Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons

(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 bad 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?"

"He's too soft," she'd said, and they had repeated the word and passed it among themselves for consideration. "Soft," they'd murmured tentatively.

He was too pliant, she meant; too supplicating. She failed to see the appeal. For if Serena had made her resolutions about who not to be, why, so had Maggie; and in order not to be her mother, she planned to avoid any man remotely like her father-the person she loved best in the world.

No one mild and clumsy for Maggie, thank you; no one bumbling and well-meaning and sentimental, who would force her to play the heavy. You'd never find her sitting icily erect while her husband, flushed with merriment, sang nonsense songs at the dinner table.

So Maggie had refused Durwood Clegg and had watched with no regrets as he went on to date Lu Bern Parsons instead. She could see Lu Beth as clear as day this very minute, clearer than Peg, whom he'd ended up marrying.

She could see Durwood's khaki trousers with the Ivy League buckle in back buckled up ("attached," that signified; "going steady") and his button-down shirt and natty brown loafers decorated with bobbing leather acorns.

But of course this morning he was wearing a suit- baggy and unfashionable, inexpensive, husbandly. For a moment he shifted back and forth like those trick portraits that change expression according to where you're standing: the old lady-killer Durwood meaningfully lingering on darling, you're all that I'm living for, with his eyebrows quirked, but then the present-day, shabby Durwood searching for the next stanza on Maggie's shampoo coupon, which he held at arm's length, with his forehead wrinkled, as he tried to make out the words.

The blond children in front were tittering. They probably found this whole event hilarious. Maggie had an urge to slam the nearest one flat over the head with a hymn-book.

When Durwood finished singing, someone mistakenly clapped-just two sharp explosions-and Durwood nodded in a grimly relieved way and returned to his seat. He settled next to Maggie with a sigh. His face was filmed with sweat and he fanned himself with the coupon. Would it seem mercenary if she asked for it back? Twenty-five cents off, at double-coupon rates . .

.

Jo Ann Dermott stepped up to the pulpit with a small book covered in tooled leather. She had been a gawky girl, but middle age had filled out her corners or something. Now she was willowy and attractive in a fluid, pastel dress and subtle makeup. "At Max's and Serena's wedding," she announced, "I read Kahlil Gibran on marriage. Today, at this sadder occasion, I'll read what he says about death."

At the wedding, she had pronounced Gibran with a hard G. Today the G was soft. Maggie had no idea which was correct.

Jo Ann started reading in a level, teacher-like voice, and immediately Maggie was overcome by nervousness. It took her a moment to realize why: She and Ira were next on the program. Just the cadence of The Prophet had reminded her.

At the wedding they'd sat on folding chairs behind the altar, and Jo Ann had sat in front of the altar with Reverend Connors. When Jo Ann began reading, Maggie had felt that breathless flutter high in her chest that foretold stage fright. She had taken a deep, trembly breath, and then Ira had unobtrusively set a hand at the small of her back. That had steadied her. When it was time for them to sing, they had begun at the same split second, on exactly the same note, as if they were meant for each other. Or so Maggie had viewed it at the time.

Jo Ann closed her book and returned to her pew. Sissy flipped pages of sheet music, the puffed flesh swinging from her valentine elbows. She flounced a bit on the bench, and then she played the opening bars of "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing."

Maybe if Maggie and Ira stayed seated, Sissy would just go on playing.

She would cover for them as she had covered for the chorus.

But the piano notes died away and Sissy glanced back toward the congregation. Her hands remained on the keys. Serena turned too and, knowing exactly where to find Maggie, gave her a fond, expectant look in which there was not the slightest suspicion that Maggie would let her down.

Maggie stood up. Ira just sat there. He might be anyone-a total stranger, someone who merely happened to have chosen the same pew.

So Maggie, who had never sung a solo in her life, clutched the seat ahead of her and called out, '' 'Love!' ''

A bit squeakily.

The piano sailed into it. The blond children pivoted and stared up into her face.

" '. . . is a many splendored thing,' " she quavered.

She felt like an orphaned, abandoned child, with her back held very straight and her round-toed pumps set resolutely together.

Then there was a stirring at her side, not her right side, where Ira sat, but her left, where Durwood sat. Durwood hastily unfolded himself as if all at once reminded of something. " 'It's the April rose,' " he sang, "

'that only grows . . .' " This near, his voice had a resonant sound. She thought of sheets of vibrating metal.