Dear Doctor Lily (13 page)

‘I am English. So are you.'

‘Not any more. I got me naturalized. You'll lose it, hon, like I did.'

‘I don't want to. Paul says I should stay the way I am.' Lily was still at the stage where she needed to drag Paul into every conversation, but Ida was thinking about herself, so she interrupted by calling Myaggie away from a china ornament, and did not hear.

Although she was more earthy and carnal now, she did not shout at the children. She had become one of those fat-bodied people who have a surprisingly soft voice, and move lightly on small feet, like a balloon. If you met her first on the telephone, you would visualize a little weightless woman, as she used to be.

Maggie was three-and-a-half. She moved about rather clumsily and did not say much, and when Lily went down on hands and knees to give her some close attention, the child's light-brown eyes would not look into hers. They wandered away, not looking at anything in particular. She had a beautiful pristine face, unmarked by much movement of expression.

‘Having a hard time training her?' Lily had seen all the nappies on the line.

‘Of course not,' Ida said quickly. ‘She wears diapers at night, is all.'

But the child was padded. Why the defensive lie?

‘Come and see what I've got for you.' Lily was fishing in her bag. Bernie came over, his eager face ready to be pleased, but Maggie wandered away to pick at the back fur of the cat stretched out on the sunny windowsill.

‘See what Lily has for you!' Ida took her hand, and she came back passively. ‘She's a little slow right now. Well, poor kid, her birth was so difficult. She like to killed me. They even said at the time she might have minimal brain damage, but she's a hundred per cent, aren't you, Myags?'

Dangling Lily's cuddly animal by its foot, the child nodded her head violently, like a doll with a spring neck, and said, ‘Mamamamamama.'

‘Sure, she don't talk so good yet, but Bernie's such a yacker, he talks for her, and she'll come to it when she's ready.'

‘Are you going to have another child?' Ida seemed prepared to make her life round the house and the children, so she might as well have one or two more.

‘I'd never go through that again.' Ida gave Lily some fearful details. ‘Buddy don't care either way. He signed on for another four years, because of the kids, but who knows what he'll do after that? This suits him okay. The work's not hard in the stores, or riding the mowers, like he'll be this summer. He's moonlighting too, tending bar some evenings, and the base is a good place for his other business. He sells a bit of stuff for a firm that makes jewellery. “Elite”, you've heard of it.' Lily shook her head. ‘See these.' Ida swung one of the glittery earrings that were too fancy for her plain tent of a dress. ‘I help him by showing the stuff around, among the women.'

‘He sounds very ambitious.'

‘He spends a lot. Very high requirements. Well, I have to say this, Lil. He bets on the horses.'

‘Oh dear.'

‘No, it's okay. He'll get his big break, and then we'll get out of here into some nice house in the suburbs.'

‘Paul says we'll have a house on Cape Cod some day. That's
his dream. His first wife didn't like it there, so they never went. I'm not saying anything against her, because I've never met her and don't want to, but I think she was pretty selfish. She didn't know her luck, having Paul, so now she hasn't got him. I ought to be sorry for her.'

‘I cut “ought” out of my language long ago,' Ida said. ‘There's no ought and should. You do what you do.'

‘What you do,' Bernie, on the floor, told the miniature car Lily had brought him.

‘Too right, kiddo. That's all a person can do.'

Since her schoolfriend Pam had gone off to the West Coast with her husband, Lily had no close friend in America to talk to. She had looked forward to confiding in Ida, but Ida did not really want to hear about Paul. Lily told her anyway.

‘You always used to laugh at me for carrying on about love.' Their brief companionship six years ago had become ‘always used to …' ‘I think I never really thought I'd find it, after Iceland, and knowing he was married. I was like a zombie for weeks after I got home. Pain, as if someone were squeezing my ribs against my heart.'

‘Go on?' Ida said in her old Midlands accent.

‘Why am I so lucky, Eye? Starting marriage is weird, isn't it, because you're so set in your spinster ways, and starting in a new country could be incredibly difficult, but Paul makes it so easy.

‘I talk funny. I don't dress quite right. Boston women don't go downtown in sweaters and slacks. I'm not organized like they are. I spill things. When we have people to dinner, I forget to cook the veg if I've had a couple of drinks. But he goes on thinking I'm marvellous. I suppose it helps, having followed poor old Barbara. She – well, anyway. But Paul is the kindest, funniest, most exciting man anyone ever met. When I go out, whatever they think of me, I feel that other women envy me, because what they've got is so … sort of, nothing. They should never have settled for it.'

‘Still trying to straighten people out,' Ida said. ‘Did you ever get to be a social worker in the end?'

‘Sort of.' Lily told her about the family centre. ‘Joan gave me a wonderful reference, so I'm going to try and get another job like
that over here. Paul is doing very well and he's just got a raise, and he's invented something marvellous that his firm is going to market. But I need to earn some money of my own, and I need to be working.'

‘Then you can come here with a clipboard and ask me, “Did you make a mistake?”' Ida looked at her challengingly.

‘All right, did you?'

‘Still like to ask 'em, don't you? I told you about marriage, long ago. You get kids. You got a home, a bank account. Once in a while, you have good times together. That's about as good as you can hope for, in the long run.'

‘I suppose so,' Lily had to say, although her happiness was crying, no, no, you can have it all, the love and the trust and the excitement. I've got it all.

Ida got up and pulled down the short tent dress, and picked up Maggie. ‘If we're going out to eat, we'd better stop yacking and go.'

‘Of course.' Lily jumped up and looked for her jacket.

Ida's friend Cora came in through the back door, a savvy-looking woman in startling colours, with flat black hair that looked dyed. She wanted to talk, rapidly, about the jewellery sales in which her husband was involved with Buddy. ‘Don't let me hold you up,' she said, and kept on talking.

In the general confusion of Ida trying to get the children ready and Cora following about, talking with much stabbing gesticulation of hands, Bernie wild with enthusiasm and Lily trying to. find where Maggie had hidden her bag, Lily knocked over the china ornament. It broke, a simpering woman in a ballet dress, lying on the floor in half a dozen coloured pieces. Maggie screamed.

‘Oh, my God, Ida, I'm sorry. I'm so clumsy, I – '

‘Don't give it a thought, love.' Ida picked up the pieces and threw them into a wastebasket. ‘I don't care.'

‘Isn't that the statuette Buddy's mother gave you?' Cora asked.

‘So what?' Ida made a face. ‘She never comes here anyway.'

They had lunch near the Air Force base at a new snack bar disguised as an old railway carriage converted to a snack bar, which Lily had learned to call a diner.

When they got back, Buddy's car was under the carport.

‘What are you home for?' Ida greeted him, on her way to the bathroom with Maggie.

‘Looking for you.' He was sitting in front of the television in a reclining plastic leather chair with the foot-rest raised, a thick sandwich and a can of beer held on his stomach. ‘I had to make myself a sandwich.'

‘So I see. Aren't you going back to work?'

‘Sure.'

‘Why the beer, then?'

‘Because I'm having my lunch.'

‘They'll smell it on you.'

‘So? Just for that, get me another can, Bernie my best boy.'

‘Buddy, this is my friend Lily.'

He was not going to get up, so Lily went to stand alongside the television set, where he could see her.

‘Hi,' he said with his eyes on the screen. ‘Seems I've heard about you.'

‘I've heard about you.'

He looked the same as the photograph, no older, a plumpish, pettish, immature man, with bits of bread and liver sausage on the front of his green shirt, and an unfriendly glance at Lily before his eyes went back to the blathering game show on the screen.

Bernie brought the beer. ‘Puppa, kin I have a popsicle?'

‘No,' Ida said. ‘You just had lunch.'

‘Sure you can, little man,' Buddy said through her voice.

‘You spoil him,' Lily said. Shut up, you fool, it's none of your business.

Buddy frowned. His mouth pushed a chunk of sandwich about petulantly.

‘Well, the kid's a little saint,' Ida said. ‘He don't take advantage.'

Buddy finished the second beer. He stood up, rebuckled the belt of his fatigues, and aimed the beer can at the wastebasket. ‘What the hell?' He bent down and picked out a piece of china. ‘My Ma's beautiful gift. Who done that?' His fist clenched round the broken china. His face reddened. His eyes glared under the dark roof of eyebrow.

‘The kid.' Behind his back, Ida winked at Lily and muttered against her hand, ‘He can do no wrong.'

‘Little Bernie?' Buddy's face cleared. He opened his fist and threw the piece of china back into the basket.

‘What, Puppa?' Bernie came from the kitchen, sucking a bar of coloured ice on a stick.

‘I know you didn't mean to do it, son,' Buddy said soppily.

‘Do what?'

‘Of course he didn't,' Lily said, ‘because he didn't break it. I did.'

‘You broke my mother's wedding gift?'

Buddy was furious. From a thick soft man with a petulant baby mouth and an early paunch, he turned into a human gorilla, arms squared, heavy body leaning towards Lily on short legs, lower jaw out, sprouting dark prickles.

‘I'm sorry.' Lily was taller, but she backed towards the door. ‘I'll replace it. I'll find out where she got it. I know it won't be the same, but – '

‘Sure as hell it won't be the same.'

What would he have done if Ida had not grabbed Lily's arm and pulled her out of the front door?

‘My God,' Lily said on the path. ‘Does he often get like that?'

‘No, no, he don't mean no harm.' Ida laughed, but the old anxious shadowed look had come back into her eyes. ‘But his mother's kind of a sacred object, and beer takes him bad, is all. He'll forget it.' She opened the car door. ‘Lucky you, being able to drive.'

‘Can't you?' Lily got into the driver's seat and put down the window.

‘Not yet, but I will. You can do anything in this country.' Ida put her arm on the edge of the door. Her hand shook a little. Her nails were still bitten, but now they had no bright rose polish. The loose sleeve of her dress showed a greenish-yellow bruise on the white skin inside her arm.

‘Buddy?' Lily laid her fingers on it.

‘No. Maggie pinched me. She holds on real tight. But lots of the women here do get beaten up. Cora and me's going to start a battered Watkins Wives' Club.'

‘As bad as that?' Lily's ideas of American servicemen had been based on old wartime pictures of French girls kissing GI heroes.

But the man who came out of the house next to Ida looked mild, with spectacles. Another, with a narrow sandy head, driving by with his wife, beamed, ‘Hi there!' to Ida. Buddy came out of the side door to get into his car and called out pleasantly, ‘Come on in, honey. Maggie peed herself.'

‘Bye, Eye.' Lily drove off quickly.

When she was first married, with an enthusiastic reference from Joan at the Family Centre, Lily had started to look for work quite confidently, but finding any kind of social service job in Boston turned out to be difficult. She answered advertisements, made phone calls and was never called back, wrote letters that were never answered.

When she finally got an interview for a counselling job in the teenage unit of a psychiatric hospital, the harried man who interviewed her in his lunch-break told her, through a sandwich and a glass of milk which frosted his fleecy moustache, that she was not only unqualified, she was illegal. Even if she had stayed at college to get a degree, it would not count in Massachusetts, and until she was accepted as a permanent immigrant, she could not work anywhere in the United States.

‘But you're so busy. You told me that yourself. You're terribly understaffed, you said. Couldn't you just, sort of, slip me in?'

‘Mrs Stephens.' It still brought a little swell of pleasure to her diaphragm to be called that, instead of Miss Spooner. ‘It isn't, sort of, possible.' He finally wiped his mouth. ‘I'd be glad to have you with us, but you have to look good on paper, as well as in the flesh.'

She traveled with Paul to a big indoor horse show in another city, where he was in charge of Turnbull's stand. Lily wore a gold shirt, which was the firm's colour, and her denim overalls with the big studs and buckles, which made her look American. She helped Paul and his young assistant, Lionel, to set up the display of weatherproof Turnbull blankets, and the boots and whips and bags and wallets, and the belts and sheepskin pads and riding hats with plastic rain covers, and the mangers and the bandages and the brushes and the name plates for stable doors, and the everything else that went with horses.

The saddles and bridles and halters were displayed on units of Paul's new Tack Rack, which attracted as much attention as anything on the stand, and a number of orders, which was exciting, since Paul was getting a royalty.