The Sunflower Forest (19 page)

‘There’s more to it than that, Paul.’

‘I think you’re lucky. Your mother has such a joy about life. And she’s got her own thoughts. She doesn’t wait around for television or something to cram what she’s supposed to be thinking into her head. She’s got originality.’

‘She’s got that, all right.’

‘Yeah, but what I’m saying is that that’s
super
. You’re too close to the trees to see the forest, Les. Not to put you down or anything. But I think she’s just this really creative, alive person. A genuine nonconformist. So maybe she is different, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean she has problems. I think you ought to appreciate your mother more. She’s not so bad. And I just don’t think she’s really got such problems.’

I looked over at him in astonishment. ‘What a lot of gall you have, Paul. Christ. Where do you come off saying something like that to me? What do you know about it? She’s
my
mother. What do you think having problems means? Hanging from the curtain rods by your toenails? Running naked through the streets? This isn’t a subject you know one thing about, Paul, so don’t go setting yourself up as an expert.’

‘I’m not setting myself up as an expert. I just said I thought you were too sensitive and I still do. I mean, I can understand where you got trouble. You live with her and stuff and I know what that’s like. I probably don’t see my family very clearly either. You just don’t when you live with people. Which is why I’m telling you this. I understand.’

‘I don’t particularly want your understanding, because you don’t understand a thing. My little sister knows more about it than you do. Maybe you got brains galore on everything else, but on this subject, you’re a zero. So I don’t think you’re in any position to judge.’

Silence.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘if I’m just being hypersensitive, what am I staying home for all the time? Am I making that up too? Does that mean my dad’s as blind about my mother as I am, Professor?’

‘I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘Why
are
you staying home?’

I didn’t reply. Weariness overtook my irritation and pushed me to the verge of tears. Desperate not to have another evening end with my crying, I said nothing more.

Paul, alert to my discomfort, reached a hand out and touched my leg. ‘Well, let’s not get into an argument. It’s not that important.’

‘It seems to me like we’re already arguing.’

‘OK, listen, Les, I’m sorry. I started it. I apologize. Let’s just forget it.’

Rubbing my hands over my face, I let out a long, slow breath. ‘It’s just that I want to get through one evening without Mama dogging every moment of freedom I have.’

‘OK. I understand.’

Paul pushed a tape into the car tapedeck.
Star Wars
. It was the only music expansive enough to fill the darkness. He grinned at me, his features made ghostly by the green dimness of the dashboard lights. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator, and we tore off into hyperspace.

We drove all the way to Eads, Colorado, almost a hundred miles across the dark plains. It made no difference. It was as flat there as anywhere and looked very much like where we had been. I was disappointed. Whenever I thought about Colorado, I pictured lakes and forests and towering mountains. But Eads was surrounded by the same open loneliness as all of western Kansas.

We were still talking space talk, still being Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, when Paul pulled into a drive-in and ordered us hot-fudge sundaes. We couldn’t remember any
Star Wars
names for food, so we made up our own. Paul kept his arm around me, pressing me close against his side as we waited for the carhop to bring out the order. The drive-in, empty of other cars, was a little island of orangish fluorescent brightness against the darkness. We had a deep discussion about whether the carhop, when she finally appeared, was an alien foe in disguise at our spaceport. Perhaps we should zap her. By the time she arrived at the car, we had dissolved in fits of laughter.

Instead of eating the sundaes at the drive-in, we drove to a nearby roadside park and got out of the car. Paul left the tape playing and the window down so that we could hear it. We sat shivering at the picnic table, and devoured ice cream in the chilly April darkness.

After he had finished his sundae, Paul folded his hands over the empty plastic dish and watched me.

He smiled.

I smiled back. Savouring the flavours and the almost painfully pleasant contrast of the hot fudge against the cold ice cream, I was still eating. I leaned across the table to give him a kiss tasting of ice cream.

He returned the kiss. Rising up and clasping my face in both his hands, he pressed his lips heavily against mine. His kisses grew wet and urgent and within moments, Paul was on the table between us. Hands now tangled through my hair, he kissed my lips, my jawline, my neck. Keen to avoid his colliding with my ice-cream dish, I whisked it aside.

‘I got Aaron’s thermos along,’ he whispered. I didn’t understand immediately. But when he reached into his pocket, I knew what he meant. The thermos filled with condoms. ‘Your birthday present,’ he said.

We moved down on to the grass in an almost fluid way, arms still around one another. Or perhaps because I was not concerned about it, even an obstacle as clumsy as a picnic table was not noticeable.

The tape came to its end and stopped. Paul turned his head and I felt his muscles tense in readiness to get up and change it over to the other side. Touching his face, I said leave it. I didn’t want more
Star Wars
. This wasn’t a children’s game. I wasn’t pretending any more.

We cuddled in the long grass, still untrimmed since winter. Paul’s hands moved with confident tenderness over familiar territory. He undid each button of my blouse, then slipped it from my shoulders. The night air was too cold to be comfortable and I pressed against him. His kisses were everywhere. Pleasantly aroused, I found my way beneath his loose-fitting overalls.

It wasn’t until Paul paused to put on the condom that it really occurred to me what was happening.
This is it
, I thought, lying in the grass beside him. The thought came to me in a startlingly cold-blooded way. Whatever arousal I had felt before he had taken out the condom quickly faded. His penis looked huge. Although I had seen it before, this time I couldn’t help but stare. What was it going to be like? Was it going to hurt? What if I did it wrong? Was I going to make stupid noises? Was someone going to hear us? I had read about that in books, about how women, in particular, would lose control and abandon themselves to writhing and screaming ecstasy. At least that’s what they were forever doing in Megan’s novel. I began thinking that maybe we ought to put the
Star Wars
tape back on, because I was just a little concerned about having quite so much ecstasy within yards of a public highway.

Paul lay down beside me again and took me in his arms.

‘You do want to do it, don’t you?’ he asked and I knew he had sensed my tension.

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re sure?’

I nodded. I did. But I was a lot more scared than I had anticipated.

We returned to gentle petting, and I hoped I’d recapture the relaxed pleasure I usually felt with Paul. But the disconcertingly detached feeling remained. My body responded but my mind drew back, tense, alert, aware, like an unrelated observer.

With meditative slowness Paul touched me. I wondered if it was his first time too. I’d never asked, mostly because I had assumed I was his first serious girlfriend, and if I wasn’t, I didn’t want to know. But now I wondered, because although his movements were slow and studied, he seemed a lot more sure of himself than I felt just then.

My body began responding with an unnerving urgency of its own. Paul’s fingers became electric and sent out tickling currents every time he touched me. The sensation would have been pleasurable, I think, if I could have relaxed more, but as it was, it was too intense. Without meaning to, I jumped when he touched the small of my back. It startled him, and he pulled himself up to look at me. I grinned and shook my head and kissed his hand.

Then I felt him enter. It hurt. Not badly but more than I had expected. Again I jerked under him and he had to try a second time. He lay atop me and his weight helped calm the sensitivity in my skin. Knowing what to expect, I could relax a little more, and it didn’t hurt so much when he tried again. It still didn’t feel particularly wonderful but it grew better.

Paul came very quickly. Almost before he was all the way in, I could feel the warmth swell inside the condom. It was a luxurious sensation, subtle and deep and by far the pleasantest I had experienced since we’d begun. Moaning, Paul clasped me to him tightly. The tension in my body drained away, and I felt very much in love with him.

We returned to necking for a while before relaxing into the damp grass, grown warm with the heat of our bodies. The air around us was full of a deep, ripe odour like the smell of apples, only heavier, and with a faint saline scent underlying it. It was a good odour and I inhaled it repeatedly, trying to decode it. The sharp, electric sensitivity had faded entirely, and I felt warm and happy. Paul kept his arms wrapped around me, but his eyes were closed. He was smiling faintly. I lay, watching him. He wasn’t asleep but he was very, very still. His penis had retracted up close to his body, and the condom hung loose and full. I touched it gently with my fingertip, and he smiled again but still did not open his eyes.

Paul didn’t seem to want to rouse himself very quickly, so with his arms still around me to ward off the night chill, I lay quietly and thought about the experience. Did it take practice? I had thought I was going to enjoy it more than I had. Had I done something wrong? Or did it just take a while to get it right? I wondered why my skin had grown so hypersensitive. I wondered why instead of sinking into the usual relaxed and sensual pleasure I got from petting, my mind had leaped to such absurd alertness. Turning on my back, I peered up through the branches of the trees to see the stars.

I was no stranger to sex. I could hear my parents making love quite often. The house was just too small not to. They weren’t noisy about it, but if you were in the study at the wrong moment, you could overhear them very plainly. They would laugh together intimately and giggle. It made Mama incredibly talkative. She would say very silly things to my father, not at all the kind of things I was used to hearing from her. She talked a kind of baby talk to him, as if she were a little girl. I never really heard my father’s responses because his voice was too deep to carry when he spoke softly. But it embarrassed me to hear my mother talk like that, more than overhearing the actual sex act did.

Anyway, I was thinking, I had never heard Mama screaming and writhing in ecstasy either. Probably no one did except in books.

Then with painful suddenness the thoughts all melted together. Making love, screaming, my mother. They had raped her, and she had been a virgin. As I had been tonight. Only not in the arms of an innocent lover. I sat up sharply.

Paul opened his eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

I tried to clear the images from my mind.

‘What’s wrong, Lesley?’ he asked again and there was concern in his eyes. He thought he had done something. He thought he had hurt me, that he’d done it wrong, that I hadn’t wanted to.

I shook my head. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. But the mood was ruined. The warmth dissipated into chilly spring dampness. Paul remained troubled.

‘Are you sure?’ He picked up his overalls and put them on.

I nodded.

‘Was it OK for you? Did you like it?’ he asked.

Again, I nodded.

He bent and kissed the top of my head. ‘I love you.’

Still cold and exposed without my clothes, still on the grass, I nodded a third time. I meant to say it back to him. I meant to tell him I loved him too. But I could only manage to nod.

O
n Saturday afternoon I went down to Torres Café with Brianna. Dad was out in the backyard mowing the lawn, so I told Mama, who was in the kitchen making a rhubarb pie, that I would be home around suppertime.

I hadn’t been seeing much of Brianna or Claire or my other girl friends, mostly because of having to stay home from school with Mama, but also because I was usually spending what free time I had with Paul. So Brianna and I met at Torres Café, where we could sit for hours over just a Coke and an order of French fries and not be hassled to buy more, and caught up on all the news. I told her all about my night in Eads with Paul, about the interminable boredom of being home from school every day, about trying to keep up with my homework, about having to give up my two nights’ work at the nursing home each week because it was impossible to coordinate with everything else going on, and how Mrs Morton, the nursing-home director, had said she wasn’t sure that she could promise me a full-time position in the summer if I quit for the rest of the spring. Brianna, in turn, caught me up on the gossip from school. Mainly, Brianna told about Jenny Soames and the fact that her parents were sending her off east somewhere instead of to university as she’d planned. Brianna thought Jenny was pregnant.

‘You want to go over to my place?’ I asked. It was about 4.30, and Brianna was counting out change to see if she had enough to buy us more Cokes. ‘I think we got some Coke in the refrigerator. I know we got Mountain Dew. That’s what my stupid sister drinks.’

Brianna wrinkled her nose.

‘Maybe I can get us some corn chips. I think I saw Mama get corn chips last time at the supermarket. You want to come over? We can sit outside on the steps and you can tell me about Danny. You think he’s going to maybe ask you out?’

As we turned the corner on to my street, Brianna nudged me. ‘Look, Les,’ she said. ‘There’s a police car in front of your house.’

I froze.

Brianna also stopped.

‘Listen, Bri,’ I said as calmly as I was able, ‘do you think you’d mind, if – well – if you didn’t come over right now?’

‘What’s happening?’ Her voice was hushed.

‘I don’t know.’

We were standing at the corner. I gazed at the police car. It was definitely at my house. I could see one of the officers in the doorway.

‘Don’t say anything about this, OK?’ I asked. ‘Don’t tell anybody.’

‘I understand,’ she said, and I knew she did. Her dad tippled a bit after paydays, and he was always getting brought home by the police.

‘Promise me, Bri. Promise not to tell, OK?’

She nodded. ‘OK. I promise.’ Then with one more look at the police car, she turned and went back down Bailey Street.

Megan was sitting on the back steps, crying. I’d gone around to the back door to go in and found her there, all hunched up. ‘They’ve arrested Mama,’ she said.

‘How? What happened?’

‘She got out. When Daddy was trimming the grass over by the lilacs. She went over to the Watermans and then she tried to make Toby go with her. They called the police.’

‘Oh geez.’ I sat down beside her. I could hear heated voices coming from the living room. ‘Who’s in there?’

‘The policemen. And Daddy. And Mr Waterman’s there and it’s awful.’

‘Is Mama there too?’

‘No,’ Megan wailed. ‘They got her in jail.’

‘Now look, Megs, don’t cry. That’s not going to do any good, is it?’ I said, although I didn’t sound very convincing.

Car doors slammed out front and an engine started. A short time later my father appeared at the back door. We moved over on the step so that he could get the door open, and he stepped out between us.

‘We have to go down to the police station and get your mother.’

‘Megan said they arrested her and put her in jail.’

He shook his head. ‘No. They just took her down there. But I’ll have to pay a fine for harassment the next time it happens.’ He frowned and looked off across the lawn at all his mowing and trimming tools, lying in disarray. ‘I had to agree to have her see a psychiatrist. Mr Waterman was going to press charges. The only way I could get him to drop them was to promise him I’d make her see a psychiatrist. The police are going to set up an appointment at the mental health clinic in Garden City.’

When we arrived at the police station, we found Mama sitting on a long wooden bench in front of the sergeant’s desk. Someone had given her a cup of coffee in a white Styrofoam cup. She sat, holding it, staring into the liquid. My father leaned over the desk and talked to the policeman behind it. They had a handful of papers for him to look at. Someone was phoning the mental health clinic. Good; there’s a Monday cancellation, he said to my father. Dr Carrera. Monday morning at ten. Yes, all right, my father was saying, his voice soft and deferential, he’d see she got there.

Apparently, it had taken all the effort my mother could muster to stay composed in the police station. The moment she got the door to the car shut, she burst into tears. My father leaned over and wrapped his arms around her, pushing her face into his shirt. We sat for several minutes in the police parking lot while he comforted her. Mama was trying to say something through her sobbing, but from the back seat I couldn’t understand. No, Dad was saying to her in a gentle voice, the police aren’t like that here. This is America, Mara. There’s no one who wants to hurt you.

How my mother had managed to hold herself together in the police station, I couldn’t imagine, because she had obviously been terrified. Once able to release the tension, she sobbed against my father’s side all the way back to the house. At home in our kitchen with Daddy’s arm around her, she still could not stop. Shaking and crying, she threw up the coffee she’d drunk into the kitchen sink.

Megan and I watched, terror stricken ourselves. To see my mama retch into the sink from the sheer fear of being inside our little two-room police station left me in awe of the inescapability of her past.

My father tried to calm her. Sitting her down in a kitchen chair, he wiped her face with the dishcloth from the sink. He was down on one knee, his hands pushing back her hair. But nothing did any good.

Rising finally, he put a hand under Mama’s elbow and brought her to her feet, and they went upstairs to their bedroom. For once I was grateful for the sound of their door closing. Mama’s sobbing became only a distant murmur, like the running of a washing machine.

Megan and I went out in the backyard. I brought out the things I’d intended to get for Brianna and me – the corn chips, dip, pretzels, Megan’s Mountain Dew.

Megan lay back on the freshly mown grass. Her arms were behind her head, and she gazed up into the leaves of the elm tree. ‘What’s going to happen to us now?’ she asked and looked over. ‘Is Mama always going to be like this from now on? Is she going to keep thinking that little boy is her son for ever?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so. If we can figure out something to do, she’ll forget it. I think she just doesn’t have enough other things to think about.’

‘But
why
does she do it? Why can’t she understand he isn’t Klaus?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She misses Klaus, I guess. She misses him so much that she can’t get him out of her mind.’

Megan fell silent. She reached across to get a pretzel out of the box, and when she had it, broke it up into dozens of small pieces. One at a time she threw them to a robin hopping on the grass near by. ‘What do you think has happened to the real Klaus?’

‘No idea.’

‘Do you think he’s still alive?’ she asked.

‘Probably. He wouldn’t be really old yet. In his thirties or so. But not Toby’s age, that’s for sure. Not needing a mama.’

Megan took another pretzel. ‘Les, is he really our brother, this Klaus? Really, truly?’

‘Our half brother.’

‘It’s weird to think about, isn’t it? That there’s somebody else walking around who’s part of our family. Who’s related to us.’ She paused. ‘What about the other baby? Didn’t Daddy say there were two?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know his name.’

‘It’s weird to think about. Really super weird.’

We lay in the grass without speaking. I munched my way through half a packet of corn chips and most of the can of bean dip. When I had emptied the packet, I scooped out the remaining dip with my finger. I was surprisingly hungry.

‘Les?’ said Megan, rolling over on her stomach.

‘Hmm?’

‘I want to ask you something.’

‘So, ask.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if that was us, do you think Mama would have tried this hard to find us?’

‘You mean if it had been us the Nazis had taken away instead of Klaus?’

‘Yeah.’

I reached for my can of pop. ‘Probably. I don’t think she’d ever want to lose us either. I think all Mama really wants is to have all her family together in one place, like they should be.’

‘I wonder sometimes,’ Megan said. ‘I wonder if because she’s
got
us, she cares as much about you and me as she does about all the things she’s lost.’

‘Well, she lost a lot, Megs. You have to be understanding.’

‘I do understand. I’m just saying that, well …’ She paused over another pretzel. ‘Well …that sometimes inside me, I don’t.’

We stayed in the yard for the better part of two hours, until dusk came. Then we went inside. Megan settled in front of the TV to watch the Muppets. I stood in the front doorway and stared out into the street. Feeling heavy with the need to get away from the house, I decided to go over and see Paul.

Upstairs, I knocked gently on my parents’ door. There had ceased to be any noise from their room quite a long time before, so I was very quiet in case they were both asleep.

‘Come in,’ my father said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Carefully, I eased the door open. They were on the bed. The bedclothes were rumpled, and my parents lay on just the sheet. My father wore only his T-shirt. Mama had nothing on at all. His one arm stretched out across the sheet, my father lay on his right side with my mama curled up, lying very close to him, her head tucked down against his chest. Her hair was loose and hid her face, but I could tell she was asleep. Dad had his left hand over her, his arm on her arm and shoulder, his fingers twined through her hair. The room was very warm and humid, and he asked me to crack the window open for him. I did.

The sun had set, and the room was murky with April twilight.

‘I was wondering if it would be all right for me to go over to Paul’s,’ I asked, still standing by the window. A rush of cool air pushed into the room. ‘I called, and his mom said it’s OK.’

‘What’s Megan doing?’ my father asked.

‘Watching television.’

‘Have you two eaten?’

I nodded.

He gestured for me to hand him the top sheet, from the foot of the bed. I came and drew it up over them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But don’t be too late, will you? And take your keys.’

I nodded. ‘I will.’

What I thought about as I walked to Paul’s house was sex. Seeing my mother and father like that, I wondered how Mama could do it. How had my dad made sex good for her again? How was it that she could come home from the police station, hysterical with fear, and a few hours later be in bed like that with my father? I couldn’t fathom what kind of communication they had together. How had he managed to comfort her and breathe life back into her right in the centre of the vortex? I wished I understood. I wished I could ask one of them, although I knew I never would.

Paul and I sat together on the curb in front of his house. A neighbour had been watering, and the gutter flowed with runoff. Paul made up little boats from leaves and twigs and set them sailing under our legs. Then he rested his face on his knees to watch them.

Behind us, Aaron’s stereo blared. As always, it was so loud you could feel it if you were in the house. But outside where we were, it was tolerable. I found it a comfortingly normal sound.

‘My family’s driving me insane,’ I said, leaning down to trail my fingers in the water running alongside the curb.

‘
Yours
is?’ said Paul. ‘You ought to see what’s going on around here. You know what my half-assed brother did today? You know Marianne MacAlister?’

‘No, Paul,’ I interrupted. ‘I don’t mean things like Aaron does. I mean insane. The real thing. The thing you get locked up in Larned for.’

I told him. I told him precisely why I wasn’t going to school. About Klaus and Toby Waterman. About my mama and the war. I think in a way he knew. Not the details. But he’d gotten the substance by osmosis.

He sat on the curb, feigning an interest in his leaf boats I knew he didn’t have. I was unable to tell how shocked he was by what I was saying. At that point I didn’t care. The need to share was so pressing to me that I had no room left to worry about anyone else.

‘What I wish,’ I said, ‘is that my father would do something. I keep telling him that – that we ought to be doing something to change things. That we ought to have been doing something all along. But my father ignores me. He never does anything but hedge.’