My Little Blue Dress (19 page)

Anyway, there. Those are my only concerns about the great wave of Young Romance that seems to have crashed down upon us these last few days, and obviously I hope
they're completely unfounded. There's no denying that Bruno does seem genuinely happy. On this, what should have been the first day of his return to bachelorhood and of a slow and painful convalescence, he seemed like an entirely recovered man, a man who'd never been sick. You should have seen him when he stopped by this afternoon to feed me and put me to bed: he looked happy, relaxed and somehow even
fit
, clad from neck to waist in a glorious new item of clothing: a navy blue T-shirt with an official gold seal on the breast that says “New York Department of Housing.”

Plus the boy's fingers in my flesh during the long shuffle back to my stinking care were firm and steady like I've never felt, and certainly gave no hint of any impending breakdown. Time will tell, I suppose, and it occurs to me that before it does I should spend a few days giving you another installment of my autobiography, which, as you may have noticed, I have been neglecting.

No, actually, you know what? I think I'll exercise my old woman's prerogative and do that tomorrow. My fingers are hurting slightly.

June 27th—Sunday

Don't know about you but whenever someone says to me “the nineteen fifties” I always call to mind this quietly famous piece of film footage from that era involving a suburban American family having dinner. I'm sure you know it. The family has four members: a nurturing young mother—with a large, sexy bottom—standing with a plastic tray and about to serve food to her seated husband, whose hair is slicked back, her son, who has freckles and a stripy T-shirt,
and her daughter, who is blond and has pigtails. All four are grinning wildly, in a somewhat sinister fashion, and over the top of the whole thing, if you're lucky enough to have sound, is a fruity, singsong voice saying: “. . . and
Mrs.
Olsen is happy because she has a new
vacuum
cleaner, and little
Timmy
is happy because he has a new toy machine gun, and little
Mindy
is happy . . . etc.” which frankly only makes the scene seem even
more
sinister.

I don't think the family themselves are famous people and yet the footage pops up on television all the time in different contexts. You can see it quite regularly on the news, for instance, under reports about the economy, and just the other day I saw it used in a promotional music video by some Negro hybrid poet-musician who was wearing a silver suit and sunglasses, and scowling into a fisheye lens that he was going to drive to white suburbia and shoot everybody. It always takes me back, seeing those few short seconds of footage, that sinister family at a table, because for me at least that's exactly how it was.

In 1948 I'd moved to London from Bunley Village with the express intention of finding an American man and persuading him to marry me—can't really say why except that I had spent the handful of postwar years in a state of increasing dismay at the deepening drabness of my homeland. The intense olive-green poignancy that had made England such a vivid place to live during the Second World War seemed to have faded away and not been replaced by anything. The country of my birth had become drab, and colorless—unknowable to me—and around 1946, I had slipped into a deep
depression, a years-long black tunnel down which I aimlessly wandered until one day, at the Bunley Coronet, slumped in my velveteen seat waiting for the main feature to begin, I was exposed to a technicolor newsreel about the booming postwar U.S. economy, featuring a happy-looking family having dinner around a plastic table, and I found myself sprinting tearfully out into the sunshine with a whole new vision of what my life could be.

Americans were pretty thin on the ground, however, even down in London. Every night of the week I attended singles mixers in dusty north London church halls, guarding my handbag in the center of the grimy parquet dance floor and being pestered by scads of creepy old Englishmen sidling up and whispering, “Might it be possible . . . ? Might it be possible . . . ?” with breath that smelled invariably of sweet, decantered sherry.

And then one night, just as I had slung my handbag over my shoulder and was reaching into it to forage for my bicycle clips, I suddenly spotted the best-looking man I'd ever seen over on the far side of the room, helping himself to punch from the punch bowl. I can't recall whether I found him attractive before I realized he was American . . . though, actually, the more I think about it, he was attractive in such a way that he could have only
been
American: tanned, and tall, and muscular, wearing a neon-pink plastic outergarment with which to shield himself from the drizzly English clime.

“Good punch?” was my opening line, after essentially being winched across the parquet by the man's attractiveness.

“Not really,” he grimaced, and we fell to talking. He claimed his name was Chester McGovern and that he was a
nuclear-power engineer, in England on a month's loan from the American government.

“What'll you do when the month is over?”

He shrugged. “Go home I guess. Quiet little town in Wisconsin, America, try and find me a gal and settle down.”

“Wow. Great. I nonchalantly poured myself a punch and sipped it, discreetly shifting my handbag over my chest in order to hide my suddenly pounding heart. “Look . . . do you . . . do you maybe want to go to a museum or something tomorrow?”

He did, as it happened, and thus began our whirlwind courtship.

For two wet weeks that winter Chester and I fed ducks in the park and went to the museums, drank coffee in cafés with steamed-up windows. We parted around fourish for propriety's sake (this was still only the nineteen fifties; it wasn't seemly for courting couples to spend all day together) but then after dark reconvened in Chester's damp, dingy lodgings where by an iridescent slab of gas heater we'd dunk chocolate biscuits into mugs of mulled cider and talk, at my insistence, of things American.

And boy oh boy did I like what I was hearing. The word picture Chester painted for me of Fordham, Wisconsin, sounded exactly like the footage that had set my heart racing at the cinema: a lush suburban idyll of automated bowling alleys and appliance stores and newly painted houses, behind each of whose façades, I felt sure, sat a grinning family of four about to nourish themselves on convenience foods served from a lightweight plastic tray—the perfect antidote to black-and-white, postwar England.

And perhaps, I realized, it also sounded like something else: the futuristic modern paradise that me grand-da had
predicted all those years ago back in Murbery, on the afternoon of the night he died, back when I was a little girl. Not much of what the old man had said to me that evening had made any sense whatsoever—I had never, for instance, figured out what he meant by the statement that I was “allergic to the past” or what the significance was of that little blue dress I still had in my luggage somewhere—but what my tiny girlish brain
had
absorbed that evening was that in his opinion humankind was destined for some sort of unimprovable, ultramodern state in which people like me—whatever that meant—would finally be happy.

We were on the seventh hole of the putting green of London's Hyde Park when Chester finally asked me to marry him. Fearful of appearing too keen—this was still only the nineteen fifties; women weren't supposed to appear too keen—I trained my gaze on some distant tree and made a great show of thinking about it.

In fact, I did think about it.

Was I
sure
about marrying Chester McGovern? He was a man after all, just like Davey McCracken had been a man all those years ago—and with a similar sort of name, coincidentally. Forging and maintaining healthy, plausible relationships with men wasn't exactly my strong suit. In fact, back in the thirties, as far as I could recall, I had decided not to marry Mr. Montgomery for the sole, specific reason that he too was a man. Was I really ready to try all that again?

Oh what the hell.

“I'll marry you if we don't ever have to sleep together and you don't mind me being a little distant occasionally,” I found myself blurting.

Chester's putt sailed wide. He followed the shot with his
eyes, then straightened out of his stance and fixed me with a hard stare. The intensity of the moment was suddenly too much for me, and lowering my own eyes, I bunched up the fabric of my raincoat pocket in such a way that my golf ball bulged up and
tocked
down upon the green felt tee where I distractedly tapped it back and forth with the blade of my putter.

“That's fine,” said Chester eventually. “That's absolutely fine.”

Ten days later I blinked awake in a low-ceilinged, primrose-yellow bedroom, with a vague memory of drinking too much on an airplane and, some days prior to that, having married Chester McGovern in a quick civic ceremony. Not knowing where I was, I turned my face to the light and found that I was looking through the slats of a venetian blind—a remotely controllable one, by the looks of it—at a great stretch of clean blue sky such as one never,
ever
saw in England.

In merely bra and panties, I sprang from bed, threw on some clothes, and descended the stairs of what I realized was my new home. I liked it, reader. I liked it a lot. The carpet was all swirly, the wallpaper was interestingly textured, and the spacious though low-ceilinged living room was filled with hi-fis and televisions and a great stack of brightly colored board-game boxes. Across a dividing countertop I also spied my new husband, wearing an apron in what seemed to be an equally well-appointed kitchen.

“Hey, it's me,” I said. “I'm awake.”

Chester whirled and held his spatula aloft like a Viking sword. “Welcome to Fordham, Wisconsin, honey!”

“Thank you. Thank you.” I waved with my hand. “Are you making breakfast?”

“Sure am!”

“Excellent. Well, I'm going to take a quick stroll. Looks like a lovely day out there.”

“Break a leg!”

It was more than lovely, I decided after I had walked a few blocks; it was magnificent. And so was Fordham, Wisconsin. The town was a seemingly endless grid of pastel-colored houses and manicured lawns, each of which was actually being further manicured as I passed by a friendly looking patriarch on a lawnmower, each of whom waved at me. Waving back and I gawped at the sheer variety of technology on display. There was a lawnmover shaped like a speaker's podium, at which the gardener stood erect, almost as if he were lecturing the grass to be shorter. Another was segmented into two black oval blobs, like an insect's body, one blob to cut, the other to gather the cuttings. Most impressive of all was a lawnmower that cut the grass
all by itself
, freeing its owner up to stand proudly nearby waving—in this case at a newly arrived, still quite sexy fifty-year-old English woman.

That's when I noticed something was amiss.

The man
didn't stop waving.
Five seconds passed, then ten, and still those five pink fingers were flapping at me, flapping, flapping, flapping.

I stifled a scream and sprinted back to our house.

“That was just a little spurt of false jet-lag energy,” I told Chester in the kitchen. “I'm going upstairs to zonk again.”

“Golden slumbers!” yelled my solicitous husband, over the insistent mechanical ping of a food-preparation device.

Reappearing after an uneasy nap I found our front door open and Chester standing there in conversation with a shapely young brunette, also in an apron and holding a pie.

“Oh here she is, here she
is
,” the woman squealed at my approach. She handed her pie onto Chester and grabbed my wrist. “Oh, Chest! You didn't tell me she was beautiful!”

“Yes I did,” said Chester quickly. “Darling, this is Betty.”

“Good to meet you, Betty. Are you a neighbor?”

“Oh isn't your accent
adorable
! Yes, I live
just next door
. And I'm the head of the local
ladies
group. Oh I can't
wait
to introduce you to the other girls. We have
such
a good time.”

“Oh wow. Fantastic.”

“. . .
such
a good time . . .” Betty repeated in a faraway voice, her grip tightening on my hand. “We have
such
a good time. You know,” she leaned close and confided, “they say these small towns are dull.”