Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [134]
They’d been nothing alike, as kids. Jennifer liked dolls and dress up. Lisa had matchbox cars, and an encyclopedic knowledge of tractors. Jennifer had liked to play with girls; Lisa preferred the company of boys, years before she even knew what she really wanted to do with them. If they had homework, Jennifer did hers on Saturday morning. Lisa was a Sunday-night girl. If not a Monday-morning-on-the-bus one. When they were both at university, they’d visited each other—once. Jennifer had come to Lisa first. Been dragged to a smoky party where the music was too loud for conversation, and friendships were forged through the passing around of a joint. Gone home alone to a messy room in a damp shared house, full of unironed laundry and cups of half-finished tea while Lisa stayed behind to work on a guy she was interested in. When Lisa had been to visit Jennifer, her room, in a civilized hall of residence, with an en suite shower room, no less, smelled of washing powder and Anaïs Anaïs. Jennifer’s friends all seemed to be girls. They existed in a girly, giggling gaggle completely alien to Lisa. They did a yoga class and ate at a vegetarian café. Jennifer introduced her to John, a man Lisa found so anodyne that she barely addressed a remark to him through two rounds in the student union. He had rounded shoulders, Lenin glasses, and a shaving rash. Lisa believed she knew the type, and she just wasn’t interested. Jennifer was cross with her, she knew—she said she hadn’t given him a chance. Lisa retorted that Jennifer had been going out with him for almost the entire year, which was surely chance enough for any guy. Jennifer didn’t come to the station at the end of the weekend to say good-bye. The whole weekend had been a disaster.
By tacit agreement, neither visited the other again. They had no interest, at that point, in anything about each other’s lives. They were sisters, of course, but it seemed they were not destined to be friends. What common ground the shared experience of their childhood had given them had ebbed away as soon as they had moved away from that home.
It might have been more of a wedge, if it hadn’t been for Mum. Mum and Mark. That gave them, finally, a reason to come together again: shared, indignant disapproval.
There were some conversations in your life that you remembered vividly, forever. Mum telling them she was pregnant, that she was going to marry Mark—that was one of those conversations. The three of them had been in the garden at Carlton Close. It was June, the start of the long summer break from university. The significance of home had shifted inexorably for both of them in recent months. It had taken its place as a stop on their journey, no longer the destination. They loved their mum, and their kid sister, Amanda, whose delight at their return almost compensated for her irritating tendencies to climb on their beds, chattering inanely, at six in the morning. They were fond of their familiar rooms, the spaghetti Bolognese, and the fact that their laundry disappeared and then reappeared, miraculously folded and ironed. But they were just passing through now. It wasn’t really where they wanted to be.
Jennifer was going inter-railing with John, in a few weeks—a trip they had dreamed of and meticulously planned. Lisa was in far too much debt to consider a trip like that. She’d spent what money she had by the sixth week of the term, raced through her overdraft limit with similar alacrity, and seriously needed to earn some money. She was going to Weston-super-Mare, where her friend Emma lived, to chambermaid with her in a three-star hotel, as soon