt boys, the gym-sneaker boys. Those where the ones she'd gravitated toward. Maybe she'd coveted everydayness, more than she ever let on. 63

Serena had made such a point of being different. She was so thorny and spiky, so quick to get her hackles up and order you out of her sight forever.... Even now, enfolding a funeral guest in her dramatic shawl, she gave off a rich, dark glow that made people around her seem faded. 63

She seemed to have drifted away from the reason for this ceremony, and now all at once she remembered: Max Gill had actually gone and died. The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say. Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with the other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away in a hearse? 67

Only in politics, he said, did you have the power to right the world's wrongs. But it was funny: Maggie had never seen politicians as powerful. She saw them as beggars. They were always begging for votes, altering themselves to satisfy their public, behaving spinelessly and falsely in a pathetic bid for popularity. She hated to think that Boris was that way. 94

It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind. 95

"In my own house! My bedroom!"

"I'm sorry, please, we're both very sorry . . ." Maggie said, and Ira, hastily righting his clothes, said, "Yes, we honestly didn't--"

"You always were impossible," Serena told Maggie. "I suspect it's deliberate. No one could act so goofy by chance. I haven't forgotten what happened with my mother at the nursing home. And now this! At a funeral gathering! In the bedroom I shared with my husband!" 120

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 that 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. 156

So the world was not as Ira had perceived it, evidently. It was more the way Maggie perceived it. She was the one who got along in it better, collecting strays who stuck to her like lint and falling into heart-to-heart talks with total strangers. 161

The mound of the baby was separate burden, a kind of package jutting out in front of her. "Breathing lessons - really," she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. "Don't they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?"

She says, 'Oh I have no illusions"- that is how she talks when she gets on her high horse. 'I have no illusions,' she says. 'I knew what you were when I first laid eyes on you. Footloose and fancy free,' she says, 'lead singer in a hard-rock band. You don't have to explain yourself to me.' I felt like I'd been, like, stencilled or something. I mean where did she get this picture of me? Not from anything that happened in real life, I can tell you. 232

What Maggie's mother said was true: 'The generations were sliding downhill in this family. They were descending in every respect, not just in their professions and their education but in the way they reared their children and the way they ran their households.' ("How have you let things get so common ?" Maggie heard again in her memory.) 260

"You mean nothing of the sort," Fiona said, squeezing the baby too tightly. "You're trying to run us, just like always, trying to run our lives." 266

He peered at her with his glintless eyes, as if expecting an answer. 278

He as just as sad as Maggie was, and for just the same reasons. He was lonely and tired and lacking in hope and his son had not turned out well and his daughter didn't think much of him, and he still couldn't figure out where he'd gone wrong. 280

Maggie tried to picture that. Why did her memories never coincide with Ira's? Instead they seemed to dovetail - one moment his to recall and the next hers, as if they had agreed to split their joint life between them. (Illogically, she always worried about whether he had behaved right during those moments she had forgotten.) 289

Add your own selections and justify your choices:

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