Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [40]
Maggie's nineteenth birthday-Valentine's Day, - fell on a Thursday, which was choir practice night. Serena brought a cake and after practice she passed out slices, along with paper cups of ginger ale, and everyone sang "Happy Birthday." Old Mrs. Britt, who really should have retired from singing years before but no one had the heart to suggest it, looked around her and sighed. "Isn't it sad,*' she said, "how the young folks are drifting away. Why, Sissy hardly comes at all since she married, and Louisa's moving to Montgomery County, and now I hear the Moran boy's gone and got himself killed." "Killed?" Serena said. "How did that happen?" "Oh, one of those freak training accidents," Mrs. Britt said. "I don't know the details." Sugar, whose fiance' was at Camp Lejeune, said, "Lord, Lord, all I want is for Robert to come back safe and in one piece' '-as if he were off waging hand-to-hand combat someplace, which of course he wasn't. (It happened to be one of those rare half-minutes in history when the country was not engaged in any serious hostilities.) Then Serena offered seconds on the birthday cake, but everyone had to go home.
That night in bed Maggie started thinking about the Moran boy, for some reason. Although "she hadn't known him well, she found she had a clear mental picture of him: a sloucher, tall and high-cheekboned, with straight, oily black hair. She should have guessed he was doomed to die young. He'd been the only boy in the choir who didn't horse around while Mr. Nichols was talking to them. He had had an air of self-possession. She remembered too that he drove a car that ran on pure know-how, on junkyard parts and friction tape. Now that she thought of it, she believed she could envision his hands on the steering wheel. They were tanned and leathery, unusually wide across the base of the thumb, and the creases of his knuckles were deeply ingrained with mechanic's grease. She saw him in an army uniform with knife-sharp creases down the front of the trousers-a man who drove headlong to his death without even changing expression.
It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.
Boris wrote and said he would try his very best to come home for spring vacation. Maggie wished he wouldn't sound so effortful. He had none of Ira Moran's calm assurance.
Serena got an engagement ring with a diamond shaped like a heart. It was dazzling. She began to plan and replan a great involved wedding production scheduled for the eighth of June, a date toward which she moved majestically, like a ship, with all her girlfriends fluttering in her wake. Maggie's mother said it was absurd to make such a fuss about a wedding. She said that people who lived for their weddings experienced a big letdown afterward, and then she said, changing her tone, "That poor, sad child, going to such lengths; I have to say I pity her." Maggie was shocked. (Pity! It seemed to her that Serena was already beginning her life, while she, Maggie, waited on a side rail.) Meanwhile Serena chose an ivory lace wedding dress but then changed her mind and decided white satin would be better, and she selected first an assortment of sacred music and then an assortment of secular music, and she notified all her friends that her kitchen would have a strawberry motif.
Maggie tried to remember what she knew of Ira Moran's family. They must be devastated by their loss. His mother, she seemed to recall, was dead. His father was a vague, seedy man with Ira's stooped posture, and there had been some sisters-two or three, perhaps. She could point exactly to which pew they'd always occupied in church, but now that she thought to look, she found they weren't there anymore. She watched for them all the resi of February and most of March, but they never showed up.
Boris Drumm came home for spring break and accompanied