The Sunflower Forest

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.

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.’

Chapter Seven

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.