"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.
Durwood was patting all his pockets, hunting something. "You wouldn't have a piece of paper, would you?" he said.
All she found was her shampoo coupon. She gave him that and he laid it on a hymnbook. Clicking his pen point, he frowned into space. "What are you writing?" Maggie asked.
"I'm trying to think of the words to 'I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.' "
Ira groaned.
The church was filling now. A family settled in the pew just in front of theirs, the children arranged by height so that the line of round blond heads slanted upward like a question. Serena flitted from guest to guest, no doubt pleading and cajoling. The fringes of her shawl had gathered a row of dust mice from somewhere. "My Prayer" played over and over, turning dogged.
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 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.