Sunny

You’re time
in the Sun.

Time in the Sun.

You’re going to have
Your
Time in the
sun.

The year before, she had been my sister. I pushed and shoved her, along with Patrice, my penfriend, and his older brothers for the whole three weeks of my French Exchange. We had bonded, us boys, overcoming class and language differences through games of boules, through getting caught with a copy of Playboy. It was my suggestion to write merde! in her journal. My suggestion that we pin her teddy bear to a wall with a nail through its ear.

See
My dolly’s dreaming!
She doesn’t have to wake.

She doesn’t have to fight
with the mirror
or the snakes.

At school, it had been the last year of boys on one side of the class, girls on the other. I was happy to reproduce this at home with the Valois. Frog! Ponglais! I was a boy with boys. A boy with boys to be taken fishing, to be taken on smoking expeditions in the dunes with Patrice’s air-rifle slung over my shoulder. I was a boy to be included in the photograph of the four of us down on the beach. Tanned. Healthy. Stood in the sun.

In that picture she was still a little girl, sat in the background by the towels, her cardigan pulled down over her knees.

That was the year before... when I was the hooker in the1st team, when I was district champion at cross country.... when I was...when I was...

This summer’s passion was to be for cycling.

The Tour had come close to the village in July and now everyone, even Monsieur Valois, was off, sweating kilometre after kilometre of the flat coastland. The Valois were a family that believed in sport, in trophies, in the importance of the body in every part of life. They also believed in the great outdoors. In physical strength. Being indoors was never permitted. It was deemed to be unhealthy. But I was under orders to take it easy. My doctors hadn’t been happy to let me come away. But I insisted, pointing out that the sun would help me heal.

Cycling was out of the question. My Mum had written a letter to Chantal, the latest housekeeper. I was left in the garden to sleep like some ancient aunt.

Plays like a girl.
A Big girl’s blouse

She and I had overcome the language barrier by playing games of cards...then Cluedo. Kerplunk! Mousetrap. Monopoly. Neutral territory. The first couple of games she let me win but then she became strict and competitive and beat me every time. She would celebrate her victories with a nervous hopping dance which always took her out of reach. I would soon get drowsy and nap away the afternoons like the stale, old men on my hospital ward.

Arm. Ahrm.Leg. Liegg. Head. ’Eadd..... Xhhed

One game of our own invention kept cropping up. I would touch myself, naming some part of the body.

Ahrm.
Liegg.
’Eadd.
Xhhed

He
correct/
(s)

the things she said.

I found myself with a reason to look at her face. Watching her mouth moving from shape to shape. Her tongue appearing in strange, unscripted places. Her strange, sanguine smile fighting for her facial muscles. I found myself a reason to look.

At the sunlight passing through the wisps of hair behind her ears. At the hem of her skirt lying across her tanned legs.

This was the Summer.

Was being translated.

French --> English
Girl --> Woman?

It was a three week visit, but it was reduced by my sleepiness to a few bright pools of light-soaked incident

.
There was the incoherent afternoon when she insisted I brush her hair and then she appeared in the garden with her dolls. She introduced them to me. Their long imaginary biographies spilling out one after another.

There was the painful trip we took on a country bus to a relative who served us coffee and left us alone in his dark kitchen without a word said.

There was the boat ride we took into the reeds in the estuary slowly sliding through the russling stalks.

There were the constant dreams of being caught wearing a dress.

Mouth
Teeth
Tongue
Lips
He avoided teaching her the verb

To Kiss

We kept to the garden. A halfway house between the wide world of the coastline and indoors. We kept to ourselves, sitting amongst the detritus of free weights and training apparatus left lying around the lawn. Patrice and his brothers seemed to have forgotten I existed and going to beach was also out of the question. The only time we had gone there, a group of excitable village girls had gathered around us. One of them, Sylvie, had screamed when I took off my shirt. She kept pointing at the puckered scar tissue and gagging on her schoolgirl English. Ug-ly! Ug-ly!

I didn’t understand the rapid conversation that followed or why suddenly we were left on our own. The girls from the village only tolerated her company for the chance to use the family’s tennis court or when she had her brothers in tow.

Too Naked. Too Bright
The Sun’s never right

I was starting to feel better by the middle of the second week. Maybe the sun was capable of mending me after all. I did not fall asleep after every meal and I was putting on weight. I was also feeling the need to walk, to be moving about more often. The operation had left me with a stoop. I was like an old man when I looked in the mirror and I had formed the idea that walking would stretch the scar tissue on my stomach and let me straighten up properly. Despite my wanting to be on my own, she insisted on coming with me. I just didn’t have the French to explain. That I wanted to fuck and shit my way along the path alone, like I had seen the old boys in hospital doing. That I wanted time to reform myself into a better, more acceptable shape. She insisted in coming along, carrying a basket, making it an outing with food and a blanket.

In losing we find

( the one gift of time?)

In longing we know there’s less to ourselves.

She led me out through the back of the Valois’s rambling garden along a sandy path. There wasn’t even a fence to mark the border of their land. I wondered at the time whether M. Valois didn’t own the wood as well, along with everything else in the village. But I have read recently that these massive plantations were created by some great government initiative to stabilise the coastal dunes, in order to protect the farm land behind from the effects of flooding.

I liked the cool shade of these woods. Particularly in the fierce heat of the afternoon. I liked the regular, vertical lines of the trunks. The way that the sun filtered down in rays. The fact that there was no brush, no complicating undergrowth. I liked the fact that I could see where I was going, that I couldn’t get lost. That I could sit down when my nerve failed me. There was just the path, the breeze, a deep carpet of needles and the occasional monster pinecone sitting like a buddha on its rounded backside.

She wanted to tell him
Of the touch of the breeze

The fountains fingering
under her skirt

She wanted to show him
The flower she grew

Her feelingsome fronds
Now searching for light

She led me to a kind of glade which had been made by a twisted, runty tree that had messed up the far-reaching symmetry of the plantation. Rabbits had made a warren in the sunniest part of this space and had nibbled the grass to a short springy carpet.
We sat on her blanket and played our game again.

Head. Arm. Finger. Fist.

Toes. Foots. Knee. She blushed ..thigh. She spoke deliberately, reproducing exactly, my unintended pause.

She had pointed at her breasts.

We were suddenly laughing. I tried to explain what she had said.
Bust. Tits.

I was suddenly aware of how ridiculous and ugly my language was. The sounds I made had no reference to the songs that the curves of her chest made me want to sing. I was strongly aware that I wanted to kiss her.

She rabbit-punched me on my arm and pushed me down on to the blanket. I winced from my twinging scar. We fought for a bit in a half-hearted fight until my sunglasses got tangled in her hair. When we finally brought our mouths together, our teeth clashed as we opened our lips .

Finally I spoke!
An afternoon expressed with the one word
Yes.

After that she made our walks to the clearing an afternoon tradition.

I had five days left of my stay with the Valois when Patrice came off his bike. He had tried to corner at speed, on one of the sand-blown department roads out in the drained marshland. Unfortunately for Patrice he had skidded on his back along the surface of a flinty old cart track. He had lain there for nearly an hour before a bee-keeper happened upon him on his way home and had taken him to a hospital. His legs looked like they had been carved like a side of beef when he peeled back his bandages for me to look. His pupils had that dark cave look of loss, I recognised from looking at my own face.

The next morning the garden was full. Even M. Valois decided to take a day off from the saddle and tried ineffectually to mend the bent frame of Patrice’s bike. Suddenly there was farting and dreadful french pop music and there were the older Valois boys vying with each other to hold up a free weight with their arms stretched out. Suddenly there was masculine laughter. M. Valois and I took bets in English as to who would drop their arm first. Patrice just lay in a deck chair, numbed by painkillers, trying to hold on to our conversation.

In the shade
Now no one sees her
Now no one knows her

What she believes

That afternoon she seemed invisible. She sat well away from us looking up word after word in the English-French dictionary. When she finally appeared in our part of the garden carrying her basket Monsieur Valois simply asked her to fetch him a drink. By the time she came back with a tray he was already unwrapping the sandwiches she’d made for our picnic. I remember she just stood there on the path, speechless, while her father offered the carefully cut sandwiches around. She put her hands on her hips and she stared at her brothers, one after the other, willing them not to touch her food. Then Patrice let out a stagey moan and we all turned towards him to see what was wrong. I asked him where it hurt.

Your arm. Your leg. There were plenty of places to chose from.
She walked towards me, meeting my eye and then tipped the jug of iced lemonade over my head.

The next day it was Patrice and I in the garden. We exchanged notes on hospitals, scars. He had recovered his unconscious swagger and he seemed happy that I was still more incapacitated than him. He lorded it over me by doing a press-up before flopping back into a sun chair. He even insisted we speak in French. We played Monopoly most of the afternoon, but we both cheated outrageously and ended up throwing the houses and hotels at each other before kicking over the board. I stood up from the mess and felt the tightness of my scar. I decided it was time to take my walk.
It seemed sensible not to walk to her spot. Her sense of possession was very strong and I didn’t want to meet her there. Instead I followed the path that ran down to the beach car park. I walked further than I had done since being ill and I was sweating heavily by the time I came to the picnic tables near the car park. I was forced to sit down to get my breath back. I was forced to look on and observe.

I noticed squirrels cork-screwing their way up and down the trunks of the trees. I noticed a car pulling up in the car park.

I watched closely as a family unstuck themselves from their car seats and climbed out into the sun. I watched a mother and daughter walk off togther to the toilets. I watched the small toddler wandering his way towards me. I watched as he picked up a pine cone about the size of an easter egg. I watched as he lumbered forward like a remote controlled robot. I watched his delight when he found an even bigger cone. I watched as he discarded his first prize as though it had never existed.

That evening I sought her out. She was staring at the TV sitting in the dark with her brothers. I mimed to her from the doorway - You. Me. Walk. I grabbed her hand when she jumped up to join me.
This should have been a dream. The pine woods at night. Walking together, trying to recover something I had lost. The woods looked even more regular in the mirror light. The marbled trunks of the trees looked like the lines of columns of a classical temple.
By the time we had arrived at the clearing I was in pain. I winced as I sat down. I was feeling more and more ill. I was over exerting myself.

She took off her sandals and began to dance. She span and span around, harvesting the moonlight. I was an observer again. She was out of reach. I watched as she jumped and shouted and then she came slowly towards me.

My bow-tiful arms.
My graze-ful legs.

She started to unbutton her sleeveless blouse. Slowly turning on the spot laughing and touching each part of her body.

My. My.
She was finally noticed

She presented each new part to me with a well rehearsed adjective. She had clearly spent hours with her dictionary.

I watched and I watched and I didn’t say no.

He watched
and watched
and he hissed the word yes.

*****

She was my sister again, when we met up many years later in Boston. I had come over to lecture about the Etruscans at BU for a semester (and also to be a guinea pig for a medical trial at a nearby hospital). In bars, after work, we bitched about colleagues and secretly mocked our Americans friend’s obsessions with Woody Allen. Her English had improved to the point of no accent. It was me that the Americans had trouble understanding. We would often find ourselves mocking our own voices.

But despite these differences our new found ability to communicate was an experience in itself, as our words rushed into the vacuum left by our past. We just talked and talked on day trips out together, describing this and that, navigating the very present colours of the Fall, and treating the past like New Found Land.

There was one day I remember most of all, a walk in the woods at Waldon Pond. We were talking about her new translations of Sylvia Plath. I stripped off to swim, despite in being cold for September. She ran her fingers over the length of my original scar.

“Your scar! Your guts.”
Your beautiful gift.

She stretched out in the sun and began to cry.

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