Tilda's Promise

by Jean P. Moore

  Copyright © 2018 by Jean P. Moore

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published September 25, 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-477-6

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-478-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938310

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Sienna, Maddie, and Lilly

  “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone.”

  —Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

  “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

  Chapter One

  HER MUTILATED WORLD

  Your membership will expire soon. This was the opening sentence of Tilda’s first email of the day, and she hit delete before going any further. Of course her membership to the museum would expire, along with her driver’s license in six months, her gym membership, and her subscription to The New York Times, among many other things. The milk in the refrigerator had been expired for days. Everything expires.

  This gloominess was not customary for Tilda, but it was becoming more common, now that the funeral was four months behind her. The last of her friends’ casseroles in the freezer had finally been discarded, and the phone was not ringing as frequently with words of comfort, concern, or just plain awkwardness. It was odd how some people couldn’t come out and say they were so sorry that Harold died. Much more frequent were “so sorry for your loss,” “so sorry you lost Harold,” or, Tilda’s personal favorite for irksomeness, “so sorry Harold passed,” like a kidney stone. When did forms of to pass become so popular? It used to be people said passed away at least, like “so sorry Harold passed away.” She’d noticed that even newspapers preferred pass in their headlines: “Robin Williams passes,” Tilda had read recently in the local paper. Passes what? She found this more than annoying, like so much of life. A simple, declarative sentence would do. But unless you’ve been through it, she thought, unless you’ve lived with the raw truth, it was much easier to soft-pedal death, to make it something vague and distant, but it wasn’t, not in the least.

  Just recently, Tilda had read a Huffington Post article called “10 Good Ways to Talk about Grief.” Right up there was “Tell the grieving, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’” This struck her as inane. The most impressive item, she remembered, was “Don’t say anything, just listen.” What the grieving need mostly, Tilda knew now, is to be left alone to find their own way out of sorrow. At least that was how Tilda saw it.

  “You’re depressed, Mom,” her daughter Laura had said to her just this morning. “I wish you’d let me make an appointment with Dr. Willis for you.”

  “Of course I’m depressed. It’s how people are when their mates die, when they’ve been together for over forty years. You don’t take drugs for it. You live with it.” Tilda had been repeating some variation of this response for weeks. At least Laura allowed that her mother could be depressed for a few months, but even she, dealing with the loss of her own father, felt her mother should be getting on with things now. After four months, she was supposed to be getting hold of herself.

  “What about you, Laura? Are you taking something? Or don’t you miss him?” She had meant this earnestly but realized, after the words had been spoken, that it had sounded cruel, accusatory. There was a pause. Then Laura said, “I’ll be over in a little while. Maybe we can go get a late breakfast. Would you like that, Mom?”

  So like Laura. She’d nag and drive her mother a little nuts, but she was a good-hearted, sweet kid. Sweet kid pushing forty.

  When, years ago, Harold had asked Tilda if she wanted to break up the party and get married, Tilda had laughed and said yes. They both knew it was time to take on adult responsibility, like marriage. They’d met at a bar, straight out of college. Tilda was there with two of her college friends who, like her, were subbing at a private school on the East Side. Harold was putting back a few for old time’s sake with some fraternity chums.

  Tilda had her eye on Harold from the start. He wasn’t particularly good looking, not in any classic sense, but he moved easily, making him appear both approachable and confident. Nothing too studied, that was the first thing she noticed. His white shirt was loosely tucked into his chinos; his belt sat easily and low on his hips. He wore expensive loafers, she could tell, but they were just scuffed enough to indicate he didn’t consider them a fashion statement. He seemed comfortable, with an appealing smile. Tilda watched him repeatedly push an errant strand of his brown hair away from his eyes. His features, Tilda thought, were just off enough to keep him from being handsome, his nose a little too crooked, his lips a little thin. She liked that he would be only a few inches taller than she was in her heels, and that he wasn’t too thin. Just right, she thought.

  He looked her way, too, but more at the three of them standing at her table, not just at her. Then he turned back to his friends and said something. She could tell he was getting up the courage to come over, so she wasn’t surprised when he picked up his beer and headed toward them.

  “Here he comes,” she said to Lynn and Bev, her friends. “What did I tell you?”

  “Hi, ladies,” he said, putting his beer down on the bar table. The girls looked down at his bottle and then at him. Harold quickly picked it up, sensing he had been too intrusive.

  “Hello,” said Tilda in a flirty but sarcastic tone, dragging out the o.

  Maybe it was then that he actually noticed her, got it that she was trying to salvage his awkward approach. “What’s your story?” she said, looking directly into his eyes.

  “My story, hmm. Well, see those two guys over there? Really nice guys, I might add. We thought maybe you three ladies wouldn’t mind having a drink with us.”

  Straightforward, certainly not too clever, thought Tilda, but she was in, if she could have Harold.

  After a few awkward moments and more unremarkable exchanges, the six of them did end up having a few drinks. No one went home with anyone, but phone numbers were exchanged. Tilda wrote her number on Harold’s cuff at his insistence.

  They started dating after that, but not exclusively. That had taken a few years. During their more serious time together, Harold went on for his master’s in accounting at City College, and Tilda took a fifth year getting her teaching certificate in English. She was offered a job at the Upper East Side private school where she had subbed. The day Harold landed a job with a big firm downtown, they celebrated with dinner at Sardi’s. Harold flashed two tickets to Hair, which had just moved to Broadway—a very hot show, he assured her.

  Their adult day jobs left them hungry for playtime on their off-hours. They went dancing, to dinner and the movies, and to Broadway shows, and they took weekend trips before settling into the daily routine of w
ork each Monday morning. Some weekends they joined protests and marched. They were passionate about civil rights and sympathetic with anti-war protesters, but they loved having fun together more than anything. And they had fallen deeply in love. “My green-eyed beauty,” he called her. “My eyes are hazel,” she said in return, deadpan, but enjoying the thought that her eyes were, to him, maybe, a mysterious, exotic green. “And I’m no beauty.” Here she firmly believed her position. But she was cute; she’d accept cute. A gymnast in high school, she hadn’t changed much after college, still standing at five foot five, weighing 120 now, five pounds over her college weight, hair still short and sandy blonde. She wouldn’t win any beauty contests, but she never fretted about her looks.

  They had a smallish wedding under the chuppah in his mother’s backyard in Queens, married by a renegade rabbi. They called him that since he had agreed to do the honors even though Tilda wasn’t converting. The Jewish wedding had been more for Harold’s mother since Harold thought of himself as a cultural Jew, not a religious one. And Tilda had given up on Catholicism several years after her confirmation, finding it remote and out of touch with the reality of her life. (Was it really a sin to have impure thoughts? Was thinking about sex really so bad?) She had been agnostic ever since. So having an untraditional Jewish wedding seemed to please everyone, including Harold’s mother. Harold smashed the glass, and a catered dinner was served under a tent. Harold and Tilda’s friends were there, the same ones who had been at the bar that evening six years earlier, in fact. They toasted the couple and said it was about time.

  The newlyweds rented a small apartment on the Upper West Side, worked, and, while they still liked to have a good time, they began to settle down. It took them a few years before they decided to start a family, but it wasn’t that easy. Low sperm count, they were told. Then, a few years later, Laura was born. Harold wanted more, a son, another daughter, it didn’t matter, but by then Tilda was already thirty and wanted to go back to teaching as soon as the new semester started. They could try again, she said, but later. In the meantime, everyone was tickled with Laura, the cutest baby ever. Everyone said so, not just Tilda and Harold.

  Gladys, Harold’s mother, was more than happy to care for the baby, taking the train every day, like a nanny. The arrangement lasted for ten years, until Gladys got sick, but by then it was too late anyway. The years, it seemed, had a way of piling on. In spite of trying, there were to be no more pregnancies. Laura was destined to be an only child.

  The doorbell rang. “Hello. Anybody home?” Laura’s voice rang out, cheerful but a little tenuous.

  Laura and her family—her husband, Mark, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Tilly, Tilda’s namesake—lived in Longview, Connecticut, one town farther north on the I-95 corridor. Tilda and Harold had left the city in the early ’80s so Laura could grow up on a tree-lined street, ride her bike, and walk to school. It seemed a dream at the time, but New York was on the verge of a resurgence, and Harold and Tilda sold their place on the West Side easily and bought easily, too, in Water Haven, a small town north of the city on the Long Island Sound, a mere fifty minutes from Midtown on the Metro North.

  “I’m in here,” Tilda answered, not getting up from her desk, where she had been re-reading a poem she used to teach, wondering if there would be some comfort in it now. Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. Not comfort so much as a feeling of closeness to Harold—the words provided that, she had to admit.

  Laura wandered back to the third bedroom, her mother’s office ever since she’d retired from Water Haven High five years earlier.

  “There’s no light in here, Mom. Do you want to ruin your eyesight even more?” she said, flicking on the overhead light.

  Tilda shielded her eyes. “Oh, don’t do that,” she said, putting down the lid of her laptop. “I’m done. Just turn out the light.”

  “Where would you like to go? I’m up for an omelet. You?”

  Tilda got up and pushed her chair under the desk. “You pick,” she said, grabbing her bag and following Laura out.

  Best to leave the organizing to Laura. Having her say was important, a need for control, Tilda always thought. She wasn’t sure where this had come from. Neither she nor Harold had ever been particularly controlling, she thought. They knew when to go with the flow, to use an expression from their younger days.

  From early childhood, Laura liked to be in charge, to make the decisions, and, as an adult, she was very competent, always called on to head committees and to organize school fund-raising projects. The enigma, though, was that Laura, beneath her together exterior, was very sensitive. Anything sad she heard on the news involving humans or animals could and often did reduce her to tears. Problems in the lives of her friends, and certainly within her own family, would leave her weeping until Mark stepped in to reassure her that all would be well, even when it was clear it would not.

  So it was surprising that she was holding back so much regarding Harold’s death. Surely Laura too was feeling the pain, but she seemed to be putting all her energy into hovering over her mother, and Tilda, more weary than annoyed, wanted her to back off.

  Tilda’s need for relief from her daughter’s intensity probably summed up the friction . . . no, not the right word . . . the tension that existed sometimes between them. Tilda often wanted to be left alone when Laura wanted to take charge. Even when Laura was growing up, Tilda would often yield. If Laura wanted to back out of gymnastics for editing the school newspaper, she would do it, rarely consulting her mother and father, until the forms had to be signed. Then Tilda would sign, no arguments, and that was that. When it was time for college, Laura gave up a four-year scholarship to UConn to go to a local community college. Why? She and Mark were dating. Marriage was imminent, Laura announced. This had caused some conflict in the family, but in the end, Tilda and Harold reluctantly agreed. After two years at the college, Laura became a dental hygienist. Shortly thereafter, Mark proposed. A year later, they were married. Laura continued to work for a time—until she got pregnant. She had not worked a day since. Was it just Tilda’s imagination, or had Laura turned her back on so much of what her mother and her generation had worked to achieve?

  Tilda tried not to take it personally, Laura’s giving up on gymnastics—which had been Tilda’s strength—and then Laura’s eschewing college to get married and become a mother. Tilda had pursued teaching and worked while Laura was growing up. Time passed, and there were no brothers or sisters. Laura, on the other hand, gave up on furthering her education and on a career to get married and to rear a single child, a child to be doted on. Laura seemed to be completely focused on Tilly, leaving no inclination for a larger family. From Tilda’s vantage point, for all Laura’s competence, she seemed to be overwhelmed with the tasks of motherhood. And no wonder. She fretted over most things Tilly-related. She wondered whether the food she prepared and served was healthy enough. What was better—organic or locally grown? She checked in daily with Tilly to be sure she was up-to-date on all her assignments. She worried that Tilly’s AP classes kept her too isolated from a more diverse circle of friends. And she practically ran background checks on the friends Tilly did have. Laura spent hours organizing carpools to soccer and swimming. Then, mercifully, when Tilly settled on dance, they both enjoyed a little breathing room in their hectic schedule.

  It was no wonder, then, that motherhood left Laura either stressed or exhausted—sometimes both.

  Mystified, Tilda tried to make sense of the contradictions: a competent take-charge daughter, a natural leader (it seemed at first), who opted for home and family instead of, say, the boardroom. Tilda, a child of the ’60s, thought her daughter might take up the mantle, be whatever she wanted, president, even. And she had done whatever she wanted. She had decided to be a stay-at-home mom. Tilda tried not to judge, but it seemed to her that the women’s movement had produced a generation of supermoms, rather than freeing them from the
single role in life that had limited so many generations of women before them.

  It had all worked out in the end, though, she said to ease her mind. Laura and Mark and Tilly were a close-knit and loving family. Tilly was flourishing, a fourteen-year-old excellent student, excelling in dance. Tilda couldn’t be disappointed if this were the result.

  The night that Harold died in bed beside her was, ironically, the first night in months that Tilda had been able to fall into a deep sleep. She had been having trouble ever since she learned that their pharmacist’s fifty-year-old daughter had died in her sleep, choking on her own blood after oral surgery. Then an old teacher friend she had known for years died in her sleep after knee-replacement surgery proved so painful that she had become hooked on pain meds. And she had liked her martinis in the evenings, but the combination had proved to be too much. Despite the reasons attached to these deaths, Tilda had decided sleeping could be dangerous.

  Every night she’d wake up at three, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. This went on until the night Harold died. Tilda had read her book until becoming drowsy, which was her routine. Before turning out the light, she looked over to see the rise and fall of Harold’s chest accompanied by a light snore. She turned out the light, pulled up the covers, and fell into a deep sleep, not waking until seven, squinting and catching a glimpse of light just beginning to show through the open spaces in the night shades. She had made it through the night.

  Tilda told Laura later that she knew immediately something was wrong. It was too quiet. Then she realized it was Harold. He wasn’t breathing.

  Laura and Tilda had gone over this many times, Laura trying to fathom why her mother hadn’t called immediately. Tilda, too, in retrospect, wondered why she had been so removed. She didn’t cry or scream, or if she had, if she had shaken Harold and implored him to wake up, if she had cried hysterically, it was someone else who had done those things. She herself had gone someplace far away, to a place where there was no Harold, to someplace where she knew she was without him and that she would be from then on, but she didn’t know where that place was. She was moving, pulling on a sweater, calling the ambulance, she must have, but she wasn’t there, not in the bedroom with Harold lying near her, not breathing. After all, Harold wasn’t sick. He was healthy. He was supposed to be waking up, getting coffee, reading the paper—for years to come. He was supposed to be with Tilda for their morning routine, always. And beyond that, he was supposed to be there for Tilly’s milestones, her graduations, for all the triumphs surely waiting for her—all those things in the future—he was to be there, not here, lying so still.