Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin Page B

for yourself but came down hard on anything that smacked of the impertinent or the slangy.
    Do I or don’t I miss Tildy?
    Standing alone was a little scary—so exposed—but at least you were just yourself, not tethered to somebody whose name always came first in the mouths of others: TildyandMaud. Standing alone was like starting your own club and waiting to see who wanted to join it, rather than having to be grateful for your measly visitor’s pass to someone else’s country club so you could swim beside your friend and be patronized by her.
    Not that it didn’t rankle when Tildy found a replacement so quickly, a brand-new person to boss around—the mousy little orphan “cousin” who would now partake in Tildy’s schemes and owe Tildy gratitude.
    Was I ever that mousy? Was I ever that grateful that she had chosen me to collaborate with her in what she called “making things turn out the way we want”?
    I probably was. Until this past summer in Palm Beach when Anabel Norton raised her plucked eyebrows at me on Worth Avenue and asked, “But what exactly do you see in her, darling?”
    That whole thing with Mrs. Prince back in sixth grade. We weren’t learning anything. Mrs. Prince, who smelled of old-lady talcum powder, had taught Tildy’s mother’s sixth-grade class arithmetic and read the Uncle Remus stories and brought the fudge to them . “Poor Mrs. Prince—her trouble was she wanted to be liked too much,” Tildy’s mother had declared. “That’s always the undoing of anyone.” Tildy’s mother could be devastating when she narrowed in on some person’s shortcomings. She could pronounce death sentences with a corrosive turn of phrase.
    “Let’s try something, Maud,” Tildy had proposed after Mrs. Stratton had pronounced Mrs. Prince’s death sentence. “Let’s see how far we can go by asserting our will over Mrs. Prince and setting an example for the others.”
    It had worked. Within two months, Mrs. Prince was gone. They got a new teacher, hatchet-faced Mother Odom, who taught the upper girls in the academy and said it was never too early to start on algebra. Tildy was giddy with their success. Maud felt a little shaky at first; she felt like a witch: if they could accomplish this, what else might they do?
    “I think you should be class president next year” had been Tildy’s next proposal. “If we start planning now, you’ll be a shoo-in for seventh grade. You’re the smartest person in the class and people respect you.”
    They respect us , Maud had thought; they respect the strange animal called TildyandMaud. Though Tildy’s grades were mediocre and her reading problems a secret shame, she seemed to take it for granted that Maud’s superior abilities were hers to share and would cover them both in glory. And as long as they were harnessed together like a pair of horses, their carriage skimmed swiftly forward, ahead of everyone else’s, borne by Maud’s abilities and Tildy’s fantasies and Tildy’s implacable self-regard.
    In the seventh grade Maud was elected class president. In the eighth grade, likewise.
    But now, for the first time without the benefit of Tildy’s electioneering, Maud found herself class president of the ninth grade, having beat out the other contender, Kay Lee Jones, nine to six by secret ballot. If Kay Lee, the prettiest and sauciest of the transfers, despite the strawberry birthmark on her neck, had voted for herself (and why not? Maud had voted for herself) , that would put all four of the St. Jerome’s transfers—Kay Lee, Lora Jean Cramer, Mikell Lunsford, and Dorothy Yount—in the Kay Lee corner.
    Given the rupture between Tildy and Maud, Tildy and her new best friend, Chloe, could easily be expected to have voted for Kay Lee. Except Maud could perfectly well hear Tildy telling Chloe, “Though Maud and I are no longer best friends, Maud is a known quantity . She takes being president seriously. It’s a job, like with her grades. Whereas Kay Lee