Dear Doctor Lily Read online

  ‘By hand?’ Verna was alarmed. ‘This is America, girl. We don’t wash our own clothes here.’

  Her own outfit could have done with a soak and a scrub. Vast grey knitted trousers, as wide as they were long. A purple T-shirt over bellying breasts that fell to where her waist might be. Hairy black cardigan that rode her gross shoulders like an animal of prey, its loaded pockets swinging at the front, the back ending half-way up her back in a ragged arch, the T-shirt ending soon below that, and half a yard of bumpy flesh before you came to the stretched elastic of the elephantine trousers. When Verna moved about the small house, knocking things over or aside, she created a disturbance in the air, and the wind of it was sour.

  On the way downtown where the shops and launderette were, Verna’s great rustic car, whose back window was taped up with plastic, coughed up the hill and rattled down the other side into a valley of superb pine trees and scattered white or red farmhouses, swinging from side to side round the corners, kept on the road by Verna’s powerful arms at the helm. Ida had to hold Vernon tightly on her lap to prevent his head bashing against the window. He was a passive little boy. Born to hubbub, he had decided not to compete.

  At the foot of the hill the car crossed a wide river and slewed to a stop behind the grain mill, where Henry Legge worked.

  ‘Henry!’ His wife leaned an arm and a squashed bosom out of the window. ‘C’mon out here!’

  ‘Shaker!’ A man doing something outside called into a shed. Henry was called Shaker at work.

  He hurried out, flapping long hands at his wife. ‘You’ll like to get me fired. This place is full of visitors.’

  ‘Bunch of snots.’ Verna put her finger under her spread nose, and pushed it into a pig’s snout. ‘Why can’t they buy their flour at Lefty’s?’

  The mill ground and sold earthy grains and cereals and special flour of all kinds from coarse to silky. Ida, yearning to the rustic like all city people, was entranced by the old waterwheel turning slowly in the swift river. Lunchers in the glass-walled restaurant above watched the great wheel dip and raise and spill the water as it had done for a hundred years, wet green whiskers dangling and dropping silver pearls, and floating soaked again to rise dripping.

  Henry could not take her into the milling shed or the barn or the mill store, or anywhere the visitors went. The old waterwheel was believed to power the grinding, so Henry must be invisible in his oily overalls in which he ran the machinery that actually turned the grindstones.

  Lefty’s Market was a grocer’s in a town no bigger than a large English village, but with many more shops. The shelves of the low-ceilinged market were crammed with things that Ida had never seen. She wanted to stay and explore, but Verna careered through the place like a lava flow, throwing tins and packets on top of Vernon in the trolley, criticizing, swearing at prices, smelling the pork chops.

  ‘This here is Ida that Buddy brought over from England to marry,’ she told Lefty at the paying counter.

  ‘American girls not good enough for him?’

  Ida was to hear this a lot until she lost her accent. It was an insult disguised as a joke.

  ‘So you’re from jolly old England,’ Lefty said, with a blue-lipped grin, and some shoppers turned to have a look. ‘How about a spot of tea?’

  That was another joke Ida was to hear many times. Sometimes she tried saying, ‘We say “cup of tea”,’ but the joker knew better.

  There was a rack of dud-looking postcards at the front of the shop. I’ll get fat here, she would write to Lily. Jam doughnuts and everything is giant size, and six different kinds of tomato soup, but Verna pushed her past the cards and on to the No-name Laundromat, where Ida saw her pink nylon blouse going into the machine with the baby’s dirty nappies. Mrs Legge sagged on to a chair to wait. Ida wanted to go back to Lefty’s, but Verna pulled her down next to her and gave her a lecture on how to take care of Buddy.

  ‘Very sensitive boy, you can’t cross him. It upsets his system. He’s a free spirit, like I say, a free spirit. He shouldn’t marry, really.’

  Oh, thanks very much. Ida put her hand over her mouth. The hot dog she had eaten at lunch was getting back at her. ‘If you didn’t put your hand over your mouth, no one would notice,’ she heard Lily saying. Mrs Legge didn’t notice anyway. You could die of a burst ulcer before she paid any attention.

  Folding the pile of torn grey nappies, Mrs Legge sighed and said, ‘Isn’t it always the way? I’ll just get this one trained to do his jobs in the toilet like God meant him to do, and it’ll be time to start all over again with the next.’

  ‘What?’ Ida stood with a sock in each hand and stared at her among the tumbling washers, the soap and hot air, the waiting women with their feet planted parallel.

  ‘Didn’t you know? Lookit.’ Verna showed her profile.

  ‘It doesn’t show.’

  Where was the baby under all those layers of fat? How did Shaker ever find his way in? Ida had seen enough pregnant women, God knows, including herself before Jackson was sent down, but she was shocked.

  Hot from the No-name, Verna smelled very bad. She put one bag of laundry over her shoulder and pulled up Vernon from among the fluff balls on the floor. Ida took the other bag and followed her out.

  During the next days while Ida was waiting for Buddy to come back and marry her, a few women neighbours dropped into Legge Manor, to inspect the new recruit to the family. They talked a lot, so Ida didn’t have to say much. They seemed quite pleasant, but almost before Verna Legge had shut the door behind them with a thud that brought a nervous ‘ting’ from the wall clock, she had started to find fault.

  ‘What did she come for? I know what she came for. Looking around. You see how she looked around? Three cups of coffee she drunk on me. Then I make a fresh pot and she takes but one sip. Well, they got a good look at you, so I hope it was worth it.’

  ‘They made me feel welcome,’ Ida said. ‘They’re very nice, your friends.’

  ‘They’re not friends, they’re neighbours,’ Mrs Legge said firmly. ‘Shut up in there!’ She slapped at her mounded stomach. ‘Lookit,’ she laughed gleefully. ‘See the rascal? See him poundin’ about?’

  But the baby could no more make itself known to the world than if it had been inside a two-foot thick igloo.

  The day before the wedding, they went downtown to buy a white hat. Ida had planned to pin a flower in her hair, but Mrs Legge said she had to wear a proper hat, like it or not. On the way back, they would ‘swing by’ Buddy’s married sister, ‘since she hasn’t chosen to behave like a Christian woman and stop around and tell you hello. Put on them shiny spike heels, Hilda.’ She sometimes called Ida that.

  ‘I thought she lived at a farm. I’ll wear my flats. She won’t mind.’

  ‘She’s supposed to mind.’ Verna made her frog face. ‘She’s jealous of Buddy, see. Thinks she’s something now because her husband went to college before he dropped out to farm a few ratty sheep. I want her to see my Buddy’s done it again.’

  ‘Done what?’ Had he been married before? One more surprise along with all the rest.

  ‘Gone one better than her.’ Verna pulled out her gum, squinted at it, passed it as fit and sucked it back inside.

  ‘Can I have some gum?’

  ‘Help yourself.’ Mrs Legge waved at the jar full of gum packets on the windowsill among the dirty mugs and dust-snagged cactus plants. ‘English people are so polite. It gets me down how they talk so polite.’ She was getting sick of having Ida there.

  The hat was a white felt with a wavy brim turned down all round. It rode rather high because of Ida’s stiff hair, but Mrs Legge paid for it while Ida was still trying to come to terms with it, and carried it out in a bag. Ida took it out in the car and turned it round on her fist; wondering about a bit of ribbon to hide the join where crown met brim.

  ‘Leave the price tag on.’ Verna smiled, driving with straight arms to give herself room behind the wheel. ‘I want Sis to see it.’

  Sis lived
over another hill in a small farmhouse that sat comfortably by a stream in a valley, with a sheep pasture sloping up to a dark magnificent wood. In front of the house was a garden with flower-beds and a low uneven wall, and across the unpaved road, a big barn and some smaller sheds, old and weathered. There was a fenced yard with two cows in it and some speckled chickens. Ducks sat in wet grass at the edge of a muddy pond. Ida’s heart rose.

  A collie ran out barking, and a healthy-looking girl in a long skirt and boots came out of the house. The afternoon sun, shining low along the road, put coppery lights into the thick bush of hair that stood out round her head.

  ‘There she is,’ Mrs Legge said gloomily.

  A wiry little girl with a streamer of long fair hair ran out behind her mother and charged into her grandmother, who bent to pick her up with some fond pride, although she told Sis, ‘Looks as if she didn’t have a square meal in weeks.’

  Ida and Sis took to each other, which annoyed Mrs Legge. She had talked about Sis and Jeff as if they were on their beam ends, but they seemed to be living a fine life among animals and growing things in an airy, uncluttered house, warmed by a huge ornate wood stove.

  Sis took Ida out to see the farm. You could hear the movement of the water in the stream behind the house. The wind came down the valley from the hill and rushed about in the trees. The smell of cow manure was sharp and oddly clean.

  Behind the barn Ida met Jeff in a fringed leather waistcoat and corduroys, filling a small truck with logs he sold to help support them in the winter. He was shy and so was Sis, but Ida felt less shy with them than she had with anyone, including Lily, who wasn’t exactly critical, but who knew how she wanted you to be. This slow, hard-working, outdoor life was different from anything she had ever known, but it called to her.

  ‘Do you think Buddy would leave the Air Force and become a farmer?’ she asked.

  Sis and Jeff laughed heartily. No comment, so Ida laughed too.

  At the car Verna Legge showed the wedding hat.

  ‘I was going to find some sort of flower to wear,’ Ida said, disclaiming the hat.

  ‘Put it on, Hilda.’

  ‘No.’

  Sis was laughing inside herself. Ida was not going to be made a fool of.

  ‘Don’t make her, mother. She – well look, it might be bad luck for me to see it before the wedding.’

  ‘Oh, you are coming, then?’

  ‘Sure.’ Sis began to laugh inside herself again. ‘Wasn’t I invited?’

  Mrs Legge backed the car without looking to see if the dog or child were behind it, and hauled it round like a battleship.

  ‘See what I mean,’ she stated triumphantly as she lurched off, scattering stones.

  Ida had turned round to see Sis and the little girl holding hands, with their hair and their long skirts blowing. She fought the stiff window to roll it down far enough to lean out and wave.

  Buddy did not turn up until early the next morning.

  ‘They screwed up my pass,’ he said. ‘Been driving through the night.’

  As Ida understood it, Watkins base wasn’t all that far away, but he needed a grievance to present to his mother, like a bunch of flowers.

  He looked better in his uniform. He always did, and when he had had a shower and a shave and a stack of Verna’s pancakes, with floods of maple syrup and oily butter that clung round his mouth, he was quite a dashing bridegroom.

  My wedding day. Who would have believed it? Eighty-five per cent of English women get married at least once, but each one is shocked when it happens. The electric heater in the trailer had set fire to itself and burned a hole in the wall that smelled of scorching rubber, so Ida was allowed to get ready in the bath-room, and to have it to herself for one whole half hour. She soaked with a highly scented bath cube given her by Phyllis, who was in a romantic mood, thrilled with herself in a new dress the colour of cough syrup.

  What the hell am I doing? Ida lay in the fragrant scummy water, keeping the back of her hair dry. Do I love him? Lily shouldn’t have talked like that. Secretly, it had shaken Ida a bit. Does he love me? In his way, I suppose. We can make a go of it. Because it was her wedding day and therefore quite unreal, Ida let herself drift away into lying fantasies of low, cushioned rooms and log fires and flaxen-haired children and cow manure.

  When she came out of the bathroom in her white dress and silver shoes, with her new silver eye make-up and pancake foundation over the wretched shadows below them, and the best pink mouth she had ever drawn, glossy as satin, Buddy looked up from the kitchen table and passed the back of his hand over his lips.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said in a wet throaty voice, which meant emotion with him. ‘Bit like they wear for tennis, but not bad.’ He looked her slowly up and down and up (she had a padded bra). Then he wiped his mouth again and gave a low whistle.

  Mrs Legge had the white hat over a lampshade near the door, so it could not be avoided, but after Buddy had driven off with his friend Malc who was going to stand up for him as his best man, and the rest of them were all ready to leave for the church, Sis hurried in wearing a long Indian kind of dress and gave Ida a big white carnation made of silk that she had bought for her hair.

  Ida was in a spot. Not really. Mrs Legge could stuff herself with the hat. Sis pinned the flower on to one side of her curls. Since Verna Legge was raging, Ida went off to the church in Jeff’s truck.

  After the wedding – my God, I’ve gone and done it! – they had coffee and cakes and beer and sweet wine in the hall at the side of the church. It was nice. There was a doddery old grandmother on a walking frame and a few cousins and local people, and Buddy stayed next to Ida all the time, holding her hand in his hot sticky one, or stroking her arm and telling people, ‘This is my wife.’

  ‘Never thought they’d get ya, Buddy boy.’ ‘Nor did I. Feels good though.’ ‘Atta boy.’ ‘Sure feels good.’ And other comfortable remarks that made Ida feel glad about the whole thing.

  Henry Legge, in a suit, said to her quite formally that he was proud to welcome her into the family. Mrs Legge did not say a word to anyone the entire time. She sat by the wall with her knees apart, and when Buddy and Ida came to say goodbye to her before they left, she turned her head away, so Buddy’s kiss landed nowhere.

  ‘You better kiss her goodbye,’ he whispered, but Ida merely gave her a victor’s smile and drew him away.

  At the gates into the Air Force base, there was some fuss because Ida did not yet have a Dependant’s identity card, and the guard, who was as brusque and suspicious as a gaoler, would not believe she was Mrs Legge.

  ‘Look, this is my wedding dress,’ she leaned forwards shyly to tell him. She had taken the white flower out of her hair and put it carefully away in a paper napkin with silver bells on it that one of Verna’s despised neighbours had brought, but she was still wearing the white dress.

  Buddy put out an elbow and pushed her back. Women didn’t talk to guards. Although he lived here, Buddy was quite nervous, because the man in the white helmet was a military police sergeant and out for trouble. He finally had to unpack a bag at the back of the car, scattering things on the floor, to find the marriage certificate.

  ‘Welcome to Watkins,’ the sergeant said dismissively.

  Their house was Number 1009 Pershing Street, which did not mean that there were one thousand and eight other houses there, but they were in the tenth block. Although Buddy had already been to the house after the last couple moved out, and moved in a few bits of furniture, the sergeant had humiliated him and he was too nervous to find the street in the dark. The officers’ houses were bungalows spaced apart, with gardens like a suburb, but the huge enlisted family area had dozens of streets with identical, square, two-storey wooden houses, almost all with a bright light outside.

  ‘Electricity must be cheap over here,’ Ida observed, to ease the tension.

  Buddy was too rattled to answer. At last, when they found themselves at the crossroads of Otis and School Streets, he had to ask a
group of boys discussing a motor-bike on the corner, which he hated to do. By the time they found the house and pulled into the covered car park alongside, he was cursing under his breath and his hands were shaking.

  ‘He gets easily upset,’ Verna Legge had told Ida in the No-name Laundromat

  Too right, he did. When he had unlocked the front door, he forgot to pick up Ida and carry her over the sill, as he had promised. He walked into the house, switching on all the lights, and went right through into the kitchen at the back to run water and sluice his face.

  ‘Come back here!’ Ida stood on the wooden front step in her good coat with the Peter Pan velvet collar over the white dress.

  Her shout brought him. He looked hastily to right and left to see if any neighbours had heard Ida and come out to look, then scooped her up and carried her easily into the bare house, kicking the door shut behind him. When he bent to put her down, Ida clung round his neck and giggled. He squeezed her tightly and kissed her with his wet face, and she made him carry her into the kitchen, kicking off her silver shoes as they went.

  There was a stove and a sink and a refrigerator and a washing-machine, but they only had two chairs and a card table in the living-room, and a bed upstairs.

  There was some beer in the fridge. Ida didn’t drink much of hers because she didn’t want it to repeat on her in bed. Buddy drank quite a lot, stopped being jittery and became sentimental. He even mooed to her, ‘Don’t ever leave me, Ah-eye-da.’

  He carried her up the stairs, because that had gone well for both of them downstairs, had a quick but satisfactory bash at her, and went to sleep.

  That was all right. When Ida was twelve, sex had turned out to be less exhilarating than the magazines made out, and nothing that had happened to her since Pa had changed her mind.

  Buddy woke in a foul mood and went off to work, hardly speaking to her. That was all right too. Best thing about playing house was having it to yourself all day. Ida stood in the kitchen in her nightgown and bare feet. The house was warm. The refrigerator made a responsible whirring sound. My own home! She stroked counters and door frames, and furnished the house in her mind with flowered wallpaper and bright-coloured chairs and carpets. She had bread and grape jelly and tea without milk. Among the few groceries Buddy had got in, he had remembered tea. She thought of him fondly.