Chapter 46

When you imagine the life story of a fortune teller’s daughter, you probably imagine red satin drapes and flickering candles, colored smoke and crystal balls.

Think this instead: a white, weatherboard, two-bedroom house with red terra-cotta roof tiles on a quarter-acre block, a kitchen wallpapered with vertical rows of fat bunches of purple grapes, a tiny mint-green bathroom, a backyard with a mandarin tree and a mulberry tree, a vegetable garden, a shed for the chickens, and a shed forDad.

Think freckled noses and screaming cicadas, fishing rods and bubbling creeks, the nose-tickling fragrance of eucalyptus and freshly mown grass, an endless expanse of hopeful blue sky.

Think suburban Sydney in the 1950s.

—

My parents met in 1946, right after the war, at a New Year’s Eve dance hosted by the Air Force Association. My mother kept the ticket, which I still have, faded and precious. It says: Dancing 8:30-1:30, Liquor permitted in hall, Novelties for all, Confetti battle. Admission 10/6 Single.

The dance was held at The Cab, which was what everyone called the Pacific Cabaret in Hornsby: an elegant, white, art deco–style building, designed so that when you walked inside it felt like you were stepping on board a cruise ship. The light fittings resembled ships’ bows. Cutout palm trees decorated the walls. The dance floor, made of tallowwood, was considered the best in Sydney.

The Cab became a roller skating rink in the 1970s.

The building was demolished in the eighties and replaced by an office block.

It’s often best not to think too much about “progress” or you may find yourself depressed.

My parents’ names were Arthur Hetherington and Mae Mills.

Arthur, my dad, was a shy, deep-voiced, tall country boy from Lismore, with a head for figures, good with his hands, a careful, meticulous, logical man. His favorite things were fishing, canoeing, and chess.

Dad served in the war as an aircraft mechanic. Most of his time was spent in hangars and workshops on the island of Morotai in Indonesia. “Oh, I think he had a grand old time,” Mum would say, as if his wartime experience was just an overseas version of the time he spent tinkering in his shed after tea. If asked about the war, Dad talked about the pilots anxiously, his forehead creased, as if he still felt the weight of responsibility for their safety. He remembered “a funny Queenslander called Gus” and “a young bloke called Les who sang like an angel.” All the pilots had superstitions. Gus always flew with his childhood teddy bear. Wasn’t embarrassed about it. Les never flew without first kicking the front tire three times.

Dad reckoned he knew enough that he could take off and fly one of the planes, but he’d have trouble landing it. People always chuckled when he said this, but I found it troubling. Landing is pretty important, I thought.

(Almost half of all men who took part in a recent survey believed they could successfully land a commercial aircraft in an emergency. It’s their hubris that makes men both so adorable and exasperating, don’t you think?)

Mae, my mum, was eighteen when they met, three years younger than my dad, and bright, beautiful, and effervescent. Her favorite things were dances, parties, library books, and the pictures. She and Dad got talking at the refreshment bar. Mum ordered a Kir Royale. Dad said, “That sounds good, I’ll have the same.” He said it was so sweet he nearly spat it out. (It must have had too much crème de cassis. I have one every year to toast their anniversary. I highly recommend, but the ratios must be correct.)

Mum introduced him to her older sister, my auntie Pat, who I’m sure was smoking a cigarette when she said, “Read Arthur’s palm, Mae. See what’s in his future.”

Mum read Dad’s palm and told him a dance was in his future.

Her flirting skills were impeccable.

She then got the surprise of her life—this was always my favorite part of the story—because Dad could dance, and he didn’t look like a man who could dance, but he could do it all: the rumba, foxtrot, swing, the Canadian Three-Step, the Gypsy Tap.

Auntie Pat said it sure was nice to watch Arthur and Mae dance together that first time, like seeing something that was always meant to be.

You would think with parents like that, I would have turned out to be a good dancer, but sadly not. “Anyone can line dance,” the teacher assured me when I signed up for his class, and you should have seen the expression on his face as I proved him wrong.

I was born right at the start of the mid-twentieth-century baby boom. This was when childbirth rates soared after all the servicemen came home in optimistic moods, ready to start families. I am therefore a baby boomer. We’re not popular. Younger generations believe we’ve had more than our fair allocation of luck. Perhaps they are right.

Correction: And service women. It wasn’t just servicemen coming home after the war. Sorry, Auntie Pat. My auntie Pat served as a nurse with the Australian Army Nursing Service. I remember her bandaging my grazed knee once and my mother trying to correct her technique. “I treated gunshot wounds in the Middle East, Mae.” Auntie Pat blew smoke out the side of her mouth. “I think I can manage this.”

My mother said, “Sorry, Pat.” It was rare to hear my mother apologize. She liked to be right. I do too.

Auntie Pat’s fiancé was taken prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore. He starved to death working on the Burma Railway. Auntie Pat never married, although she was deeply in love with Paul McCartney, but he wasn’t available. I’ve read that your first experience of love permanently changes your brain. It does feel like that.

Mr. Brown, who lived three doors down from us, had a son who was also a prisoner of war, but he came home. Sometimes, on moonlit summer nights, he took off all his clothes and ran through the neighborhood. Poor old Basil Brown, we children said, obliviously.

There were a lot of “old maids” in our neighborhood, who had maybe lost their first loves like Auntie Pat, or maybe there weren’t enough men to go around after the war and they never even got first loves. Miss Heywood had a long blond plait and often cried silently for no reason as she taught us piano. Of course, I’m sure there was a reason for her tears, we just didn’t know it. Perhaps it was the sound of our playing.

Miss Piper, an angry, beautiful lady, kept six milking cows on a vacant block of land next to her house. She used to take the cows for “walks” across the bush and up our road, like they were her pets. She’d named all her cows after flowers: Buttercup. Lily. I can’t recall any more names. Primrose! Well, you get the picture.

I’m glad we no longer say “old maids,” and for the widespread availability of antidepressants, dating apps, sperm banks, and vibrators. It’s much easier for young women to be single. Progress isn’t always bad.

I had no brothers or sisters and never had a lot of friends, due to my personality, but I had my friend Ivy who lived next door to us on Bridge Road. I don’t remember meeting her. She just always existed. Like a sister, I guess. She did the talking for both of us.

Back then Hornsby was a bushland suburb with a country village feel to it. Ivy and I ran along bush tracks filling our billycans with wild blackberries. We splashed bare feet in the big clear rock pools at the bottom of our street. We caught tadpoles, frogs, and lizards. Ivy and I had our own little tomahawks, if you can believe it, which we used to cut down tree branches to build bonfires.

The colors of my childhood memories are so rich and vibrant, but then again, yours probably are too. My eye specialist told me the lenses of our eyes naturally become yellower as we age, so colors are never as bright as they once were.

On weekends my dad took me fishing in a tinny boat he kept at Apple Tree Bay. I always had multiple thoughts to share with my dad as we waited for the fish to bite, and questions to ask. It’s possible I never paused for breath. Once, I overheard him say to my mother, “Gosh, she’s the funniest little thing.”

I still feel the warmth of his love in those words.

Although I didn’t inherit his dancing abilities, I did inherit my dad’s head for figures. He said I could count to one hundred by the time I was two. I’m not saying I was a genius. I was just mathematically inclined.

I read that the delightful award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence pretended to walk with a limp as a child and was so “committed” to her performance her teacher believed her to be permanently injured. I found this anecdote charming. Jennifer was already the actress she would one day become.

My father could see the person I was destined to become.

He played mathematical games with me when I was very small. He would set up bowls of sliced banana on the table. He’d eat a piece and say, How many now, Cherry? That’s how I learned addition and subtraction and multiplication.

Dad worked for the railways. He started out as a third class machinist, I believe, and moved up and up, all the while taking classes offered by the Railway Institute. He said to me, Cherry, if ever there is an opportunity to learn something new, you must take it.

Dad was ambitious. His dream was to work for the Department of Railways in York Street as a suit-and-tie-wearing “businessman” in the green-tiled art deco building called Transport House. He studied for an accounting qualification by correspondence. He and I did our homework together each night at the kitchen table.

I was in charge of balancing the family checkbook by the time I was nine. I would bend my head over my task at the kitchen table and sometimes I caught my parents exchanging smiles; maybe they were even trying not to laugh. I expect I looked self-important.

One night Dad told me I might one day study mathematics at Sydney University, and my mother made a sound: a little exhalation of disbelief.

“Cherry could study mathematics at university if she so chooses,” said my father sternly.

My parents didn’t often argue. Sometimes, if Mum was in a mood, she would snootily correct my dad’s country boy speech. “It’s fish ing, not fishin’,” and sometimes my dad would inform my mother that money didn’t grow on trees. Surely she knows that, I would think to myself bemusedly.

Their most sustained, most significant source of conflict involved the salesmen who knocked on our door, every day except Sunday. Mum was their favorite customer. She bought herbs, spices, “healing balms,” makeup, face creams, encyclopedias, a sewing machine, and a vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner salesman carried in his own bag of dirt, spread it out on the carpet, and vacuumed it up. My mother was enthralled. I said I could actually still see some dirt, but nobody took any notice of me.

My mother would have loved online shopping. Oh my goodness, she would have bought truckloads of skincare. She would have embraced retinol like a “Real Housewife.”

There was only one door-to-door salesman Mum didn’t like: Jiminy Cricket. This was my mother’s nickname for the insurance man who knocked on our door every month to collect our insurance payment. We all called him that. Once Dad accidentally said, “Bye, Jiminy,” as he closed the door. I believe Jiminy’s real name was Brian, so that would have been embarrassing for Dad and confusing for the insurance man.

If you’re of a different generation, it’s possible we don’t share the same cultural references, so I should tell you that Jiminy Cricket is a character from the Disney movie Pinocchio. He’s a wisecracking cricket, dressed in a top hat. He’s annoying. Consciences often are annoying.

The insurance man had short, fast little legs and he was smiley and bald. He wore a trilby hat that he removed when we opened the door to him. He did resemble the Disney character, although he wasn’t green.

My mother hated him. She said Jiminy made her skin crawl. She said he was “oily.” I think he must have been one of those unctuous, obsequious, patronizing men. Perhaps you know the type. When I was organizing her funeral, I wondered why I felt such antipathy toward the funeral director. Was it simply because I was paying him to bury my mother? That’s when the word “oily” arose from my memory.

Every month my mother complained about Jiminy. She said life insurance was a waste of money. Like throwing it into the ocean. She said there were so many better things she could do with that money. “I bet,” said Dad dryly.

She said life insurance was bad luck.

My dad said, “Bad luck? I assume you’re not serious.”

She was serious. It’s not uncommon. Superstition is one of the three main reasons why people choose not to buy life insurance. People think it will make them more likely to die.

Investing in life insurance does not increase your risk of dying.

Correction: Investing in life insurance may increase your risk of dying if you are married to a murderer. I’m not trying to be funny. Just accurate.

My dad said, “It’s for your security, Mae, for you and Cherry. Life is unpredictable. It’s a small amount of money to ensure you’re protected if I get hit by a bus or struck by lightning or—”

“Don’t say that! Never, ever say things like that!” My mother rushed about the house knocking on wood wherever she could find it.

Dad gave her a cuddle and they stopped talking about it. Dad said we could start saving for a holiday, not our normal camping holidays on the Central Coast, but a holiday at a proper roadside motel where you hung your breakfast order on the outside door handle before you went to sleep and in the morning you opened the door to find a tray on the footpath, with tiny jars of jam and honey and little gold-wrapped rectangles of butter along with your toast in a paper bag, and a hot pot of tea. Mum and Dad had experienced this kind of breakfast on their honeymoon, and it sounded like a dream to me.

Dad never did take us to a roadside motel.

Not all dreams come true, even for lucky baby boomers like me.

—

Of course, arguing over money is not unusual in a marriage. Conflict over financial matters is a leading cause of divorce. Ask most couples, wealthy or poor, what they argued about last and they are likely to say money.

Ask that young woman who wore my wedding dress on the plane.

Actually, please don’t ask her. She might say their last argument was about me.