Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [29]
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 syl- lable 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 Dur- wood 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.