Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  Isobel was almost fourteen when the new school year started. Everyone told her it would be traumatic to change schools, but apart from her two soul-mates, who would come to the Cape often for weekends, it was quite a relief to shake free of the assorted come-and-go Newton friends, and the hangers-on who had nothing better to do than call her up to talk about nothing when she wanted to be left alone.

  At the new junior high school, she was not as far ahead as she had expected. Her class had the same lump of neanderthals, who didn’t count, and didn’t know they didn’t count, and the same percentage of stars and leaders. Isobel had thought she would be more sophisticated than them, and it was a shock to find that some of these people who lived on the wrong side of the Cape Cod canal were ahead of her.

  But she had Tony, and he was eighteen. These girls who took an hour to dress and do their hair before school were fooling around with fourteen- and fifteen-year-old hairless zombies, cratered with acne.

  Tony had a soft line of moustache and a tiny clump of apprentice beard in the cleft of his chin. He was up at the house a lot, working for Isobel’s father. Although they were free and easy with each other in the old way, she no longer thought of him as a childhood friend. Pretty soon, he noticed that. He scolded, ‘Bella, don’t do that. Don’t look like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re – listen, you’re too young, that’s why.’

  ‘I won’t always be,’ Isobel warned.

  Tony had a motor-bike. He took Cheryl and Dana and others out on the back, girls who were dark like him, related, many of them, within the Portuguese community.

  Isobel was not allowed to go on the bike, but she was Tony’s only white girlfriend. Her time would come.

  It had been harder for Cathy to leave the chattering sunshiny crowd of friends who had flocked in and out of the Newton house, and ‘slept over’ in each other’s bedrooms where every wall and door was papered with posters of harmless rock stars whose only groupies were little children. On Cape Cod, Cathy cried every morning at first, before the school bus came, because she was not tough, like Isobel. But she quickly made new chattering, whispering friends, and one of them gave her a black cat with an extra toe on each paw.

  Now that they lived in the country all the time, Arthur was not enough, because he would only stay with Cathy when her father was not about, so she was working on her mother to let her get a dog from the S P C A kennels. She would get it. Both of them could handle Mud pretty well these days, each in their own fashion: Cathy quietly persistent, like drops of water on stone, Isobel threatening to build up to a scene. Mud was busy and often distracted, with getting the house into shape and going to and from Boston to her job at Crisis. Either method worked.

  Lily knew that Paul had hoped she might give up her job after they moved seventy miles south of Boston. He did not talk about it, and since she did not want to leave Crisis, she did not talk about it either.

  Three days a week, she left home early, and struggled to be back by the time Isobel and Cathy came home, if Paul was not going to be there. She was always home in time to cook supper.

  Martha needed Lily, and Lily needed Crisis. She could not pretend to herself or anyone that she wore herself out with the long drive and the traffic and the urgent pressures of the agency out of a sense of duty. She loved the volunteers. Many of them were young students. Lily trained them and backed them up and gave them praise and solved their problems, and delighted in their enthusiasm and laughter and the serious kindness with which they responded to callers, who might be two or three times their age, but often benefited unexpectedly by finding that they could unload their fears and anxieties to someone of a different generation.

  With the clients, she tried not to become as involved as she had with poor Louise, but her style was to go overboard, and she hoped that she could energize depressed and defeated people, and rekindle dying self-esteem by the strength of her own hope.

  Timid Gloria, hanging on to old guilts. Veronica, whose child was killed. Selina and Joe and their grisly marriage. Dennis, the congregational minister with a drinking problem, abandoned by his wife, kicked out by his congregation.

  ‘I must go and see him,’ Lily said, when Dennis had finally agreed to go into an alcoholism unit.

  ‘I know. He needs you.’ Martha sighed. ‘And you need him. You try to show him that he matters to you, and without knowing it, he makes you feel that you matter.’

  ‘Is that so dreadful? Everyone’s got to have some justification for taking up space.’

  ‘Don’t lay your dependency on these people,’ Martha said. ‘It isn’t fair.’

  But sometimes in the street, or on the subway, or in a crowd anywhere, Lily imagined the strangers round her into people who might need her help. What’s wrong with her? Is he all right, with his pale face and loose collar and suit that hangs on him as if he’d lost weight? Why is that boy standing so near the edge of the platform?

  One day towards the end of winter, when Lily went down from the office to the telephone room to clear up some things before she went home, she saw that friend of Ida’s sitting in the waiting-room. He had been seeing Martha off and on for quite some time. He could never seem to get his life straightened out. Martha knew he needed more help than she could give, but there was no way she could get him to see a doctor.

  ‘Hello, Mike.’ Lily went into the waiting-room. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not too hot.’

  ‘Have you come to see Martha? I’m afraid she –’

  ‘Yeah, I know. She said come yesterday, but I got the day wrong. I’ll stick around and see if she comes in.’

  ‘She’s gone for the day. Didn’t they tell you?’

  ‘Yeah, but I thought they were trying to put me off.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that. Did someone give you coffee?’

  ‘Sure. They always give you coffee.’ Mike jerked his head at the untouched mug on the table beside him. He had the same disgruntled air that he had worn at Lily’s house, with Ida and the children.

  ‘Would you like to talk to someone? Elaine’s upstairs, one of the counsellors. I’ll get her to –’

  ‘I’d like to talk to you.’ Often, Mike looked down or sideways when he spoke. When he turned his head to look at you, he gave you a full, flat stare, dark eyes sombre, unblinking. ‘But I suppose you haven’t got the time.’

  ‘Let me get Elaine.’

  When Lily had originally turned down Ida’s request to see this man herself, it was soon after Louise had hanged herself in the hospital. Lily had been feeling useless. She was not going to go sailing into Ida’s friend’s problems as if she were the only one who could help.

  ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ Mike continued to stare at her. The face was boyish and vulnerable, in spite of the battle scar, but the eyes were ageless.

  ‘Of course. You came to my house with Ida. I didn’t mention that when you came here to see Martha because –’

  ‘You knew you didn’t like me.’ Mike was quick to cut you short.

  ‘Don’t play games,’ Lily said. ‘I’d like to talk to you, but actually, I’m on my way out. I’ve got to get some papers over to City Hall.’

  ‘I’m going that way myself.’ Mike stood up. His hair was clean and neatly cut. He wore decent boots and a heavy white sweater and had kept on his padded jacket, although the waiting-room was warm. ‘Were you going to walk?’

  Lily was going to drive, but she did not want to be in her car with him, so she said, ‘Yes, let’s walk across the common, then, and we can talk on the way.’

  A light snow was falling, and the muffled air was warmer. Mike was quite tall. He walked with his head down and his hands in his pockets, talking steadily without looking at Lily, and occasionally stopping on the path, so that she had to stop too, and giving her the brooding stare.

  He had quarrelled with his friend in Hanover, and moved out of his house and given up that driving job, and lost two others. He was living in a
rooming house where the heating system froze or fried you. He had been picked up by the police with some other men after a fight in a bar. He had been selling cocaine. He had a stomach ulcer. His mother wanted him home again, ‘But if I ever go back, it’ll be to kill her.’

  He was angry with her, and with the whole world. He nursed his anger across the whitening common, and showed it off to Lily like a valuable attribute. He told her some of the stupid things he had done lately, and explained them as inevitable, ‘Because I was so mad.’

  ‘Come back and see Martha tomorrow,’ she told Mike when she left him on the snow-swept brick plaza to go up the steps to City Hall.

  ‘What good will that do?’

  ‘You’ve got to find some way to help yourself.’

  ‘Why doesn’t someone do something to help me?’

  When Lily came out again and headed for the subway entrance, he fell into step beside her.

  ‘I thought you were on your way somewhere, Mike.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  He put money into the turnstile for both of them and went with her without talking on to the platform and into the crowded train, where they stood side by side and swayed together as the antediluvian car rocked round the perilous curves. His anger had left him. He was silent and rather meek, smiling nervously if she looked at him, widening his smile when she smiled. If he followed her to the parking lot, he might expect her to take him back to Hanover on her way home. While she was wondering what to do about him, he got off the train at a stop before hers, and turned to wave dejectedly and was gone.

  Walking across the common had made Lily late. This would be the second time this week she was not home for her children. They did not mind, but she thought Paul did, although he never said so. She always left a note somewhere for him to find during the day, and he always put a note into her briefcase for her to find in Boston.

  She rang Paul at the tack shop to make sure he was at home.

  ‘Don’t rush,’ he said. ‘The roads will be bad.’

  ‘It’s not snowing much.’

  ‘I said, don’t rush.’

  ‘I heard you. Thanks. I’ll be back by six. Take some frying chicken out of the freezer.’

  The main road was crowded with homing cars and buses throwing up slushy snow against each other’s windshields.

  Nearer to the canal, the snow became rain. Lily was late. She speeded up, worrying, and had a near miss, pulling out to pass a car when another was already passing her. The other car’s horn shocked her like a pistol shot. Farther on, she passed him too, to serve him right.

  She was driving too fast for the wet road, taking chances, in that idiotic delirium when you risk your neck to get somewhere on time, too strung up to admit any sobering thought like, ‘What’s the good of getting there dead?’

  The state trooper came up behind her and flashed his blue light for her to stop. He took a long time getting out of his car and a longer time going back to it with her licence, and writing up Lily’s warning notice.

  ‘Next time, it’ll be a ticket.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ Lily was too effusive. They didn’t like that.

  ‘Keep that thing down,’ he said impassively. He had not looked at her.

  He was chubby and pink. Not naturally a stern man. Did his family ask him to make this face sometimes, for a joke?

  He followed Lily for a while, and then, in her rear mirror, she saw him turn across the grass in the middle of the highway and go back the other way. Lily speeded up again.

  She was over an hour late. She left the car outside the garage and ran breathlessly into the house. Paul kissed her and held her tightly.

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry I’m so late. And it was my turn to feed the horses and muck out, wasn’t it?’

  ‘We and Daddy did it.’

  Isobel was frying chicken. Paul and Cathy were cutting vegetables minutely for Chinese stir-fry. When Lily went to help them, they sent her away.

  She went up to the bedroom and called the centre to tell them, ‘If someone named Mike calls in the night …’

  She did not tell Paul about the state trooper.

  Best thing that’s happened to me in a bad world, Mike thought. She might be able to help me, that Lily. She understands, a bit. Not all of it. No one can. But she’s honest and when she smiles, there’s hope for the world.

  Martha’s tough. She’s not really like a woman, and I can’t fool her any more than any of these other tough dames like Connie, or Ogre Momma, or Ida or Shirley. I can’t fool Lily, either, but would I need to?

  She’s kind, he said to himself, sitting in a bar. She likes me.

  ‘Have a drink.’ He went over to a woman sitting on her own with a beer and a pack of cigarettes, getting through the smokes faster than the beer.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she said, and added, ‘Kid,’ as if she knew his fears.

  Paul had a lot of good news to tell Lily. He started, but she interrupted with, ‘I saw that friend of Ida’s today. The taxi driver – do you remember?’

  ‘A surly fellow. I saw Pyge Tucker today. She’s building a new barn at her house here and going to bring two horses down, for the local shows. She’s getting all the stable equipment through me, and she’s got me orders for at least half a dozen Tack Racks from friends here, and given me a whole lot more names for the mailing list. I’m going to get some dressage saddles for her to try too. She says she’ll never buy anything more from Turnbull’s.’

  ‘Sucks to them,’ Lily said. ‘You’re a wild success. Listen, Ida’s poor friend is in a mess. I can’t tell you about it, because it’s confidential. I shouldn’t even tell you I saw him, but I know you’re safe.’

  She could never resist bringing back to Paul her excitements and her problems. Some were fascinating. Some bored him. Now that he was plunged up to the neck in his own business, he often wanted equal time to tell her about the tack shop, but a rise in the wholesale price of New Zealand rugs and orders from new customers for Tack Rack ‘seconds’, which Turnbull’s had agreed to let him distribute, were pale stuff compared to Lily’s visit to the Charles Street gaol, or her confrontation with a battered client’s husband, who pushed in front of her face a fist that wore a gold ring, out of which sprang a tiny curved knife.

  Paul’s first expansion had been printing and mailing hundreds of brochures, designed by a young woman whom Terry had known at the art college. Lily had resented Jeanette’s frequent visits to the shop, because she was petite and freshly beautiful, and took herself too seriously and said things like, ‘I’m not comfortable with the impulse image, quote, unquote,’ waggling two fingers of each hand in the air. ‘Do you know what I’m saying?’

  Lily did not like the look of her forties coming up, which made Paul smile, since he was looking at fifty. Lily wanted to feel young. That was one of the reasons why she was so absorbed by the student volunteers. Some days she went to work in blue jeans and one of Paul’s shirts worn outside. Four-letter Americanisms had crept into her English vocabulary. Paul had to stop her saying, ‘Shit, man’ in front of the children. They heard enough of that at school.

  Fooling around with Harry probably also made her feel young, Paul thought. When the stables were finished, Harry had helped Paul to find a wonderful bay horse for himself, half thoroughbred, half quarter horse, and a fine safe but lively brown horse for Lily, and a larger pony for Isobel, who wavered between loving horses more than people, and not riding for days, because losing interest in it was a sign of growing up.

  Harry had continued with Lily’s training, so that she could now do almost everything with her springy, compact brown horse.

  The two of them were very thick.

  ‘Harry may be just a good friend to you,’ Paul said once, ‘but what does he imagine you are to him? You come on pretty strong.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Lily said airily. Caught, she was bluffing it out – Paul knew her so well. ‘I’ve got to keep my hand in.’

  ‘At what?’

&n
bsp; ‘Men.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh – I don’t know. To prove something to myself? No, that’s awful, darling. I’m sorry. Hate me.’

  ‘I am consumed with love for you.’

  ‘And I for you.’

  They were. They told and showed each other this often, in many ways.

  In May, Harry brought down one of his horses in a trailer. He wanted to take it over to ride at Sandy Neck, the long beach between Sandwich and Barnstable on the north coast of Cape Cod.

  ‘What do you say, Lil? Do you want to bring John along and ride with me?’

  ‘I’d love to. But I don’t know that I –’ Lily looked at Harry and not at Paul. Her face was alive, eyes eager, that lovely mobile mouth open, chin forward, as if to grab at the treat.

  ‘You go ahead,’ Paul said. ‘You’ve always wanted to ride on that beach.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind? I was going to start typing up addresses for you from that new list you brought.’

  ‘That can wait. You go, love.’

  ‘All right then, Harry.’

  Harry looked past her at Paul. Paul looked at Harry. The look held years of friendship.

  ‘No, Lil,’ Harry said, as if he were years older than her. ‘You go with Paul.’ Lily reddened and closed her mouth up tight and looked down, as if she had been chided. ‘Paul can drive my truck and I’ll mind the store and watch out for the girls.’

  ‘But you came –’

  ‘I’ll take Dorado over there on Sunday. You two have fun.’

  It was a glorious day. Not a soft spring watercolour day, like May in England, but crisp and vivid, with intense new green, and clouds furling and tumbling high up in a piercingly blue sky. Paul parked the truck and trailer in the sand at the landward side of the low dunes, and they backed the horses out and saddled them, and set off along the sand track that wound along the edge of the great salt marsh.

  The bay horse Robin stepped out strongly, neck flexed at just the right angle behind the leaf curve of his ears, black mane sailing out toward the marsh when the sea wind came through gaps in the dunes. Half-way to the end of the Sandy Neck promontory, they passed a cluster of little shacks, facing the marsh, their backs silted up by dune sand. They were all still boarded up, except one which was hung about with coloured floats. The door and shutters were open, and a man and a woman were inside with buckets and brooms, cleaning.