Breathing Lessons

by Anne Tyler

  “Maggie! You came!” Serena called from the doorway.

  Maggie turned, but all she saw was a silhouette against a blur of yellow light. She said, “Serena?”

  Serena rushed toward her, arms outstretched. She wore a black shawl that completely enveloped her, with long satiny fringes swinging at the hem, and her hair was black too, untouched by gray. When Maggie hugged her she got tangled in the tail of hair that hung down straight between Serena’s shoulder blades. She had to shake her fingers loose, laughing slightly, as she stepped back. Serena could have been a Spanish señora, Maggie always thought, with her center part and her full, oval face and vivid coloring.

  “And Ira!” Serena was saying. “How are you, Ira?”

  Ira stood up (having somehow spirited his cards out of sight), and she kissed his cheek, while he endured it. “Mighty sad to hear about Max,” he told her.

  “Well, thank you,” Serena said. “I’m so grateful to you for making the trip; you have no idea. All Max’s relatives are up at the house and I’m feeling outnumbered. Finally I slipped away; told them I had things to see to at the church ahead of time. Did you two eat breakfast?”

  “Oh, yes,” Maggie said. “But I wouldn’t mind finding a bathroom.”

  “I’ll take you. Ira?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “We’ll be back in a minute, then,” Serena said. She hooked her arm through Maggie’s and steered her down the aisle. “Max’s cousins came from Virginia,” she said, “and his brother George, of course, and George’s wife and daughter, and Linda’s been here since Thursday with the grandchildren.…”

  Her breath smelled of peaches, or maybe that was her perfume. Her shoes were sandals with leather straps that wound halfway up her bare brown legs, and her dress (Maggie was not surprised to see) was a vibrant red chiffon with a rhinestone sunburst at the center of the V neckline. “Maybe it’s a blessing,” she was saying. “All this chaos keeps my mind off things.”

  “Oh, Serena, has it been just terrible?” Maggie asked.

  “Well, yes and no,” Serena said. She was leading Maggie through a little side door to the left of the entrance, and then down a flight of narrow stairs. “I mean it went on so long, Maggie; in an awful way it was kind of a relief, at first. He’d been sick since February, you know. Only back then we didn’t realize. February is such a sick month anyhow: colds and flu and leaky roofs and the furnace breaking down. So we didn’t put two and two together at the time. He was feeling off a little, was all he said. Touch of this, touch of that … Then he turned yellow. Then his upper lip disappeared. I mean, nothing you can report to a doctor. You can’t exactly phone a doctor and say … but I looked at him one morning and I thought, ‘My Lord, he’s so old! His whole face is different.’ And by that time it was April, when normal people feel wonderful.”

  They were crossing an unlit, linoleum-floored basement overhung with pipes and ducts. They picked their way between long metal tables and folding chairs. Maggie felt right at home. How often had she and Serena traded secrets in one or another Sunday-school classroom? She thought she could smell the coated paper that was used for Bible-study leaflets.

  “One day I came back from the grocery store,” Serena said, “and Max wasn’t there. It was a Saturday, and when I’d left he was working in the yard. Well, I didn’t think much about it, started putting away the groceries—”

  She ushered Maggie into a bathroom tiled in white. Her voice took on an echo. “Then all at once I look out the window and there’s this totally unknown woman leading him by the hand. She was sort of … hovering; you could tell she thought he was handicapped or something. I went running out. She said, ‘Oh! Is he yours?’ ”

  Serena leaned back against a sink, arms folded, while Maggie entered a booth. “Was he mine!” Serena said. “Like when a neighbor comes dragging your dog who’s dripping garbage from every whisker and she asks, ‘Is he yours?’ But I said yes. Turns out this woman found him wandering Dunmore Road with a pair of pruning shears, and he didn’t seem to know where he was headed. She asked if she could help and all he said was: ‘I’m not certain. I’m not certain.’ But he recognized me when he saw me. His face lit up and he told her, ‘There’s Serena.’ So I took him inside and sat him down. I asked him what had happened and he said it was the oddest feeling. He said that out of the blue, he just seemed to be walking on Dunmore Road. Then when the woman turned him back toward where he’d come from he said he saw our house, and he knew it was ours, but at the time it was like it had nothing to do with him. He said it was like he had stepped outside his own life for a minute.”

  MARCY + DAVE, read the chalked words above the toilet paper dispenser. SUE HARDY WEARS A PADDED BRA. Maggie tried to adjust to this new version of Max—vague and bewildered and buckling at the knees, no doubt, like one of her patients at the home. But what she came up with was the Max she’d always known, a hefty football-player type with a prickle of glinting blond hair and a broad, good-natured, freckled face; the Max who’d run naked into the surf at Carolina Beach. She’d seen him only a few times in the past ten years, after all; he was not the world’s best at holding down a job and had moved his family often. But he had struck her as the type who stays boyish forever. It was hard to imagine him aging.

  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 one-sided. 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 mirror and caught sight of the squin
ched 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 and stick to me like glue, and that’s exactly what I got. Exactly. Max hanging on to the sight of me and following me with his eyes around the room. When he had to go to the hospital finally, he begged me not to leave him and so I stayed there day and night. But I started feeling mad at him. I remembered how I’d always been after him to exercise and take better care of his health, and he’d said exercise was nothing but a fad. Claimed jogging gave people coronaries. To hear him talk, the sidewalks were just littered with the piled-up corpses of joggers. I’d look at him in his bed and I’d say, ‘Well, which do you prefer, Max: sudden death in a snazzy red warm-up suit or lying here stuck full of needles and tubes?’ I said that, right out loud! I acted horrible to him.”

  “Oh, well,” Maggie said unhappily, “I’m sure you didn’t intend—”

  “I intended every word,” Serena said. “Why do you always have to gloss things over, Maggie? I acted horrible. Then he died.”

  “Oh, dear,” Maggie said.

  “It was nighttime, Wednesday night. I felt someone had lifted a weight off my chest, and I went home and slept twelve hours straight. Then Thursday Linda came down from New Jersey and that was nice; her and our son-in-law and the kids. But I kept feeling I ought to be doing something. There was something I was forgetting. I ought to be over at the hospital; that was it. I felt so restless. It was like that trick we used to try as children, remember? Where we’d stand in a doorway and press the backs of both hands against the frame and then when we stepped forward our hands floated up on their own as if all that pressure had been, oh, stored for future use; operating retroactively. And then Linda’s kids started teasing the cat. They dressed the cat in their teddy bear’s pajamas and Linda didn’t even notice. She’s never kept them properly in line. Max and I used to bite our tongues not to point that out. Anytime they’d come we wouldn’t say a word but we’d give each other this look across the room: just trade a look, you know how you do? And all at once I had no one to trade looks with. It was the first I’d understood that I’d truly lost him.”

  She drew her tail of hair over one shoulder and examined it. The skin beneath her eyes was shiny. In fact, she was crying, but she didn’t seem to realize that. “So I drank a whole bottle of wine,” she said, “and then I phoned everyone I ever used to know, all the friends we had when Max and I were courting. You, and Sissy Parton, and the Barley twins—”

  “The Barley twins! Are they coming?”

  “Sure, and Jo Ann Dermott and Nat Abrams, whom she finally did end up marrying, you’ll be interested to hear—”

  “I haven’t thought of Jo Ann in years!”

  “She’s going to read from The Prophet. You and Ira are singing.”

  “We’re what?”

  “You’re singing ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.’ ”

  “Oh, have mercy, Serena! Not ‘Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.’ ”

  “You sang it at our wedding, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “That was what they were playing when Max first told me how he felt about me,” Serena said. She lifted a corner of her shawl and delicately blotted the shiny places beneath her eyes. “October twenty-second, nineteen fifty-five. Remember? The Harvest Home Ball. I came with Terry Simpson, but Max cut in.”

  “But this is a funeral!” Maggie said.

  “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 Parton. 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.”