Breathing Lessons

by Anne Tyler

  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 Serena’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 everydayness, 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. I
t 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.”

  “I 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 bending 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 self-consciously solemn. Behind them came a fair-haired man, most likely the brother, and various other people, severely, 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.

  Now the piano trudged off on “True Love.” Evidently Sissy was filling in for the chorus. Serena was giving the Barley twins a pointed, accusing glare, but they faced stubbornly forward and pretended not to notice.

  Maggie remembered Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby singing “True Love” in a movie. They’d been perched on a yacht or a sailboat or something. Both of them were dead too, come to think of it.

  If the minister found the music surprising, he gave no sign. He waited till the last note had faded and then he stood and said, “Turning now to the Holy Word …” His voice was high-pitched and stringy. Maggie wished he were Reverend Connors. Reverend Connors had shaken the rafters. And she didn’t think he’d read any Holy Word at Serena’s wedding, at least not that she could recollect.

  This man read a psalm, something about a lovely dwelling place, which came as a relief to Maggie because in her experience, most of the Book of Psalms tended to go on in a sort of paranoid way about enemies and evil plots. She pictured Max reclining in a lovely dwelling place with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, his crew cut glinting against the sunlit sails. He would be telling them one of his jokes. He could tell jokes for hours, one after the other. Serena used to say, “All right already, Gill, enough.” They’d often called each other by their last names—Max using Serena’s maiden name even after they were married. “Watch it there, Palermo.” Maggie could hear him now. It had made the two of them look more amiable than other married couples. They’d seemed like easygoing buddies, unaware of that dark, helpless, angry, confined feeling that Maggie’s own marriage descended to from time to time.

  In fact, if Serena believed that marriage was not a Doris Day movie, she had certainly never proved it in public, for her grownup life had looked from outside like the cheeriest of domestic comedies: Serena ironic and indulgent and Max the merry good-time guy. They had appeared to remain focused exclusively upon each other even after becoming parents; Linda had seemed more or less extraneous. Maggie envied that. So what if Max was a bit of a failure in the outside world? “If I just didn’t feel I had to carry him; always be the one to carry the household,” Serena had confided once. But then she had turned breezy and waved a hand, clanging her bangle bracelets. “Oh, well! But he’s my sweetie, right?” she’d said, and Maggie had agreed. He was as sweet as they came.

  (And she remembered, if Serena didn’t, how she and Serena had spent the summer after fifth grade spying on the gracious Guilford home of the man who was Serena’s father, and how they had cunningly shadowed his teenaged sons and his ladylike wife. “I could bring that woman’s world crashing around her ears,” Serena had said. “I could knock on her door and she would go, ‘Why, hello, dear, whose little girl are you?’ and I could tell her.” But she had said this
while hidden behind one of the two complacent stone lions that guarded the front walk, and she had made no move to show herself. And then she had whispered, “I will never be like her, I tell you.” A stranger would think she meant the wife, but Maggie knew better: She meant her mother. “Mrs.” Palermo—love’s victim. A woman whose every trait—even the tilted, off-center way she carried her waterfall of black curls—hinted at permanent injuries.)

  The minister seated himself, orchestrating his robe. Sissy Parton weighed in with a few ominous notes. She looked toward the congregation and Durwood said, “Me?” right out loud. The blond heads swiveled again. Durwood rose and headed up the aisle. Apparently you were expected to remember on your own when your song was due. Never mind that you had to cast your thoughts back twenty-nine years.

  Durwood struck a pose beside the piano, resting one arm on the lid. He nodded at Sissy. Then he started off in a throbbing bass: “Hold me close. Hold me tight …”

  A lot of parents had forbidden that song in their houses. All this wanting and needing really didn’t sound very nice, they had said. So Maggie and her classmates had had to go to Serena’s, or to Oriole Hi Fidelity, where you could still, in those days, pile into a listening booth and play records all afternoon without making a purchase.

  And now she recalled why she hadn’t liked Durwood; his operatic tremolo brought it all back. Once upon a time he’d been considered quite a catch, with his wavy dark hair and his deep-brown eyes and that habit he had of beseechingly crinkling his brow. He’d sung “Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms” in the high school auditorium on every conceivable occasion, always the same song, the same theatrical gestures, the same fifties crooner style, where the voice breaks with feeling. Sometimes Durwood’s voice broke so extremely that the first syllable of a line was silent, and even on the second syllable he kicked in a touch late, while the plump, bespectacled music teacher gazed up at him mistily from her piano. “Dreamboat,” his entry in the yearbook had read. “Man I’d Most Like to Be Shipwrecked With,” he’d been voted in the school paper. He’d asked Maggie for a date and Maggie had said no and her girlfriends had told her she was crazy. “You turned down Durwood? Durwood Clegg?”