My Little Blue Dress (14 page)

T
HAT SUMMER THE
Creative Department
*
was torn apart by controversy. None of us in the servants' quarters had a clue what was happening, beyond the knowledge that the formerly tight-knit Creatives had staked out two separate and distinct territories in the cafeteria and were looking daggers at each other over the salad bar. One faction was led by Marc, the department head, a tall, muscular, balding man with a little tuft of chest hair in the hollow of his throat and a fondness for collarless shirts, and the other by Brandon, an intense young American who exercised a lot and who, in the days before the controversy, had always eaten alone with a large book. More than that we did not know. But we were all worried. As had been explained to me back in the recruitment office, without its light, almost giddy atmosphere of joie de vivre Bunley Downs simply couldn't function as the hotbed of creativity the Allied war effort required it to be. Wars had been lost over an awful lot less.

I found out what all the trouble was one Friday in early June. The head caterer was out with the flu and so it fell to me that afternoon to wheel the beer into the Creative
Department's Big Friday Meeting. If the mood had been sour of late in the cafeteria, it was pure
poison
in the Main Conference Room that afternoon as I carefully backed in with the beer cart.

“Has it come to this?” I heard Marc say as I laid out plates of sandwiches on the side table from his spot at the head of the rosewood conference table. “Brandon, has it come to this?”

Brandon's gaze never shifted from his yellow legal pad where he was drawing angry little boxes in the margin. “I guess it has. You've refused to take note of our objections and so . . . yeah. You've left us no choice. How can we keep on working here if you're just going to ignore us every time we make a serious objection to one of your plans.”

“But
Bran
don,” Marc implored him. “Brandon, Brandon,
Bran
don. But it's such a tiny
stupid
thing.”

“Oh it's stupid, Marc,” Brandon slammed down his pen and stared at it, “but it's not tiny. This is meant to be a top-secret facility. This is a
war
. Secrecy should be our top priority and you're acting like we're . . .”

“I know, I know. I'm acting like a member of ‘The Little League,' whatever that is. Well, I'm sorry but your resignations are not accepted. We are going to stay in this room until this fiasco is resolved. Otto. You said you might have hit upon a compromise.”

Otto, a thick-lipped round-headed Austrian rocket scientist with a pair of entirely spherical glasses, blinked nervously down at his notepad.

“Okay. Vell on ze front of ze T-shirt I haf ze verds ‘I am being a member of ze Bunley Downs Creative Department' or vot haf you. And zen on ze rear, vich vill be seen by ze viewer,” he gestured, “only after zey haf walked
past
ze
person vearing ze shirt, I haf ze additional verds ‘Und now I must haf to kill you.' ”

There was a lot of doubt on a lot of faces, but not on Marc's. “Well, Brandon, what do you say? That strikes me as rather ingenious. He addresses your security concerns by threatening innocent passersby with
death
if they breathe a word of our existence. While he also meets
my
requirements for an organizational T-shirt,” leaning forward Marc clenched his fists beseechingly, “. . . a T-shirt, Brandon, that cements the bond that everyone in this room . . .” he pointed round at them all with his pen, “. . . has with everyone
else
in this room. Maintaining esprit de corps is
my responsibility
, Brandon. Radar is yours. I don't tell you how to distinguish a plane from a weather balloon. I would prefer that you not tell me how to foster morale.” He leaned back. “So how about it. We go with Otto's design and put this whole ugly episode behind us.”

Brandon stood and started gathering his papers. “Marc, with all due whatever, that is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. We shouldn't have a T-shirt at all. This is a top-secret military facility, not a chain of goddam restaurants. Look I just . . . This isn't happening. Me and my people want out.”

A terrible silence descended, the sound of something beautiful dying, and the next thing I knew my mouth was moving, forming words.

“Um,” I said, from over by the side table. “Can I say something? I couldn't help but overhear.”

Only Marc would look at me. “Please do.”

I wasn't nervous. I just spoke. “Well, I just think that sometimes in situations like this it can be helpful to get some outside perspective and anyway it just occurred to me that maybe the way to accomplish
both
your goals is to, instead
of a T-shirt, print up a batch of Bunley Downs Creative Department
underwear
. That way no member of the public will ever know, but you'd get the same sense of camaraderie you'd get from a T-shirt . . . in fact you'd get a deeper camaraderie because it would be like a secret you all share . . . anyway.” I blushed. “I'm sorry if I've spoken out of turn. It was just something I was thinking.”

No, it was more than that.

It was genius.

My memory of that next minute is a blur, but when it was over the rosewood surface of the conference room table was splattered with tears of laughter and relief, and two grown men, Brandon and Marc, were hugging each other like pandas in the zoo. I remember gripping my cart by its handle and
trying
to leave the room, but Marc broke from his embrace with Brandon and ran to block my exit.

Reader, he blocked my exit permanently.

M
Y STARTING WAGE
as a Creative was five hundred pounds a week, an enormous sum in those days, as much as a wealthy man in a classic English novel might have in his entire bank account, and the first thing I did was move me mam and me out of the servants' quarters into a room at Mrs. Truman's rooming house in Bunley village. It was the best room she had, with a kettle and a trouser press and an
en suite
bathroom and everything. At the institute itself they gave me a corner office and a slot on the bicycle rack that no one else could use. Those were very exciting days but I was careful not to get bigheaded. On my desk I kept the small brass gyroscope the geniuses had given me for my
forty-second birthday, whose polished wooden base bore the legend, “Caffeine Makes the World Go Round.”

But my tea-wheeling days were done. For me the rest of the war was all about bicycling in through the air in the morning, waving to the guards, leaving my bike unlocked in my slot, how's it going, how's it going, then up the stairs and into the Main Conference Room to see what pastries were waiting on the side table. I'd get a coffee and a donut, take my seat at the table and start bantering with the other Creatives as they casually dribbled in. Sometime around nine o'clock, without any formal intervention from Marc, the conversation would smoothly turn to the subject of bouncing bombs, or bulletproof vests, or machine guns that could shoot through the propeller of a plane without hitting the blades, or how to seed the sky with little tinfoil strips to make the German radar think we had five billion planes . . . until soon the ideas would be coming to people faster than they could blurt them out and we'd all be ripping crude sketches from our legal pads and sliding them madly around the table, tossing tennis balls back and forth as an aid to concentration, swigging from little bottles of mineral water until
boom
. You thought it was still only ten past nine but in fact it was lunchtime and you had just invented a whole
plane
or something!

And that was my Second World War.

On the night it all ended, in 1945, a huge party was thrown in the officers' mess. They ordered a jazz band up from London and oh how we danced. Around eleven, bathed in sweat, I left the party and wandered off through the innards of the complex with a bottle of single malt that I had sweet-talked out of the barman. In the darkened kitchen
I danced again, alone, more gently, swaying amid the outsize appliances to the strains of the music bleeding through from the mess, then I ambled off down the corridor and snapped on the lights of the firing range.

The firing range had formerly been a squash court, and soon it would be again. At the rear, against the mattresses full of bullet holes was a bale of folded paper Germans. I sat down on them and unscrewed the cap of my whiskey.

Here was to me, I reckoned, filling my plastic glass and promptly draining it.

Here was to me for having
made it
.

From beginnings that were
worse
than humble, from
nothing
, the undeniable fact of the matter was that I had clawed my way up the pole of life, inch after terrible inch, crisis after crisis, the big black birds of Chaos and Nonexistence nipping at me incessantly with their awful beaks, to finally become an actual finished person, with a life more real and vivid than I had ever dreamed it could be. I mean look at me: sitting in a converted squash court on the last night of World War Two, the tickle of gunpowder in my nose, fresh sweat wet on my upper lip and under my arms, listening to the rumble of nearby boilers . . . the
cuck
sound my plastic glass made as I set it down on the smooth cement floor . . . the
whisper
of my blouse as I raised one fist beneath the buzzing squash-court lights and quite frankly just fucking
held it there
.

Mn?

Why?

Why did I hold my fist in the air?

Because
two
wars had ended that day, reader: The war against the Germans, whose two-dimensional paper images lay flat, docile and defeated beneath my
Bunley Downs: Britain's Best Kept Secret
boxer shorts.

But also the other war, the bigger one, the war whose first shot had been fired very quietly forty years earlier in a dusty room above a grocer's shop on a sunny Saturday morning, the War of My Becoming.

Yes,
two
wars had ended that day—not just one—and in a stunning upset
I had managed to win them both
.

[okay calm down buck

time now is
27 AUG--9:45
P
.
M
.

45 years done in 6 hrs
8.2 years per hour.
55 years left/8.2 = 6.7073170732 hrs, call it seven which means a finish time of about 6.13
A
.
M
.

so ahead of sched, going very well, but NO FUCKING NAPPING

if you have spare time then use it constructively i.e. by fucking finding a way of expanding memoir to explain WHY WHAT HAPPENED HAPPENED and thereby getting self off hook.

for instance what if you made her keep a DIARY of the summer, a diary sort of woven into the memoir, including present day stuff featuring self.

thereby demonstrating to reader how bad everything was for self and how none of it was self's fault.

do it.

are genius

except killing old woman was stupid stupid STUPID.

27 AUG--9:46
P
.
M
.]

PART II
Diary of a Life Interrupted

June

June 1st—Tuesday

So I'm trying something new, reader, an entirely fresh approach to this book.

Here's how it'll work:

From this point forward, as well as being my autobiography, this book is also going to be my
diary
. Every evening between today and the end of August, which is when my publishers are coming round to collect this manuscript, I'm going to write an account of the day just ending. I'm going to tell you how I'm feeling, what I had for lunch, what the weather's like, etc., and then whenever some element of that material reminds me of an incident from my Past I am planning to “flash back” to that earlier time and deliver another installment of my autobiography, thereby weaving the two narratives—the story of my life in the Present and the story of my life in the Past—into a single narrative . . . cord.

Do you see? The
form
will be that of a diary—there'll be a day and date at the top of each entry—but the
content
will be half diary, half autobiography. For example, a typical entry might read:

July nth—Thursday

Woke up, went to the bathroom, blah blah blah. Opened a new jar of the pills I take for my arthritis and was reminded by that ball of cotton wool that's always in a pill jar of a cloud I once saw over Blahland . . .

I moved to Blahland in Blahvember of 19blah- venty blah with a troupe of traveling blah blah blahs and we had the following adventures: x, y, z.

But those days are gone. Now I am an old woman whose arthritis will not let her do that sort of thing. The rest of the day passed uneventfully and now I am going to sleep.

You see? Pretty straightforward.

Now let me quickly tell you
why
I've decided to make this change.

I've decided to make this change because I'm ruining the life of my caregiver—the young man who lives next door to me—and this is the only way I can think of to even start to pay him back. For four long months, with deepening guilt, I've watched the strain of looking after me make Bruno Maddox depressed and listless, then rob him of his stamina and his sense of purpose, and eventually whittle away so much of the vigorous young man I first met back in
February that there is nothing left but a nub, a lump, a wretched little stump of a man with just enough vitality left to keep me alive, but nothing left over with which to live himself.

And then, unbelievably, last week it all got much, much worse.

Bruno works one hour a day for a tiny cable television station here in Manhattan and last Thursday morning they called him up and, as far as I could tell from only his side of the conversation, asked him to attend the taping of a pilot episode for a new panel-based discussion program, potentially debuting next spring. He went and, as would later become apparent, found himself seated next to an attractive young female magazine journalist. The two of them fell to talking, one thing led to another, and the next thing Bruno Maddox knew he had a “date” for the evening, a date with a girl.

Had I known what was happening I would have tried to stop him from going. I could have fallen out of the electric bed, faked a seizure,
something
. But the first I knew of his evening plans was when he plonked a bowl of tuna mayonnaise on my swingable side table and set out whistling into the early evening.

Bruno was back in less than an hour—as I could have told him he would be—utterly destroyed, as caregivers invariably are whenever they try to reimmerse themselves in social intercourse after months of lonely caregiving. For the best part of an hour he lay in a clammy heap by the radiator, face in his hands, moaning and mumbling to himself.

Eventually, from his impressionistic mumbles, I was able to piece together most of what had happened: the taping of the pilot episode that afternoon, the girl, the bar she'd
told him to meet her at, how the crowds and the noise had overwhelmed his feeble, atrophied senses, and how—most tragically—when the girl had asked him, over the din of wherever they were, what it was that he wanted to do with his life, Bruno had found himself blurting that he wanted to
live in an undersea dome and interact with the world only by computer
, prior to bolting the scene, coming home and collapsing.

I recognized those symptoms immediately, from my own experience in the nineteen thirties. It was information phobia. And having read
The Caregiver's Bible
by Dr. Steven Hearne, G.N.P., Ph.D., about nine times cover to cover, I was led to a terrible but inescapable conclusion: that Bruno Maddox had finally crossed the line from merely being depressed and exhausted by the hell of looking after me into having full-blown “caregiver's syndrome,” which, as Dr. Hearne spends an entire chapter pointing out, is an actual, free-standing mental illness that people don't recover from without actual medical treatment. Even when your care recipient
dies
—which they all do, by definition—a person with Caregiver's Syndrome
doesn't get better
. In fact, they usually get worse. Caregiver's Syndrome is a truly terrible thing.

That was the evening I resolved to act, to do something. The obvious move, the only move that would actually make a difference, would be to kill myself, but sadly I'm too weak these days to even peel a banana let alone stick my head in the oven or throw myself out the window. The bulk of my remaining strength is concentrated weirdly in the two fingers and thumb with which I grip the pen that writes these words. Believe me, if I ever think of a way to kill myself that only involves those three wizened digits then I'll be off this
Earth sooner than you can say Jack Robinson. In the meantime I think the most I can do is make this autobiography into a tribute to Bruno Maddox. By keeping a daily diary I will build a permanent record of that young man's daily agonies, preserving them for posterity, so that after I'm dead anyone who cares to can pick up
My Little Blue Dress
and maybe learn a thing or two about the resiliency of the human spirit.

Here goes.

Today's lunch was vegetarian chili from a can. It reminded me, vaguely, of a chili con carne that the chef at Bunley Downs used to serve us in those lazy months after the Second World War ended, as we creative military geniuses were wrapping our gyroscopes in brown paper, disassembling our slide rules, and saying our good-byes. Those were good times, reader, whereas these are
bad
times. Though I have to say that this is possibly the sexiest and most elegant format for a memoir that any old lady has ever thought of.

So are you ready, reader? Are you ready for Part Two?

Good.

So am I.

June 2nd—Wednesday

Sad scene here this morning while Bruno was taking my blood pressure.

Just as the boy was safety pinning the cuff around my arm—which has grown too thin for the Velcro surfaces to coincide as they would on any normal person—my chest
began to crackle. This happens almost every day. Bruno dropped the cuff of the blood-pressure machine, bent me forward on the electric bed, and rubbed my back in circles until I gave a proper cough, then another, then spewed a few teaspoons of dark gray phlegm into his waiting hand.

Oh God
, I pulsed him telepathically.
*
Sorry
.

Bruno straightened up, looked down at the phlegm in his hand and right then suffered what Dr. Steven Hearne terms a “sudden loss of focus.” Instead of sprinting to the sink and washing my filth off his person the young man drifted to the window, gazed vacantly down into the street . . .

Hey
, I pulsed him gently.
Hey
.
Earth to Bruno Maddox.

And then, with a sigh, he absently ran the handful of phlegm through his hair.

Oh God
, I pulsed as he stumbled gagging down into the kitchen.
I am
so
sorry. Please kill me kill me kill me
 . . .

The thing you have to understand, however, about the young man Bruno Maddox is that he's a saint to his very core. I'm not exaggerating. He's a profoundly good young man. Kill me? Reader, he didn't even
hit
me. Didn't even grab me by my greasy nylon lapels and denounce me as a disgusting, effluvium-producing old bitch, which I would be the first to agree is what I am. No. Once Bruno had rinsed my dreadful goo from his hand he simply clambered back up into the living-room area and resumed checking my blood pressure in as cheerful and tender a manner as if I'd slathered his palm with gold bullion rather than lung butter. And that just made me sadder.

You see, reader, Bruno Maddox doesn't know anything about blood pressure. He only bought the machine last week, from this madman over on the Bowery who, if memory serves, was probably also selling a shoe, a folded square of clear plastic and a water-damaged issue of
Asian Tit Parade
from a blanket on the sidewalk, and consequently it came with no instructions.

Not that Bruno cares. He doesn't even watch the mercury shifting in the cloudy glass tube. He just stares into space as he pumps the squeezy ball in his hand. Why? Because he's a caregiver, and caregivers crave ritual of any sort, however meaningless. It makes them feel like they're “in control of the Home,” according to Dr. Hearne, though the truth, of course, is that they aren't in control of anything.

So yes. All in all, today's blood-pressure incident was a very sad scene indeed.

June 3rd—Thursday

Today was the first day of summer, by my estimation. Bruno and I live on the corner of Eldridge and Broome streets, down in Chinatown, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of the dirtiest, smelliest and most neglected spots in all of Manhattan. No shops, no people, just blackened shuttered storefronts and piles of reeking garbage, and from early June to late September there's a distinctive stench of fish and sewage that haunts the place, and which for the first time in nine months came floating through the window today during the Afternoon Session as we sat watching women's billiards on television.

Hey
, I pulsed Bruno.
Summer's here, can you feel it? Can you smell it?

But the boy just coughed and rubbed his face, tried to keep himself focused on the Samson Insurance Ladies Nine-Ball Challenge. I don't know what I was expecting. As a poet might say, what use hath a caregiver for the changing of seasons or the wonders of nature? None. Each day for him is like a wet, gray day in the dreariest month you can imagine.

I should have known better than to pulse him what I pulsed him.

It was thoughtless of me.

June 4th—Friday

More sad scenes this evening, reader. Some very sad scenes indeed.

Bruno got home from work at nine-thirty, two hours late, and he was visibly drunk: shiny with sweat and hiccuping at the foot of my electric bed. Rather than take me to the bathroom, however, an obvious necessity given his lateness, his first act was to stumble through the fire door to place a 'phone call.

“Hi, er . . . it's me,” he slurred into someone's answering machine. “Bruno Maddox. That guy. From before. Um, sorry for calling. I just . . .” He cleared his throat. “Just wanted to offer some sort of semi-apology for, um, all that stuff that happened the other week. I'm very sorry about, um, . . . just ducking away like that. I was not . . . feeling myself and um . . . so that's what I'm calling to say. Um . . .”

There was a
thud
and a
whoosh
as he slumped against the doorjamb and slid to the ground. “I'm slightly drunk I have
to say.” He chuckled. “There's this
guy
at work . . . this hairy little guy who plugs in my earpiece and his
mother
unfortunately died last year and this was the one-year anniversary and so he
asked
me to go have a drink with him and well it was weird.”

That's enough,
I pulsed him.
Hang up. You're starting to ramble
.

“Right across from where we work there's this little
alley
way that one of the restaurants has made into a bar for people to drink at after work. They've laid down this really weird blue fake grass and got some of those little round umbrella tables and there are speakers hanging from the lampposts playing the radio . . .
anyway
, we got some whiskeys and Mark Clark—that's the hairy little guy who plugs in my earpiece—started telling me all about his mother dying and it was very sad and I tried to change the subject but then he started telling me about this ambition he has to have a newspaper column in his hometown called ‘News to Me, by Mark Clark.' ” Bruno cleared his throat contemptuously. “Every week he's going to round up all the wacky, offbeat stories from other papers around the nation and then sign off every time with the words ‘and that's news to me . . . . ' I don't know why I'm telling you this but anyway that was in a weird way even
more
depressing than the mother thing and then more drinks came . . . .”