The Sunflower Forest (6 page)

‘Did I ever tell you what I believed then?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, you know how Mama was in the war? And she couldn’t go home to her family?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, when I was little and in the school in Yakima, I thought maybe they were going to do that to me. That teacher, remember, she used to always keep me after school. Mrs Hoolihan. Because I kept doing those worksheets wrong. And I thought it was going to be like it was with Mama. That pretty soon she wasn’t going to let me go home at all.’

‘That would never have happened, you know,’ I said. ‘You should have told somebody you felt like that, because we could have told you. It wouldn’t really happen.’

‘But it happened to Mama, Lessie. And it was when she was at school. She told us that. She was there and she couldn’t go home.’

‘Yes, but that was different. There was a war on. And she was at the university, not in grade school. Besides, that was in Germany a long time ago. Not America. It wouldn’t happen here.’

‘Well, yes, I know that. I’m telling you what I believed
then
. Remember, I was just little.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I mean, you can understand it. They
did
keep Mama there and not let her go home. So I thought they might do that to me too. Especially when Mrs Hoolihan made me stay after school and wouldn’t let me leave until I did those papers right. It really wasn’t such a stupid notion.’

I put my arms around Megan.

‘It was you guys I was scared about most,’ she said. ‘That they’d keep me there and I’d never see you or Mama or Daddy again. That’s what happened to Mama, and I think I’d just die if the same thing happened to me. I would. Even now. So, I kept dreaming about it. Over and over and over.’

‘Was that tonight too?’ I asked.

‘No. I just wet the bed, that’s all. Then I got up and changed the sheets and I was just sitting around. It made me feel lonesome.’

Silence settled over us. It was horribly late.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ Megan asked.

‘You mean tonight? Yeah, I did.’

‘Is he OK?’

‘Yes, he’s OK.’

‘Did he kiss you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘You know, Megs, it kind of wrecks a thing like this when you have to come home and discuss it with your little sister.’

Megan shifted. ‘I don’t see why.’

The darkness closed in around us, and Megan grew so quiet that I assumed she had fallen asleep finally. I was very sleepy myself. Closing my eyes, I dozed.

‘Les?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘I’m getting awfully tired, Meggie. I want to go to sleep.’

‘But can I ask you something first? Before you go to sleep?’

‘You will anyway.’

‘Well, you know about the war?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Well, we’re studying about it at school. And you know, my teacher was telling us about some of the things the Nazis did to people. To the Jews, you know? She had some pictures. They were in a book.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Have you ever seen those pictures, Lessie?’

‘What book is it?’

‘Well, I can’t remember its name. But have you ever seen pictures like that? Of what they did to the Jews?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have.’

Megan was silent. I was wide awake again.

‘Is it true? Did they really, really do things like that to people?’

‘I guess they did.’

‘Mama never makes the war sound very bad. She makes it sound like, well …I don’t know. You hear her stories. Like about Jadwiga. About how silly she was and stuff.’

Again silence.

‘Well …’ and then she stopped. I could feel her breath against my arm as she exhaled. ‘Well, Les, do you think they ever did things like that to Mama, things like in those pictures?’

‘Is that what’s bothering you? Are you worried about that?’

‘But did they, Lesley?’

‘Megs, Mama wasn’t a Jew, was she? Those were Jews in those pictures.’

‘But how come she never went home when the war started?’

‘I don’t know. She was working or something. I don’t know. But it was different than with the Jews, Meggie. I know that for certain. They liked Mama. See, they thought Mama was really beautiful. Because she was so blonde and stuff. You know. She’s told us about that. About how the Nazis liked people to have blonde hair and blue eyes. Aryan. That was their name for it. They liked people to be Aryans. And Mama was.’

‘But Mama had a hard time in the war. You know it. Like she’s got all those little scars and stuff. You know that’s from the war. Daddy said.’

‘Well, who knows. It was a difficult time there then. People got in trouble pretty easy. And you know Mama and her opinions. She’d get in trouble anywhere.’

No response from Megan.

‘But it wasn’t anything like what happened to the Jews. The Nazis hated the Jews. They planned to kill them all.’

‘But what was it like where Mama was?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then how can you say it was different from the places the Jews were? For all you know, maybe it wasn’t.’

I sighed. ‘I’m too tired for this, Megan. It’s the middle of the night. Cripes, it’s practically morning. I want to sleep.’

Megan squirmed around. She was well past the cuddly stage. Instead, she was mostly knees and elbows. She had her shoulder jammed against my breasts.

‘But what was it like for Mama, Lesley? I got to know. I keep thinking about those pictures and I got to know.’

‘But
I
don’t know. Listen, just forget about it. It happened a long, long time ago before you were born or I was born, before a whole lot of people were born. A
long
time ago.’

‘If it was so long ago, how come it still bothers Mama?’

‘Megan, go to sleep.’

‘But I need to know. I just keep seeing those pictures in that book. I shut my eyes and that’s what I see. In this one picture there was this little boy with his hands above his head. And they shot him. I keep seeing him in my mind. I keep seeing the way he was looking out of the picture. He was littler than me.’

‘Well, stop seeing him. Don’t think about it, because it’s over and done with. And Mama’s circumstances were not like the Jews’. I do know that much. Mama would have told us if it had been like what happened to the Jews. But she hasn’t, has she? So stop worrying and don’t think about it.’

Megan sighed. ‘You sound like Daddy.’

Again, another long silence. But this time I didn’t grow sleepy. I lay staring at the wall.

‘Les?’

‘What is it now?’

‘You know Mama?’

‘Of course I know Mama, Megan.’

‘No. Stoppit. Be serious. You know
about
Mama. The way she is. That’s because of the war, isn’t it?’

‘Megan, I mean it. Stop worrying about it. If you don’t shut up right now, I’m going to make you go back to your own bed.’

‘I’m not worrying. I’m just wondering.’

‘Well, then stop wondering.’

She sighed again. Then she wiggled to make herself more comfortable against me. She sighed one more time, heavily.

‘Your teacher shouldn’t be talking to you kids about stuff like that. You’re too little. She’s just scaring you. And I think that’s wrong. I think in the morning we ought to tell Daddy what she’s doing.’

Megan didn’t answer.

‘So just forget about it and we’ll take care of it in the morning, OK?’

Megan squirmed and then relaxed. She expelled a long breath of air and then closed her eyes. ‘Doesn’t matter really,’ she said quietly. ‘I already knew about it anyway.’

B
oth Megan and I slept late. It was after ten o’clock when I woke up. Megan was still in bed with me, still asleep. I had a painful crick in my neck from not having been able to move easily during the night, and it hurt like heck to turn my head. So I sat up cautiously and then tried to climb over my sister without waking her. Quietly, I dressed and brushed my hair. Megan remained dead to the world.

Downstairs in the kitchen, my mother and father were still sitting at the table and drinking coffee. On days when my father didn’t have to work, my parents enjoyed long, leisurely breakfasts. Often they spent as much as three hours at the table, talking, eating, reading the newspaper, discussing world events, listening to the radio and drinking the strong, dark coffee my mother made in a special pot. When I came down I could tell they had eaten their main breakfast quite a while earlier, but by the way things were spread out, it was apparent they were still a long way from finishing.

Warily, I glanced at my father to see if he was angry about my late return. But after greeting me, he returned to his coffee and newspaper. Mama was browsing through the want ads. She looked up.

‘Did you have a nice time?’

‘Yes, Mama, I did.’

She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair. ‘This boy, did you like him?’

‘Yes, Mama.’ I smiled at her as I went to the refrigerator to take out the eggs. ‘I like him a lot. He’s different.’

Lifting down a bowl, I broke a couple of eggs into it and scrambled them. Mama had turned in her chair to watch me. Her hair was loose. Apparently she had washed it earlier and had not gone to tie it back yet. Like Megan, she had extraordinarily straight hair, and it lay across her shoulders, reflecting the glow of the kitchen light. Putting her cigarette into the ashtray, she pulled out one strand of hair and twisted it around her finger.

‘Guess what, Mama. Paul liked the turquoise shawl. He said how soft it was. He thought it was beautiful.’

Pleased, she smiled.

‘And guess what else? They have dogs. Two of them. Labradors. Named Fortnum and Mason. His mama lets them ride around in the backseat of her car when she goes to do the shopping.’

My mother laughed. She adored dogs. We’d had one once, a great hulking brute of a dog, a cross between a Dalmatian and a Newfoundland retriever. Mama had named him Piffi, which was a very unlikely name for that dog. He should have been called Brutus or Killer, or at the very least Rover. But in spite of his appearance, he had been gentle and good tempered. Megs used to ride on him, and I dressed him up in doll bonnets or tied yarn to his tail to make him look more like the pony I was longing for then. However, Piffi’s real allegiance had always been to Mama.

All the while I talked, I kept an eye on my father. I was concerned that if I let the conversation between Mama and me flag, he would pounce on me for having stayed out too late. I stalled as best I could, talking faster and faster, elaborating way beyond what I actually knew about Fortnum and Mason. But Dad said nothing. He sat with his newspaper and his coffee and a piece of toast Mama had gotten up and made for him while I was talking. When I couldn’t detect a flicker of life from behind the newspaper, I gave up and ate my breakfast.

I knew he knew I had come in late. Because it was my first date alone with a boy, Dad had sat me down for a thorough talk the night before. Unlike Mama, my father wasn’t the least concerned about Paul’s virginity. He made me Scotch tape a dime inside my shoe so that if I needed to call him to come get me, I’d be prepared. I knew it mattered to him and my lateness wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Besides, he seldom went to bed before midnight anyway.

But my father said nothing. I could tell he was listening to my conversation with Mama, but he never came out from behind the sports section. My mother saved me. Delighted with all this talk of dogs, she began reminiscing about Piffi. We exchanged little memories about him, and Mama was laughing and illustrating her stories with animated gestures. Dad, I suspect, was reluctant to spoil her happy mood by getting mad at me.

The weather that Saturday was wretched. It rained in the morning, the drops half-frozen before they hit the ground. Around noon the sleet stopped and the sky hung low and swollen. When we had lived in Washington state, the snowdrops and crocuses would begin to show in late January, and I had always shared Mama’s deep relief at seeing them, even though the weather often persisted in being miserable. But here there was nothing to indicate that winter wouldn’t go on for ever. All I could see out the window was dead grass, bare trees and lead-grey sky.

After breakfast, Dad rummaged around the house in an attempt to assemble all the bits and pieces he needed to do the income taxes. It put him in a foul mood. He yanked out the junk drawer in the kitchen while I was doing the dishes and he rooted sullenly through the mess. Unable to locate all the prescription receipts, he hollered for my mother, and she came running. For some reason my father always assumed that Mama had done something with whatever he could not find in the house. Still unable to unearth what he wanted even with Mama’s help, he left the junk drawer sitting up on the counter, its contents strewn everywhere. Wiping the counters down with a dishrag, I paused, unsure if I should put the stuff away or leave it alone.

Mama seemed nearly as moody as my father. Wearing a pair of faded jeans and one of my old sweatshirts, she drifted around the house restlessly, hands in her back pockets. She was trying to help Dad find everything but she wasn’t much help, chiefly because doing the taxes put my father in such rotten humour that no one could have pleased him. So she shadowed him at a distance, hands still in her pockets, until he growled impatiently at her for always sticking things in strange places. Then I heard her mutter softly that she
didn’t
stick things in strange places, that if he would only file them away in his desk like she asked him to …But by that point Dad had disappeared somewhere else. So she wandered over and sat on the edge of the kitchen table and watched me struggling through college applications. Until my father hollered for her again.

Boredom, I think, had always been my mother’s principal foe. She needed more to keep her occupied than she could ever find around our house, especially now that neither Megan nor I were babies any longer. If she could have had a job of some kind or something similar, I think it might have helped. I had said this to my father on numerous occasions because, since he was working, I didn’t think he was as acutely aware as I was of how empty Mama’s days were. But he didn’t agree. In fact, he was flatly against her working. Mama was too unpredictable, he would always reply. What with her moods and her strong opinions and her idiosyncrasies, you couldn’t expect people to be very tolerant.

My mama had a lot of what Dad labelled ‘idosyncrasies’. Many of them were rather endearing behaviours, if no one you particularly wanted to impress was watching.

For instance, my mama talked to radiators. And to most other inanimate objects, if the occasion arose. In her mind everything had the possibility of being alive. ‘Well, you don’t really know, do you?’ she’d say to us when we laughed at her. ‘Would a stone know you’re alive? Well, then how can you know for sure that the stone’s not alive too and
you
just don’t perceive it? How do you know? It could be.’ And in her mind, it could. So it only stood to reason that you treated everything courteously, just in case. Our radiators, which were forever banging and clanging, were the recipients of three-quarters of Mama’s conversations on cold winter mornings, when Dad, Megs and I were still stumbling around bleary eyed. ‘You got air in your belly?’ she’d enquire politely of the one in the kitchen as we sat, eating jam and toast.

Some of her idiosyncrasies, however, were less charming. She had, for instance, a morbid fascination with food. Starchy things, like potatoes or pasta or rice, were her favourites, and many were the occasions that we would chance across her in the kitchen, eating a bowl of plain, cooked macaroni or a dish of cold, leftover potatoes. And my mother ate
everything
, including the fat off the meat, the skins off the potatoes, the liquid left in the vegetable bowl. Her idea of scraping dishes before washing was to eat whatever the rest of us had left and then wipe the plate clean with a piece of bread to get the last bit. The most distressing aspect of this inability to ignore food concerned things that fell on the floor. My mother would eat dropped food. She didn’t confine herself to retrieving those things that could be washed off, but also went after and ate such things as Jell-O or mashed potatoes or butter. Both Megan and I had always found this horribly embarrassing behaviour, and we were often reduced to bouts of berserk screaming when we demanded that she leave it alone and she in turn called us wasteful little louts. But we never broke her of the habit. She still did it every time something dropped. So we were forced to keep the kitchen floor literally clean enough to eat from and we prayed like zealots when we went to a restaurant that God might intervene before anything hit the ground.

And others of Mama’s idiosyncrasies were downright intolerable. Perhaps her most incorrigible habit had to do with her speech. My mother still spoke four languages and used three of them in daily conversation, yet out of all those words, she had never acquired a euphemistic vocabulary. Consequently, tact and diplomacy certainly were not Mama’s strong suit. She had a colourful, multilingual way of offending everyone by always saying precisely what she thought. This habit, more than any other, drove my father wild. ‘Why can’t you think sometimes before you speak?’ he would yell at her. ‘How can you say things like that?’ Yet Mama made no serious attempt to curb her tongue. ‘I am just being honest,’ Mama would say. ‘It’s
you
who are wrong, always saying what isn’t true. I’m just saying what I think. I’m just being sincere.’ Or on other occasions, particularly when her language had gotten a little salty as well, she would just give him a completely blank look. ‘What does it matter?’ she’d ask. ‘They are only words. Shit is shit. Fuck is fuck, no matter what you call them.’ And Dad would explain that you
didn’t
call them that, period, at least not in polite company. Mama would nod wearily and shrug, and I knew she didn’t care one way or the other. Then, the next time, there they’d be, together at the checkout at the supermarket, Mama sliding cans of pork and beans or whatever down the conveyor belt for Dad to pack, and she’d casually remark what a bastard she thought the man who cut the meat was. My father would go white with horror, and once they were in the car, the argument would start all over again.

So these were the reasons, my father explained, that he did not want Mama out working. She’d end up being humiliated or treated shabbily or made fun of, he said. Or she’d get herself into trouble.

I still didn’t agree. Some of the things Mama was capable of doing were excruciatingly embarrassing, and I was as bad as anyone about trying to keep her separate from people I hoped to impress, but nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking that if she had something more to occupy her mind, perhaps she wouldn’t have so much time left over to think up good reasons for engaging in eccentric behaviour.

I am not sure how much Mama felt her confinement. Everything always had intensity for her, wherever she was, and she could go about the most mundane tasks with almost electric vigour. She liked listening to her various phonograph records and often jotted down notes to help her remember to show Megs or me some small nuance she had discovered in comparing one piece with another. She pored over the newspaper for so long each morning that she was far better informed on the state of the world than either my father or I. Then she’d reread the editorials, clip out articles and write short, sharp, to-the-point letters to people like our congressmen or the President. She always made me proofread the letters to make sure she’d made no grammatical errors. They were good letters, well thought out. She read voraciously. She would read anything we brought home from the library for her, from murder mysteries to books on family finance. She browsed through Megan’s and my schoolbooks, and sometimes I would find pencilled-in answers to the questions at the ends of the chapters. She exchanged magazines with Mrs Reilly next door. And every payday she made Dad buy her a paperback at the supermarket.

Mama’s contacts with people outside the family were limited, partly because of our frequent moves and the difficulties in meeting people that engendered, partly because of her fluctuating agoraphobia, and no doubt partly because of my father’s inclination to keep her home. She did have coffee with Mrs Reilly quite often, and when she was active, she went downtown, and I knew she had some acquaintances in the stores because she always came back with local news. Otherwise, her only long-standing contact was with a German Jew from Berlin, who now lived in New York. She had never met him. She’d simply struck up a correspondence with him after reading an article he’d written in a magazine. Over the years their friendship had flourished. My mother had developed very strong Jewish sympathies arising from what she termed her ‘enlightenment’ during the war; yet I knew she was still wracked with guilt about having been born Aryan in a time and place when that had mattered and about never having questioned the Hitler regime until she was forced to. She spent hours composing the letters she sent Herr Willi. Writing them out in longhand, revising them, writing them again, typing them, she struggled to untangle turgid emotions and troubled philosophies. Occasionally she would let me read the letters, to see if I thought what she was trying to say was clear. But she wrote to him in German, her sentences far more complex than anything she ever produced in English, and often I could not fully understand them. One thing, however, was always plain to me then: we underestimated Mama.