Free Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler Page B

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 every day ness, 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 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