Breathing Lessons (7 page)

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 onesided. 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 jnirror and caught sight of the squinched 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 Par-ton, 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 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.