Joy Holley
Heart-Shaped Yes
The first time I saw the heart-shaped YES, I was five years old. My sister, my parents and I were staying with my Aunty Ruth in Eastbourne, which felt completely natural at the time but probably meant my parents’ relationship was already on the rocks. Mum took me with her on a walk to the shops, which included a studio where you could paint your own bowls and plates. I sat with her while she carefully stenciled a design she had printed at Ruth’s, then painted it onto a small, rectangular dish. When it was finished, the dish read YES. The letters were written in the shape of a heart. It was a surprise for Dad, Mum said, ‘for our third wedding anniversary.’ I had to promise to keep it a secret. Mum paid the people at the counter, and they told her the dish would be ready to pick up in a few days.
A couple of days later, Dad took me with him on a walk to the Eastbourne shops. ‘We should go check out that studio,’ he said. ‘The one where you paint plates.’ I had to stop him. I had to keep it a secret. But all I could get out of my mouth was ‘Yes’. Dad wandered around the studio and I followed, panicking in silence. He walked over to the shelf where the painted plates were waiting to be collected by their owners. ‘Oh,’ he said. I didn’t have to tell him who painted it. He led us out of the studio. ‘Let’s just pretend we never came here, okay?’
On their anniversary, my parents opened each other’s presents in bed with my sister and I sitting between them. I can’t remember if Dad pretended to be surprised or if he told Mum he had already seen the plate. They divorced a few months later.
*
Tonight, I am going to a party dressed as the song ‘Go-go Dancer’ by Lana Del Rey. When Mum saw the battered white go-go boots I brought home from the Costume Cave sale she laughed and said, ‘Your dad used to wear boots like that, back in his band days.’ I have wanted boots like these for years, because Lana Del Rey specifically mentions white go-go boots in that song.
I also considered dressing up as ‘Lolita’. I was reading the book when I first picked up Lana Del Rey’s album at the library, and it was track 14 – also titled ‘Lolita’ – that encouraged me to listen to it. I was 15 years old. But even before that, the name ‘Lolita’ was distinctly familiar. I was almost certain that when I was much younger, I had heard a Prince song in Dad’s car about another girl called Lolita. The fact that I remembered it at all was surprising, since there are hundreds of Prince songs I have heard in Dad’s car, then forgotten entirely. If I’d known what they were about, I’d probably have remembered a lot more of them. But although I was too young to understand what ‘Cream’ or ‘Jack U Off’ meant, the name ‘Lolita’ clearly caught my attention. Years later I tried to find this song online, but there was nothing. I decided I must have imagined it.
*
My parents met at a party in Sydney, 1994. They started talking because of Mum’s t-shirt. It was red, with the word YES printed on it in white. Dad immediately recognised this heart-shaped YES, because it was copied from the inner sleeve of a Prince album. Also, one of his friends had made t-shirts with that YES on it for all of the staff at her hairdressing salon. Therefore, he knew Mum was either one of those staff, or a big Prince fan. She was both.
After they’d been going out for a few months, a photo was released from a music festival they’d both attended, just a couple of weeks before they met. The photo was taken from onstage, looking out at the audience. Mum and Dad were standing right next to each other. She wasn’t wearing the YES t-shirt.
*
At Mum’s house, there is a whole bookshelf of photo albums dedicated to my sister and me. For each year of our childhood, there is one album for me and another for her – excepting, of course, the four years I spent on Earth before she was born. I always forget that one of these photo albums also holds all of Mum and Dad’s wedding pictures. I’ve flicked through them all before, but generally I avoid them. It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I noticed the wedding invitation slotted into one of the clear slips. A plain white card with a red, heart-shaped YES.
*
On 22 April 2016 I am woken up by my phone buzzing twice in a row. I often get woken by Facebook messages, and usually I ignore them, but something about the double buzz makes me need to check. I reach down to the carpet and feel around. My charger cord leads me to my phone, which I lift into sight, pressing my thumb down on its round, familiar button. It turns out I have far more than just two unread messages. Through blurry eyes I manage to make out: tell your pa I am sorry for his loss x. Almost immediately, I convince myself that my grandad must be dead. But unless my dad has made a Facebook status about this before telling his own daughter, there is no way my friend could have known this before me. Even then, it would be a strange message to send.
Before I have time to process this, however, I scroll down to the messages from my boyfriend, Marc. I flip back the duvet covers. I jump out of bed. I run down the hall. I call out ‘Dad!’. He opens the bathroom door. His towel is damp and his skin is all steamed up from the shower. His eyes are red from crying.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
He smiles but his voice is shaky. ‘Only just!’
I hug him. Soon I am crying too.
*
A couple of months before this, my dad went to Sydney and saw Prince perform four times in one weekend. The last of these shows marked Dad’s eleventh Prince concert.
*
The night before this, Dad and I were chopping vegetables in the kitchen.
‘So my world stopped for a minute earlier this week.’
I put down the carrot and turned to look at him. ‘Huh?’
‘Prince got rushed to hospital. According to the press it just turned out to be flu, and dehydration. He cancelled a show last week because of the flu too. But God, imagine.’
I went back to the vegetables. ‘God. Yeah.’
*
Dad takes the day off work. I tell him I don’t need to be at uni till the afternoon and he makes us both a long black with the espresso machine he’s had since before I was born. I only started drinking coffee a year ago, and at Mum’s we only have a plunger, so coffee at Dad’s is somewhat luxurious. I sit on one of the revolving chairs at our kitchen bench, still in my pyjamas, with my feet dangling above the floor. I feel closer to eight than eighteen.
‘We need some starfish to go with this coffee,’ I say, and Dad laughs for the first time all morning.
‘Don’t forget the maple syrup and jam.’
Usually, such specific Prince references would go straight over my head, but thanks to his guest appearance on the Muppets videotape I watched so much when I was little, the lyrics to ‘Starfish and Coffee’ are ingrained in my memory.
‘You know,’ I say, taking a sip. ‘I might not even have been born if it wasn’t for Prince.’
Dad laughs again. ‘I guess so.’
*
The theme for the party tonight is ‘dress up as a song’, but Marc doesn’t have a costume yet. I ask Dad if he’s got anything Prince-related that would work. He gives me the necklace that has been hanging on his bedroom wall since before I can remember. It’s a long, thin piece of leather with Prince’s Love Symbol tied onto it. I feel nervous about accepting, but I take it anyway. I put it on and feel safer than I did before. I text Marc, ‘Find a purple shirt’.
*
Marc and I met at another party, about eighteen months ago. I was standing by the aux cord, deciding what song to play next, when Marc asked me my name.
‘I’m Joy.’
‘Oh! So you’re the Radiohead girl.’
By this he meant I was the girl who kept liking Radiohead posts on a Facebook group we were both in. Marc liked most of these posts too.
We talked about bands until we fell asleep, wrapped up in sleeping bags on someone else’s living room floor. I said I’d send him a song he had to listen to. He sent one back. In the weeks that followed, we exchanged enough songs to form a lengthy playlist. Marc told me I should listen to Mezzanine by Massive Attack. I played it on repeat. Mum stuck her head in my bedroom door.
‘Are you listening to Massive Attack?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Your dad is gonna love this.’
I told Marc that it turned out my parents had been listening to Massive Attack since before I was born. Marc asked if I knew their song ‘Protection’. I said no, but as soon as I pressed play, I realised this was a lie. The singer’s voice was so familiar she could have been a family member. Marc told me she was the singer from Everything But The Girl, which explained it. There had been EBTG cds scattered around both my Mum and my Dad’s house all my life.
At my eighteenth birthday party, one of the last songs we danced to was Everything But The Girl’s ‘Mirrorball’. Marc and I were the only ones who had heard it before, but I pulled my friends into a circle and by the second chorus, they were singing along too: ‘Come on girl, it’s alright. Come on girl, it’s alright now. Come on girl, it’s gonna be alright now.’ Dad heard our voices from his bedroom down the hall and texted Mum.
*
After uni, I run down Kelburn hill, the Prince necklace bumping repeatedly against my chest. It’s simultaneously comforting and uncomfortable. Half the shops on Cuba Street are playing Prince songs. I’ve been op-shopping for half an hour when I realise I’m not wearing the necklace anymore. Panic swallows me. I feel five years old again. I go back to all the shops and ask if I left anything in the changing room. The shopkeepers become extremely sympathetic when I explain what I’ve lost, but we can’t find the necklace. I retrace my steps back to where I last remember wearing it. I call Dad. He is understanding, as always, and keeps any hint of disappointment out of his voice. I say ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’, then finally ‘I love you’. He says ‘I love you too’.
*
That night, I text Dad to tell him I’m wearing the raspberry beret I found in a second-hand store last year. He replies, ‘And if it was warm, you wouldn’t wear much more’, which makes Marc and I laugh because my go-go costume consists of fishnets and a tasseled bodysuit.
*
Six months later, I’m at my friend Lily’s birthday party. Her and her boyfriend Hector both go to jazz school and have similar tastes to my parents. It was Lily who reintroduced me to Curtis Mayfield and Erykah Badu as a teenager, and it’s on Hector’s iTunes library that I finally rediscover ‘Lolita’ by Prince. Hector is surprised that I remember the song, considering what a little-known album it’s from.
‘Prince is super strict about keeping his music off the internet anyway,’ he says. ‘So there’s no way you’d have been able to find it on Youtube.’
*
I ask Dad for the MP3, but he gives me a USB instead. When I plug it into my laptop, I find a long selection of Prince albums. The first one came out in 1978. As I carefully do the maths, I find myself mouthing at the screen, ‘You’ve loved him twice as long as you’ve loved me.’
Joy Holley is 22 years old and lives in Wellington. In 2020 she will be studying her Masters in fiction at the IIML. Her writing has been published in Landfall, Turbine|Kapohau, Starling, The Spinoff and other New Zealand journals.