The GI Bride (22 page)

Again, it seemed my pregnancy would never
end, and every time I saw Dr Crown for a check-up, we thought it would be the last visit
before the baby arrived. Finally, before I left his office one day, the doctor gave me
an injection that he said might get labour started, if the baby was ready. I went home
and, sure enough, began having contractions. When they were coming regularly, Mary
rushed me to the hospital. Every time we hit a bump in the road, she’d scream,
thinking she might have hurt me, but the look on her face had me laughing so hard we
both ended up with tears rolling down our faces.

‘Oh, stop it,’ I said.
‘Now I’ve gone and wet myself!’ Off we went again, and laughed all the
way to the hospital.

After I’d been admitted, someone took
me directly to the labour ward. There, a nurse prepped me for delivery but suddenly the
contractions stopped. It had been a false alarm and eventually the doctor sent me home
again. I, of course, was disappointed but Mary said she was grateful for the practice
run.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told
her.

‘Don’t be,’ she replied,
‘I’ve been scared to death about getting you there in time, and now, when it
really happens, I’ll be an old pro at playing the part of Daddy.’ My pal
Mary was a real trouper.

We carried on for about two more weeks, but
then Dr Crown decided labour should be induced, but this time it would be in the
hospital. The baby was again quite large and in the right position. Mary took me to the
hospital
and off we went to the labour ward. There, a nurse put me on
an intravenous drug to induce labour. The contractions began almost immediately, and
this time they didn’t stop. Once more I was in labour for a long time but finally,
in the delivery room, when Dr Crown announced that I had a healthy baby girl, I was over
the moon with joy. She weighed in at nine pounds two and a half ounces, so, after all
that exercising, I hadn’t produced a smaller baby, but
I
was a bit
smaller this time.

Robin Lee, as we named her, was born on 4
October 1961 and was the most beautiful baby: she had enormous dark eyes and a thick mop
of black hair. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and when I finally closed them, I
could still see her perfect face. I couldn’t believe I’d been lucky enough
to have a little girl, especially after I’d wished for a son as my first child.
Mary made me laugh when she told me what had happened in the fathers’ waiting
room.

‘I was a nervous wreck,’ she
said. ‘I was pacing up and down, and someone told me I shouldn’t be in
there, that the room was only for fathers.’

‘I am the father!’ Mary had
protested, in her agitated state.

We congratulated each other on the great job
we had done and she left to notify Palmer. Throughout Robin’s life, we have often
joked about who her ‘real’ father was.

I soon received roses and a phone call from
Robin’s biological father, who cried, saying he would never drink again, that he
loved me, couldn’t wait to see us and couldn’t live without me. In the next
few days, I heard from him a lot, always with the same promises. His parents came to see
the baby and they were delighted with their little
granddaughter,
especially because she was so much like her daddy.

We went home to Mary and John’s, and
for the next few days there was a stream of visitors and tons of gifts. Even the local
shopkeepers sent flowers and presents, such was the excitement about our little
daughter’s birth. Wayne, who was now almost six, was just as excited as everyone
else was about his little sister and we had to remember to make a fuss of him too. He
was always such a loving little boy that no one would ever want his feelings to be
hurt.

My family in England was thrilled for me
because they knew how much I had wanted a girl. I wished I knew when they would get to
see her; it was nearly two years since I’d been home.

I knew it was time to face the future
positively so I booked our flight to Las Vegas. Palmer told me he had found and rented
what he described as a luxury furnished apartment, complete with swimming pool, and
until we found the right house, we were to leave our own furniture in storage. After
shipping the baby gifts, we got ourselves packed up too. Then, when Robin was just ten
days old, we said a tearful goodbye to Mary and John, and flew to Nevada, to start the
new and wonderful life Palmer had promised us.

When we got off the plane at McCarran Field
in Las Vegas, it was like stepping into a steam bath. The heat that greeted us, even
though it was evening, almost knocked me over it was like being smothered with a hot
damp blanket. I was immediately reminded of my first summer in Chicago, in 1955, when
the heat had been so oppressive and I’d been so miserable. Oh, my God, I thought,
if it’s like this at night, what must it be like during the daytime? I
couldn’t dwell on that now, though, because there was too much else to think
about. As we came through the gate, there was Palmer, grinning from ear to ear. He was
obviously smitten with his new baby daughter and happy that we had finally arrived. By
that time, he had bought a car, and drove us away to our new luxury accommodation.

In 1961, Las Vegas was not nearly as built
up as it is today and we had to drive through some desert areas before we reached
‘The Strip’ where all the big hotels and casinos were. It was late evening
so the lights were dazzling as we passed the Flamingo, Dunes, Sands hotels and many
smaller properties. All of those original hotels and casinos have since disappeared,
replaced with much bigger and far grander buildings. On a later visit to Las Vegas, many
years later, I found that I didn’t recognize the area where we had lived; in fact,
I couldn’t find it.

Our eyes were almost popping out of our heads
as we drove down a new road that had desert on either side and pulled into the brand new
Sunset Sands Apartment Complex. The buildings looked much like rows of motel units with
a swimming pool between each pair. There was a small amount of grass around each pool,
but other than that, it was just sand for miles around.

‘Welcome to your new home,’ said
Palmer, as he slid open the glass patio door that took us straight into the living
room.

‘Is that the only door?’ I
asked.

‘Nope, there’s another just like
it into the bedroom,’ he replied.

‘That’s weird,’ I said.
‘Not very secure, is it?’ I suppose I was a little wary after living in the
big city.

‘Nothing to worry about here,’
he said, laughing. ‘No one’s going to bother us in the desert.’

Wayne was already off checking the place
out. ‘Where do I sleep?’ he asked, and Palmer showed him a room with two
double beds. ‘Wow, can I have a friend to stay over?’ We laughed and told
him that as soon as he found a friend, he could certainly invite him to stay the
night.

The apartment itself was fairly new and
decent but, again, felt like a motel. There was a smallish living-dining area, a
galley-style kitchen in the middle, and two large bedrooms, with a shared bathroom off a
connecting hallway across the whole back of the apartment. It was a strange layout but
there was a washing-machine in the kitchen, which was a great relief since we had
diapers. Palmer had not used the washing-machine: it still had its Styrofoam packing
inside. I discovered he had been
sending all of his dirty clothes out
to be laundered and ironed. Even his underwear was in the closet on hangers.

‘Isn’t that a bit
expensive?’ I asked later.

‘Well, there’s no dryer and I
wasn’t about to hang stuff out on the line,’ he said. ‘Besides, I
didn’t have an iron and wouldn’t know how to use one if I did.’

Men, I thought. Mum was right. They’re
bloody useless.

Palmer had the next day off work so we
ventured outside to explore this strange new desert world and, of course, Wayne headed
for the swimming pool. ‘It’s too cold,’ he said, shivering, with goose
bumps all over him the desert night air had chilled it. He looked disappointed. I was
relaxing on a poolside lounge chair and the baby was in her buggy beside me. Palmer
assured Wayne that the water would be much warmer after the sun had been beating down on
it for a few hours and told him to try it again after lunch. By the time ‘after
lunch’ came, it was too hot to be outside so he had to wait until early evening.
We realized that we had to adjust our thinking and schedules to the desert
temperatures.

On many occasions I ended up doing my
grocery shopping at midnight since the supermarkets were open twenty-four hours a day. I
was surprised by the rows of slot machines at the front of all the stores, just after
the checkout lanes, and shocked to see how many people used them before leaving. I came
to enjoy shopping late at night: not only was it much cooler, but that was when I was
most likely to see some of the stars doing their shopping. One night, I thought
I’d die of embarrassment when I almost knocked down Keely Smith the singer, and
wife
of Louis Prima the band leader with my shopping cart as we both
sailed around the end of an aisle. She was startled but smiled at me. ‘We really
must stop meeting like this,’ she said. We both laughed, but my knees were
knocking. I couldn’t wait to get home to tell Palmer.

Two strange weather-related incidents
occurred when we lived in our new desert home. The first was a sandstorm, which almost
totally removed the paint from the car we had no garage so it was outside in the parking
lot. Thank goodness, our insurance paid to have it repainted. The second was another
storm, wind this time, and I had forgotten that I’d hung laundry on the line
overnight. When I remembered it and went outside to retrieve it, it was gone. Now, that
wasn’t all bad: I’d only had some old sheets and towels out there, but lots
of new sheets and towels had blown over into our yard from one of the hotels on the
Strip. I decided it was poetic justice and kept them all.

Palmer couldn’t wait to show us around
the city and to introduce us to the people at the Flamingo Hotel, all of whom had been
anxious to meet his family. The casinos were palatial, with their crystal chandeliers
and all the other glitz, but the cigar and cigarette smoke made my eyes water. The sound
of all the slot machines was unbelievable. It reminded me of something I used to hear on
buses in England, when the conductor’s little machine spat out the tickets,
ka-ching
,
ka-ching
. I was amazed to see how packed those places
were at any time of day or night. That was when I learned that Las Vegas truly was the
‘City Without Clocks’, just like the title of the book by Ed Reid. There
were no clocks in the casinos. Of course, the idea
was that people
should forget the time and how long they’d been there.

Besides the casinos and the extravagant
shows, there wasn’t much to see in Las Vegas. We drove up to the Hoover Dam, which
was spectacular, but it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I couldn’t stay there for long
because, for the first time ever, I experienced some kind of phobia. It almost
suffocated me. I felt closed in by all those high, cliff-like mountains. I had the baby
in my arms, and when Palmer asked me to come and look over the parapet at the water
below, I was petrified that I would drop Robin over the edge. I had nightmares about it
afterwards.

When I studied the map of Las Vegas, I
noticed there was an Indian reservation on the edge of town. I’d been disappointed
when the one I’d visited in Wisconsin had turned out to be just a tourist
attraction. Perhaps this is the real thing, I thought. After all, we’re out in the
old Wild West now. I asked Palmer to take me there and I was disconcerted to find that
it was just a bunch of shacks, some not much better than chicken coops, with Native
Americans living in them. It was depressing, and just one more disillusioning American
experience.

‘Is this really how they live?’
I asked Palmer.

‘Yeah,’ he replied.
‘They’re all drunks, so what can you expect?’

Hmm, I thought. You should talk.

One of the first things I did after settling
into our new home was to find a Lutheran church. After we’d attended services for
several weeks, the pastor invited the congregation to come forward to accept Holy
Communion. I stood in line to await my turn at the altar. When I was in
front of the pastor, he stopped and looked at me, and as he began to offer the
sacrament to me, he suddenly withdrew it. He leaned in close to me. ‘I’m
sorry but you can’t receive Communion,’ he whispered.

‘Why?’ I asked, as the heat of
embarrassment rose in my face.

‘You haven’t transferred your
membership to this church yet.’

I stood frozen to the spot for what seemed
like minutes but could only have been seconds, then turned and walked out of the church.
Shock and disbelief turned to rage and I began to run, tears streaming down my face. I
didn’t stop until I arrived home. Another rejection, I thought. I’ve been
rejected by the bloody church. I was glad the children hadn’t gone with me that
day: it would have made my escape much more difficult. Palmer asked me what had
happened, and when I told him, he laughed. ‘That’s what you get for trying
to be such a goody-goody,’ was all he said, which upset me even more.