Dear Doctor Lily (29 page)

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. ‘The 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?

‘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.