Torey Hayden - The Sunflower Forest

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.’