The Sunflower Forest

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.’

Without even looking up from his food, my father said, ‘You’re excused. You may go to your room, Megan.’

Megan just sat, kicking the table leg.

Lifting one eyebrow, he looked over at her. Megan threw down her napkin, rose and left.

I felt sorry for Megs. I knew exactly how she felt. Besides, it was easy to hear from her voice that she’d had the slumber party all planned out. You could tell that she’d most likely sat through all of Katie’s party the previous week, saying to herself, at my party we’ll have hot dogs, at my party we’ll watch Happy Days, at my party there’ll be even more girls than here. Megan always did have more dreams in her head than sense.

After the dishes were done, I stopped by her room. She was lying on her back on the bed, doing nothing but staring at the ceiling.

‘Look, I’m sorry about your not getting to have a slumber party, Megs.’

‘Go away,’ she said.

‘I know how you feel. I remember wanting stuff like that too.’

‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘He’s just mean.’

‘He’s not trying to be, Megs. He thinks he’s doing the right thing.’

She looked over. ‘It’s because of Mama, isn’t it? He just doesn’t want to bother Mama. Well, I didn’t hear Mama say anything against it. I didn’t hear her complain.’

‘Megs, it’s not his fault. It’s just one of those things.’

‘Well, whose fault is it, then?’ she asked and rolled over on to her stomach. The instant she said that, she knew the answer. Gently, she kicked at the bed with her foot. Silence followed. I picked at the wallpaper by the light switch. ‘You know what, Lesley,’ she said at last.

‘What’s that?’

‘I hate Mama.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Yes, I do. Sometimes I do. And you know what else? I meant what I said. I don’t really like being in this family very much.’

Then at last it was March.

‘Lesley? Lessie? Wake up.’

‘What do you want?’ Sleepily I rolled over to see Megan leaning over my bed. It was not even 6.30.

‘Are you awake? Get up. Come on. I want to show you something.’

‘Go play in traffic, Megan.’

‘Get up. Come here. Come in my room.’ She gave me a mighty shove.

Without any show of good humour, I got out of bed and followed her back to her own room. She ran across and bounced up on the bed.

‘Lookie here, Les.’

‘This better be good. Or I mean it, Megan, I’m going to murder you.’

‘Look.’ She had the curtain held back.

It was not quite dawn. Early March and the world for the main part was still winter grey. From Megan’s window I could see the big, leafless sycamore in the Reilly’s backyard, the street, the roofs of other houses, and out beyond them the dull, yellowish stretch of plains. The day was dawning clear and cloudless, but at that hour the sky was mostly without colour.

‘I don’t see anything, you little pig. What did you drag me in here for anyway?’

‘Down there. Look in the grass under the window.’

On the small stretch of lawn between our house and the Reilly’s, I could make out crocuses growing in the grass. White and yellow ones, forming letters, M-E-G-A-N.

‘Look at it. See? Someone’s made my name in flowers down there on the lawn. See them? I never noticed them until just this minute when I woke up and looked out. And there they were.’

I pressed my nose against the glass to see them better. The letters were surprisingly clear in the grass. Then the windowpane fogged over with my breath.

‘It’s like magic, isn’t it?’ Megan said. Megan was the kind of child to believe in magic. Although she didn’t admit it, I knew she still hoped for the possibility of fairies and elves and a real Santa Claus.

I tried to see down the strip of lawn to tell if there were flowers under my window too. When I saw crocuses there, I pointed them out to Megan and she bolted off her bed and down the hallway to my room.

The letters making my name were not nearly so well formed as Megan’s. They looked like L-E-S-L-F. There was no Y at all, just random flowers. But still, I could see it was my name.

‘Who did it, do you think?’ Megan asked, as she tried to wrench open my window to stick her head out.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mama. I bet it was Mama. I bet Mama did it.’ The window wouldn’t open after the long winter of being shut. Megan pressed her face and both her palms flat against the glass. ‘Or maybe it’s really magic. It’s like magic, isn’t it? I’ve never seen it before now and there it was, like it came up overnight. There was my name in the grass.’

‘I don’t think it did,’ I said. ‘We never go over on that side of the house. It could have been up for ages.’

‘But I look. I’m always looking out my window, Lesley, just like now. And there it was. Just this morning.’

The discovery excited Megan out of all proportion to what it was. I couldn’t restrain her from galloping in and bounding into bed with Mama and Daddy. They were both asleep when she crawled in between them. My father woke, yawning. Mama turned over sleepily and kissed Megan on top of her head. Megs was squirming down between them and chattering like a chipmunk. When Mama saw me standing in the doorway, she beckoned. I got into the bed with everyone else.

Mama put her arms around us. Megan was between her and Daddy and I was on Mama’s other side. She pressed us against her with strong arms, and my nose was filled with her warm, familiar smell. It was a broody scent, of baby powder, stale cigarette smoke and sleep.

‘Did you plant the flowers, Mama?’ I asked.

She nodded. She was smiling drowsily.

‘It’s like real magic,’ I heard Megan say. Her voice was growing soft and sleepy sounding. I lay with my head pressed against Mama’s breast. She had her left hand on my face. Her skin was almost hot, and I could feel the faintly different temperature of her wedding ring against my cheek.

‘It was magic, Liebes,’ Mama said to Megs.

There were a few moments of sleepy silence.

‘I love you, Mama,’ Megan whispered.

Then my father rolled over with a motion that rocked the whole bed. He settled deeper into his pillow. ‘There’re an awful lot of female voices nattering on in this bed,’ he said without opening an eye. ‘And this being Sunday and the day of rest …’

With a finger to her lips, Mama winked at me. No one spoke again. I lay for a while, quite wide awake. I could hear Mama’s heart beating. I lay listening to it. Then eventually, I closed my eyes and went back to sleep too.

Chapter Eight

When I was very young, we lived in west Texas for a while. I don’t remember much about it. I was only about three at the time. I don’t recall anything about the house at all. I do, however, remember that there was no yard at the back of the house. The ground just stretched away from the back porch down a hill and out on to alkali flats before dissolving into the interminable plains. Sitting on the porch, I used to look out over the landscape and think to myself that if I could only see far enough, the plains would stretch all the way to the ocean and on the other side was Madrid, Spain. Why Madrid, Spain, I don’t know. How I even knew there was such a place, when I was that age, I don’t know either. But that was one of only two clear memories of the house in west Texas. My other memory was of the sunflowers.

Down on the alkali flats below the hill grew sunflowers. They may have been wild ones, springing up after the summer downpours had flooded the flats. Or maybe they were cultivated. My memory doesn’t serve me there. What I do remember is sitting on the porch and looking down on all those sunflowers.

They were beautiful from the hill. The big golden heads would track the sun through the day, and that made them seem as if they were looking at me part of the time and looking away the other. Sometimes children would come and play there. From where I was sitting on the hill, I could see them, small as insects, disappear amid the flowers and the huge heads would nod and sway as the children ran among them. Laughter would ride up the hill on the wind.

I longed to go down there myself. The sunflowers beckoned to me welcomingly. Certainly I didn’t have permission the day I did go. I remember slipping down the rough prairie grass of the hillside, keeping low to the ground to stay out of Mama’s sight, in case she glanced out the window. Then I ran across the flats and into the shadows of the flowers. My biggest concern was not getting caught.

When I ran among the sunflowers, I discovered they were gigantic, a veritable forest, not small, the way they appeared from the hilltop. The flowers were high above my head, and before I realized what was happening, I was deep among the tall stalks. With each step I took, the green-and-gold wilderness closed silently behind me. In no time at all, I was lost, trapped.

I screamed.

I flailed about amid the sunflowers, hysterical, crying in terror to get out. The flowers went on and on in all directions, and I could not escape. Panic-stricken, I thrashed and screamed and was swallowed up.

Mama found me. From the house on the hilltop she could hear my terrified crying. She’d come crashing in among the sunflowers, bending them aside, pushing them down. They were even taller than she was.

In her hurried slide down the hillside to reach me, she had slipped and scraped her knee. I remember clutching frantically at her and tasting blood mixed with my tears. She pulled my fingers apart and lifted me up on her shoulders so that my head was above the flowers and she carried me out.

What I remember with brittle sharpness is that final moment, being on my mama’s shoulders. I remember turning and looking back at the forest closing behind us, the flowers bright in the Texas sun, and innocent and heartless.

For my mother, however, sunflowers had an entirely different connotation. They were of almost mystical significance for her. Sunflowers had grown wild in the back garden of their cottage in Wales after the war. The way Mama talked about it, it was easy to tell that she perceived the appearance of those unexpected sunflowers as practically a religious experience. They were the sign of her resurrection, and she knew she had managed to pass through her season in Hell.

My mother loved to tell us about those years in Wales. They were among her very best stories, spun out in epic, almost myth-like proportions, laced with lyrical descriptions of an aged land. I loved them above all the others, not only because she made them so beautiful to listen to, but also because they were the only stories about her life after the war that had the same magnificence as her tales of Lébény and her girlhood. They reassured me that she still had the capacity to be happy and that all her joy had not been dragged from her by the horrors of the war.

The translated name of the cottage was Forest of Flowers. It was high up a mountainside in north Wales. Mama always told us how she and Daddy had had to climb the last half mile to the cottage on a small, steep path. I had a very romantic image of Forest of Flowers in my mind. I could see the narrow, meandering trail passing through sun-dappled woods, the forest floor a carpet of snowdrops and bluebells and populated with little Thumpers and Bambis. And there in the clearing, like Snow White’s cottage, was Mama’s holly hedge and the winter jasmine and the quaint wooden arch, all leading up to the whitewashed Forest of Flowers.

Those were her sunflower years.

In Kansas, sunflowers are grown commercially. If you go out in the late summer along the small country roads in western Kansas, you’ll come upon field after field of flowers, a sea of golden, nodding heads. In the time since we’d moved to Kansas, it had become a family ritual to drive out every few weeks to watch the progress of the sunflower fields from planting in March to harvesting in mid-autumn. In spite of that childhood experience, which still came back to me in nightmares, I enjoyed these journeys, although I never could bring myself to walk down the narrow rows between the stalks, planted in military straightness, the way Mama and Megan did. For my mother especially this observation of the sunflower crop was a most pleasurable way of marking the year. The sunflowers were the single redeeming feature of Kansas for my mother.

By mid-March the ground underfoot was spongy and smelled of newness. The sun had grown surprisingly hot in the space of a few weeks. It was a Saturday afternoon, but despite the weather, I was in my room studying. On the next Monday we were having an exam in calculus, and I’d be the first to admit that calculus was not my best subject. It wasn’t going to be an easy test either. Mrs Browder told us on the previous Friday that she was intending to give us a set of ten problems and we had to solve eight of them. So I was frantically going back over old assignments to make sure I knew how to do them.

Mama came to the open door of my room. ‘I feel like a walk,’ she announced.

This caught me completely unawares because my mother had not been out of the yard since the end of January. I turned from my desk to see her standing in the doorway. She was dressed in old tan corduroys and a plaid shirt. She had one of Dad’s pullovers on, and her hair tied back with a yarn ribbon. She smiled at me, knowing, I think, that she’d surprised me.

‘They’ll be starting to put the sunflowers in,’ she said. ‘And I want to walk out and see.’

‘Mama, it’s quite a walk. Most of those fields are at least a couple of miles away or more. If you wait until Daddy comes home, I’m sure he’ll take you out in the car.’

She remained in the doorway. She had a small smile that gave her a look of amusement. ‘Come with me, baby. We can walk that far. It’s such a beautiful day, and I’m longing to move my legs.’

‘We don’t even know for sure if they’re putting them in the same fields as last year. I think we ought to wait for Dad.’

‘I have cobwebs in my legs. Come along with me. I want to walk.’

I turned back to my books for a moment. ‘I can’t, really, Mama. I have a calculus test on Monday morning. And I honestly think I might not pass it. Not if I don’t study; because I don’t understand how to do all these problems. In half of them I can’t even tell what they’re looking for.’

She continued to stand there, silent but insistent. It was difficult ever to deny my mother things.

‘Maybe Daddy can take us all out in the car tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We could have a picnic. Why don’t we do that?’

Mama still had the small smile on her face. She looked young to me then, standing there in those old clothes. She had an ageless quality to her facial expressions that made it very difficult for people to guess her age.

‘What about Megs?’ I suggested when it became apparent Mama wasn’t going to give up the idea. Megan was downstairs doing something in the kitchen. I knew because I’d been hearing her throughout my studying. Megan never had been what you could call a quiet child. ‘I bet Meggie would love to go with you. Why don’t you ask her?’

Mama considered that. She waited a moment longer in case I was going to change my mind. Finally, satisfied that I wasn’t, she turned and left.

I could hear them preparing downstairs, fixing a picnic of fruit and soft drinks. Mama was talking in Hungarian, her voice full and undulant. Megan was beside herself with excitement, and her glee floated up the stairs in squeally, high-pitched syllables.

From my window I watched them leave together. They had the little knapsack with them. Bulky in Dad’s brown sweater, Mama strode off down the street, moving purposefully, like one of Odin’s Valkyries. Megan flitted around her like a small, dark wraith.

‘Where’s your mama?’ my father asked when he returned from work mid-afternoon.

‘She and Megs went to see the farmers putting in the sunflowers,’ I replied. He had come upstairs, still carrying a bag of groceries in one arm. He was in his blue work coveralls and had his cap on. He set the bag down on my bed. Taking off his cap, he ran his fingers through his hair. It stood straight up.