Dear Doctor Lily (19 page)

‘It's all right,' Nora said. ‘I'm here. There now.'

When he climbed into her twin bed (she had used the excuse of his imaginary bad back to sell their soft old double, genesis of Lily and Blanche), she took him to her in a motherly fashion. ‘There now, lovey.'

‘It's awful that I never see you,' Lily said to Ida on the phone. ‘I've had you on my mind.'

‘Too bad there's nothing better on it.'

Lily sounded guilty, poor old Lil, with her incurable passion for taking people on and doing right by them.

‘I need to see you, Eye,' she said, but did she really, with her successful husband and her two children and her house in Newton and probably a lot of new friends? She doesn't need me, Ida thought, without bitterness, just as a statement of fact.

Although Ida could drive now and had a bashed-in grey Chevrolet with rust-chewed flanks and a low seat from which she could hardly see over the wheel, she would not go to Newton. She did not want Lily to come up to Watkins, with Buddy the way he could be, so they met at a Howard Johnson's restaurant on the highway.

Lily's two little girls were beautiful. The four-year-old was dark and intense, staring with shiny round eyes and not saying much, while the younger child was fair and fairylike and never stopped chattering nonsense.

Lily said Ida's children were beautiful too. She could not get over what a saint Bernie still was at ten years old.

‘Paul's son was so mixed up and difficult at that age. I thought he came round to our side that first summer on the Cape, but his mother's still so possessive and difficult. She tells him, “Your father abandoned us.” I try to straighten things out, but I can't say, “Your mother was the one who was sleeping around.” And he's so unpredictable. One minute he's calling to say he wants to come to us, but then Barbara won't let him. The next, she's agreed to him staying with us, and he'll be all over the girls, playing with them and being very responsible, and then start shouting because we can't go to the movies since there's no baby-sitter, and calling his mother to come and fetch him home.'

‘Well, he's fifteen.' Ida did not want any more of Lily agonizing over her stepson. ‘When Bernie's a teenager, he'll probably be just as bad.'

‘I don't see why, Ma,' Bernie said, eating salad. What kid his age chose salad in a restaurant?

‘You can't go on being perfect for ever.'

He worried Ida sometimes, he really did. He ought to be a mess, seeing the way Buddy was with him, either yelling at him or indulging him, or coming home pig drunk and smashing things. Last time, he had hauled Bernie out of bed to come downstairs and listen to him raving, and when he threw up on the new couch-cover, Bernie, pale and skimpy in his shrunk pyjamas, had cleaned it up.

Lily was careful also to praise Maggie, and not to notice that she made gaping faces and did not finish words. At seven, she had grown pretty homely, with thick-lensed glasses in the passionate pink frames she loved, and a short pug nose like Verna Legge's side of the family. This bad luck made Ida love her more.

‘She's just a bit slow, is all.'

Maggie never minded what she heard said about her.

Ida saw Lily take a breath before she risked asking, ‘How does she get on at school?'

‘Bit slow.' Ida put some pieces of hamburger bun back on Maggie's plate and mopped at the spilled juice. ‘But it's a rotten school, on the base. Everyone knows that. If she can't read too good, that's the teacher's fault, not hers.'

‘You don't think she should be tested?'

Four-year-old Isobel stared with those eyes like wet damsons. Maggie paid no attention.

‘There's a place in Boston,' Lily began, smiling with her head on one side to cover her nosiness.

‘Shut up,' Ida said. ‘You leave us alone, eh?'

‘All right, all right. My God, Eye, what's the matter with you?'

Lily raised her voice, which was still so English that people at neighbouring tables looked around. Cathy began to wail in her high-chair, and Bernie gave her one of his french fries.

‘Gi' a fren' fry.' Maggie scowled, and Bernie gave her the biggest one he had been saving to eat last.

‘There's so much help children can get,' Lily ploughed on. ‘You haven't got the right to –'

‘Just lay off of me,' Ida said. ‘Just lay off.'

The doctor at the base, and the school, and other mothers, some of whom were just as nosy as Lily, had finally forced Ida to accept the truth about Maggie, but she was not going to let Lily feel sorry for her.

Buddy said Maggie was an idiot, which did not help, but there was nothing much Ida could do about Buddy. They lived pretty well, with enough food, and the Air Force paying for the furnace to roar all day and all night in the wicked New England winters, which somebody should have told Ida about before she left home to be a GI bride in her pink suit and crippling shoes.

‘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.'