Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

"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, 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 of 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 frorn 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.