Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Remember those high heels I was going to cut a dash in, and I couldn’t get them on when the plane landed?’ Ida brought Lily back to the far-away adventure, which they never tired of remembering, because it carried their lost youth. Or was it because their lives were so different now, that it was the only shared topic? ‘And now here we are in Hojo’s, with a couple of kids each and my figure gone, even if yours is still more or less okay.’

  ‘Just a couple of mums.’ It was ice-cream time, and Lily was wiping sticky fingers with a wet paper napkin. ‘You seem so good at it, but I don’t think I am. I scream sometimes, don’t I girls?’

  ‘And hit,’ Isobel said.

  ‘You rat, I don’t, not hard anyway, and only when you ask for it.’ Lily came up red in the face from bending down to find a spoon on the floor. ‘Paul’s so patient with them, but then he doesn’t have them all day. Here we are, those giddy girls from Iceland. Remember Wally following you about with a paper cup of Scotch? Here we are, talking about our children like every other mother you meet.’

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Ida said obligingly, although one of her reasons for marrying Buddy, aside from needing to escape, had been to have her own children and be like everybody else. ‘You and your career. You were going to become this great social-worker person.’

  ‘I still want to. I’m going to try to start working part time, when the girls go to school.’

  ‘I want to go to school now,’ Isobel said, folding her mouth in her determined way.

  ‘Won’ li’ it.’ Maggie shook her head exaggeratedly, making her thick, wiry Legge hair fly out.

  ‘I will too. I know all about it,’ said Isobel, who went to playschool twice a week.

  ‘Will nah.’

  ‘Will so.’

  ‘Wi’nah. Hit her, Bern.’

  ‘Cool it, Mags, or I’ll take you outside.’ Bernie was the best person to deal with Maggie when she got agitated.

  ‘No no no I wanna don’t wanna Mumma Mumma no no no,’ from Cathy.

  ‘I love all this,’ Lily said, ignoring it, with her chin on her strong hand and her eyes focused inwards on herself. ‘I thought it was all I’d ever want, with Paul, but I really do want to get back to work some day and do something that matters. I mean, make a small dent in the world. Don’t you, Ida? Do you think about that?’

  ‘Not much.’

  When Lily got into her blessed saviour bit, Ida felt like an ant person left behind on earth by someone who soars away in a balloon. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’

  Right now, when she finally got back to 1009 Pershing, after getting a flat tyre outside Billerica and changing the wheel with Bernie’s help and limping home on the leaky spare, she had Buddy to cope with.

  He was on the swing shift in the warehouses, four to twelve, but he didn’t come home till long after midnight, reasonably sober, but very jumpy and active in a rubbery sort of way that meant no more sleep for Ida.

  She got up, to stop him waking Bernie, and came down in the fancy pink robe he had bought for her birthday. Depending on the jewellery and horse-racing situation, Buddy either had money in his pocket or he didn’t. When he was flush, he would woo Ida with unpractical luxuries, and buy expansively for the children – overpriced dolls that Maggie broke or lost, a ten-speed bike that Bernie was not ready for.

  Ida made him something to eat, and sat with him while he grumbled about the Air Force, and the Tech Sergeant he was going to kill, and the late movie on the television, which he always snapped on as soon as he came into the house, and his digestive system, which he was sure had cancer somewhere in it.

  He was terrified of cancer and terrified of death. Where did he get that from? Nobody in his immediate family had had cancer, and Verna, from whom he had absorbed a lot of his whacky ideas, did not think about dying, because she was not going to do the world that favour.

  ‘It’s got me worried, Ay-eye-da.’ He burped on the last chunk of boloney sandwich. He had grown a moustache like a small blackthorn hedge this year, to match his eyebrows. When he ate or talked or did both together, it went up and down. ‘There’s something there, I know there is. Like it was some kind of obstruction, so I can’t get anything down.’

  ‘Except three square meals a day, and snacks in between.’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, doll. I’m a sick man.’

  When he looked at her with his eyes turned up like that, and his rubbery body deflated, he was her pitiful child, which he loved to be, and Ida could not help melting into tenderness, as she did when Bernie or Maggie were sick. She left her puzzle book and sat on the couch by his chair and reached forward to take his hand and stroke it.

  ‘Open it up,’ he said. He was not her pitiful child any more. His brow came down and the round ball of his chin went out and the jumpy energy tightened his body. ‘Open up the robe.’ His moustache was wet at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘No.’ Ida pulled it closer over the astoundingly large breasts, which she would have liked when she was young, but were too heavy now, and drooping.

  ‘Open the goddam robe.’ He lunged at her and tore it open to get his hands inside.

  ‘Don’t, Buddy, that hurts.’

  ‘That’s what you like.’

  She had never been able to rid him of that myth. Had Verna told him that too, about women? Is that what she required of poor old Shaker Legge?

  When Buddy kissed her, she turned her head away, because she hated the feel and smell of the moustache. He sat on her lap and put an arm behind her head to hold her mouth hard against his, scrubbing the moustache around, so that when she finally pulled away, she felt as if she had been dragged face down along a dirt road.

  ‘Good, huh? I grew it for you, babe. I know what women like.’

  Poor fellow, he had only had a couple of women before Ida, except possibly his mother, which Ida wouldn’t put past either of them. She didn’t think he’d had anyone else since, because when he came home late, he was usually too pissed to function, although he talked as if he were the stud of all time.

  ‘Get up the stairs.’ He made his soft brown eyes go glinty, which he thought was lecherous. When she pushed him off her lap and stood up, he pulled the robe off her shoulders and tore the neck of her nightgown.

  ‘No, Buddy, I told you. I’ve got my period.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  It wasn’t this time. That was probably why she had felt stupid and out of touch with Lily and her rapt ideals.

  ‘Goddam lie.’

  ‘Want me to prove it?’

  ‘You’re disgusting.’ Buddy hated anything that happened below the waist, except sex. He had never changed a baby’s diaper in his life.

  ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

  He grabbed her. ‘If it’s no, you stay here. We’ll put on some records, live it up. Open a bottle of wine, kid.’

  ‘Oh, God. Okay, then, come on.’

  Ida turned off the television, took his hand, and led him like a child, giggling and poking at her, up the stairs. He dropped his fatigues on the floor and got heavily into bed.

  ‘No tricks now, or I’ll kill you, you stupid fat woman.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’ Ida went to the bathroom and took out her Tampax.

  What Buddy thought was good sex was falling on you like a gibbering baboon and hurting you as much as was possible with a quick in-and-out method which was all he could ever manage. Women at the base talked about foreplay and female orgasm, and Cora and Duane Ellis kept a book by the bed, and tried things. But if Ida ever attempted to educate Airman Second Class Bernard Legge, he took it as a criticism, and became angrier and rougher.

  Afterwards he rolled over and gave her his fat little bottom. Sometimes Ida still thought back to the narrow cold bedroom in Staple Street, and her father’s trembling hands. The worst thing about him had been that occasionally she had almost liked it, at the same time as she hated it. Which was worse, George with his prayers and complicated rituals, or
Buddy with his childishly brutal onslaughts?

  ‘If my boyfriend Jackson hadn’t got sent down all those years ago in Stafford,’ Ida said aloud, to annoy Buddy, who was falling asleep, ‘my life would have been different.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Buddy kicked a foot backwards. ‘Worse.’

  Coming back from the bathroom, Ida picked up Buddy’s clothes from the floor. She checked the pockets and put his money in the mug on the bureau. At the bottom of the pants pocket she found a brooch in a tightly folded envelope, and took it to the window to look at it in the light of the street lamp.

  Beautiful. The Elite Jewelry Company made some pretty gaudy stuff, hard to sell at the price they wanted, but this was a gorgeous gold pin with two hearts entwined, and what looked like diamonds, but must be zircons, set round the edges.

  ‘I’m going to Margie’s coffee,’ she told Buddy next day. ‘I’ll take along the good-looking gold brooch as well as the earrings and charm bracelets. There’s always women there looking for something special they want their husbands to buy for them.’

  ‘What brewch?’

  ‘It was in your pocket.’

  ‘You silly cow, I told you to leave my things alone.’

  ‘And let them go through the washer and drier? Oh, fine, fine. I’ll know next time.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the drawer with the rest of the Elite stuff.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Buddy ran up the stairs in his socks, with Maggie after him like a puppy. She had not gone to school today. When she cried and put two fingers in her mouth, upside down with the elbow stuck out, Ida usually let her miss the bus. What difference did it make? Ida could teach her as much at home.

  During the week, a few more pieces appeared which Ida was not to show, because they were for special buyers. Cora and Duane came round to fetch a couple of rings with large blue stones.

  ‘They look almost like sapphires.’ Ida put on one of the rings. It was too big for her. Her fingers had remained small and fine. She twirled it around under the lamp to sparkle for Maggie, who had a nice eye for things of good taste. ‘Marvellous what they can do.’

  ‘Sure is.’ Cora took the ring off Ida with her long curved nails that were coloured like jewels themselves. ‘It’s a new line. Keep it under your hat. They’re not to be marketed until the price is right.’

  ‘Are they stolen, then?’ Ida asked for a joke.

  ‘What kind of talk is that?’ Cora looked at her sharply. ‘In front of the kid.’

  ‘That dummy don’t know if it’s Christmas or Easter,’ Buddy said.

  Unless you spoke directly to her, Maggie did not listen, like Bernie did, to what grown-ups were saying, or look at them; but why did he let her down to other people? He liked to cuddle Maggie when he was in a good mood, or roll with her on the floor until she giggled and shrieked from the tickling. On the road, he would sometimes repeat names of towns and makes of cars to her, as if he were trying to teach a parrot, so why couldn’t he be loyal? Instead of trying to impress Duane and winking at Cora, who was supposed to be Ida’s friend anyway.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ Cora said. ‘Better than living with a genius like our Harvey.’

  Cora and Duane, who was a flashy dresser, always had everything the best: kids, cars, stereo. Duane had one stripe on Buddy now.

  Ida took Maggie to the kitchen to work on her reading book. If the others knew something she didn’t know, she didn’t want to know it anyway. She gave Maggie a piece of candy.

  ‘Make the best of it, eh, Mags?’

  That was how she had coped with this marriage, in this country. Millions of GI brides had given up and gone home. Ida had done well, making the best of it.

  The next thing Buddy brought back from the bar was a small brown dog with a Ho Chi Minh beard, and a white patch over one eye.

  ‘This guy gave it me to pay off a debt.’ Buddy brought it in on a short piece of rope, and it gave Ida a short, squeaky bark and went under the table.

  ‘You’ve gone soft,’ Ida said.

  ‘Give the kids a treat.’

  The bark had woken Bernie. He hurtled down the stairs, and then up again to wake Maggie. Stupefied with sleep, and half blind without her glasses, she lay under the table, her arm over the watchful dog, her mouth curved up in a clownish slice-of-melon smile.

  The dog’s name was Abraham. ‘A-ham.’ Too difficult for Maggie, so Bernie shortened it to Adam.

  ‘First man in the world, first dog at Ten-oh-nine Pershing.’

  He adored the dog. He was the one who fed him, and ran out with him as soon as he came home from school, but Adam, an apologetic, insecure mutt, forever looking in corners and under furniture for something that wasn’t there, attached himself to Maggie. He slept on her bed and padded about after her on longhaired feet that were too big, as if he were wearing someone else’s socks. She pulled at his hair and his wispy beard, and tied scarves over his frayed ears, and patted him as if she were beating a carpet, but he stuck by her.

  Maggie had always been given to wandering off. When she was little, Ida sometimes tied her to a small tree with a long piece of clothes line around her waist. One of the neighbours complained.

  ‘She’s to be shut indoors away from the sun, then?’ Ida squared up to the neighbour. She was not afraid of any of these women, including a couple of English wives from Surrey, who fancied they would not have spoken to Ida, back in England.

  ‘Put up a fence around your backyard.’

  ‘My husband’s going to.’

  They had priced the lengths of fencing and the posts, and he was going to borrow Franklin’s pick-up to fetch it; but he never did.

  Now when Maggie wandered off on one of her dreamy walks, along the paths among the pines and scrub oaks, or across the backs of the houses toward the baseball park, from which she sometimes had to be brought back by Ida or Bernie, the dog went with her. Just about the time when Ida began to worry, she would hear the high single bark, which sounded like ‘Yuck!’ Adam would be scratching anxiously at the back door, his lamb’s tail, which he never wagged, between his legs, and Maggie sitting on the bottom step with her back to the house, as if she were starting out rather than coming home.

  Buddy had been scared, when he brought the dog from the bar, that Ida would be angry with him and throw it out. He was pleased to find himself a success. He had done something for the kids. He was a good father. He and Ida told anecdotes about Adam at the Enlisted Men’s Club. For a while there, they were kind of a happy family. It was cute to see Bernie out back with his friends and their dogs, throwing sticks for them, and taking them off into the woods to look for squirrels.

  Ida showed Maggie how to write the dog’s name, ADAM, and told her some bits of natural history: how dogs were once wild, like wolves, and how they lived by their noses. When Adam went smelling from tree to tree and checked the fire hydrants and the wheels of parked cars to find out which other dogs had been around, ‘He’s reading the paper,’ Ida told Maggie, ‘to see what the local news is.’

  Buddy either screamed ferociously at Adam or worked him up to excitement, or fed him chocolate, the way he did with the powerful unruly dogs at Leggeland. Bernie had a special tender face for Adam, his bright eyes softened with love. When his father forgot to give him his allowance and then gave him too much, he put some of it away for his old age, and bought dog biscuits with the rest, instead of candy.

  Ida made up stories about the brown dog, which had become the central focus of the family, pulling them together.

  ‘Adam used to be a queen’s lap-dog; he wore a jewelled collar. Adam was a spy in his former life. That’s why he grew a beard and patched out one eye. When it snowed in Moscow, he wore a fur coat and ski boots, four of them.’

  ‘You’re crazy, Ah-eye-da.’ Buddy enjoyed it too.

  ‘He had an electric tail warmer, he says. Once it shorted. That’s why he only has half a tail.’

  ‘Adam says’ was a way to get Maggie’s attention. ‘Adam say
s to go back upstairs and make yourself decent. You brush his hair, he says, so why can’t you brush yours?’

  Maybe Lily was right. Maybe Ida might go back to some kind of work one day. She could be a teacher.

  Adam still searched uneasily in empty corners, and spent a lot of time poking about in the cellar, as if he had buried bones there.

  One Saturday morning, he suddenly rushed through the kitchen, slipping on Ida’s waxed floor, and sat by the door with his head on one side, white patch up, one ear cocked, one dangling.

  ‘Adda!’ Maggie shouted at him.

  ‘He wants to go out. Let him out, honey.’

  Maggie opened the door and went out with the dog.

  Half an hour later, they had not come back. Almost an hour. No frenzied scratching at the door, as if wild beasts were after him. Ida went outside and called the dog, and whistled her special whistle for Maggie, the first three notes of ‘There was I, Waiting at the Church’.

  ‘Don’t pee your pants,’ Buddy said. ‘She’ll turn up, she always does.’

  ‘Adam will bring her home,’ Bernie said.

  ‘She went out without her jacket.’

  ‘So what, it’s warm, and she’s got her sweater on, ain’t she?’

  ‘She’ll be tired.’

  ‘Nah.’ Buddy was doing his push-ups on the living-room floor, with Bernie beside him, thin arms collapsing. ‘She’s like me.’

  Maggie was solid and rubbery. Bernie was slight, like Ida had been, and light on his feet as she still was, as if her extra bulk was air.

  Buddy let himself down and lay prone. Bernie jumped on his back. ‘Let’s you and I go fish in the pond.’

  ‘I’m too busy.’

  ‘Puppa. I wanna go fishing, Puppa.’ The infantile whine was obnoxious at ten years old, but it still worked with his father. They went off to buy worms at the bait shop.

  Ida walked along to the baseball field, where some fathers were chucking balls for sons to catch in the enormous leather mitts which still made Ida smile, although she was so Americanized. When she used to go with Jackson to the county ground, naked hands were all that grabbed the hurtling cricket ball out of the air.