Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  When Ida stopped, he said, ‘messed his pants!’ to make her laugh again. The three of them ran to the gate, whooping and swerving in circles. To look at them, you’d have thought they were all drunk.

  Ida got Maggie to go to sleep before she left for the church. Bernie was going to play cards with his grandmother. Clara did not go to the services with George any more.

  ‘Afraid she might enjoy herself.’ He made one of his rare jokes.

  The small group of people on uncomfortable chairs in Winifred’s mother’s upstairs-room did not enjoy themselves a lot. It was completion contemplation night. After two or three people had told about successful healing, George Lott gave a brief rambling harangue. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and held up his hand like a traffic cop. They all closed their eyes. Jackson was imprinted on the inside of the lids. Damn him. She could even smell him. Would she never be free of him? She wouldn’t meet him. She never wanted to see him again. If he came to her house, she would set her mother on him. He’d be at the pub, she knew that, so sure that she would come running when he snapped his fingers.

  She would have liked to break the silence of the group. Her spirit moved her to say, ‘Give me strength.’ She took a deep breath, and just as she began, ‘My spirit – asks –’, George Lott snapped open his eyes and struck his hands together.

  Mrs Rees and her daughter brought tea upstairs, with ginger-nuts. Everyone spoke to Ida, and said they were glad to see her back. They were decent people, George was the only dotty one, but Ida wanted to be gone and safe at home away from the Lamb and Flag, away from the chance of Jackson lurking in the street.

  But when a small quarrel broke out among the faithful about whose turn it was to wash up and tidy, Ida heard herself say, ‘I’ll be glad to do it. You go on home, Pa. Give me the key and I’ll lock up.’

  ‘Good girl.’ He put on his pouchy tweed cap. ‘Use plenty of washing-up liquid.’ He had a mania about germs. ‘So shalt thou too be cleansed of all impurities.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Ida risked, and the others enjoyed the laugh, now that they did not have to feel holy. George even laughed too. He honestly seemed to have lost sight of everything that had once happened in Ida’s room under the roof, and with it, all guilt or blame.

  A fearful excitement walked with Ida along the pavement and down Chester Street to the corner pub. She had escaped from Jackson once. What kind of fool was this who pushed open the frosted glass door, settled beside him on the stool at the bar and put her hand round the glass of shandy he had already ordered for her?

  He was morose. She talked about the service, prattling on a bit to try and get him going. When she told him how she had sent her father home and tidied up the church house, he asked, ‘You got the key?’

  Ida put her hand into the pocket of her coat and showed him the key on her palm. He grabbed it before she could close her hand.

  ‘Come on.’ He got off the stool, and stared round belligerently at the few quiet drinkers. He turned up his collar, and Ida followed him out.

  Winifred’s mother called out to them as they went quietly into the house.

  ‘Just some people from the church, dear.’ Ida opened the door of her room. The old lady was settled for the night in a high bed with a lot of pillows and the radio reading her a story. She asked for a hot drink.

  Jackson fussed and fumed while Ida heated the milk and took it in. ‘Cup of tea?’ she asked him hopefully because the automatic way she had followed him here was leading her toward panic.

  He swore at her. They went upstairs. Behind the front-room with the uncomfortable chairs, there was a bedroom for Winifred’s sister when she came from Weymouth. Ida lit the gas fire. The boiling radiators in Pershing Street had spoiled her for taking off her clothes in the cold.

  ‘God, but you’re fat,’Jackson said. ‘Christ, look at all this, and this. You used to be a little skinny handful with nothing on you. I’ve got to get used to you like this. My God, you’re so fat.’

  ‘If that’s how you feel –’ Ida was going to say, ‘Forget it,’ and put on her clothes and march out and leave him to rape Winifred’s mother. But by then it had started, and it all came back to her, what she had run away from, the old fear and fascination, the glory of the man.

  ‘We were always meant for each other.’ That soft, hot voice that ate through her defences to the core of her being and destroyed her into all body and no soul. ‘There was always only you and me.’

  Ida stayed in England longer than she had meant to. Shirley fetched her allowance from the Air Force and sent it over twice, but then there was no more.

  At last, a letter came from Sis. ‘Buddy is up here. With the war winding down, thank God, they’re sending the men home. You’d better come back, Ida. He’s in rough shape.’

  Wounded? Gone off his rocker? Ida could hardly care. The whole focus of her existence was how often she could pretend to be going round to Linda’s, after the children were in bed, and then sneak the church key off the hook on the back of the larder door and meet Jackson at the house.

  Days when they could not be together, because of church meetings, or because of Diane, or Clara, or Ida’s children, did not count. Buddy did not count. Her softened feelings toward him had disappeared into no feelings. That’s it, she had told herself when he had shot the dog, and when he had hit Bernie. She had not known then quite what she meant. Now she did.

  Sis wrote again. Buddy had been charged with receiving stolen goods. He was remanded on bail for a civilian trial, and living on the base. That was why Ida had no more housing allowance. A note from Buddy was inside Sis’s letter, folded very small, since he was suspicious even of his own sister, who was helping him.

  ‘When are you coming back? I need you. Their trying to frame me here after all I went through in the Nam war.’ He had only been gone a few months, and never got farther than Australia.

  Ida wrote that she and the children would not come back until he sent her some money. He sent a dollar draft. She changed it into pounds and gave it to her mother, so that she could stay longer.

  When Ida discovered she was pregnant, she was thrown into confusion. At first, she wanted to run straight to the clinic where they had helped her before.

  You killed my baby. Twice? Could she do that to Jackson? The next time they were to meet, she did not go, because she did not know what to say. She bought a kit and gave herself another test. No doubt. No doubt at all. At the church service again, she wanted to let out a biblical cry: ‘God forgive me, I’m with child!’ But George was there, and the others were so kind to each other, so peaceful tonight under the empty phrases that her lunatic father wafted over their heads like a drift of smoke from something burning in the kitchen. For the first time, she envied them. Maybe it was all delusion, but still, they had something she had not got.

  ‘Pray,’ George Lott intoned. ‘Look into yourselves for the answers.’

  Ida looked. She tried to see beyond the fear and confusion, to break out of the trap and find her way back to the commonsense that had helped her to survive this far. It all came to her. This baby was not her enemy. It was her friend.

  Diane had had the good sense to have her tubes tied. Thank you, Diane. If Jackson wanted a baby, he would set Ida up in a place of her own, and leave Diane. They were not married. He liked Bernie, and if he had been willing to father Ricky, he would take on Maggie also, for the sake of living with his own child and his own Ida that he dwelt with in magic and obsession in the upstairs back room at Winifred’s mother’s house.

  Dreaming, hoping, her voice airy-light so as not to threaten him, Ida said to Jackson quite simply, ‘I’m going to have your baby.’

  They were at the corner table in the Lamb and Flag, where they met so that they could arrive at the house together. Ida had her cropped head on one side and her chin down, smiling up at him.

  Jackson had been watching the dart board. He kept his eyes there for a long moment before he took them away, very sl
owly, and looked down at her. His face was not pleased, not surprised, not angry, not sad. It was nothing, the mouth without expression, the eyes like dead fish.

  ‘Get out of my life,’ was all he said.

  Ida got up and went out. As her new English shoes echoed along the pavement in this deserted part of town, she was bleakly conscious of the tiny foetus, flourishing within her like a parasite, a relentless invader.

  Buddy had rented a house off base, a glorified shack that would never take them through the winter. It was a mean place, right on the main road, where Maggie could not go out on her own, and the furnace died if you turned the thermostat over sixty.

  A place to fight in.

  ‘Shut up!’ Ida yelled at Buddy. ‘The kids aren’t asleep yet, and they can hear everything in this shoe box.’

  ‘So what? They may as well know what’s going on, since they’re part of the problem. If we didn’t have them, we might get by.’

  ‘Shut your rotten mouth, you bastard.’ Ida lowered her voice and hissed at him. ‘If you think two kids is a problem, you don’t know nothing. I’m having another baby.’

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘Yours, of course.’

  ‘Like hell. I’ve been gone too long.’

  ‘I’m four months gone.’ She had calculated back to the night before he left for Viet Nam. Nearer the birth, she would tell him the baby was going to be late.

  ‘Bitch.’ He came toward her. He had lost weight while he was abroad, and being brought back to face the jewellery charges had given him a flabbier, shiftier look. After Ida came back, he had shaved off his moustache, to pay her back for cutting her hair.

  ‘Watch it, Buddy. If you touch me, I’m sending Bernie next door to call the police. All you’d need, under the circumstances.’

  He stood in front of her with his legs apart and his fists clenched, frustrated, his eyes, those soft brown eyes that had never grown up, looking from side to side in the cramped room.

  ‘Whose is it?’ he repeated stupidly.

  ‘The night before you left – remember?’

  ‘God damn. I was wearin’ a rubber.’

  ‘They can be torn.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ But he did. He was so dumb, he was easier to fool than a child.

  ‘You going to have another baby, Ma?’ Bernie asked, next day, not curiously, but in a conversational tone.

  ‘I reckon. Do you mind?’

  ‘Okay by me. There won’t be room for it in this dog kennel, though. Pop, kin we have another dog? A guy at school’s got a litter of –’

  ‘Gut that out.’

  One of the hard things about being back with Buddy was that he had lost interest in Bernie. He no longer alternately spoiled and bullied the boy. He ignored him. Bernie tried everything in his repertoire to try to get his father back. It was pitiful.

  Before the end of January, they all had colds or flu, and Ida’s doctor said they must move to a warmer house. Buddy was frantic about having to pay more rent, with his future an unknown precipice. The longer his case was delayed, the worse it looked, and the legal officer on the base warned him that even if the court let him off with a fine, he was headed almost certainly for a dishonourable discharge.

  Ida got the rest of the stuff out of storage. Since Buddy was still working at the base and being paid, she was able to buy herself a car, another clunking old gas-eater, the only kind she could afford.

  She had arranged to meet Lily, but then she called it off, because Buddy had hit her in the face, and Lily was too sharp to believe Ida had run into the edge of a door.

  When the baby was born, things would be better. This one was a drag on Ida from start to finish. Her legs and back were killing her a lot of the time, and her fear that the birth would be as long and difficult as Maggie’s weakened her strength and made her impatient with the children, and not able to keep Buddy on an even keel, as she had always managed to do.

  She told the doctor that she wanted a Caesarean.

  ‘Nonsense. You’ll sail through it.’ He did not know any of her history. Air Force doctors came and went all the time. They didn’t care. Some of them had been in Viet Nam and were not yet fit for regular posting, and airmen’s wives knocking out babies was not their idea of a thrilling career.

  ‘If it’s like the last one, it’ll kill me, and maybe the baby as well.’

  ‘You’re hallucinating. You’re in perfect shape. Small pelvic girdle, sure, but it looks like it’s going to be a small baby.’

  In which case, would Buddy still believe it was late?

  The court case was now set for August. Through spring and early summer, Buddy went noticeably downhill. He would not see his lawyer: ‘What’s he pesterin’ me for? Bump up the fees, is all.’ He would not see his mother, or any of his family, although they were all ready to stand by him, and would swear to a man that evidence against him was false, if anyone asked them. He would not see any of his old friends, including Cora and Duane, which was just as well.

  He had some new sleazy drinking buddies, one of whom was a tart named Allie, whom he might or might not be sleeping with. Ida didn’t care.

  Maggie was part of a programme to put handicapped children into normal classes with their own age group, which had made her more withdrawn. She said and did nothing in class, and got beaten up in the playground by a girl smaller and younger than herself, and lost a permanent front tooth. The dentist would only put in a temporary bridge until her mouth grew. Maggie quickly found out how to take the front tooth out, and wore it mostly in her pocket.

  Bernie went into the jungle of junior high, and lost some of his sweetness and trust in order to survive.

  ‘Better days are coming,’ Ida told him, as she had promised him at every bad stage in his eleven years, because it was a belief that had kept her going through her thirty-three. ‘Nowhere to go but up. After the baby is born, you and I will have fun together.’

  Buddy still knocked Ida about if she did not get out of the way, or sometimes she hit him first. Somehow they stuck it out together. Buddy could not approach the precipice of his trial alone, and Ida had nowhere else to go. Maybe his lawyer would get him off in the end, in spite of himself. Ida still indulged in her optimistic dreams, all evidence to the contrary.

  She was huge and slow-moving, with varicose veins that forced her to keep her legs up, when Buddy started to ask, ‘Whose baby?’ again.

  ‘You know it’s yours. If you can believe you had it in you.’

  ‘Watch your mouth.’ He knocked her feet off the chair and sat down. ‘I can give you babies any time I want, but this time, I sure as hell didn’t want, so come clean, you bitch.’

  ‘Gimme a break. I’m not going through all that again.’

  He lifted a foot as if he were going to kick at her sore legs.

  When she refused to argue, it infuriated him almost as much as if she had told him the truth. So one morning at breakfast, she did tell him, crazy with the need to stop him nagging and tormenting.

  The kids were there. That was the worst of it. Buddy pulled the kitchen chair out from underneath him, smashed it against the wall, and with Bernie hanging on to his shirt, his arm, his leg, anywhere he could try to get a slipping handhold, Buddy slammed one of the chair legs into Ida’s stomach.

  She went down. Buddy hurled the chair leg through the glass half of the door and went out after it.

  ‘Oh, Ma.’ Bernie and Maggie were on the floor with Ida, stroking her, mooing and whimpering. Maggie was white with mauve lips, gibbering with fright. Bernie was half out of his mind.

  She had to get herself together. She sat up and leaned against the refrigerator with her legs stuck out beyond the huge mound of her stomach. The pain subsided. The baby kicked out sideways. It was all right. When Ida got her breath back, she stood up, with Bernie’s help, and ran a hand through the hair she had kept short herself, raggedly, with Judy’s style long gone.

  ‘What’ll I do?’ Bernie was in anguish. ‘Th
e school bus will be at the corner in a few minutes.’

  ‘Let it.’ Ida felt like a giant. She commanded the universe. ‘You’re not going to school, neither one of you. Now listen. You go on up with Maggie and pack whatever you can get into those suitcases under my bed. Not just summer clothes, take your warm things, and find your boots. I can get my stuff into garbage bags. What I can’t, the hell with it.’

  Her saucepans, her favourite kitchen utensils, her ornaments, her picture of two children in sun hats walking hand in hand through an English meadow, the cushion cover she had been working on since her legs were so bad: she walked out on them all. She took her photograph album, and when she was ravaging through a drawer, she found the dead and dried carnation from her wedding, folded in the napkin with silver bells, where it had been ever since, and dropped it in the black plastic bag to remind her of her girlish folly.

  They packed as much as they could into the old black car, which sagged on the back axle even with nothing in it, and tied Bernie’s bike on the roof, because it would have dragged in the road if they had tied it on the back.

  ‘Goin’ Englin’,’ Maggie said comfortably.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Bernie told her, sharply for him, perched on the edge of the front seat, his worried face almost against the shield. ‘We can’t drive to England.’

  ‘To Englin’,’ Maggie said.

  ‘It’s all right, chick, we’re going to Aunt Sis.’

  But half an hour into the journey, Ida pulled into a rest area for a think, the baby pushing bits of itself against the steering wheel. Sis would take them in, but she lived too near Verna. The trouble would be colossal. It wouldn’t be fair on Sis and Jeff.

  ‘We’ll find somewhere for tonight, a motel or something.’

  She drove on, and ignored the start of a new inner disturbance, and then the first ominous pain.

  ‘What’s the matter, Ma?’

  ‘I don’t feel so good.’

  Shirley had gone away, and she couldn’t go back to any of the other women she had known at Watkins. Got to keep going. Where to? Where could she go?