In the school’s political hierarchy I occupied a neutral, if isolated, position. Friendly enough with most of the girls in my year but not a fixed member of any one faction, I was a social Switzerland. Away from the piano, many of the other girls may rarely have given me the time of day, but my ability to reel off popular songs and sight-read—to play a piece of new music at first sight—put me beyond the brunt of their forensic criticism. Because of the piano I enjoyed a level of immunity from the social persecution that the coolest girls perpetrated on other awkward saps who lacked the protection of an instrument.
Twenty years later, I was astounded to realise that despite feeling like the world’s biggest nerd at the time, I had earned their admiration and respect even though I could neither see nor enjoy it.
My school reunion turned into a recital of the popular songs I used to play by request before and after Music classes. A chorus of mature women sang out song titles with startling recall: ‘Jessica’s Theme’, the theme from M*A*S*H (‘Suicide Is Painless’) and an Elton John medley. They also remembered me as quite the Billy Joel interpreter, wrapping my still-small hands around ‘New York State of Mind’ and ‘Allentown’. I had played those songs repeatedly, dreaming of living in New York one day when I didn’t have to get up at six every morning before school, or rely on my mother to drive me around. I had no idea what a New York state of mind might be, nor where Allentown was, or why they might have been shutting down the factories there. Though I learned that Allentown was in New Jersey, it might as well have been New Zealand for all I understood about the place. Had everyone else been as oblivious as I was to the irony of my performing songs about creative melancholy and job insecurity while in the cloistered protection of a private girls’ school?
After The Man from Snowy River shot him to stardom, Tom Burlinson acted in several films before carving a successful career from singing and musical theatre, with a specialty in impersonating Frank Sinatra—when I, as a thirteen-year-old with an imperfect understanding of the relationship of one’s life to the plans we make for it, had expected him to become a major movie star.
At the reunion, my peers did not see my bookish 37-year-old face but that of the musical teenage girl, frozen in time beside the assembly-hall Steinway. I was as guilty as anyone of fixing in my mind an image of a girl who in many cases bore no relation to the woman in front of me, reeling off her personal and professional statistics as though I was a census collector.
Yet I was struck by the similarities in my peers’ life stories. They put me in mind of another famous statement of Joan Didion: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ I learned that a demographically disproportionate number of women had borne three children. That an even higher number lived in the suburb in which they had grown up. And that many had worked for one employer for more than ten years. We tell each other stories in order to live with ourselves, is more like it.
After John died I had yearned to be far away from everything comfortable and familiar to me, so at the reunion I stuck to my story that I had moved to New York after being widowed. But as these conversations confirmed, the truth was, with or without my husband, I never could picture myself living their sort of life. The idea of working at one place for a decade did my head in, as did the idea of moving back to live in Hunters Hill. No wonder they all expected me to still be sitting at the piano. And children? Despite my grief as a young widow, I was quietly relieved John and I had never had a baby. My perception of parenting, forged in a house devoted to routine and repetition, was limited to a daily grind of dirty nappies, endless laundry and thankless meals.
On the other hand, the reunion forced me to see the tangible benefits that accrued from the routines and the repetitions that my former schoolmates described with wabi-sabi smiles. A stable income. A family life. Enduring love, or whatever describes the glue that binds a couple after years of childrearing.
I thought of the line about apples not falling far from the tree. I had come to the reunion looking in vain for other apples that had scattered far and wide, and that had suffered a few bruises as a result. My mistake had been to expect difference, not repetition. I now see this was an unintended consequence of my grief, which in its voracious need for disruption had led me to change country, career, and the way I chose to work and relate to people I loved: via Skype. Though the remoteness was largely of my own making, I felt as distant from these women at thirty-seven as I had at seventeen.
Almost everyone I spoke to that night had been certain that I must have been ‘doing something with the piano’ for the past two decades. To them, I had been working as a musician, not as a book editor. I felt sorry to disappoint them, and bewildered by their surprise at how differently my life had
