The Sunflower Forest (7 page)

So I felt sorry for her. It seemed wrong to me that she should spend so much time sitting around the house all day, reading novels and watching soap operas. That would depress anyone. But one time Mama overheard me when I was talking to my father about it and telling him I didn’t think he was right to keep her at home. She took me aside afterwards and told me to leave the matter alone. She was OK, she said, she didn’t mind. What she meant, I think, was that she didn’t want me to hurt my father.

Mama seemed at loose ends that Saturday, trying to help Dad assemble what he needed for the income taxes. Finally, she wandered into the living room and turned on the phonograph. She had a collection of old 78s she’d bought while they were living in Wales. The music on them was a type unique to the Welsh, and Mama was fascinated by the complex harmonies.

‘Do you want to hear
The Lark Ascending
?’ Mama called to me after a short while. I was still in the kitchen.

‘All right, Mama,’ I called back.

That had been Elek’s favourite piece. Mama had told me so often about Elek’s sitting in the gazebo, playing his violin, that I could see the house near Lébény myself, and the gardens with their broad expanse of lawn curving around the lime trees. The white gazebo I pictured was one of those with all the ornate Victorian fretwork. Behind it was the mill pond, glassy in the mid-afternoon sun. The ducks quacked sleepily as they drifted in the shallows. And soaring over it all was the eerie, grave beauty of
The Lark Ascending
.

She played the record twice, turning it up louder to make certain I could hear it. As I was trying to fill out college application forms at the kitchen table, I ended up putting my hands over my ears in order to concentrate enough to understand what I was reading.

My father came down the stairs from the study. Mama lifted the needle off the record. He came into the kitchen to sharpen a pencil. She followed him to the doorway.

‘O’Malley, dance with me,’ she said to him as he stood over the pencil sharpener. She came and put her arms around his waist.

‘Not now, Mara. Let me get this done first.’

She had her cheek pressed against his back. Her hair, still loose, flowed over her shoulders. She was watching me, smiling at me, because my mama knew she could get pretty much anything she wanted out of Daddy. He stood in front of the sharpener and felt the point of the pencil.

‘Dance with me now, O’Malley,’ she said. ‘I’m in the mood.’

Grinning, he unhooked her arms. My dad was a sucker for dancing. On Friday and Saturday nights he would put on records and push back the couch and the coffee table in the living room and whisk Mama off, as if it were the Stardust Ballroom. Both Megan and I had learned to dance before we were in school. Perhaps my favourite memory of my father came from when we lived on Stuart Avenue. Mama was very pregnant with Megan at the time and she could hardly get close enough to my father to put her arms around him. Plus, she tired easily and her back hurt. So my dad played waltzes all night because they were slow. When they were taking a break, my father lifted me up on his lap and showed me the cover of one album with a picture of the Vienna Woods on it. He and Mama had been there in the woods of Vienna, he told me. Right there by that tree. They had eaten bread and cheese on a picnic, but no sausages because meat was still too hard to get in those days. They had gotten married not very far from that spot in the Vienna woods. Then when he started the music again, he bowed deeply to me and asked if I wanted to be his partner. I was eight and couldn’t waltz very well. So he told me to stand on his feet and he whirled me around and around the living room.

I remember that evening with timeless clarity. I remember the colour and plaid of his shirt. I remember the way he looked down at me, his smile, his eyes. I remember his warm man’s smell as he hugged me to his stomach. I felt like a princess, dancing magically around the room on my father’s feet.

‘Dad?’ I said, standing in the doorway of the study. I was trying to discern if he was still working on the taxes, because if he was, I didn’t want to interrupt. The papers were strewn all over the top of his desk: tax forms, receipts, slips for this and for that. But Dad had a magazine open on top of the lot.

He raised his eyes as I came into the room. It was almost evening. On such a gloomy day, the passage of day into night was not noticeable until it had happened. He had the desk lamp on, and it bathed his hands and the litter of paper on the desk in a yellowish glow. The rest of the room was a deep, grainy blue.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘It’s about going to college next year. I have to get these applications in.’

He rocked back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

‘They’ve got deadlines. My counsellor at school keeps hassling me about it because I’ve put it off so long.’

‘Put what off?’ Dad asked.

‘Put off deciding where to go.’

‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked.

I set the applications down on the edge of the desk. Stuffing my hands into my pockets, I gazed at him over the top of the lamp. Silence.

‘It’s something I thought you might kind of like to help me decide,’ I said. ‘Like Paul’s dad. His dad decided that he ought to go to Ohio State. See, they have a good statistics department there. His dad thought that the job opportunities would be good in statistics.’

My father reached over and took the applications. ‘Have you figured out how much these places cost?’

‘Yes, Daddy. It’s at the end. I was doing that earlier. That’s why it took me so long. See. I calculated the tuition and my room and board. If I used that savings bond Grandma gave me, plus my money from work …Well, just look at it. I got it all figured up.’

He studied my calculations.

‘I could go to Fort Hayes. Or KU. If I get a really good scholarship, I thought I might try for Columbia. It costs a lot, I know, but if I got a big enough scholarship … It’s a very good school. That’s what Miss Harrich says.’ I paused. ‘What do you think, Daddy?’

He said nothing. He just read. Standing in front of his desk, hands still in my pockets, I rocked back and forth on my heels and watched him. I felt nervous without really knowing why. It caused a crawly feeling, primarily in my hands and feet and in the pit of my stomach. Desperately, I wanted my father to help me, to tell me where he wanted me to go and what he thought I should do, the way Paul’s father had done. That was the chief reason I had procrastinated with the applications for so long. I kept waiting for Dad to say something when I told him about the places I was interested in. I knew he cared about what I did, so I could never figure out why he left me to decide so much on my own.

‘It’d be nice,’ he said, ‘if you could go somewhere close to home. In case we needed you or you needed us or something.’

‘Fort Hayes? That’s nearest. If we don’t move. Are we going to, Daddy?’

‘I don’t know. No one’s mentioned it to me.’

‘Should I apply there?’

Again he paged through the various applications, checking my figures at the end. Then looking up, he handed them back to me across the lamp. ‘I trust you to do a good job, Lessie. You know better than anybody what you’d like to do.’

‘But Paul’s dad pretty much decided for him.’

‘How can that be right?’ my father asked. ‘You’re the one who’s going to end up living at the college and doing whatever it is you get trained for. Not me. You’ve got a level head, Lesley. You know best the things you’re interested in. You just go ahead and decide.’

‘Even Columbia?’

He grimaced. ‘That is a long way away.’ Then he smiled. ‘You’re a lucky girl. You got all your mama’s brains. And your daddy’s going to be proud of you, wherever you choose to go.’

I stared at the papers. ‘May I have money for the application fees?’

He nodded. ‘You let me know what you come up with and I’ll write you a cheque.’

I
applied to the University of Kansas in Kansas City. I told them I wanted to study languages. Who knew? Maybe I would. It ended the visits to Miss Harrich’s office anyway. On the 27th of February they sent me a letter of acceptance. I showed it to my father, and after work the next evening he came home with a box of chocolate éclairs from the bakery at the supermarket and we had a family party.

No one ever did speak of moving, so eventually I concluded we weren’t going to. Mama continued to cast around the house restlessly during the month of February. Her agoraphobia worsened abruptly, and for a while she refused even to go next door to see Mrs Reilly. But she never said anything about moving. On my way home from school one afternoon, I stopped by the florist’s and bought her a bowl of forced hyacinths. It was only a tiny point of brightness in the winter-ridden days but it was the best I could do. The ground outside remained brown and unbroken.

Megan took up crocheting. She wasn’t very coordinated at doing things with her hands, so it took my mother almost three weeks of undiluted patience to teach her. Once Megan caught on, she crocheted and crocheted, turning out a thing that was five inches wide and about three feet long, because she didn’t understand how to cast off. It looked like a woolly blanket for a snake. I thought my mother was going to break a blood vessel trying not to laugh when Megan showed it to her. But she didn’t laugh. Instead, she said how nicely all the stitches were made and how she’d always wanted a crocheted belt. I don’t believe that’s what Megan had thought she was making, but she was so tickled by Mama’s comments that she immediately set about making another one.

I spent as much time as I could get away with at Paul’s house. All on his own he had converted the attic into a room for himself, so that he would have space for all his projects. Paul lived for the quiet, free moments he could spend up there and I lived for the moments I could spend with Paul. Sometimes I would sit on his bed and watch while he tinkered with one project or another. Other times we would lie, arms around one another, stretched out across the bed, and talk. We talked about ourselves, about school and our classes, about the future, about life, about dreams.

Our relationship moved with languid gentleness. Indeed, I suspect that if Paul’s family had realized how very little went on behind Paul’s closed door when I was with him, they would have laughed at us. As it was, I always had the distinct feeling from his mother that she was relieved to have me around. I think she’d begun to despair that Paul, happily shut up in his attic with his gerbils and his telescope and his dozens of notebooks full of observed astronomical minutiae, would ever get around to taking girls out. So sometimes I said things to Paul in their presence that intimated we were doing more than we were. I didn’t want them to know that we had such an innocent relationship because I think Paul would have gotten a real razzing. His mother kidded him a lot anyway in a cheerful, good-natured fashion, because he blushed really easily and it made everybody laugh. Paul hated her doing it, but I must admit, she was funny, and her teasing was a whole lot less caustic than my mother’s was, when she got on to someone.

I did, however, find myself anxious for the relationship to move more quickly, but intimacy was difficult around Paul’s house because, even up in the attic with the door closed, there wasn’t an abundance of privacy. His brother Aaron was worse than Megan had ever dreamed of being. If we were in the attic, Aaron would continually go back and forth outside the door, making smoochy noises, even when Paul and I were doing nothing more than homework and kissing was distant from our minds. Once Aaron changed thermoses with Paul when we were going skating, and when Paul opened his to pour hot chocolate, out dropped a pile of condoms instead.

The only place we could go for peace was the spot on the creek where Paul had taken me on our first date. Aaron didn’t have a driver’s licence, so we were safe there. And God knows, no one else was dumb enough to be out picnicking in a spot like that in February. We went out often, perhaps once or twice a week, but still we did nothing serious. We just petted and necked. I was a little worried. I enjoyed the slow, easy-going friendship we had and was fearful of losing that if I pressed him. But at the same time, I was ready for more. I didn’t know what to do. I talked about it with Brianna, to see if she thought I should say something or do something. I asked her if she thought anything might be the matter with Paul, because Brianna had four brothers and I reckoned she’d understand how boys worked better than I did. I even toyed with the idea of talking to Mama. But I didn’t. Not because Mama wouldn’t understand. To the contrary. A lot of things Mama seemed to understand completely and, in an obscure way, I resented that. Paul was
my
boyfriend and these were
my
feelings. So, in the end, I just kept quiet. Most of the time Paul and I did no more than lie in the brown prairie grass, arms around each other, and watch birds wheel over the enormous expanse of sky above us.

I had rapidly grown to adore Paul’s family. They were noisy, energetic and extroverted – the antithesis of mine. One of Paul’s two brothers was already married and living in Garden City. The other, Aaron, was fifteen. With a face full of acne and peach fuzz, Aaron knew he was God’s gift to girls. Every time I saw him, he was either washing his hair or blowing it dry. He deafened the household with his stereo. To me, Aaron was a kid right out of a television comedy: bold, brash and full of one-liners.

My favourite member of the family, aside from Paul, of course, was his mother. The very first time I came to the house at the end of January, she’d put her arm around me and told me to call her Bo. None of this Mrs Krueger stuff. After all, if I was a friend of Paul’s, I was a friend of hers.

She was a tall woman. Her features were rather plain; she didn’t have the classic bone structure that made my mother’s face so dramatic, but nonetheless, Bo was an attractive woman. Even in February she had a tan. Her body was long and lean from diets and dance classes and daily swims at the Y. Twice a month she had her hair highlighted and trimmed to keep the short, stylish cut. Bo dressed in jeans with designer names and turtlenecks under Oxford-cloth shirts, not like my mama in her old cords and Daddy’s shirts and sweaters.

Sometimes when I was over on Saturdays and Bo wasn’t busy, she would take me into the bathroom off the master bedroom and show me how to put on make-up. She’d pull my hair into a ponytail and draw with soap on the mirror to show me the shape of my face. Look at those cheekbones. Why couldn’t I have cheekbones like that? she’d always say. Or else she’d take out balls of cotton and orange sticks and little jars of cuticle remover and help me do my nails before putting on pale, dreamy coloured polish. On other occasions she would let me come into her bedroom and she’d show me her clothes. This blouse is a Bill Blass. Ralph Lauren designed this pullover. See what good use of colours he makes? Feel this. It’s genuine silk.

Bo knew all the really exotic places to shop. She had been to New York City and shopped in Saks Fifth Avenue. She’d been on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Once she had even been in the same shop as Shirley MacLaine. I would stand in the bedroom beside her and listen and feel drab and colourless, my bones, like Mama’s, peasant huge, my hair, like Daddy’s, uncontrollable. The eye make-up would smudge when I put it on. The blusher made me look like I had a fever. And once when I came home after Bo had made me up, Mama just stood there, arms folded over her breasts, and shook her head. When I asked what was wrong, she burst out laughing. But with every passing visit to the Kruegers, I grew to love Bo more. She never seemed to doubt that I could enter her world, if I tried. She never seemed to lose faith that I was really a peacock in sparrow’s clothing.

Paul’s father I never really came to know. He was gone much of the time. He was a lawyer and was thinking of running for the legislature, so he spent a good share of his time in Goodland or Topeka or over in Kansas City. The few times he was home when I was over, he was usually in his study. Unlike my daddy, Mr Krueger really did have paperwork to do.

The majority of the time I spent at the Kruegers was, of course, spent with Paul. Usually we shut ourselves upstairs in his room and worked on his projects. He would explain them to me in patient, loving detail. Some of the things I did eventually understand. Most of them I didn’t, but it mattered little. I found it fun to be with him, to work on them, to see how they came out. He could so easily conceptualize what he wanted to do and then create it that I was excited just to be a spectator to the process. Through January and most of February we worked on a contraption to photograph Kirlian auras and then hunted for various items to try in it, including money and gloves and once, the seat off the upstairs toilet. But Paul’s real passion was for astronomy and his dream was to build a telescope larger than his current one. So we spent hours and hours together, paging through catalogues that sold ground lenses and mirrors and numerous bits and pieces that I had no understanding of, in preparation for creating what I came to think of as ‘our telescope’. Actually, I was impressed by the telescope he already had. I’d never seen one that powerful in someone’s home before and I knew it must have cost a great deal of money. We spent a lot of our evenings looking through it. I learned how to locate Procyon and Andromeda and Mira, ‘the Wonderful’, and helped Paul keep his observation notebooks. Sometimes we attached his father’s camera to the telescope, and once I got to take photographs of the moon. Later, we made plans to get them blown up into posters, some for his room, some for mine.

At my house, life remained very much the same.

‘Daddy,’ said Megan one evening as we were sitting at the dinner table, ‘can I have a slumber party?’

Dad looked up. ‘You can. The question remains whether or not you
may
.’

Megan groaned. ‘
May
I have a slumber party? I got to thinking about it today and I thought, well, maybe when my birthday comes around, we might’ve moved and I won’t know any kids to ask. So can I have a slumber party now while I still got friends?’

‘We’re not moving to my knowledge,’ my father replied.

‘Well, we might. You never can tell. Besides, my birthday’s right in the middle of summer vacation, and there’s never any kids around then anyway. So can I have one now? And we can count it for my birthday, like an advance against it or something. I won’t ask for anything then.’

‘What’s a slumber party?’ Mama asked.

‘Oh Mama, it’s where kids bring over their sleeping bags and sleep on your floor. And you eat food and stuff. It’s real fun.’ Megan obviously had it plotted out already in her head.

‘Well, Meggie,’ my father said, ‘I can see why you’d like to do it, but I don’t think it’s a very good idea right now.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, for one thing, it’d be a lot of trouble for your mama.’

‘No, it wouldn’t. Just a little party. Just a little, little, little one. Just maybe me and Katie and Tracey Pickett and Suzanne Warner. And maybe Jessica. And, oh yeah, Melissa. I can’t forget Melissa because I went to her birthday party in November. Remember? But that’s all. Just them. And I already got it thought out. They could bring their sleeping bags and we could do it in the living room. And we could have dinner, you know, like hot dogs or something. Nothing big. I could make hot dogs myself. Then we’d just watch TV and go to sleep. We wouldn’t be any bother at all, Daddy.’

By the set of his jaw, I could tell my father had already decided against it.

Megan studied his face.

‘No, Meggie,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid not. Maybe some other time. Maybe when we get a bigger house.’

‘But we’ll
never
get a bigger house.’

‘Sure we will. Maybe we’ll get a house with a rec room in it. Then you can play games and everything.’

‘By then I might be old and not want a slumber party.’

‘Sure you will.’

Megan fell silent a moment, her lower lip jutting over her upper. ‘I want a party now, not some far-off time, Daddy. Not someday.’

‘I know you do, kitten.’

Putting her elbows on the table, Megan braced her face on her two fists. She rolled her eyes in my father’s direction. ‘It’s not fair. I never get to do anything. Katie had a slumber party just last week. Katie’s had
three
of them.’

‘Yes, and you got to go to every one of them, didn’t you, Megs?’ Dad said.

‘That’s not the
same
.’ Megan’s voice had grown whiny. My father’s brows began to knit together when she spoke like that. ‘Well, it’s not, Daddy. Sometimes
I
want to do these things too. Sometimes I just want to be like everybody else.’

‘But you’re not everybody else, are you?’

‘No,’ Megan said in a low voice. I could see she was about to cry. Mama, next to her, was busying herself with the mashed potatoes.

‘Well then,’ said Dad, ‘that’s that. Just as soon as we’re in our new house, Megan has a party. I’ll mark that down in my diary so I remember. Just as soon as we’re settled.’ He looked over at her. ‘But in the meantime, young lady, take your elbows off the table and start on all that food.’

Megan was still teetering dangerously on the edge of tears. With one foot she kicked against the leg of the table. Milk danced in our glasses. Mama turned around and lifted the coffeepot from the stove. She asked Dad if he wanted more.

‘You know something,’ Megan said, her voice low and hoarse, ‘I don’t really like being in this family very much. In fact, I hate it.’