The GI Bride (11 page)

The DBE’s annual fête was fun too. It
was held at the British Old People’s Home in Brookfield, Illinois, and was
modelled on English village fêtes, with stalls, maypole dancing, games and races. They
even served cream teas in the food tent, and it always ended with a performance by
Chicago’s Stockyard Kiltie Band. Hearing the bagpipes and watching the swirl of
the kilts always made me emotional; it was hard not to cry. The old people’s home,
though, had been built next door to Brookfield Zoo, which provided material for many
jokes.

Bob was usually reluctant to go to parties
or events like the fête.

‘We’ve been invited to a party
this weekend,’ I’d tell him.

‘We’re not going,’
he’d say. ‘You know I don’t like parties.’

‘Please, Bob, I’ve been stuck in
the house for weeks and I need to get out.’

At first he made the effort to take me, and
I think he managed to enjoy himself once he was there, especially after he’d had a
few drinks, but later he began refusing to go. I didn’t know why the fun had gone
out of him, and decided to ask if it would be okay for me to go without him.

‘Will you take care of the baby, then,
if I can get someone to take me?’ I’d plead. Sometimes he said yes, at
others he said no; when he said no, I was devastated. When he agreed to baby-sit, I
would arrange for someone to pick me up and take me, then bring me home. I didn’t
want to miss time with my English friends: I needed them. In addition, when I visited
the neighbours I’d met in the apartment building, he usually chose to stay at home
watching TV. For the most part, all Bob wanted was for dinner to be ready when he came
home from work, then to sit in an armchair, where he usually dozed off until it was time
to go to bed. My once fun-loving husband had disappeared and been replaced by an old
stick-in-the-mud. When we were with people, the old Bob reappeared, his cute smile, his
lovable chuckle, it was all there, so why couldn’t he show it at home to me?

More and more frequently, after putting the
baby to bed, I’d leave Bob snoozing in his chair and wander downstairs to my
neighbours, the Ballmaiers, where at least I had someone to talk to. I’m sure Bob
wasn’t very sociable
because of his upbringing. The Ballmaiers,
Cindy and Phil, were true social animals. They always seemed to have company, always had
the coffee pot on and always cooked huge amounts of food to feed whoever turned up. They
were a blessing to me in those days.

Cindy and I still laugh about the time she
came up to our apartment to have coffee with me and to let our two little ones play
together. The boys, who were the same age, having been born just a week apart, were
playing on the newly carpeted floor of our living room, while Cindy and I were in the
kitchen, chatting over coffee and cake. Suddenly, an awful stench drifted into the
kitchen, overpowering the aroma of the gorgeous, freshly baked cake we’d been
enjoying.

‘What’s that smell?’ I
said.

‘Smell?’ she replied, almost
choking on her cake. ‘It smells like shit to me.’

We dashed down the hallway to investigate
and, to my horror, found that one of the little angels had messed his pants. The result
had fallen out onto the carpet and they were now happily bulldozing it everywhere with
their toy trucks. No wonder they’d been so quiet.

One day when Cindy and Phil’s child,
Little Phil, came running through the living room he tripped over his toy Mickey Mouse
guitar. As he started to cry, we heard him mutter, ‘Fucking Mickey Mouse!’
Of course, his parents claimed they had no idea where he had heard such language. That
little boy, whose mouth was washed out with soap, is now a minister …

As I think about the Ballmaiers, I’m
reminded of another entertaining event that they shared with me. I’m
sure it wasn’t funny to them when it happened, but I still grin
when I think about it. Apparently, Cindy was in the living room talking to an insurance
man. Phil was elsewhere in the house so was unaware that Cindy wasn’t alone.
Suddenly, he called out to her: ‘Hey, Cin, come see the size of this turd I just
did. I’ve never seen such a long one.’ Poor Cindy, I can only imagine how
she felt, and God knows what the insurance man thought. She said he left in rather a
hurry.

I had never before met anyone quite like the
Ballmaiers, nor have I since, but Phil claimed a special place in my heart because of
something he did for me soon after we first met. He and Cindy invited Bob and me for
dinner one evening, and when we got there, I had the shock of my life well, almost.
Besides cooking platters full of his famous fried chicken, he had baked a birthday cake
for me, complete with eighteen candles. ‘Cindy told me you’d never had a
birthday cake,’ he explained, ‘and when she told me it was your birthday in
a couple of days, I thought I’d better remedy that. I can’t believe
you’ve never had a birthday cake before.’ Well, I cried like a baby. His
thoughtfulness bowled me over.

I don’t know when I began to get
restless but I knew I needed to do more with my life. The problem was that I lacked the
confidence and skills to go out and get a decent job, and I felt decidedly frumpy.

One day as I was browsing through the
newspaper for inspiration, I saw an advertisement for Sabie’s Modelling School. It
offered evening classes and promised to ‘give you the confidence you need to do
something worthwhile
with your life’. It was as though the ad
was there just for me. I knew I was not model material but felt that if I went through
their training I might gain the confidence I needed to make something of myself. I rang
to ask for more information.

‘Are you crazy?’ shouted
Bob.

‘How selfish,’ commented his
parents, who somehow became involved in the debate.

‘You go for it,’ encouraged
Cindy and Phil.

I begged and pleaded, promising I would find
a way to pay back the money it would cost. One of my arguments was that I’d be
able to get a decent job so that we could save to buy a house. That idea seemed to
appeal to Bob, who said he’d think about it.

Of course, Bob and his family thought I was
crazy, and I’d known they would, but I signed up anyway. I don’t remember
what it cost but it wasn’t much. I managed to stretch the housekeeping money and
was able to make small weekly payments; I also had a little birthday money put away. The
classes were held once a week, in the evening, so usually Bob could baby-sit, but if he
was being difficult about it, as he sometimes was, I could always leave Wayne with the
Ballmaiers.

I thoroughly enjoyed the classes. They were
what I imagined finishing school to be like. We learned about makeup, hairstyles,
clothes and appropriate accessorizing, walking, sitting and standing correctly, how to
enter and leave a room graciously, and so on. It was great fun and the class often
dissolved into gales of laughter at some of our less successful attempts at
graciousness. At the end of the course, the graduates’ husbands, boyfriends and
others came to watch the fashion show we put on and to see us get our
diplomas. I was the only one there with no family in attendance, but that was nothing
new: when I was a child, no one had ever come to see me in school plays.

Surprisingly, after I left Sabie’s I
had some calls to do modelling assignments, not runway stuff, of course, but enough to
boost my confidence and morale. I mostly did catalogue work for Montgomery Ward or Sears
Roebuck, or modelled at shows for the wholesale buyers’ markets. I still laugh
when I think of how skinny I was at the time; I sometimes had to wrap a small towel
around my middle to fill out the dress or coat I was modelling. It was hard work and the
pay was good but I knew I wanted, and needed, to get a full-time job.

While all this was going on, my brother
Peter and his wife Brenda decided to come to America. They would stay for just a couple
of years and hoped to make enough money to go back to England and buy a decent house. I
was thrilled at the prospect of having some of my own flesh and blood nearby. Bob was
kind enough to sponsor them into the United States and, as luck would have it, the
apartment next door to ours became available so we snatched it up for them. I could
never have believed I’d be lucky enough to have family close by. It was a
miracle.

Peter had no problem getting a good job, as
he was a fully qualified journeyman compositor and a member of the International
Printers’ Union. He started work just a day or two after they’d arrived in
the US. Initially, he had to work night shifts, so Brenda and I spent many evenings
together. We loved it when Peter stopped off at the bakery on his way home from work in
the morning to
pick up a loaf of freshly baked Gonnella bread, still
warm from the oven and crunchy. I would go over to their apartment and we would sit at
their kitchen table, eating slice after slice of bread and jam. I had missed good bakery
bread since I’d been in America, so the crusty French and Italian bread we bought
was like manna from heaven.

Shortly after Peter and Brenda came to the
States we and our parents each bought a tape recorder. They were the reel-to-reel type
and it took ages to fill one of the tapes, but at last we could actually talk to each
other, hear each other’s voices. I used to live for the days when a tape arrived
in the mail. Mum and Dad still didn’t have a telephone and had no idea when
they’d be able to get one. Anyway, on a tape we could chat for hours while on the
telephone we could talk for a few minutes at most. I wish I still had those tapes but
they were soon forgotten after telephones and travel between the two countries became
more available and affordable.

When the novelty of having my family next
door began to wear off, I believe Bob became jealous of my friendship with Brenda
because we spent a lot of time together. We were always nattering over cups of tea, she
telling me about her family, the life she’d left behind in England, and how hard
it was being in America, with Peter working nights and sleeping all day. It was
wonderful to share everything we had in common, the memories of home and families, and
the difficulties we faced in the States, the frequent homesickness and our guilt at
leaving our mothers. We shared lots of laughter and tears, and always tried to see the
funny side of things.

On one occasion the funny side was hard to
find. For some reason, perhaps our janitor was away, the garbage bin, which we shared on
the porch between our facing back doors, hadn’t been emptied for at least a week.
It was now overflowing and we couldn’t get the lid to close, so Brenda and I
decided to take it down to the basement ourselves. We each took a handle, and as we
lifted it, it tipped, emptying the contents all over the back porch and down the
stairs.

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘Oh, my God,’ screamed Brenda,
and when I realized what she was screaming about, I screamed too. Millions of maggots
were crawling everywhere.

‘I knew that garbage had been left too
long,’ I said.

‘Now what do we do?’ moaned
Brenda.

‘Let’s see if we can just sweep
them down the stairs and over the edge,’ was my first suggestion. I fetched a
broom and began to sweep, but got nowhere.

‘They’re just crawling
back,’ said Brenda. ‘We’ll have to kill them.’

‘What with?’ I asked, but then I
had an idea. ‘I’m going to run some really hot water and put bleach in it.
That should kill the little buggers.’ Off I went to prepare the lethal potion.

When I came back out, I took off my shoes so
they wouldn’t get wet, and began swooshing the water over the maggots and sweeping
them away in a tide of noxious hot water. Brenda stood and watched as I sloshed about in
the now muddy, maggoty water. It took ages to sweep it all the way down two flights of
stairs and off two back porches. I left the broom by the basement door, staggered
back up the stairs, and told Brenda, ‘If I don’t get a
cup of tea soon, I’m going to die.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you
can’t come in here with those dirty feet. You’ll have to wash them
first.’ Then she added, ‘You can’t wash them in the sink, Iris. That
would be disgusting. You’ll have to flush them clean in the toilet.’ And
that was exactly what I had to do before she’d make me a cup of tea. We’ve
often laughed about that nightmare situation, but it still makes me shudder.

Brenda and I often went shopping in the
evening, as girls do, and we occasionally went to see a movie. This meant Bob had to
baby-sit, but he usually just wanted to watch TV anyway, while I was not prepared to sit
out the rest of my life glued to a TV screen and neither was Brenda. One night Brenda
and I were watching a movie when, about halfway through, the film suddenly stopped and
there was an announcement over the loudspeaker, which at first I didn’t
understand.

‘They’re calling your name,
Iris. They want you to come to the manager’s office right away,’ said
Brenda.

‘Oh, God, no, something must have
happened to the baby!’

We scooted out of our seats and rushed up
the aisle towards the exit. Scared half to death, we went to the foyer, and there was
Bob, with Wayne in his arms. ‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘Your son’s
been crying ever since you left and I want to go to bed.’

Everyone was staring at us and I could have
died of shame at the idea that people might think I was neglecting my baby, and at the
spectacle my husband was making of himself and me. I wasn’t sure if I hated Bob or
myself
more. On the drive home, I clung to my small son and cried.
Eventually I glanced at Brenda. She looked back at me and shrugged, as if to say,
‘Don’t look at me. I don’t know what to say or think either.’ I
dreaded the scene that might erupt when we got home, but there was no scene. Bob
didn’t say a word, just took off his clothes and went to bed, while I sat there,
crying and rocking Wayne, all the time thinking what a terrible person I must be.