Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [22]
She flushed the toilet and emerged to find Serena considering one of her sandals, twisting her foot this way and that. "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. Say you suddenly came to while you were-oh, say, out shopping with your daughter-but it was your seven- or eight-year-old self observing all you did. 'Why!' you'd say. 'Can this be me? Driving a car? Taking charge? Nagging some young woman like I knew what I was doing?' 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.) She reached for a paper towel and said, "I thought on the phone you said he died of cancer." "He did," Serena said. "But it was everywhere before we knew about it. Every part of him, even his brain." "Oh, Serena." "One day he was out selling radio ads the same as always and next day he was flat on his back. Couldn't walk right, couldn't see right; everything he did was onesided. He kept saying he smelled cookies. He'd say, 'Serena, when will those cookies be done?' I haven't baked cookies in years! He'd say, 'Bring me one, Serena, as soon as they're out of the oven.' So I would make a batch and then he'd look surprised and tell me he wasn't hungry." "I wish you'd called me," Maggie said.
"What could you have done?" Well, nothing, really, Maggie thought. She couldn't even say for certain that she knew what Serena was going through. 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.
She frowned into the jnirror and caught sight of the squinched blue chicory flower lolling above one ear. She plucked it off and dropped it in the wastebasket. Serena hadn't mentioned it-sure proof of her distracted state of mind.
"At first I wondered, 'How are we going to do this?' " Serena said. " 'How will the two of us manage?' Then I saw that it was only me who would manage. Max was just assuming that I would see him through it. Did the tax people threaten to audit us; did the car need a new transmission? That was my affair; Max had left it all behind him. He'd be dead by the time the audit rolled around, and he didn't have any further use for a car. Really it's laughable, when you stop to think. Isn't there some warning about your wishes coming true? 'Be careful what you set your heart on'-isn't there some such warning? Here I'd vowed since I was a child that I wouldn't be dependent on a man. You'd never find me waiting around for some man to give me the time of day! I wanted a husband who'd dote on me