Unfinished Desires (44 page)

CHAPTER 36
Reunion
MAUD

Saturday afternoon, October 27, 2007
Storage unit 1516
Lake Worth, Florida

“
HELLO?
”

Maud Martinez, slick with perspiration, was sitting on a crate catching her breath when her cell phone rang.

“Maud?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Tildy. I just this minute got your letter. I was so excited I could hardly read it.”

“Oh, Tildy, I don’t believe this—”

“You sound out of breath. Are you out
jogging
or something?”

“No, I’ve been moving boxes.”

“Where are you
right this minute?”

“I’m in my storage unit out on the highway. I sold our house. I’m sitting on a crate.”

“Are you out of the house yet?”

“No, but it’s almost empty.”

“What’s in the crate you’re sitting on right now?”

Such a Tildy question!

“My mother’s china. She was so proud of it. When she married Art Foley, they went out and bought everything new.”

“She’s gone?”

“They both are. He died first, and Lily’s been gone since eighty-eight. And your parents?”

“Oh, very much gone. And—ohhh!—but listen, Maud, what are you going to do now?”

“You mean today, or for the rest of my life?”

“Both, but let’s start with today. Do you have a
date
or anything tonight?”

“A date! Good Lord, no.”

“Now listen, Maud, and don’t interrupt until I’ve finished. You could get on the Florida Turnpike and be at my house in nine hours. What’s stopping you?”

Glorious, dramatic Tildy. As though they were still fourteen. “About ten more trips to the recycling center tomorrow, then the floor sanders finish Max’s office and surgery on Monday, and I want to be sure they leave it spotless for the new owner—the closing’s a week from Tuesday—and I have a doctor’s appointment this Tuesday—”

“Are you okay?”

“It’s just a routine checkup. She likes to scold me about my LDL and cross-examine me about my wine intake.”

“What
time
Tuesday is your doctor’s?”

“Ten-thirty”

“Why don’t you plan to get here for a late supper on Tuesday night? Why are you laughing?” The old Tildy: quick to sniff out insurrection.

“I can’t drive after dark. I’ve got cataracts.”

“Oh. Well, if you started out at daybreak
Wednesday
morning you could be here before dark. We could still celebrate Halloween together.”

Saturday night, October 27, 2007
Maud’s house, formerly part of the Palm City Animal Hospital
Sunset Avenue, Palm Beach

Maud salsa danced in her socks in the empty upstairs living room by moonlight. Even in the pit of her depression after Max’s death, she had danced, telling herself, “If I am doing this, I’m not dead yet.” But she danced without sound; she couldn’t have stood the songs. The songs would have turned it into a weeping extravaganza. She danced alone, without sound, taking care with the precise steps, to honor the love between Max and herself.

The last incision from Daisy’s toenails had been sanded away yesterday by the machines, but Maud could still summon the resolute
click-click-thump
of Daisy’s final arthritic years. When the dog could no longer climb up to lie beside her on the bed, Maud had dragged the mattress to the floor, where they’d continued to sleep together until the day Daisy snacked on the fatal debris at the beach. That was March, seven months ago. Max had now been gone two and a half years.

Max had been an inspired and passionate dancer. And thanks to Miss Bianca Mendoza back at Mount St. Gabriel’s, Maud had been able to astonish him by sliding right into the tango the first time they danced.

Daisy, as a puppy with a broken hip and then as an aging dog with arthritis, had watched them dance in this room, keeping time with her tail—her contribution to the family ritual. Max had found her lying on oily rags in the lid of a cardboard box on his surgery porch a week before Christmas 1989. He set her hip and carried her upstairs, still woozy from anesthetic. “I bring you an early Christmas present,” he told Maud. They made a bed for her on soft old towels in a laundry basket. She was mostly four big golden feet and terrified brown eyes. “What do you think happened?” Maud asked, already in love. “She could have been kicked or thrown downstairs or hit by a car. Then left on our doorstep by a guilty son of a bitch or a Good Samaritan. Poor little
nerviosita
, we will make it up to her.”

They named her Daisy. As in “I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.”

Max and Maud: twenty-eight and a half years. Max and Maud and Daisy: sixteen years. Maud and Daisy: two years.

I am grateful to have had so much
.

Sunday morning, October 28, 2007

The email from Tildy had been sent at 3:48 this morning, with two attachments.

Dearest Maud, I’m so excited I can’t sleep. Now, don’t you dare back out. Here are MapQuest directions from your house to mine, and a recent picture of me with my oldest granddaughter, Jane. Just so you won’t be shocked when this old ruin opens the door on Halloween. What kind of wine do you drink? Your Tiddly.

Maud phoned Lake Worth Haircutz. She had to look up the number; her last appointment had been before Max’s funeral. The stylist’s gravel voice answered on the first ring. “Lucia, it’s Maud Martinez. Remember me?”

“Maud! I thought you’d moved away.”

“No, I’m still here. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday.”

“I work on Sundays by appointment now. I’ve got this guy coming in for an emergency makeover.”

“That’s what I need. Have you any openings before Wednesday?”

“Tomorrow is terrible, and Tuesdays I’m off. Could you do one o’clock today?”

“Oh, Lucia, thank you. I’ll be there.”

“Good to have you back, love.”

Sunday afternoon

“Well, let’s undo all these clips and pins, Maud, and see what we’ve got here. My God—it’s Rapunzel!”

“A gray-headed Rapunzel, I’m afraid.”

“But human hair’s amazing, no? Who was it?—some movie star’s mother, in the thirties—sent a stylist to the cemetery every month to keep her daughter looking good. How long has it been now since Max passed away?”

“Two years and six months.”

“And hair grows an average of a half inch a month—but I think yours must grow faster, because it’s halfway down your back. Good hair, though. Still got body and shine, even without me. So what were you thinking of doing?”

“On Wednesday, I’m going to get together with someone I haven’t seen since I was fourteen.”

“Wow! It’s none of my business, but is this by any chance an old flame?”

Maud fished the color print from her purse and handed it up to Lucia. “My best friend, Tildy, from grade school. We haven’t seen each other in fifty-five years. When she emailed this to me this morning, I realized how much I’d neglected myself.”

As Lucia scrutinized the picture, Maud, watching her in the mirror, felt pangs from that long ago day when she had proudly handed Tildy’s picture to Anabel Norton on Worth Avenue and Anabel had raised her plucked eyebrows and laughed.
“This
is the superior being called Tildy? Why, Maud, she looks like—Orphan Annie without a neck. She is such a little girl compared to you. … What exactly do you see in her, darling?”

“Your friend takes good care of herself,” said Lucia. “So does the daughter.”

“That’s her
granddaughter
. And in the email I had this morning, Tildy described herself as an old ruin.”

“It’s a
very
clever three-color process. Her stylist must do gazillions of teensy-tiny highlights and lowlights, all mixed in together. But how does she get it to stand up in a crest like that? A brush cut usually collapses past a couple of inches. What was her hair like as a girl?”

“It was tawny and curly. Like Orphan Annie’s.”

“When is it you’re going to see her?”

“I’m driving up Wednesday; she lives just outside Atlanta. And I’d like to look my best.”

“Well, love, you’ve still got the basics. Bones, bones, bones. And those you can’t buy with any number of processes. We used to cut it in that swingy bob just below chin level. Is this going to be a fancy occasion?”

“No, we’re just going to celebrate Halloween together at her house.”

“Aha! I think I’m starting to feel inspired.”

Halloween, Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Six hundred and twenty-six miles, from Maud’s to Tildy’s. But the ideal MapQuest driver must have a steel bladder and a bottomless gas tank and a body younger than hers to make it in nine hours and twenty-nine minutes. It was already close to ten hours when Maud crossed into Georgia, and after the events of her trip she was beginning to feel a little spooky. When she’d left home at dawn in a downpour, the local radio stations were already announcing indoor sites for Halloween activities. Hurricane Noel, a latecomer in the season, was expected to blow out to sea, but not before he ruined the day for costume parades and trick-or-treaters. “You’re going as Morticia, aren’t you?” said the girl waiting on her in a service plaza near Orlando. “And that lavender wig is a great touch.” Stopping at a Burger King for a late lunch in Waycross, Maud was befriended by four seriously costumed adults in the booth across from her. At first she had taken them for two couples; but no, they were all men: proudly they ticked off their identities: a pimp, a French maid, the grim reaper, and Bette Midler. The pimp asked her if she was in costume, adding, “Or do you just normally dress, like, stylish goth?” Maud told them she was on her way to celebrate Halloween with a childhood friend in Georgia and that she’d gotten in the habit of wearing too much black “but the hair is mine, not a wig. My stylist put a lavender rinse on the gray and wove in a few dark attachments. Do you think I can pass for Morticia?” From the way they laughed, Maud knew she had been accepted as a game old girl out to have herself a cool Halloween.

The rain had stopped by the time she crossed into Georgia, and from then on the local stations were saying this was Georgia’s worst drought since 1931. From too much water to too little, in a day’s drive. Eleven hours on the road at age seventy, with lavender hair and attachments, having conversed with more strangers than she’d met in months. No wonder she was feeling spacey.

Left, left, left, right, left. Charlton Terrace, Westersham Place, Denmeade Walk, Bolingbrook Drive, Cherbrooke Lane. Dusk was falling on the parched lawns. Costumed children carrying bags patrolled the sidewalks: Spider-Men, Batgirls, Wonder Women—a glut of Harry Potter robes.

A Muslim woman in red stood in a driveway passing out packages of candy to a circle of children. Maud drove on by, wondering which Muslim sect wore red chadors—or maybe it was a Hindu sect, though it was most likely a mother in costume. Then she saw that she had gone past the house number at the end of her quest. She turned around and headed back. The woman in red was at the curb now, waving her on with both arms and laughing. It wasn’t a chador; it was a religious habit. In red fabric, but with the white headband and the neckcloth and the silver crucifix of the Order of St. Scholastica.

Maud pulled over, shut off the ignition, and stepped out into Tildy-land.

THE FRIENDS HUGGED
. Tildy felt bulkier, yet frailer. Wrinkles fanned out from her eyes and made a little fence along her upper lip, but after fifty-five years, her way of scrutinizing you hadn’t changed.

“You’re skinny!” she accused. “I
hate
you. Is that a wig?”

“No, it was my stylist’s contribution. She got inspired when I said I was going to spend Halloween with an old friend.”

“You are still beautiful, Maud, though a little sad, I think. Tell me what you want first: bathroom, drink, or food.”

“All of the above. In just that order. Should I pull into your driveway?”

“You’re fine just where you are.”

Carrying Maud’s overnight bag (“This doesn’t feel heavy enough. You
are
going to stay a few days, aren’t you?”), Tildy led her through a roomy kitchen with a sewing alcove and up some back stairs, hiking up her skirts like a practiced nun. “This is the shortest way. I’m putting you in my granddaughter Jane’s favorite room. It has privacy and a view of the woods—or what’s left of them. Our twins grew up in another house.”

“You had twins?”

“God, we do have a lot to catch up on! Yes, identical twins, just like Mama and Antonia: one sour, one sweet. Now, you take your time and do what you need to do and I’ll go down and start the wine. White or red? I got your choice of each.”

All Hallows’ Eve 2007
Tildy’s screened porch, off the kitchen
Marietta, Georgia

Before the light has left the sky, they are already tipsy. Maud reclines on a chaise and Tildy, in her nun’s habit, is ensconced in a wicker chair, with her feet up on an ottoman. She is also wearing red shoes. (“The Pope wears them with his outfits, so I figured, Why not?”) There’s a nip in the air, and Tildy has brought out a mohair lap robe and draped it around Maud like a tender straitjacket. On a table within reach of both of them is a half-empty bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc in its marble chiller, cheese straws and olives, and a glass dish filled with the candy corn of their childhood Halloweens.