My parents’ bedroom was on the first floor, and ours was upstairs. Their bedroom was nearly twice the size of ours and had two views, a side view and a rear view. My mother was proud of her kitchen, which had a Bosch gas stove and oven, an integrated Bosch dishwasher, and a Worcester Bosch combi boiler. We had a basement that my father converted into his home office and another bathroom. Both the upstairs and downstairs had the original wood flooring, which my mother cleaned and polished twice a week.
My father believed that if you took care of old things, they would never be old. People would think you had recently bought them. “Treat everything as if it’s destined to become a valuable antique, and you’ll never go wrong,” he said. “Nothing, no matter how small, should be neglected.”
We were a short walk from High Street, which was the English way of saying Main Street. Julia, who eventually became the elementary-school teacher she had intended to become, was always showing off her knowledge, even when she was only fourteen. She loved correcting my grammar and leaped to explain things before our mother could take a breath.
“High Street, you know,” she told me once, “is a metonym.”
“A what?” I said. I was all of ten.
“It’s when something isn’t called by its own name but by the name of something closely associated with it,” she recited.
“Oh,” I said, still not understanding, or, more important, not caring.
“It’s like calling Mummy’s best dishes china. It comes from its association with Chinese porcelain. We often say ‘the crown’ when we’re referring to the queen. Understand?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, before she could go on.
“I’ll ask you the meaning in two days,” she threatened, because I dismissed her so quickly.
We were quite unalike in so many ways, most of all in how we looked. Julia took after my father more. She was bigger-boned, which gave her “forever wide hips.” Her hair was lighter than mine, more a dull hazel brown, and no matter what she washed it with, it was always coarser. She had light-brown eyes and a bigger nose and wider chin but thin lips. I felt sorry for her when people would remark about my good looks and completely ignore her. Sometimes, it felt like we were from two different families.
Ever since I could remember, people would flatter me about my raven-black hair and violet eyes. They called me a young Elizabeth Taylor. My hair was naturally curly, and along with my high cheekbones and full lips, it made me “movie-star material,” according to Alfie Cook, who was two years older than me.
When I was in the seventh grade, he vowed he would someday be my boyfriend. He stood there and predicted it with the authority of the prime minister. However, he never was my boyfriend, because I never wanted him to be. He was too serious about it for me, and that diminished any romantic possibilities. He was that way about everything and had his whole life planned out when he was just a little more than fifteen. He did accurately predict that he would go to school to become an accountant, just like his father, and when he graduated, he would become part of his father’s company.
“I’ll probably be married by twenty-three and eventually have three children, more if one of them isn’t a boy. Got to carry on the family name, right?”
I thought that having such a definite plan for yourself meant you had no ambition. Ambition required more risk, more exploring. Of course, my father believed Alfie was the most sensible boy in my school, but I don’t think I was ever interested in sensible. To me, being sensible meant denying yourself what you really wanted or wanted to do. There were always good, logical reasons not to buy something or not to do something. I learned that truth from my father after listening to his review of people who came in for loans. He always considered what would be practical, and more often than not, he didn’t take any risks.
It’s always easier and safer to say no, I thought when I was older, but people who live on noes never explore and never discover. Maybe they need fewer Band-Aids in life, but without any risks, they had less of a life to me. These were my secret thoughts growing up. I don’t think there was a day when I didn’t fear my father looking at me more closely and then leaping to his feet, his accusing finger pointed at me like a revolver, crying, “You’re a balloon. My daughter is a balloon!”
I stopped worrying about it when I was older. I was too intent on becoming a professional singer. Even in grade school, I stood out whenever it was time to sing. Everything seemed to move gracefully for me, carrying me toward that one goal, so I believed it was meant to be. I didn’t demand it or even compete for it, but I was quickly singled out in chorus.
Julia blamed herself for my pursuit of a singing career in defiance of my father. She had taken me and my girlfriend Helen Dearwood to the Three Bears to eat. We both could order a pint with our food. Before we were finished, they started the karaoke competition. Helen urged me to go up, and Julia didn’t stop me. And after I sang, the pub’s owner invited me back to sing. I did a few times, and then he offered me ten pounds for Friday and ten for Saturday. My total singing time wasn’t more than a half hour or so in the beginning, but gradually, I sang for longer periods.
How many times would I hear Julia say, “If I had only stopped you that night”?
“It wouldn’t have mattered. When you’re destined to do something, you do it,” I told her, but I think she liked blaming herself. Maybe it made her feel more important in the family and definitely more aligned with our father’s view. When she continually said that, I began thanking her for taking me to the Three Bears, and that put a stop to her mentioning it. I didn’t think it was something anyone should be blamed for anyway. When my father wasn’t around, my mother took some credit for my singing, revealing she sang when she was younger, but quickly added she would never have considered singing as a career.
“Such a thing never entered my thinking,” she told me. “And if it had, I’m sure it would have popped like a soap bubble.”
When she said that, I thought I heard a note of regret, not that she would ever admit to it. There was something terribly sad about her whenever she reminisced about her childhood. I could almost smell her thinking about missed chances. I often wondered, if she could have a second go at it, would she still have married my father? She was surely pretty enough to attract most any man. Whatever good features I had, I had inherited from her. But that was all I really wanted to take from her.
Most girls would want to be something like their mothers, but deep in my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t. My mother was full of compromise. She lived solely to be sure my father was happy and content. I loved her, but she was too eager to think less of herself. It’s often a good thing to think about someone else before yourself, but there are parts of yourself that you must cherish and nurture if you want to be proud or simply be satisfied with life as you know it. I would never tell anyone that my mother was really unhappy. She was; she just didn’t realize it, or want to realize it.
I knew I would never be happy if I didn’t set out to see where my future was. Hopefully, it was waiting for me on a stage, behind a microphone, or in front of a television camera. When I left my house that day years later, it was as if someone who had been living inside me for all my life had finally fully emerged. It was her body now; she was taking the footsteps to the taxi, she was boarding the airplane, and she was looking out the window when the New York skyline appeared and, although no one else could see it, fireworks were exploding in the sky.