The Sunflower Forest (13 page)

‘Who’s she?’ the little boy asked, looking across Mama to me.

‘My daughter.’

‘Oh,’ he replied without much interest. He broke the rest of the candy bar into squares and ate them quickly, one by one. I could smell the chocolate on his breath.

They talked, my mama and this little boy. He was full of a sort of heartless innocence, chatting with immodest directness, passing judgements, caring mostly for the candy. He laughed at Mama’s accent. He said she was a very old woman. She laughed back at him and told him he was a very little boy. Then he was up on his knees beside her, talking animatedly, bouncing up and down, stretching his hands out in wide gestures as he spoke. Then he climbed on top of her, straddling her legs, patting her on the head. Mama seemed not to mind his audacity, nor the fact that he was a dirty little thing. His clothes were old and poorly cared for. His hair needed washing. He smelled of stale urine.

I grew cold, sitting in silence while they laughed and competed with one another to be heard. My toes were numb. Mama was lounging back against the tree trunk, oblivious to both the temperature and my discomfort. Finally, the little boy rose to his feet to go. He bounded up on to the cottonwood trunk with the agility of Peter Pan.

I sat up. ‘Hey you,’ I said as he was about to bolt off. He paused, teetering back and forth on the trunk above me. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Toby.’

‘Toby what?’

‘Toby Simon Waterman.’ Then he jerked his head in the direction of my mother. ‘’Cept her there, she calls me Klaus. I call her Mrs Nice and she calls me Klaus.’ He smiled. ‘That’s our deal, ain’t it?’ He grinned at Mama. Then he turned, scrambled up the bank and disappeared over the edge of the gully.

Mama remained leaning back against the tree and smiling.

‘That isn’t him,’ I said to her as we walked back home. The wind was to our backs and it blew my hair around my face. I kept my shoulders up and my head tucked down.

Mama didn’t reply.

I looked over. ‘You realize that, don’t you, Mama? You’re not really thinking he is, are you? You aren’t. He’s just some little boy.’ I walked on. ‘In fact, a rather awful little boy. Did you see how filthy he is?’

Still no reply from my mother. She was braced against the wind also, hands in her jacket pockets. Her blowing hair completely obscured her face from me.

‘I mean, if he reminds you of Klaus, that’s probably OK. I guess it is. And maybe it doesn’t hurt to visit him. But you’re not imagining he really is Klaus, are you?’

‘The motherfuckers,’ she said softly. ‘I told them they’d never manage to keep him from me.’ Her words were almost borne away on the wind before I caught them.

‘
Mama
. Mama, you listen to me. That isn’t Klaus. You know that, don’t you? Of course you do. Klaus would be a man by now. If you were only seventeen, he’d be nearly forty. You do realize that, don’t you?’

‘I told them I’d find him. They said I wouldn’t. But I swore I would. I knew I would. I always kept looking. Kept on going and looking.’

‘
Mama!
’

She looked over at me. She had to hold the blowing hair out of her face to see me. There was a peculiar expression on her face, reminiscent of the look she had when she’d made a really good joke and my dad had fallen for it. The kind of expression she had when she was very pleased with her cleverness. I felt relief to see her smiling like that.

‘Good joke, Mama,’ I said. ‘You caught me.’

She kept grinning. ‘I never forget.’

A
s abruptly as it had surfaced, the furore over Klaus died down. Both Megan and I remained intensely curious about this extraordinary revelation, but the matter rapidly receded into silence. The subject was closed. There were no more discussions between Mama and Daddy, no more arguments, not even allusions. It was as if the entire thing had not occurred.

Mama was in high spirits. As the weeks passed and the flowers began coming up, she busied herself around the garden. The weather turned pleasant and seasonable and filled her with noisy exuberance. When Megs and I came home from school, she was always eager to show us what she’d been up to during the day, whether puttering around the house making elaborate desserts for supper or ironing the dish towels. Constantly, she was singing under her breath to herself in her not particularly marvellous voice. She wanted to know everything that was happening to us at school, about how I was getting on with Paul, about graduation coming up in June. She and Mrs Reilly started going to garage sales, and she came home with some remarkable items, including a gigantic tarnished brass fork that she made Dad hang in the hallway outside the kitchen.

Of course, I assumed Mama was still making daily pilgrimages to the tree trunk by the creek. She was discreet about it. It was never mentioned; she was always back before Megan or I returned from school. But I was almost positive she was doing it. What I was not certain of was whether or not my father knew she was going to see Toby Waterman. It was hard for me to guess what kinds of discussions my parents had with each other in private. I knew they talked a lot because I could usually hear the buzz of their voices long after they’d gone to bed at night. But I don’t think Toby was ever one of their topics. If my father had known, the whole issue would not have been relegated to silence the way it was, and Megan and I, I believe, would have felt freer to ask about Klaus.

However, if Dad didn’t know, he should have been able to guess. Not only was Mama in a vastly improved mood, which always meant that she had found something interesting to occupy herself with, but she was focusing her attention in different directions. For instance, she became quite keen to know what kind of treatment poor people got. She’d always been the more politically aware of my parents, and her views had always been considerably to the left of my father’s, but suddenly she wanted to discuss them. What’s going to happen to the poor people? she would ask him at the dinner table. What do we do when people can’t take care of themselves? When their children are hungry? When they don’t have proper clothes? We need to help out. We need to do something. It’s wrong to have things when other people don’t. My father would point out to her that we weren’t exactly rich ourselves. But we’re not poor, Mama would reply. There are some people right here in town who are a lot poorer than we are.

Over those weeks I spent a lot of time thinking about Mama and Toby Waterman. Once I recovered from the initial shock of discovering I had a brother I’d never known existed, I realized that the shock came from Klaus’s existence, not Toby Waterman’s. My mother’s spending time with Toby seemed harmless enough to me. He liked her. He obviously enjoyed her company as much as she did his. As long as his teeth didn’t rot from all the chocolate bars, I didn’t think there was anything seriously wrong with the relationship. Just two lonely people finding pleasure in each other’s company. But at the same time I felt guilty for knowing she was doing something like that and not telling my father. I was a little annoyed with Dad too because it seemed to me that he should have been able to see it, but I was almost positive he didn’t. And I didn’t tell him. It wasn’t really my business, I reckoned, as long as it didn’t impinge on our lives. So I went on as if it weren’t happening.

For me the month of March was fairly peaceful. With graduation nearing, most of my teachers seemed to realize that no one felt like working hard. My only difficult subject continued to be calculus, but even Mrs Browder was easing up.

I spent most of my free time in the language lab, listening to tapes or talking to my French teacher, Miss Conway. She was young, and I thought she was very pretty. She knew I was going to study languages at university, so she gave me extra things to read and let me listen to the records she’d bought in Paris when she had been there in her junior year abroad in college. And she told me that some day she would have me over to her apartment and show me her slides.

Each week I spent three or four hours extra in the language lab, usually alone after school, working with the cassettes. I liked French best, due mostly to Miss Conway, who was my favorite teacher, but also due to the fact that French was not a language my mother spoke, so I felt I deserved some credit for doing well in it. Miss Conway did not know that the reason I was such a star pupil in German was because when I went home at night I had to speak it to get the butter passed to me at the dinner table. That makes you quite outstanding in a second-year German class. But French I had to do all on my own. I had a surprisingly difficult time because when I was at a loss for a word, English, German, and even Hungarian would come to my mind first. Miss Conway would stay after school with me sometimes and sit at the console to correct my pronunciation. ‘
Accent allemand!
’ she would always shout through my earphones. Later, she’d tease me about it, saying I was just paying too much attention to old Mr Tennant, the German teacher, and why wasn’t I that awake in French? She could never understand how I had developed such a harsh-sounding accent. And I never told her.

The rest of the time I spent with Paul. We were starting to build his new telescope. Or at least he was. I’d lie on his bed and browse through Edmund’s Scientific Catalogue while he tinkered with mirrors and lenses. I told him I wished he was in my calculus class so he could help me, and he said physics and calculus were quite separate disciplines and he wasn’t any better than anyone else in calculus. I asked him how come he was going into statistics then? Why wasn’t he going to study astronomy or something like that? No jobs, he said. His father said that he had to learn something that would make him employable.

One weekend afternoon when the sun had become hot, I took off my shirt while Paul and I were lying together in the grass out on Ladder Creek. Then he unhooked my bra. We had no blanket to lie on, so all along my back I could feel the damp, scratchy prairie grass. Paul, beside me, touched my breasts, moving his fingers around the nipples. It made me shiver with an electric sensation that I found too intense to be pleasurable, and spasmodically, I would jerk away from him when I couldn’t tolerate it any longer. Paul unbuttoned his pants. Closing his eyes, he clutched me tight against him and rubbed his body against mine. I could smell his sweat. It was a pleasingly sexy odour that belonged with the smell of prairie grass and with the warmth of late March sun. Then suddenly I felt a spurt of wetness over my belly and I sat up abruptly. Paul laughed. Didn’t I know that was going to happen? he asked and dropped back on to the grass. Hadn’t I realized he was going to come? Raised up on one elbow, I looked at the semen, creamy and white like liquid soap from the dispenser on the kitchen window ledge. I had never seen semen before and I
hadn’t
known it was going to happen and for a moment I was tempted to deny my ignorance, feeling stupid for having been so surprised. But instead, I just giggled and fell back on the grass beside Paul and we laughed about it together.

When it was time to go, I wiped the semen off my stomach with my shirt. At home that night I examined the shirt, smelled the faintly musky odour. I meant to put it into the laundry afterward, but I didn’t. I kept the shirt out and put it under my pillow for that night, if not to smell Paul’s closeness, then to dream of it.

During those days of late March and early April the only person in the family to have any problems was Megan. She went through a peculiar stage. She grew obsessed with reading about Jews and concentration camps. The rest of us basked in untroubled happiness, while Megan went from day to day, distracted by thoughts of tortured Jews. Although she never came right out and asked my mother, I knew she wanted Mama’s version of the war. Whenever I thought she might ask, I threatened her with whatever dire consequence I had available to me at that moment. It unsettled my own peace slightly because I never entirely trusted Megan and now, more than ever, I didn’t want her to jar Mama’s good mood.

I couldn’t understand what Megan was getting out of it. I had never gone through such a bizarre stage when I was her age, and I couldn’t fathom why she should. All the books on the subject were far too advanced for her. She wasn’t what could be called a spectacular reader, even by third-grade standards, so I didn’t believe she could actually be distilling much from the material. But that didn’t seem to deter her. She kept at it, cloistering herself in her room for hours at a time. In a perverse way it was almost laughable. I reckoned Megan to be the only person in the world reading
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
who still believed in fairies.

But the fact was, it wasn’t laughable at all. Megan was miserable and she was making us miserable. The two of us argued constantly and over everything. But it wasn’t just me. She argued with Dad. She argued with her friends. She’d had a big blow-up with her best friend, Katie, and came fuming into the house one afternoon, saying she was never going to see Katie again as long as she lived. To my knowledge, she was keeping that threat. And she even argued with Mama, which was strange because she’d developed a fixation about being with Mama all the time. My mother couldn’t even go into the bathroom without being bothered. But still Megan argued with her. Perhaps she argued with Mama most of all.

It was then too, during that early part of April, that I learned about Paul’s parents. We were, of all places, in the playground of the park on Third and Elm when he told me. I’d been working at the nursing home that afternoon and Paul had come to pick me up afterward. He hadn’t been able to get the car from his mom, so he’d walked. We were cutting through the park when he sat down on one of the swings.

‘They’re going to get divorced,’ he said. He twisted the swing around. Leaning back, he stared up at the chains, wound around one another. ‘I heard them talking the other night. They haven’t said anything to me or Aaron yet. I just overheard them in the kitchen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He lifted his feet from the ground and the swing spun around. ‘Nothing to be sorry about really, I guess.’

Regarding the other swing, I debated about whether or not to sit down. I was still wearing my white nurse’s aide uniform, and Mama was always complaining about how dirty I got it.

‘I think I knew it was coming,’ Paul said. ‘It’s been coming a long, long time. They don’t love each other. Maybe they never did.’

I tried to imagine what it must feel like to know your parents didn’t love each other. It was an entirely foreign concept to me. I couldn’t fathom what my mother or father, either one, would do without the other. They fit together like one person. Apart, they would be incomplete.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. I sat on the swing, realizing that compared to Paul’s problems, Mama’s yelling at me about my uniform wasn’t much.

‘Dunno.’

Silence. He had begun to push himself back and forth on the swing. I lifted my head and looked up at the sky.

‘I’m just thankful I’m going away to school,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to have to live with either one of them, quite frankly. My dad, he wouldn’t want me anyway. I think maybe he’s said six whole things to me this year. “Hey boy,”’ Paul said in a sneering mockery of his father’s voice. “Hey boy, what you doing there, boy? How come you aren’t on the football team like Aaron? How come you hang around with all those fairy queers in the physics club?” “Hey boy, don’t look at me like that. You earn the money, then you call the shots.” That’s all he ever says to me.’

I pushed my swing and let it come forward. ‘I’d live with your mom.’

Paul snorted. ‘Maybe you would. I wouldn’t.’ He made a second futile-sounding little noise. ‘I embarrass the shit out of my mom. You’ve seen her. With all her fancy, phoney crap.’

‘You shouldn’t talk like that, Paul. It isn’t true.’

‘A lot you know about it.’

There was a long silence. It was growing late. The sun was down on the horizon, and I was finding it not a particularly warm evening.

‘I embarrass the shit out of you too, don’t I?’ he said. ‘You want to be just like her, don’t you? And you’re embarrassed by me.’

Slamming my feet down to stop my swing, I stared at him. ‘What do you mean? Why do you say something like that?’

‘Because.’

‘Because why, Paul. You don’t embarrass me. Why would you say that to me?’

‘Think, Lesley. It shouldn’t be too hard.’

Disgruntled, I turned my head away. ‘Cripes, Paul, don’t make it a stupid guessing game.’ I looked back. ‘If something’s wrong, just say so. Don’t be so coy.’

‘Well, if you think I’m so godawful wonderful, how come you’ve never once invited me over to your house? Jesus, you practically live over at our zoo. And I’ve never even met your folks.’

I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that was how it seemed to him. ‘Oh cripes. Oh God. God almighty, Paul, you think it’s
you
?’

Shrugging, he launched the swing backwards with a push.

Now what? I looked down at my fingernails.

He was seething. I watched him pump the swing higher and higher and I could tell he was easily as mad at me as he was at his folks for their divorce. In a way perhaps he was madder.