Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  ‘Feel okay, Ma?’

  When the pain came again, she did not tell him. Stomach gas, maybe, or hunger cramps. She had eaten almost nothing since she got up. She swallowed air and made herself burp.

  ‘Pardon me,’ she said to Bernie.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  Where? The cramps again. She would have to pull off the highway and get them all something to eat.

  But you don’t go through two births and not know labour pains when they hit you. Regular. Must be about twenty minutes since the last one. God, she’d have to start timing them properly. She was going to have to go somewhere and have this goddamned, poor little, God-forsaken, father-forsaken, fighting baby that was in command now, in control of its useless mother.

  The road on both sides was empty. Ida made a U-turn through a gap in the middle where it said ‘Police and Highway Vehicles Only’, and headed south again.

  ‘Where are we going, Ma?’

  ‘You’ll see. We’ll be okay.’

  ‘Kin we stop and get something to eat?’

  Ida shook her head. Got to keep going now.

  ‘Where are you?’ Ida’s voice had not been urgent, but Lily’s was. ‘Where are you, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Somewhere near you, I don’t know. Newton, Newton Centre, Newton Highlands, what’s the difference? I asked at a gas station and he says this is Newton Centre.’

  ‘What gas station? Where?’

  ‘Near a big garden place.’

  ‘Centre Street?’

  ‘There’s no names. I’m at a kind of shopping centre.’

  ‘What stores?’

  ‘Dry cleaners, liquors, paint store, nothing much.’

  ‘I think I know. Hang on. I’ll call an ambulance.’

  ‘No, don’t. I’m all right. But the kids are with me.’

  ‘Stay there. Don’t move, Ida. I’m coming. I’ll be there in five minutes.’

  It was fifteen minutes by the time Lily had explained to Paul, and taken pans off the stove and got Cathy out of the bath. Red lights went to war against her, one by one, changing just as she sped up to the crossing. She went through the last one, and passed a van by the skin of her teeth, as it was pulling out to go round a parked car.

  The phone booth was in a far corner of the parking lot, outside the closed liquor store. Lily could see the heads of Bernie and Maggie hanging out of the windows of a big black car like a hearse. Ida was in the booth, talking to the maternity unit.

  ‘Twelve minutes.’ When Lily opened the glass door, Ida put out a hand to squeeze her arm. ‘Twelve minutes now.’ The hospital said something. ‘I don’t know … well, you’re the boss.’

  ‘Hi, Lil.’

  ‘Hi, Eye.’

  They looked at each other deadpan for a moment, like travellers meeting in the middle of a desert.

  ‘“Plenty of time,” she says.’ Ida was huge, her general fat camouflaged by the specific bulk her short body could hardly carry.

  ‘Not plenty of time. You should be in there now. Come on.’ Lily opened the door of her car, but Ida went towards the hearse.

  ‘I’m not going to leave my car. You know where the hospital is? We’ll follow you.’

  As Ida got into her car, her children got out and climbed in with Lily.

  ‘We’re hungry,’ Bernie said. Maggie was grizzling.

  ‘Haven’t you had anything to eat?’

  ‘Not all day,’ he said, not pitifully, but as a statement of fact.

  ‘Let’s stop and pick up doughnuts somewhere on the way,’ Lily called to Ida.

  ‘I saw a place.’

  Instead of stopping at a grocery, Ida led Lily at speed in the opposite direction from the hospital, and swung into the crowded parking lot of a McDonald’s.

  ‘Want a hamburger and fries, kids?’

  ‘Ida – no.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s okay. I’m not scared now. This one’s going to be a breeze, I know it.’

  Whatever had happened, whatever she was doing here, there was a sort of unholy contentment on Ida’s face under the funny cropped hair that made her look younger.

  In McDonald’s, Ida and the children ordered a full meal from the very young girl in the baseball cap, who shoved it over the counter without looking at them. They ate slowly, squeezing envelopes of ketchup and bright-green liquid pickles on to everything, while Lily fretted over her coffee and tried to remember details of her brief student visit to Obstetrics, where the male students, stark white or green, were only allowed to watch from the doorway. Having a baby yourself was totally different from someone else having one.

  ‘Let’s hurry,’ she kept urging, but Maggie was messing the food with her fingers and staring without drinking over the rim of the violent-coloured milkshake.

  Ida ate a cheeseburger with a side order of french fries, and belched, without apologizing or putting her hand over her mouth. That much, at least, America had done for her.

  ‘You okay, Ma?’

  Ida groaned, and rolled her eyes at Bernie.

  ‘How long?’ Lily asked sternly.

  Ida looked at the man’s watch, clumsy on her narrow wrist. ‘Five minutes.’

  ‘Ida – please – let’s go.’

  ‘Maggie ain’t done yet.’

  ‘She can take it in the car.’ If Lily had to deliver the baby oh the floor of McDonald’s, would the girl behind the counter look at them then?

  At last, she got Ida going. A side trip to the ladies’ room, more groans – ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘In the toilet at McDonald’s’ – and then Bernie was in the back of Lily’s car, Maggie beside her with the greasy food in a napkin, and she sped for the hospital. Ida drove so slowly that Lily kept losing her and having to wait.

  ‘Maybe she’s having it in the car,’ Bernie said.

  At the hospital, they all went up to Maternity, where Ida was told she might not deliver for another three hours – so much for the toilet at McDonald’s. Lily would not leave her, but the children could not be in the waiting-room, so the three of them were put into the chaplain’s office outside the Maternity unit.

  Lily read Maggie bits from the Book of Common Prayer and drew pictures on the chaplain’s note-pad, and took her to the ladies’ room twice, because of the giant milkshake. Bernie took himself off on a tour of the hospital, with the purpose of going up and down in every elevator and stopping at every floor.

  Maggie was greasily asleep on Lily’s lap when a nurse came to tell her that Ida had a son. So much for three hours.

  ‘Another boy, gee, that’s good.’ Bernie grinned. ‘So it won’t be just me and two women.’

  ‘Have you –’ Lily had not heard from Ida what was going on. ‘Has your mother left your father, do you think?’

  ‘Guess so. He hit her with a chair.’

  ‘A chair?’

  ‘Just the leg.’

  Lily was allowed to see Ida before she went home. The children could come back to the hospital tomorrow.

  ‘I told you,’ Ida winked. ‘It was a breeze. I don’t know why I was scared. I could have had six more since Maggie.’

  She looked drained, wrung out, heavy-eyed, the short fringe wet on her forehead, and so purely lovable that Lily went on her knees by the bed and laid her face against Ida’s and cried a little into the pillow.

  Did I look like that? I thought I must look like hell after Isobel and Cathy, but did I look miraculous like that? Was that why Paul couldn’t speak?

  ‘I’d better call Buddy,’ Lily said into the pillow.

  Ida moved her head sideways.

  ‘He’ll have to be told.’

  ‘It’s not his kid.’

  Lily raised her head, and saw Ida fall asleep. A nurse came in. ‘Mrs Legge’s boy says the little girl has wet her pants.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  Six

  Four years ago, after Ida’s baby was born, that dumb kid Maggie had made the stain on the carpet in Isobel’s room, and no
power on earth had ever been able to get it out.

  A small rug now covered the place where Maggie, crawling across the floor with Arthur in one of her dog games, had stopped, looked up at Isobel and then flung her big head forward to pitch its contents on to Isobel’s blue carpet which she had chosen herself that year, when her room was done over for her birthday.

  To open her bottom drawer to get the bag she needed now, four years later, for the plane trip to England, Isobel had to turn back the rug, and there it was, a ragged crab shape, turning the bright blue to pale brown, reminding her, as always, of Maggie.

  ‘How did she manage to do that?’ Isobel had asked at the time, when it was clear that carpet foam and scrubbing were not going to remove the stain.

  ‘That’s for her to know and you to guess.’ Her mother sat back on her heels and quoted one of Granny’s sayings. ‘Must have been some kind of acid in her stomach.’

  But normal people’s throw-up didn’t do that much damage. That nutty kid always had to be different, throwing up, or anything else. She wandered off and had to be whistled for, as if she were a dog, but she didn’t know how to treat animals. She hurled herself on their dog Arthur and mauled him around as if he were a stuffed toy. If he hadn’t been so gutless, he would have bitten off her face, and got blamed for it. The dope even came to Maggie when she called him, although she could not pronounce his name any better than ‘Arth’. Daddy made that into a joke. Arthur’s double bark when he was on the wrong side of a door, which he usually was: ‘Arth! Arth!’

  Maggie would have hurled herself on the baby, if her mother had left him within reach. If little Fred was on a counter, in the basket (Cathy’s basket, it had been), Maggie would stand on tiptoe, trembling, her hands going everywhere, like butterflies; her pink glasses slipped crooked, bottom lip wet with dribble from wanting to pick up the baby.

  He was only a few days old, and red as raw meat, with a tuft of red hair. Maggie was eight, but she wasn’t allowed to hold him on her own, in case she suddenly lost interest and dropped him.

  Although Isobel was two years younger, she was allowed to hold Fred and help with his bath and diapers and bottles. It had been exciting at first, but it soon got to be a drag, with three of them and the baby crowded into the house, and Mum flat out all day, and telling Isobel, ‘Not now,’ and, ‘I haven’t got time.’

  It had been neat having the TV on so much, because they all turned it on whether they were going to watch or not, which drove Daddy crazy. So did the bubble-gum. Bernie and Maggie chewed it all the time, blowing it out as big as their faces and cracking it back like a pistol shot. When they ate, they stuck it under the table. Ida would always give Isobel a stick of gum if Mum wasn’t looking, but all the same, it was a relief when they all suddenly disappeared without a trace, taking with them the infant car-seat that had been Isobel’s and then Cathy’s.

  Four years later, Isobel shut the bottom drawer, made a vomiting face at the stain on the carpet and turned the rug back over it. Downstairs, she played ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano with Terry. She took the base, because she liked thumping better than tinkling.

  Terry was staying the night, and coming to England with them tomorrow. He was at college, but he hadn’t gone grand and grown up. You had to leave him alone if he was in a bad mood; but he did funny things, like riding a bicycle backwards and leaving notes on parked cars, and he was teaching Isobel to draw horses facing right as well as left, and how to see monsters in clouds.

  ‘My brother,’ Isobel would tell everybody in England. Ida’s departure had been a relief to Paul too. If she had not taken off, with some of the baby things that Lily was saving, ‘in case’, he felt that he would have exploded, spattered over the walls and ceiling.

  He was proud of Lily for rescuing Ida and her children and managing so cheerfully to fit them all into the Newton house; but after a few days, he had to grit his teeth to be that kind, tolerant Paul that everybody thought he was by nature, backing Lily up in all her warm-hearted spontaneous enterprises. The play group, the Golden Age picnic, the Fresh Air Kid, who had wanted to go back to the Bronx, the puppet show in the children’s ward, the fruits of impulsive energy which didn’t always ripen, but with which he went along, trying to keep the peace, and playing the piano where necessary.

  Ida, who was as big as if she were still waiting to give birth, not recovering from it, had been given Cathy’s room; but she spread the baby all over the house, even in the garden, since she insisted on drying its clothes on the line instead of in the dryer, and the trash cans overflowed with disposable diapers, and flies. She talked all the time, like a woman who has, been cast away on a desert island, but she did not talk about that boor she had married, so nobody knew what her plans were, nor why she had been in labour in the phone booth outside Derry’s Liquors.

  She had stayed almost two weeks, but it seemed like months. The house was too small. The table was too small when they all ate together. The girls’ bathroom was polluted.

  Bernie slept on the sofa, and Paul fell over his model cars when he went through the darkened room to make his morning coffee. He was glad to go to work. He had always looked forward eagerly to coming home. Now he sometimes found himself dreading it.

  Lily was exhausted. Isobel was snapping bubble-gum and reverting to tantrums to get attention. Cathy wanted to go back into diapers. Every time Paul got Lily alone for a moment, he asked, ‘When are they going to go?’

  ‘Ssh, I don’t know. Thanks for being so nice about it.’ That was how he always got trapped into being nice. ‘Ida’s not that strong yet Paul, and I think she’s pretty desperate. I don’t think she has anywhere to go.’

  Desperate or not, Lily and Ida had some chummy times together. They talked and purred over the baby, and sometimes giggled about nothing, as they had in Iceland when he first knew them. Since Ida was manless, temporarily or permanently, Lily seemed a little less married.

  After years of wearing her front hair fastened back, Lily had let Ida cut it in bangs, like her own. Her hair was now three sides of a square frame around her face. The bangs looked cute on her, although she agonized as soon as it was done. ‘Disaster! It makes my face too broad. Where’s my noble forehead? The back of my head’s too flat.’

  She cast away the collection of clips and combs that used to hold her thick swatch of brown hair, and Isobel took them all and fastened up bits of her strong curling hair in odd ways. Cathy fought for them, but they fell out of her fine hair.

  Maggie took all the clips and combs out of Isobel’s drawer and buried them in the garden, in the place where Arthur buried his bones.

  ‘Do something, Daddy! Mummy, beat her up!’ Isobel was scarlet, with brimming eyes and jutted bottom teeth. ‘I wish she was dead.’

  ‘Hush, Bella. Be nice.’ Paul often found himself repeating things his mother had told him.

  With Isobel lying on her stomach, beating the floor, Paul picked the wrong moment to tell Lily that they were invited for drinks and supper by the Jensens in Dover, who dated from his days with Barbara, and had remained friends.

  ‘How can I? I can’t leave the girls with Ida. She’s got enough on her hands with the baby, and Mrs Dunn would never stand for the chaos here. You know what she’s like.’

  ‘Get someone else.’

  ‘I can never get any of the teenagers at the last minute. Besides …’

  ‘You don’t want to go.’

  The Jensens got along better with Lily than they had with Barbara, but Lily was still slightly insecure about Paul’s past life She preferred the friends they had made together.

  ‘Dammit, Lily.’ Isobel stopped pounding her fists and looked up. Paul and Lily went out on to the porch. ‘Do something for me for once, will you?’

  ‘That’s not fair. I do all the time.’

  ‘Not this last week.’

  ‘Don’t be vile. It doesn’t suit, you, darling. You’re always so good-tempered about everything.’

  ‘I have to be. I lik
e to feel calm and easy. Getting mad embroils you.’

  ‘That’s a cop-out.’ Lily was trying to work up to a fight. They never fought. ‘You’re insulating yourself from the world out there.’

  ‘I see more of the world than you do. You don’t know what Turnbull’s is like these days. The boss says, “Do it your way, Paul,” and then breathes down my neck. Young Dennis says, “Great idea!” and then runs to Mr T. and gripes behind my back. Suppliers let me down. Customers want this, want that, want everything except to pay. I want to scream and shout and pull a whip off the rack and start laying about me, but I swallow a lot of oxygen and stay pretty calm, and everyone says, “Why do you stay so calm?’”

  ‘Why do you?’

  ‘Because it’s the easy way out. Purely selfish. My father taught me long ago when I used to scream and yell, that controlling it is easier than letting it rip. He was right. So are we going to the Jensens’, for God’s sake, or does that bloody woman come first in our lives?’

  ‘Don’t shout. Why can’t you stay calm about Ida?’

  ‘That’s it, I can’t. Maybe I’m getting old.’

  ‘Quiet.’ She would never let him be ten years older than her.

  ‘Aren’t I allowed to be crabby at forty? She talks too much, and you’d think she had seven babies, the way it takes over the whole house. I don’t trust her either, for some reason.’

  ‘She’s going to steal the spoons?’

  ‘It’s just a feeling. I think she exploits you.’

  ‘She’s my friend. I’d do anything for her.’ Lily’s noble look didn’t come off so well now, with the bangs over her forehead.

  ‘Would she for you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t leave the girls with her.’

  ‘Because it’s too much. Why are you so suspicious?’

  ‘Because I’m fed up. I want our nice cosy life back. We’re going to the Cape in a couple of weeks. What if they’re still here?’

  ‘We could take them …’

  ‘Then I’ll stay here.’