Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [63]
"What for?" "His nephew's out on a call but he's expected back in no time." "Then why can't we just leave?" Ira asked.
"I couldn't do that! I wouldn't rest easy. I wouldn't know how it came out." "What do you mean, how it came out? His wheel is perfectly fine, remember?" "It wobbled, Ira. I saw it wobble." He sighed.
"And maybe his nephew won't show up for some reason," she said, "so Mr. Otis will be stranded here. Or maybe it will cost money. I want to make sure he's not out any money." '' Look here, Maggie-'' "Why don't you fill the tank? Surely we could use some gas." "We don't have a Texaco credit card," he told her.
"Pay cash. Fill the tank and by then I bet Lamont will be pulling into the station." "Lamont," already. Next thing you knew, she'd have adopted the boy.
He restarted the engine, muttering, and drew up next to the self-serve island and got out. They had an older style of pump here that Baltimore no longer used-printed flip-over numerals instead of LED, and a simple pivot arrangement to trip the switch. Ira had to readjust, cast his mind back a couple of years in order to get the thing going. Then while the gas flowed into the tank he watched Maggie settle Mr. Otis on a low, whitewashed wall that separated the Texaco from someone's vegetable garden. Mr. Otis had his hat back on and he was hunkered under it like a cat under a table, peering forth reflectively, chewing on a mouthful of air, as old men were known to do.
He was ancient, and yet probably not so many years older than Ira himself. It was a thought to give you pause. Ira heard the jolt as the gas cut off, and he turned back to the car. Overhead, the balloons rustled against each other with a sound that made him think of raincoats.
While he was paying inside the station he noticed a snack machine, so he walked over to the others to see if they wanted something. They were deep in conversation, Mr. Otis going on and on about someone named Duluth. "Maggie, they've got potato chips," Ira said. "The kind you like: barbecue.'' Maggie waved a hand at him. "I think you were absolutely justified," she told Mr. Otis.
"And bacon rinds!" Ira said. "You hardly ever find bacon rinds these days." .
She gave him a distant, abstracted look and said, "Have you forgotten I'm on a diet?" "How about you, then; Mr. Otis?" "Oh, why, no, thank you, sir; thank you kindly, sir," Mr. Otis said. He turned to Maggie and went on: "So anyways, I axes her, 'Duluth, how can you hold me to count for that, woman?' " "Mr. Otis's wife is mad at him for something he did in her dream," Maggie told Ira.
Mr. Otis said, "Here I am just as unaware as a babe and I come down into the kitchen, I axes, 'Where my breakfast?' She say, 'Fix it yourself.' I say, 'Huh?' " "That is just so unfair," Maggie told him.
Ira said, "Well, I believe I'll have a snack," and he walked back toward the station, hands stuffed into his pockets, feeling left out.
Dieting too, he thought; dieting was another example of Maggie's wastefulness. The water diet and the protein diet and the grapefruit diet. Depriving herself meal after meal when in Ira's opinion she was just exactly right as she was-not even what you'd call plump; just a satisfying series of handfuls, soft, silky breasts and a creamy swell of bottom. But since when had she ever listened to Ira? He dropped coins glumly into the snack machine and punched the key beneath a sack of pretzels.
When he got back, Maggie was saying, "I mean think if we all did that! Mistook our dreams for real life. Look at me: Two or three times a year, near-about, I dream this neighbor and I are kissing. This totally bland neighbor named Mr. Simmons who looks like a salesman of something, I don't know, insurance or real estate or something. In the daytime I don't give him a thought, but at night I dream we're kissing and I long for him to unbutton my blouse, and in the morning at the bus stop I'm so embarrassed