The man Who Didn't Like Judy Garland

We are in the car, my father and I, on a journey down south. My father has been living in Sydney since Mum died. I don’t know it yet, but the cancer that will kill him has stirred in his cells, lifted its head and looked hungrily around.
We don’t know each other that well, my father and I. When Mum died, he left for Sydney in a blink, a moment. He could have come to us, we asked him, on the day she died, but he’d already decided, and he went. There was a hole in Timaru where my parents used to be and I couldn’t seem to fill it. I said it twice, in conversation, “When Mum and Dad died”, then gasped the words back. Dad wasn’t dead! It only felt that way.
I drive, past Taupo, across the Desert Road, into Waiouru. We pass the Army Museum. I glance sideways, catch him yearning, breathing deep.
“Want to go in?”
“Could we? Is there time?”
I pull over and turn around. We’re heading for the ferry terminal at Wellington but I’ve allowed for punctures and pit stops, slips, washouts and navigation errors.
“Course we can.”
This is part of him, five years out of his life, five years that shaped and bruised and changed him, that he locked away until his last years, that emerged in words like treacle, so slow and measured that you waited, helpless, for the next phrase, the next grim revelation. A month as a prisoner of the Italians, with a missing in action letter sent home to his family. A convoy, a land mine, a friend in the next truck blown up, flung from the vehicle, his severed leg wedged up under the dashboard.
We’re quiet for a while, once we’re back on the road. The radio plays softly until he reaches forward with a sideways lift of the eyebrow, asking permission to turn it up. I stiffen. It’s Judy Garland.
“Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly…..”
I shoot him a glance but he’s not looking at me, he’s gazing into nowhere. He’s smiling.
“Birds fly, over the rainbow, why, oh why can’t I?”
The notes trail off. I love that song, but Dad?
“What a beautiful voice.”
My father whispers the words. He’s teared up again. I’m trying to concentrate on the road but this is important. A huge hurt is gathering in my chest.
“I thought you didn’t like Judy Garland!”
The words are shards of broken glass. I almost taste the blood.
“Didn’t like her?”
My father is bewildered.
“I’ve always liked her.”
“But Dad…”
He looks at me in amazement.
“She was the best singer to come out of that era”, he tells me. “ Don’t you remember how your mother used to sing that song in the car?”
“Dad!”
I’m wailing, I know it, I can hear it. It’s too much. Salt water spills over and rushes down my face. I can’t see. I pull over to the verge, skid to a stop in the gravel. I lay my head down on the steering wheel. I’m not here any more, not in this car, not fifty-two years old, sitting beside my ageing father. I’m eleven, in another car, another time, and a door has just been slammed in my face.
We’re going to the beach. Mum and Dad in the front with my little brother, and my two sisters and I in the back. Mum usually starts singing but she’s quiet today. She knows all the words of all the songs and now I know them too. I take a breath and my elder sister elbows me in the ribs to shut me up but I don’t care, I want to sing, I love singing, I want to be a singer.
“Somewhere over the rainbow…..”
There is already something in me, a longing, a lost, aching feeling, a wanting older than my years. I pour it all out, and when the song is over, there is silence in the car, until Mum reaches out and touches my father on the thigh.
“Wasn’t that lovely, Dad?”
My father jerks away from her touch and hunches over the wheel.
“She sounds like Judy Garland!”
Is that a bad thing? It feels like a slap. His voice is harsh. I try to work it out. What have I done wrong? Is it because Judy Garland is an American? I know he doesn’t like Americans, he’s a New Zealand Army man, none of them like Americans, I’m only eleven but I know that much. Is it that? Did I sound like an American?”
I don’t become a singer. I don’t actually become anything, I just get through my life. There is a standard set somewhere I never meet, a goal I never reach. I am never who I want to be, and I am never, in the end, the person someone wants. I sing in the car, at night, when no-one else can see me. They are the songs my mother sang, and I still know all the words.
“Meg? Meg!”
Dad is stroking my hair, shaking me gently, asking what’s wrong. I can’t explain. I don’t even know myself. I say I was thinking of Mum, and we’ve been to the museum, and it’s the trip down south and having the chance to have some time with him, and what about him telling me what’s really going on with his health, and I cry a little bit more and then I stop. I mop my face and he holds my hand and tells me about the cancer and how long he thinks it will be and how much I mean to him. How much he loves me. We go on.
I am in the shower. My father has died his ugly, drawn out death, but that was years ago. Six years, five months, four days. Sometimes I sing in the shower, but only when the house is empty. The house is empty now. I sing. The song comes out of the ether…
“Somewhere, over the rainbow….”
The water beats upon my head and I am crying, leaning against the wall and crying as if I will never stop. I remember now. I remember the morning, getting ready for the beach, I remember Mum trying to pack a picnic and find the togs and get us to stop fighting and get ready! I remember things going wrong but I don’t remember what, except that Dad told Mum to hurry up and Mum yelled at him that if he’d give her a hand instead of sitting in the car drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and revving the motor, it wouldn’t take her so long to get all four of us sorted out.
I remember trying to make it right. We were driving along and there was this awful silence and the whole day was going to be ruined. I started to sing and Mum spoke, “Wasn’t that lovely Dad?” when she’d been quiet for all those miles, when she was usually so cheerful when we were going somewhere because we didn’t get the chance to go out much, and I remember what my father said:
“She sounds like Judy Garland!”
I am not eleven now. I have lived my life and I know how it is between grownups. I know about tiffs and tensions, I know about budgets, and money, and the lack of it. I know about trying to keep it from the children. I know about fathers who are so tired on their day off they don’t want to go anywhere, they just want to sit and relax, to read a book, to sleep. I know about mothers desperate to get out of the house, to have a change from housework and child-minding, from cooking and cleaning and tears.
The water sluices over me. I want to drop to the floor and huddle there forever, hidden in its stream. I have lived my whole life looking for something that was never lost, trying to fill a gap that wasn’t there. My father wasn’t angry with me. Just for that minute, of that hour, of that day, he was angry with Mum. I thought he didn’t like Judy Garland, but I was wrong.
I turn the shower off and grab my towel. For the first time, I understand what formed, and transformed, and deformed my life. I can’t go back, and I can’t fix anything, I can’t undo old hurts or change done deals, but at least, at last, I understand. It wasn’t Judy Garland. I thought he didn’t like me.

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childhood and misunderstandings