Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [26]
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 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