Sonja & Carl

by Hillier, Suzanne;

  “If I say yes, will you consider not going back to the Bruins?”

  “You’re ruining everything,” he said, obviously annoyed. “I always told you I was going back. And you’ll say ‘yes’ anyway.”

  He kissed me gently. It was my first kiss. I had never been on a date, even with the kiss giver. I loved it, the softness of his lips, the scent of soap and shaving lotion, the smell of the car’s new leather seats all blanketing me. He was sealing our future with a kiss, and while I craved the closeness, it frightened me. I could no longer hide in my literary world, and I was aware now I’d been hiding but would be exposing myself to the rawness of life, pledging myself to an uncertain future at nineteen. By marrying Carl, I was taking a bizarre and wild risk. I could feel my heart beating, and it was difficult to breathe.

  “I may be having a panic attack,” I whispered as I saw him watching me as I struggled for air.

  He took my hands, cold and tremulous, in his large rough warm ones and drew me close. I felt his warmth and smell and it cocooned me as he cradled me in his arms. My heart returned to normal and I started to breathe as if falling into a deep slumber, but through the drowsiness other parts of me were coming alive.

  “No need to panic, I’ll always be there for you.”

  It was then that I knew I’d marry him and would try not to question what I knew was a risk-laden decision. I felt full of hope. I placed my arms around his neck and kissed him, but after a moment he drew back.

  “We’ll wait. I want it to be really special . . . with us. June’s a good month. You’ll be finished with your exams and the season’s over.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “I don’t appeal to you . . . in that way.”

  He kissed me again, this time less gently. “You appeal to me too much,” he said. “That’s why I want to wait. You’ll see.”

  THAT NIGHT AFTER he had dropped me off, kissing me goodnight and cupping my breasts in his hands, I lay in bed. I was naked, my usual flannel pyjamas in a twisted heap on the floor. I explored my body, holding my breasts where minutes before I had felt his hands warm through the wool of my sweater. I massaged them, feeling their sponge-like heat overflow in my hands while my nipples hardened. I rubbed my hands against the elastic flesh of my hips, and then clasped the harsh nest of my crotch, pushing into the warmth inside, and feeling it pulse against my fingers. I felt a longing, searing in its newness, that caused my throat to tighten, and I wanted Carl. My urge for intimacy, so long repressed, had become compelling. Carl had said, “It sets me free, hockey does.” Now perhaps sex would do it for me. And he said he’d always be there for me.

  THE WEEK OF the Easter break was full: an engagement party in my black dress, Jerry Henley crowing his approval, Candace Stewart purring her congratulations with her eyes never leaving my ring. Dwarfed in a large chair, Ma actually swinging her legs, showing her new shoes and wearing a new dress and hairdo, courtesy of my fast-diminishing bank account. Ma smiled and nodded her head, pretending to understand what must have seemed to her a torrent of animated babble.

  Carl was solicitous of Ma, with her occasional English phrase, actually kissing the tiny chafed hands upon introduction and escorting her from the Challenger, gently removing her coat, hanging it up, and fetching her a glass of wine, with a plate of Mutti’s hors d’oeuvres. Ma was obviously thrilled and smitten, chirping a “Dank yoh” after every gesture.

  His kindness to Ma touched me more than anything else he’d ever done. I had underestimated him.

  “Thanks for being so good to my mother,” I whispered that night, parked in front of the apartment, hugging and kissing him in the car—but still not inviting him in.

  “It was a pleasure,” he said, seeming surprised that a thank you was necessary, and with such sincerity that I hugged him even more. He seemed aroused but he held back, and I wanted more.

  “Oh Sonja,” gasped Ma when I entered, “how come you not love a man like that? Soo bootiful. Soo sweet. If I had man like that, I eat him with a spoon.”

  “Perhaps you should be marrying him yourself, Ma,” I laughed, but I was pleased.

  Apparently having Carl Helbig for a son-in-law much surpassed blue coats with fox collars and Christmas dinners at the Sinclair Hotel.

  “YOU’LL LIKE MY sisters, Helga and Anna,” Carl said the day after he gave me the ring. We sat looking at the lake again, watching as the lusty wind blew tangled fingers of foam against the brown rocks. “They’re both living out of province. Anna’s in Vancouver and Helga’s in Calgary: their husband’s career choices. They’ve got some European hausfrau in them, following their men, in spite of their own careers, or perhaps getting away from Mutti, or all of the above.”

  We both laughed.

  “They were great to me when I was young. I was their little plump brother with white frizzy hair and eyes like blue saucers, and they could never say no to me. I was a junior artist, always scrawling over Mutti’s nice clean walls with Magic Markers. It drove her crazy, and she’d go on one of her wooden spoon rampages. They’d hide me under their beds and lie for me, and it always worked. By the time she’d find me she’d cooled off, and settled the score by telling me there’d be no dessert for a week, and calling me a naughty boy: a schlimmer finger, which would always get a laugh from the girls. I knew I could always count on them to sneak me some of their dessert anyway.”

  “Was she a good mom?”

  “You could say that. The thing I remember most was that she was a clean freak. I was the cleanest little kid in kindergarten. I was scoured morning and night, and she’d even call me in from playing in the backyard so she could wipe ‘my filthy hands’ with a cloth soaked with dish detergent. It was a pain in the ass; show me any kid who doesn’t get his hands dirty when he’s playing with his trucks in the backyard dirt. She loved routine, study hours, bedtime hours, and TV hours—a real Kraut. My sisters fought her on it, but by the time I was in my teens, they were off to university and she’d loosened up. She encouraged the hockey. She and my dad attended all the games, and she drove me to hockey camp in the summers. My dad’s a great guy. He hates confrontation so he always let Mutti run things, but he always had my back.”

  He leaned back and watched the restless water with half-closed eyes. “I remember my first concussion: I was seven and it was my first summer at hockey camp. I was speeding like a crazy little dynamo when I crashed into another kid and hit my head on the side of the rink. Everything went black and I couldn’t remember the rest of the game. My buddies said I lay there for a few minutes, sat on the bench for another minute, and then started again. I went back the next day, and no one was upset. The couch told Mutti I’d had ‘a little tumble.’ It became a pattern for me: I’d always get up and keep playing even if at times I couldn’t remember what had happened. Mutti thought it was great and called me her ‘little warrior,’ and so did the coach. And then when my grades took a nosedive I’d be even more of a warrior—you gotta be great at something—and with me it was hockey. I never made the connection that maybe getting my head whacked on a weekly basis wasn’t helping my brain.”

  “Terrible,” I murmured, “just awful.”

  “Let’s look at the upside,” he said, smiling, “Everyone loves a hockey star, especially girls. It makes you a sex magnet, and you might say I took advantage of that, but not unfair advantage.”

  “You should take advantage of me.” Said with a complaining pout, it only increased his smile, and he didn’t answer. “Did you care for any of them?”

  “I liked them: I appreciated their co-operation and the fact that they liked me. I treated them well. Mutti was hot on manners, so I was a door-opener, and never rough, or rude, or too forceful, and because of that some of them thought I cared for them more than I did.”

  He smiled at the turbulent lake where the windswept water reflected the white incandescent sun, barely visible behind the sheer grey clouds.

  “Did you ever really care for any of them?” I was insistent: it was import
ant to me.

  “No, not really, you see, they didn’t know about my reading, or the lack of it. And I’d never tell them, I was too ashamed, and that drove a wedge between us right away. I’d always think, ‘What if she knew I was such a clueless bastard that reading a book was like Chinese water torture?’ Then you found out and it was such a relief.”

  Was that my attraction—that I knew so much?

  “Glad I was a help,” I said, smiling, but not inside.

  He continued, his voice low and serious, “I used to watch and listen to you in class when I wasn’t cutting up, distracting everyone, and being the class dickhead. I used to marvel at you. You always knew the answer to every question, and you answered in that high, clear voice of yours, and I thought that was really great, and I wished I was half as smart.” He leaned back, rubbing the wheel of the Challenger, and a smile hovered around his mouth at the memory.

  “I’d look at you when I thought you wouldn’t notice, with all that black hair scooped back from your awesome little white face, so different from everyone else’s. But you’d never look at me, and I’d think, she doesn’t even want to look at an idiot like me, shows what great taste she’s got. Then I finally got up the nerve to ask you to a movie, and you said no. And that was it: I knew for sure you had great taste.” He looked at me, and his smile deepened.

  I placed my face in my hands. “I thought you asked me so you could make fun of me later . . . to your choir buddies.”

  “Why would I do that?” He was obviously shocked. “The worst I ever did was the period question, which was really bad, and what’s this about choir buddies? None of those guys go to church, even the Catholics. Let’s get out, I want to feel the wind on my face, it reminds me of hockey.”

  He got out and came over to my side of the car and opened the car door, but I shook my head so he walked toward the lake. I watched him standing on a rock, his black bomber jacket and square shoulders silhouetted against the cream-coloured sky, his golden hair blowing in the wind. I left the car, walked up behind him, and put my arms around his waist.

  “I’d like to freeze this moment, and then when we’re old we can say, ‘Remember that afternoon at the lake, with the wind blowing against us?’”

  “I was thinking about our kids, you don’t mind having kids, do you? I love kids, love the way they’re so eager about everything because it’s all new and shiny. We can have our own hockey team, and one little girl with black curls, who’ll sit on my knee and smell nice.”

  “Girls have their father’s brains, boys their mother’s. Psychologists are saying that now.”

  “All the more reason to have six boys. And we’ll have a nanny so you can go to university forever.”

  “As long as the nanny’s not too good-looking. Some fathers sleep with their kids’ nannies when the wife’s away; I’ve read instances of that.”

  “That’s terrible. Why would I do that when I’ve got you?” He sounded genuinely astounded.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “I forgot about how moral you were about the adultery in Gatsby.”

  “You know when I decided I wanted to marry you? When you almost broke down reciting Lear’s speech after Cordelia died. You frightened the hell out of me, and I thought to myself, if this girl can get this worked up about some play written hundreds of years ago, think of how she’d be if something exciting really happened to her in the present.”

  “Like?”

  “Like our getting really close.”

  “You were gauging my orgasm potential, right?”

  “That’s not a very delicate way to put it.”

  But I continued, “Which you won’t know about for months, which is your choice, as we both know.”

  We both laughed into the wind and he turned and placed his arms around me, and we stood swaying together on the rock with the harsh wind blowing against us and all the time I smelled the tang of spruce, mixed with his Irish Spring and Aqua Velva, and my heart swelled with love for him, but I didn’t say so. I don’t know why I didn’t.

  CARL’S SISTER HELGA arrived from Calgary for her yearly visit with her boys three days before I left for university. She was a tall woman, who looked like Carl with a blond wig. I admired her: she seemed so serene and capable. Carl saw me watching her and whispered, “She’s a large animal vet. She can handle anything, rambunctious boys, me, and even Mutti.”

  Her three little boys were full of joy and energy, bouncing off everything, including Mutti’s newly upholstered brocade sofa; the Royal Doultons, I noticed, had disappeared. Three-year-old, yellow-haired Brad was first. He stood waiting until Carl, smiling broadly, scooped him up and placed him on his shoulders, holding his sturdy thighs with his large hands. Brad placed two small grubby hands over Carl’s eyes and the now-blind Carl staggered around the room, bumping into walls, while Brad shrieked with delight.

  “Enough,” ordered Helga after a few minutes, and a protesting Brad was deposited gently on Mutti’s waxed floor.

  “You promised,” said five-year-old Max, and off they went to the brown grass of Mutti’s backyard where a game of catch took place. Here Carl slowly threw underhanded pitches with a bruised baseball and praised a beaming Max after every successful catch.

  From the concrete steps, eight-year-old Lewis sat and waited, then finally called, “We got Lego, Uncle Carl, don’t forget.”

  They sat at Mutti’s shiny dining room table, where protective newspapers had been placed, and focused on assembling the Lego purchased by Carl to celebrate Lewis’ visit. Carl sat, head bent foreword, fair hair falling over his forehead, frowning in concentration; Lewis, having finished putting a truck together, stood beside him, a slight hand on his arm, smiling as if they shared some private secret.

  Watching them, I felt choked up with tenderness. I would protect Carl from all harm, such as bangs to the head suffered as he rushed to the net in pursuit of a goal.

  Brad, holding out his arms, howled with fury when we prepared to leave, fat tears pouring down his flushed full cheeks.

  “If you’re bat like this, Uncle Carl won’t play with you no more,” warned Mutti with an ominous pout, but Carl knelt down and, taking the small, hot clenched fists in his hands, gently explained he’d be back soon, and even sooner if he stopped crying.

  “Take care of my little brother,” whispered Helga at the door. “He loves you so much and now I know why, and even Mutti approves.” I felt part of the family and I loved it.

  “You must have run a daycare in your previous life or spent it coaching Little Leaguers,” I said as he drove me home.

  He laughed. “I coached Little Leaguers in this life. There’s nothing like kids, they really just want to please, some people don’t realize that.”

  “And then they become teenagers, and only want to please themselves.”

  We both laughed, not that far from our own teenaged years.

  “My worst time with Mutti,” he said, “was when she gave away my shepherd. I loved that dog, he used to sleep at the foot of my bed, and I took good care of him, used to walk him every day, feed him, and brush him down, and he’d be all over me when I came in the door. Then I came home from school one day and he was gone. He’d been shedding fur over her damn rugs and furniture and she’d given him away to some tradesman who’d come to fix the kitchen sink. I freaked out, told her I hated her, and even my dad got angry with her. And he never got angry. It took us weeks to track him down, and then the guy told us that he’d been killed by a car, trying to run away. I cried all the way home. I was about twelve at the time, and I remember my dad patting me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Your mother’s too much for the clean house. But you’ve got to forgive her.’”

  “Did you forgive her?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t speak to her for weeks. I still haven’t forgiven her.”

  “Did she apologize?”

  “Not Mutti. Just kept mumbling about some people being happy to live in ‘dirt and filth,’ which was crazy, absolutely
nuts. His name was Lucky, which he wasn’t. They say you should never call a dog Lucky—he ends up never being that way.”

  “We’ll have a dog for our six boys and one little girl,” I said, keeping my voice light and playful, “and we’ll call him ‘Carson,’ a combination of both our names. And he’ll be very lucky.”

  “So will I.” He smiled, reached over, and took my hand.

  We drove on through the chilled streets of Davenport, with its leafless trees and starless sky, a comfortable silence between us. I cared for him, I knew that now, and it had nothing to do with hockey contracts that would pave my way through university. I cared for his essence, a vulnerable boyishness and sensitivity, and his lack of literacy meant nothing.

  “I guess I’ll be invited in as usual.”

  His voice was bantering but with an undertone of irritation.

  “You must understand,” I said, attempting to keep a self-conscious hostility from creeping into my voice. “Some people don’t live like your family does. Some people don’t have shiny mahogany tables, Royal Doultons, and newly upholstered furniture. Some people have surroundings that are ugly and drab, that smack of poverty. No need to expose you to that.” I was thinking, of course, of my own exposure.

  He kissed me gently on the lips. “It wouldn’t make any difference in the way I feel about you; you must know that. What kind of snob do you think I am?”

  But he’d see me in a different light, an impoverished lower-class light. And even worse, he might feel sorry for me.

  “Perhaps someday,” I lied, knowing it would never happen.

  THEN THERE WAS a dinner at the Helbigs, with Ma as a guest, and a double date with Jerry Henley and his girlfriend, Pattie Beaumont, who seemed much more interested in Carl.

  “Carl won’t have sex,” I complained to Jerry, watching with narrowed eyes as Pattie gyrated on the dance floor, grinding into a grinning Carl, who she’d almost pulled out of his seat. “It makes me wonder what my attraction—or lack of it—is. We make out, and then he stops.”