Halfway through the days of our lives - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kimberley Starr
MY FATHER MOVED US TO SYDNEY. I filled more and more diary pages as we prepared to leave. "I don't want to stop writing," I wrote, "because then I have to start thinking ... in a few hours' time these people will just be memories." At fifteen we were poised on the on-ramp to life. It was all about boys then, and how to combine a relationship with study. I spent the next, final, years of high school in a Sydney convent where even the company of nuns who had raised families before taking vows wasn't sufficient to stop girls shucking off their virginity as quickly as possible, as if that was the way to avoid being "called". (I remember one Loreto girl walking around with fingers stuck in her ears, just in case.)
To my diary I confessed: "I have decided that life without romance is very dull." In one three-month period, parted from my first unexplored, possibly entirely unreturned Canberra love, I went through four boyfriends, one of whom I also thought I loved. Although our relationships are long over, I recall those boys now as I read through my pages. Even though I've wondered over the years, I've never known what became of those boys or if my friend was "called". Somehow, I doubt it.
When old school friends do catch up over the internet, conversations tend to run along the lines of: "So, how did Allison or Laura end up?" as though being in our thirties were the end of the story: we should all be living our happy endings or getting our just deserts by now. Many of us who seemed to take different paths have ended up in the same place – busy with careers and children with not enough time to enjoy either. Of course, for some the end has come. There have been a couple of car accidents and there is that one girl I remember from Year 10 who seemed to live her life in fast forward, pregnant at sixteen (how shocked we were, yet how little difference it made) and dead in her early thirties, her son already older than we were when so shocked.
There was so much that I didn't and couldn't know. No one "called" me, but there was the moment when, standing with my husband in what should have been the enveloping arms of St Peters, I fully understood what it meant to be Catholic – or rather, to be excluded from it because we were both divorced. There have to be exclusions, things we miss out on and leave out. Life is fuller than we have time for.
I write in my diary of boys I kissed and boys I didn't, but maybe could have. I describe my writing – something I thought would be my great first novel, miraculously produced from the mind of a mere teenager. It was called The House on the Hill. I no longer recall what it was about or even where it is. I won the history award at the end of Year 10 – I don't know why, wasn't I always arguing with the teacher? But now I realise how short it all is, how little of it stays with us.
ONE NIGHT I'M WATCHING THE NEWS over the back of a high chair when a televised face looks familiar and, spoon of rice cereal poised, I lean closer. I know him from somewhere. It turns out that the boy I went to primary school with, whose adoptive parents were friends of my parents, has killed a woman while raiding her house for money for a drug fix. He killed an elderly woman, of our grandparents' generation, for money for a drug fix, and shows no remorse.
Back in International Youth Year, while our teachers tried to keep us informed about life's choices, this is what seemed serious: a school friend confessed that her boyfriend was addicted to marijuana. I told my diary: "The two of us skipped second period to be miserable in ... we bought Minties and consoled ourselves with those, while we caught five trains (we kept getting on the wrong ones) to go shopping." Drags on a funny cigarette at fifteen are not the addiction of a thirty-five-year-old who will kill for a fix, but maybe that led him there. I don't know what consolation to reach for. There are tragedies too deep for confectionary. A boy I knew well has grown up and killed a woman.
Sometimes, we are too worried that life is not what we expected. Motherhood introduces us to children who are strangers, and the dream of combining it with some sort of career overlooks how boring those careers can be. One of the biggest stresses is having all the things we thought we wanted: the careers, the children, the houses, and the emotion that came along with them – the guilt that we should enjoy it. Only we don't have time. We should remember something we seemed to know as children: what it means to be alive – if only we had the time to think about it. We ask each other and wonder. Sitting in doctors' waiting rooms, perhaps, or at night dozing towards sleep, or in the car. A boy I knew well has killed a woman.
One afternoon, driving home with my middle son and supermarket bags in the back seat, I pass a line of cars parked on both sides of the road. I check the clock on my dashboard and it's three o'clock and for one moment, one flash of time, I'm seventeen again and this is the queue of P-plated cars outside my school. Momentarily, I know and feel everything that I knew and felt then. I have a crush on a teacher whose name I don't need to remember, the security of friends and ignorance of what would transpire in the lifetime between then and now. Everything that envelops me belonged to someone else entirely. Husband, career, babies – these were all part of an inconceivable future in a moment that took less time to experience than to describe. And then, back in the now, bringing home a lazy dinner after a busy weekend, driving my car with my son singing cheerily in the back, I wonder again what happened to all that. The girls we were, the feelings we had, the desires and the dreams, the laughter – what happened to everything we left behind? What happens to the past when we don't live there any more?
"I have bought a notebook which is to be my next volume of diary. I wonder if it will see as much change in my life as this one has," I wrote on the third last diary page. It was the year I moved to Sydney and discovered boys. The future, now another chapter of my past, opened up a new and empty book. I was such an optimist. "On average, life gets better. Of course there are always bad patches, but life gets continuously more sunny." It's odd now to read what I wrote next, as it seems to be some particular message – about balance, perhaps. "On average," I repeated. As I write, my grandfather lies sick, perhaps dying, in an interstate hospital. I order a mug to send to him that has a photo of my three boys on one side and "Feel better soon, Pop" on the other. My youngest is smiling in the photo. He still has only two teeth. I think of him that day that my brakes failed, and how it felt to be standing, holding him, at the side of the road after the emergency vehicles, the accident team, had been and gone and we were waiting for a taxi home. He was a small, squirming warmth in my arms, an embrace I had thought I would not feel again. The price we pay to love our children is becoming parents. The line continues on, our grandparents warm those beds for us. All I hold of the past that we can hold on to is in words. Although I stopped writing it years ago, I'm glad I kept that diary. ♦