Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize)

by Anne Tyler

  "So?" "It's not a ... request program," Maggie said.

  Over their heads, a piano began thrumming the floorboards. Chord, chord, chord was plunked forth like so many place settings. Serena flung her shawl across her bosom and said, "We'd better get back up there." "Serena," Maggie said, following her out of the bathroom, "Ira and I haven't sung in public since your wedding!" "That's all right. I don't expect anything professional," Serena said. "All I want is a kind of rerun, like people sometimes have on their golden anniversaries. I thought it would make a nice touch." "Nice touch! But you know how songs, well, age," Maggie said, winding after her among the tables. "Why not just some consoling hymns? Doesn't your church have a choir?" At the foot of the stairs, Serena turned. "Look," she said. "All I'm asking is the smallest, simplest favor, from the closest friend I've had in this world. Why, you and I have been through everything together! Our weddings and our babies! You helped me put my mother in the nursing home. I sat up with you that time that Jesse got arrested." "Yes, but-" "Last night I started thinking and I said to myself, 'What am I holding this funeral for? Hardly anyone will come; we haven't lived here long enough. Why, we're not even burying him; I'm flinging his ashes on the Chesapeake next summer. We're not even going to have his casket at the service. What's the point of sitting in that church,' I said, 'listening to Mrs. Filbert tinkle out gospel hymns on the piano? "Stumbling up the Path of Righteousness" and "Death Is Like a Good Night's Sleep." I don't even know Mrs. Filbert! I'd rather have Sissy Par-ton. I'd rather have "My Prayer" as played by Sissy Parton at our wedding.' So then I thought, Why not all of it? Kahlil Gibran? 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing'?" "Not everyone would understand, though," Maggie said. "People who weren't at the wedding, for instance." Or even the people who were at the wedding, she thought privately. Some of those guests had worn fairly puzzled expressions.

  "Let them wonder, then," Serena said. "It's not for them I'm doing it." And she spun away and started up the stairs.

  "Also there's Ira," Maggie called, following her. The fringe of Serena's shawl swatted her in the face. "Of course I'd move the earth for you, Serena, but I don't think Ira would feel comfortable singing that song." "Ira has a nice tenor voice," Serena said. She turned at the top of the stairs. "And yours is like a silver bell; remember how people always told you that? High time you stopped keeping it a secret.'' Maggie sighed and followed her up the aisle. No use pointing out, she supposed, that that bell was nearly half a century old by now.

  Several other guests had arrived in Maggie's absence. They dotted the pews here and there. Serena bent to speak to a hatted woman in a slim black suit. "Sugar?" she said.

  Maggie stopped short behind her and said, "Sugar Tilghman?" Sugar turned. She had been the class beauty and was beautiful still, Maggie supposed, although it was hard to tell through the heavy black veil descending from her hat. She looked more like a widow than the widow herself. Well, she always had viewed clothes as costumes. "There you are!" she said. She rose to press her cheek against Serena's. "I am so, so'sorry for your loss," she said. "Except they call me Elizabeth now." "Sugar, you remember Maggie," Serena said.

  "Maggie Daley! What a surprise." Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of those netted onions in a grocery store.

  "If this is not the saddest thing," she said. "Robert would have come with me but he had a meeting in Houston. He said to send you his condolences, though. He said, 'Seems like only yesterday we were trying to find our way to their wedding reception.' " "Yes, well, that's what I want to discuss with you," Serena said. "Remember at our wedding? Where you sang a solo after the vows?" " 'Born to Be with You,' " Sugar said. She laughed. "You two marched out to it; I can see you still. The march took longer than the song, and at the finish all we heard was your high heels." "Well," Serena said, "I'd like you to sing it again today." Shock made Sugar's face appear to emerge from the .netting. She was older-looking than Maggie had first realized. "Do what?" she said.

  "Sing." Sugar raised her eyebrows at Maggie. Maggie looked away, refusing to conspire. It was true the pianist was playing "My Prayer." But that couldn't be Sissy Parton, could it? That plump-backed woman with dimpled elbows like upside-down valentines? Why, she resembled any ordinary church lady.

  "I haven't sung for twenty years or more," Sugar said. "I couldn't sing even then! All I was doing was showing off." "Sugar, it's the last favor I'll ever ask of you," Serena said.

  "Elizabeth." "Elizabeth, one song! Among friends! Maggie and Ira are singing." "No, wait-" Maggie said.

  Sugar said, "And besides: 'Born to Be with You.' " "What's wrong with it, I'd like to know?" Serena asked.

  "Have you thought about the lyrics? By your side, satisfied? You want to hear that at a funeral?" "Memorial service," Serena said, though she'd been calling it a funeral herself up till now.

  "What's the difference?" Sugar asked.

  "Well, it's not like there was a coffin present." "What's the difference, Serena?" "It's not like I'm by his side in the coffin or anything! It's not like I'm being ghoulish or anything! I'm by his side in a spiritual sense, is all I'm saying." Sugar looked at Maggie. Maggie was trying to remember the words to "My Prayer." In a funeral context, she thought (or in a memorial-service context), even the blandest lines could take on a different aspect.

  "You'd be the laughingstock of this congregation," Sugar said flatly.

  "What do I care about that?" Maggie left them and walked on up the aisle. She was alert to the people she passed now; they could be old-time friends. But no one looked familiar. She stopped at Ira^s pew and gave him a nudge. "I'm back," she told him. He moved over. He was reading his pocket calendar-the part that listed birthstones and signs of the zodiac.

  "Am I imagining things," he asked when she'd settled next to him, "or is that 'My Prayer' I'm hearing?" "It's 'My Prayer,' all right," Maggie said. "And it's not just any old pianist, either. It's Sissy Parton." "Who's Sissy Parton?" "Honestly, Ira! You remember Sissy. She played at Se-rena's wedding." "Oh, yes." "Where you and I sang 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,' " Maggie said.

  "How could I forget that," he said.

  "Which Serena wants us to sing again today." Ira didn't even change expression. He said, "Too bad we can't oblige her." "Sugar Tilghman won't sing, either, and Serena's giving her fits. I don't think she'll let us out of this, Ira." "Sugar Tilghman's here?" Ira said. He turned and looked over his shoulder.

  Boys had always been fascinated by Sugar.

  "She's sitting back there in the hat," Maggie told him. , "Did Sugar sing at their wedding?" "She sang 'Born to Be with You.' " Ira faced forward again and thought a moment. He must have been reviewing the lyrics. Eventually, he gave a little snort.

  Maggie said, "Do you recall the words to 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing'?" "No, and I don't intend to," Ira said.

  A man paused in the aisle next to Maggie. He said, "How you doing, Morans?" "Oh, Durwood," Maggie said. She told Ira, "Move over and let Durwood have a seat." "Durwood. Hi, there," Ira said. He slid down a foot.

  "If I'd known you were coming too, I'd have hitched a ride," Durwood said, settling next to Maggie. "Peg had to take the bus to work." "Oh, I'm sorry, we should have thought," Maggie said. "Serena must have phoned everyone in Baltimore." "Yes, I noticed old Sugar back there," Durwood said. He slipped a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He was a rumpled, quiet man, with wavy gray hair that he wore just a little too long. It trailed thinly over the tops of his ears and lay in wisps on the back of his collar, giving him the look of someone down on his luck. In high school Maggie had not much liked him, but over the years he'd stayed on in the neighborhood and married a Glen Burnie girl and raised a family, and now she saw more of him than anyone else she'd grown up with. Wasn't it funny how that happened, she thought. She couldn't remember now why they hadn't been close to begin with.

  Durwood was patting all his pockets, hunting something. "You wouldn't have a piece of paper, would you?" he said.

>   All she found was her shampoo coupon. She gave him that and he laid it on a hymnbook. Clicking his pen point, he frowned into space. "What are you writing?" Maggie asked.

  "I'm trying to think of the words to 'I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.' " Ira groaned.

  The church was filling now. A family settled in the pew just in front of theirs, the children arranged by height so that the line of round blond heads slanted upward like a question. Serena flitted from guest to guest, no doubt pleading and cajoling. The fringes of her shawl had gathered a row of dust mice from somewhere. "My Prayer" played over and over, turning dogged.

  Now that she knew how many people from her past were sitting here, Maggie wished she'd given more thought to her appearance. She could have worn powder, for instance, or foundation of some kind-something to make her face less rosy. Maybe she'd have tried painting brown hollows on her cheeks, the way the magazines were always recommending. Also she'd have chosen a younger dress, an eye-catching dress like Serena's. Except that she didn't own such a dress. Serena had always been more flamboyant-the only girl in their school with pierced ears. She had teetered on the edge of downright gaudy, but had somehow brought it off.

  How gloriously Serena had defied the stodgy times they'd grown up in! In third grade she'd worn ballet-style shoes, paper-thin, with a stunning spray of sequins across each toe, and the other girls (in their sensible brown tie oxfords and thick wool knee socks) had bitterly envied the tripping way she walked and the dancer-like grace of her bare legs, which came out in goose bumps and purple splotches at every recess period. She had brought adventurous lunches to the stewy-smelling cafeteria: one time, tiny silver sardines still in their flat silver tin. (She ate the tails. She ate the little bones. "Mm-mm! Crunch, crunch," she said, licking off each finger.) Every year on Parents' Day she proudly, officiously ushered around her scandalous mother, Anita, who wore bright-red, skin-tight toreador pants and worked in a bar. And she never hesitated to admit that she had no father. Or no father who was married, at any rate. Not married to her mother, at any rate.

  In high school she had evolved her own personal fashion statement-rayon and machine embroidery and slinky blouses from the Philippines, when the other girls were wearing crinolines. You'd see the other girls wafting through the corridors, their skirts standing out like frilled lampshades; and then in their midst Serena's sultry, come-hither, plum-colored sheath handed down from Anita.

  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 were the ones she'd gravitated toward. Maybe she'd coveted every day ness, more than she ever let on. Was that possible? Well, of course it was, but Maggie hadn't guessed it at the time. 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. (How many times had she and Maggie stopped speaking-Serena swishing past as grandly as a duchess?) Even now, enfolding a funeral guest in her dramatic shawl, she gave off a rich, dark glow that made the people around her seem faded.

  Maggie looked down at her hands. Lately, when she took a pinch of skin from the back of a hand and released it, she noticed the skin would stay pleated for moments afterward.

  Durwood muttered to himself and scribbled phrases on her coupon. Then he muttered something else, staring at the hymnal rack in front of him. Maggie felt a clutch of anxiety. She placed her fingertips together and whispered, " 'Love is a many splendored thing, it's the April rose that only grows in the-' " "I am not going to sing that song, I tell you," Ira said.

  Maggie wasn't, either, but she had a sense of being borne along by something. All through this church, she imagined, middle-aged people were mumbling sentimental phrases from the fifties. Wondrously, love can see . . . and More than the buds on the May-apple tree . . .

  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. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the panty hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.

  A slim blade of black knelt at Durwood's elbow It was Sugar Tilghman, blowing at a swatch of net to free it from her lipstick. "If I'd known I was expected to provide the entertainment I never would have come," she said. "Oh, Ira. I didn't see you there." "How you doing, Sugar," Ira said.

  "Elizabeth." "Pardon?" "The Barley twins have the right idea," Sugar said. "They flat-out refuse to go along with this." "Isn't that just like them," Maggie said. The Barley twins had always acted so snobbish, preferring each other to anybody else.

  "And Nick Bourne wouldn't even come to the funeral." "Nick Bourne?" "Said it was too long a drive." "/ don't recall Nick at the wedding," Maggie said.

  "Well, he was in the chorus, right?" "Oh, yes, I guess he was." "And the chorus sang 'True Love,' remember? But if the Barley twins won't join in and Nick Bourne's not coming, there wouldn't be but the four of us, so she's going to skip the chorus part." "You know," Durwood said, "I never understood why 'True Love' went so high on the charts. That was a really boring tune, when you think about it." "And then 'Born to Be with You,' " Sugar said. "Wasn't it funny about Serena? Sometimes she kind of overdid. She'd take some run-of-the-mill pop song like 'Born to Be with You' that all the rest of us liked okay, and she would make so much of it, it would start to look weird. It would start to look bizarre. Things always got so exaggerated, with Serena." "Like her wedding reception," Durwood said.

  "Oh, her wedding reception! Her receiving line with just that mother of hers and one fat twelve-year-old girl cousin and Max's parents." "Max's parents looked miserable." "They never did approve of her." "They thought she was sort of cheap." "They kept asking who her people were." "Better not to have a receiving line at all," Durwood said. "Shoot, better just to elope. I don't know why she went to so much trouble." "Well, anyhow," Sugar said, "I told Serena I'd sing today if she insisted, but she'd have to make it some other piece. Something more appropriate. I mean I know we're supposed to be humoring the bereaved, but there are limits. And Serena said, well, all right, so long as it came from the time when they were first dating. Nineteen fifty-five, fifty-six, she said; nothing later." " 'The Great Pretender,' " Durwood said suddenly. "Now, there was a song. Remember, Ira? Remember 'The Great Pretender'?" Ira put on a soulful look and crooned, "O-o-o-o-o-o- oh, yes . . ." "Why not sing that?" Durwood asked Sugar.

  "Oh, be serious," Sugar said.

  "Sing 'Davy Crockett,' " Ira suggested.

  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.

  "Ssh, everybody. They're starting," Maggie said. She had glimpsed the family approaching from the rear. Sugar rose hastily and returned to her seat, while Serena, who was bedding over two women who could only be the Barley twins, settled next to them in a pew that was nowhere near the front and went on whispering. No doubt she still hoped to talk them into singing. Both twins wore their yellow hair in the short, curly, caplike style they'd favored in high school, Maggie saw, but the backs of their necks were scrawny as chicken necks and their fussy pink ruffles gave them a Minnie Pearl look.

  An usher led the family up the aisle: Serena's daughter, Linda, fat and freckled, and Linda's bearded husband and two little boys in grownup suits, their expressions selfconsciously solemn. Behind them came a fair-haired man, most likely the brother, and various other people, s
everely, somberly dressed. Several had Max's wide face, which gave Maggie a start. 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?

  The family settled in the frontmost pew. Linda glanced back at Serena, but Serena was too busy arguing with the Barley twins to notice. Then the piano fell silent, and a door near the altar opened and a lean, bald-headed minister appeared in a long black robe. He crossed behind, the pulpit. He seated himself in a dark wooden armchair and arranged the skirt- of his robe fastidiously over his trousers.

  "That's not Reverend Connors, is it?" Ira whispered.

  "Reverend Connors is dead" Maggie told him.

  She was louder than she'd meant to be. The row of blond heads in front of her swiveled.