The Sunflower Forest (15 page)

It was a chocolate bar with almonds.

The fight just went out of me. I found myself suddenly awash with a very hopeless kind of sadness. The emotion was made even more powerful by its unexpectedness. One moment I was furious and full of exasperation. The next was all pain and sadness.

‘Mama, what are you doing to us?’ My voice quavered. ‘That’s Meggie’s favourite kind of candy bar, didn’t you know that? Why are you giving candy to some strange child when you’ve got your very own children right here? What’s wrong with us?’

She raised her hand and looked at the candy.

‘Chocolate with almonds. That’s Meggie’s very favourite. Yet you never buy candy bars for Meggie.’

She studied the chocolate bar.

‘Mama,
we
love you. Not that little boy. He’s just some kid who likes you because you give him candy. He’s just greedy and if you stopped …Meggie and me, we’re your children. I don’t know where your other children are or who they are or what’s happened to them, but, Mama, you ended up with Meggie and me.’

There was a small, sharp silence.

‘Please, Mama, give the candy bar to one of us. Give it to Megan. It’d make her so happy if she thought you’d gone and specially bought her a chocolate bar with almonds because you wanted to. Because you knew she liked them. Please give it to Megs.’

With the fingers of one hand, Mama was twisting her lower lip. She was still contemplating the candy in her other palm.

‘But I said I was going to find him,’ she said in a near whisper. ‘I swore to God I’d get him back. I swore it on my life.’

‘Mama.’

When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. Reaching out, she took my hand and placed the candy bar in it. Then she turned and ran up the stairs. I heard the door to my parents’ room open and slam shut. She was gone.

My father sat at the table, hands braced on either side of his head, fingers twisted through his hair. He studied the tablecloth. I had told him about what had happened when he came in from work. From his expression then, I had been unable to discern whether or not he’d suspected that Mama was continuing to see little Toby Waterman. He had sighed and put a hand over his eyes. He had whacked the banister with his cap all the way up the stairs.

There was no argument, as I had feared there would be. No yelling. No nothing. He went into the bedroom and spent a long time talking to Mama. Later he came out. She never did that night.

I made supper for us. Soup and sandwiches, because no one was especially hungry. Megan took her sandwich apart and ate the middle out of it, and my father threatened to send her to her room for making such a mess. I didn’t tell him that she’d eaten a whole Hershey bar while he was up with Mama.

Afterward, we stayed amid the clutter of dirty dishes at the table.

‘Oh golly,’ he said wearily. ‘What do we do now?’ He brought a hand down and traced along one of the flowers in the material of the tablecloth. Megan was sitting on the far side of the table. Slouched in her chair, head resting against one arm, she shoved crumbs around with her finger.

‘Maybe I ought to go over there and see those people and talk to them,’ my father said.

‘What good would that do?’ I asked.

‘Let them know that we know. Honestly, they must wonder. Honest to Pete. If someone were doing that to Megan, I would have been ready to shoot them by now.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know what gets into her sometimes.’

Silence. I was wishing Megan would leave. It was difficult to discuss anything delicate. But apparently she wasn’t going to.

‘Does Mama really believe that boy is Klaus?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

More silence.

I glanced around the kitchen, at the dirty pots and pans, at the stove and refrigerator and the spice racks on the wall. It was a very ordinary kitchen.

‘I don’t see how she can,’ I said. This was crazy thinking. Before – the other things Mama had done were just eccentric. Annoying, yes, but just eccentric. They made Mama different from most people but then Mama was. This, however, was crazy, plain and simple.

‘I don’t know,’ my father said again.

‘Dad?’

He looked over.

‘Do you think Mama ought to go see a psychiatrist or something?’

For several moments he was pensive. Then he shook his head.

‘It might help.’

‘It isn’t that big a deal, Les,’ he said. ‘We can handle it ourselves.’

‘But it might help.’

Silence again. Dad scraped a bit of food off the tablecloth. It was dirty. It needed to be changed.

‘No,’ he said softly.

‘Why not?’

He lifted his head, looked out around the room, ran a hand through his hair. Then his attention returned to the tablecloth. He searched for another dirty spot and scraped at it with his fingernail. ‘She wouldn’t understand, Les.’

I watched him.

‘There were psychiatrists there,’ he said. ‘In Ravensbrück. Where she was during the war. They were, well …’ He shrugged. ‘Well, they did things. You know what I mean.’ He rubbed his hand through his hair again.

‘But that was then,’ I said.

‘She wouldn’t understand. You know how she gets her opinions of things. She wouldn’t be able to see that they wouldn’t hurt her. You know your mama when she believes something.’

I sighed. ‘But couldn’t you make her understand?’

‘I wouldn’t try. I took her away from those things, Les.’

I sighed again.

‘I know it’s hard, sweetheart,’ he said, reaching his hand over to touch my shoulder. ‘But this just isn’t that big a deal. Just a little thing. Just another one of your mama’s little things. She’ll get over it in time. I know it’s annoying, but it’ll pass just like everything else does.’ He looked at me. ‘You do understand.’

I did, I guess.

Megan shifted in her chair. ‘Daddy?’

‘Yes, love?’

‘Daddy, I know about those things. I’ve been reading. I understand too.’

He reached across the table to caress her cheek. Megan smiled.

Then she looked down at her fingernails. She gazed at them thoughtfully before looking back. ‘That was a camp, wasn’t it, that place? It was like where the Jews were, huh?’

My father nodded. ‘And a few other people, like your mama.’

Lifting her chin, Megan gave me an I-told-you-so glance. I said nothing.

‘So you see what a brave woman your mama is, Meggie?’ my father said to her. ‘See what good strong blood you have running in your veins?’

Megan nodded.

‘That’s why we help Mama a little bit when she slips and isn’t as strong now. That’s what families are for.’

I drifted into thought, sitting there in the bright kitchen light. My sister and my father continued to talk, but I ceased listening to them. What came to me was a vision of a girl. A young girl, not even my age. With pale hair and pale eyes, with strong, broad features, perhaps not quite beautiful yet, but rather ungainly, the way tall girls are at that age. A good girl, who ate her peas, kept her fingernails clean and tried hard not to fight with her brother. Wearing the blouse with lace around the collar that her mother had given her. I could see her quite clearly then. Not my mother but a stranger.

I looked over at my father. ‘I want to know one thing,’ I said.

His eyes met mine.

‘Did they rape her?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, they did.’

T
he next day I stayed home from school. It was my father’s decision, intended to buy him more time to figure out what to do to keep Mama from seeing Toby Waterman. My mother was not pleased about this. The night before, she had not come downstairs after her spell. When my father finally went to bed, I could hear them talking. I heard her voice rise in protest at something that he said. My dad didn’t argue with her; his voice was barely audible. She went on for quite a while and then left the room, slamming the door behind her. She went into the bathroom. The faucet in the bath came on, and then my father was out in the hallway saying, Mara, open the door. Let me in there. She did. The door to the bathroom shut again, and the sound of the water drowned out their voices. I fell asleep before either of them came out.

During the night Megan was up. She had gone out to the linen closet in the hall to get clean sheets and had pulled half the contents down on top of herself. I climbed out of bed and went and helped her change her sheets. When I was back in my own room, I lay in the dark and hoped that Mama would sleep late in the morning. I felt exhausted.

Of course, Mama didn’t. She was up with Dad at seven.

The morning that followed was miserable. Angry with me for being there, for having told my father, for having interfered, my mother said virtually nothing to me all morning. Bored and restless, she paced through the house, leaving clouds of cigarette smoke in her wake. I sat in the living room and watched game shows on television.

The afternoon, I feared, would be worse. That was normally the time she saw Toby, and I was frightened she would go to him regardless of me, in which case I couldn’t realistically do much to stop her. Or worse, Toby would come over to our house as he had the day before.

The whole experience was intensely uncomfortable for me. I felt like a jailer.

Mama made lunch for the two of us. Afterward, she returned to the kitchen with a box of photographs. Making herself another cup of coffee, she sat down at the kitchen table and began to sort through them. Relieved to see she had found something to occupy her, I returned to the living room and watched soap operas.

When I rose some time later and went into the kitchen to see what Mama was doing, I found her still sitting at the table with the pictures. She was drinking Kool-Aid and eating potato chips and had her feet up on the chair across the table from her. Although I noticed she was wearing her walking shoes, I said nothing. Instead, hoisting myself up on the counter behind her, I reached down and took a handful of snapshots.

Most of them I had seen. They were ones of my sister and me when we were younger.

‘Look at this one, Mama,’ I said and handed her one of Megan. It was taken when we lived in Yakima, in the backyard of our house there. Megan was standing stark naked in her little plastic wading pool.

I looked through the others. ‘Where’s this?’ I asked.

‘Wales,’ Mama replied.

‘I didn’t know you had a camera then.’

‘We didn’t.’ She reached a hand up for the snapshot. I gave it to her. ‘Jones the Farmer took this. He owned Forest of Flowers. It’s by the cottage. The cottage was over there, beyond the right side of the picture. See? You can see a bit of the holly hedge.’

I leaned down from where I was sitting on the counter and put a hand on her shoulder to steady myself. The photo was of my father and a black-and-white dog. The hedge in the background was no more than a vague blur because the entire photograph was slightly out of focus.

‘When we stood there,’ Mama said, ‘in the place where O’Malley is standing, we could see all the way down to the valley.’

I studied the young man in the picture. He didn’t look much like my father. He was thin and reedy like a boy who didn’t eat well. But it was obvious what a good time he was having with the dog. Even through the blurriness, his casual joy was apparent. I wondered whose dog it was.

Mama remained silent. With one finger she touched the figures of the man and the animal, probing them gently, as if she expected to feel the texture of them. ‘It’s a strange place there,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know what it was. You felt it. But I never knew what it was.’ Her voice was soft and distant. ‘The light, perhaps. I would sit at the window and wait for O’Malley to come home and I would look down into the valley. The light was different there, a different colour.’ She smiled faintly at the figures in the picture. She touched the dog. ‘I loved it there. The land was so old. So grey and green and sad. It broke my heart. You know the way some things do. When you are sad with joy.’

‘Would you like to go back, Mama?’

Her features softened with a smile. ‘Oh baby,
ja. Ja, ja
. Oh, it is the one place I wish we hadn’t left. I would go back there in a minute, if I could.’

She held up the photograph and gazed at it. ‘I don’t have an American heart. I belong in an old country. You must be brave and new to live in this place. I have too much sadness. I belong in an old country.’

A thousand ideas loosed themselves in my mind and went scattering in all directions. ‘Mama, why don’t we go back?’

Turning away and reaching for her glass of Kool-Aid, she shook her head. ‘It takes money. We have no money for things like that.’ But I could see by the expression on her face that I had made her dream.

I jumped down from the counter and came around to sit in one of the chairs. I was thinking frantically. There had to be a way. If we could get Mama away from here, out of Kansas, away from Toby Waterman …

She sat, glass between her hands, and did not speak. Deep in distant memories, her features relaxed. She smiled inwardly, and the smile never fully left her lips.

‘It was the flowers,’ she said softly. ‘There were more flowers there than I had ever seen, even in Popi’s conservatory. Forest of Flowers. Up on the hillside. The valley was grey and green. It was always in the mist. But we were on the hillside and had the sun.’

After school Paul stopped by. He was in a sour mood. The whole day had gone wrong for him. He was disappointed to find I was not in class. Aaron had gotten to take the car for driver’s ed. There had been a pop quiz in English over a book he hadn’t read.

Mama had gone upstairs at last to take a nap, and Megan was in the kitchen, so Paul and I went out to sit on the front lawn.

‘Were you sick or something?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied. The sun was very warm. After being in the house all day, the heat on my back felt good. ‘Mama’s having a little trouble so I stayed home with her.’

He looked at me. I think Paul believed everything about Mama had been made up. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell him about Klaus because there was too much about Klaus I didn’t know myself. I certainly didn’t want to tell him about the crazy business with Toby Waterman. ‘She’s had a couple of bad days, that’s all.’

‘What do you mean? Is she depressed?’ he asked. Clearly, he wanted to know exactly.

‘Yes,’ I said because that sounded better than the truth did.

Concern wrinkled his forehead. ‘Is she …I mean, she isn’t suicidal or anything, is she?’

‘Oh no,’ I said and I laughed, which I abruptly realized wasn’t an ideal reaction to a question about suicides and depression. So I clamped a hand over my mouth. I was a rotten liar.

I was wishing I hadn’t told Paul about Mama’s having problems. It was almost worse than not having him know at all. Wistfully, I thought about the fact that the lies never stopped in something like this. Now that I didn’t need to hide the fact that Mama was different, I was having to disguise less acceptable differences under more acceptable ones.

‘Your dad let you?’ Paul asked. ‘Just skip school, I mean.’

A bug was crawling along through the grass beside my leg, so I put a finger down to let it crawl up. ‘I wasn’t skipping. I stayed at home with my mother. My dad told me to. I do it all the time. I always have.’

He watched me.

‘So?’ I asked. ‘Who else is going to? Megan can’t. She’s too young. And too irresponsible. I used to do it when I was her age but you could never trust Megan like that.’

Paul picked a clover blossom from the lawn. He had collected half a dozen or so in his lap. With his fingernail he split the stems and tried to chain them together. They fell apart. ‘I’d go stark raving mad if I had to stay home with my mother,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t pay me.’

‘I’ve never thought too much about it,’ I replied. ‘It’s just something I’ve always done.’

‘Do you resent it?’ he asked, looking over. ‘I would. Even if my mom was tolerable, which she isn’t. I’d still resent my old man telling me what to do. Boy, if he told me I had no choice but to stay home with my mom, I’d sure say a thing or two.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ I said.

‘You want to bet? I would. I mean, you got your own life to lead, haven’t you?’

I paused. ‘I don’t see where it’s very different from having your father tell you what school to go to and what subject to major in.’

An angry glare. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Seems the same thing to me. Seems worse. You don’t want to go into statistics. You know very well you don’t. You’re not even especially good at it. It’s just him telling you to do it.’

Leaning over, I searched through the grass for a four-leaf clover. Neither one us said a word. Paul still struggled to make his clover chain; it still fell apart. I found what I thought to be a four-leaf clover and pulled it out. It wasn’t. I balled the leaves up between my fingers, and the juice ran out and stained my skin.

‘It’s a lot different,’ he said, resentment still echoing in his voice. ‘I have to go where my dad says because he’s paying for it. If it’s his money, I’m pretty much trapped, aren’t I? But how much are you getting for this? You’re not being paid to stay home. There’s no money involved. You don’t have to do it.’

The small wad of green pulp was still between my fingers. I lifted it up and smelled it. I liked the smell of grass. Letting out a long breath, I shrugged. ‘You do have to, Paul,’ I said. ‘Know what I mean? They’re your family. You just do it. I don’t know why. You just do.’

My father didn’t return until almost seven that evening. I knew where he had been. Over at the Watermans, telling them about my mother and their boy. Of course, I didn’t want to say that to Mama. When she’d come downstairs from her nap about 5.30, she’d wondered aloud why my father was late. To keep her from worrying, I said the first thing that popped into my head. I told her he’d phoned from the garage while she was asleep and had said he had to stay late to service the mayor’s car because the mayor had some big function first thing in the morning and his car wouldn’t run. I had no idea if the mayor even patronized Mr Hughson’s garage but I assumed Mama didn’t know either.

When six o’clock came and went and my father still was not back, Mama made us a cold supper with a salad so that we could eat and yet Dad wouldn’t have to eat warmed-up food when he came in. Megan had hauled out her Barbie-doll camper and about two hundred miscellaneous Barbie-doll accessories and had strewn them all over the kitchen floor while Mama was preparing the meal. After having dodged Megan and her toys for long enough, my mother finally told her to get out of the way with her things. ‘See, you can’t do that any more,’ Megan said to the Barbie doll, jamming it into the camper. She whizzed it off across the floor. ‘Barbie’s going to concentration camp now,’ she said to herself as she crawled along the floor and propelled the plastic camper out into the hallway. My mother went white. I told her that we had to do something about Megan’s reading those awful books.

When my father returned, he appeared exhausted. He’d apparently cleaned up at the garage before going over to the Watermans, because he returned home wearing a shirt and tie. While he was up in the bathroom washing for supper, Mama said in a scandalized whisper to me that the mayor was expecting a bit too much to have the men who serviced his car work in white shirts. I said no doubt it had been a nerve-wracking experience for Daddy, so it was probably best not to mention the mayor to him at all.

Mama sat with my father at the kitchen table while he ate. As she talked to him, she leaned across the table towards him. She told him how we had spent the day, about the pictures and our lunch and seeing that the lilac by the garbage cans was starting to bud. She told him that she had read in a women’s magazine that you had to watch out for too much lead in the water in old houses because of lead pipes and did he know if our house had lead pipes, since it was, after all, a rather old house. All the time she spoke, she kept her fingers moving toward him, fiddling with the placemat and the coffee cup and the cuff of his shirt. She spoke in Hungarian, and it occurred to me, as I stood with my back to them, listening while I did the dishes, that Mama wasn’t speaking English very much at all lately, even when she wasn’t tired.

After supper I gave my father a while to unwind before I went up to the study. As always, he was stretched out in the lounger. He had it pushed all the way back into a horizontal position. The radio was blaring out marching music, which I would not have found particularly relaxing. But Dad had his eyes closed and his arms hanging loosely over the sides of the chair.

I did not say anything. I simply let myself in and sat down on the footstool next to the chair. Listening to the music, I decided that I didn’t care greatly for marches.