Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  Bubber pounded the piano keys; it seemed he would never tire of that progression. One three five eight five three one. Half step up. One three five eight five three one. She went upstairs to change her clothes, put on black maternity pants and a creamy peasant top, wrist bangles and long earrings. Looking at herself in the mirror, she addressed the new hybrid of reckless bald Sunny in pleasantly haired Sunny’s expensive wardrobe.

  “Own it,” she said to herself. “Own the bald. Own the braided honey loaf. Own it. Your husband is Maxon Mann. Nobel Prize winner. Your mother is Emma Butcher. Fucking awesome lady. Own it.”

  The doorbell rang and Sunny ran downstairs to let the nanny come in. They had to have a nanny who was also a nurse, because sometimes that was necessary, and Maxon could tolerate only a few people coming into the house. No string of teenaged babysitters. No switching back and forth with the other moms on the street, so that there were always kids over. Sunny found the nanny humorless but well informed. Didn’t matter. Maxon agreeing to let anyone into the house was reason enough to sign off on anything.

  “He’s playing the piano,” said the nanny. “Hey, that’s pretty good! I didn’t know he could do that.”

  “I didn’t either. But I took him off his medication,” said Sunny. “His behavior may be erratic. He may laugh, he may scream, he may decipher texts from the Harappan civilization, he may just go to sleep. Don’t know. But I have my cell phone and I’m one street over. So call me if anything comes up.”

  “Well, how long should we let him play the piano?” asked the nanny.

  “As long as he keeps wanting to,” said Sunny. “Within reason. Right?”

  Without further explanation, Sunny plunked the braided honey loaf, now hard and perhaps even sliceable, into a floral-themed bowl. She dropped a kiss on the top of Bubber’s head and he lolled his head back to say “Oh, I love you, Mother” in a voice that could almost be described as having inflection. His hands never stopped. Sunny felt very happy inside, hearing these words from her son even after she had taken his medicine away.

  Out on the sidewalk she felt the breeze on her head, and she tapped on down the walk to her neighbor’s house. Sunny had hosted several neighborhood craft shows, but then she had allowed the honor to rotate around the friends in her inner circle. The neighborhood craft show was more of a swap meet than a commercial enterprise, although there were prices on all the items and a lot of commerce was simulated. If you bought Theresa’s hand-beaded earrings for thirty-five dollars, then she might turn around and buy Rose’s hand-stamped Christmas cards, three boxes for ten dollars each. Rose might purchase Sylvia’s aromatherapy concoctions, and Sylvia would come and sample your silver pendants. No one really left any richer or poorer than they had arrived, but they all had varied assortments of little items to disperse among their less important friends, saying, “This soap was created by hand by one of my friends down the street. She does it in her FROG, can you imagine? Doesn’t it smell just like Christmas cookies? I knew you would love it.”

  The type of women that frequented the neighborhood craft show were not the type that needed extra money for Christmas. They were there playing store. They were also there for the mimosas. There was a delicately lettered sign festooned with streamers and balloons, set up on an A-frame in Jenny’s perfect yard. But if any stranger had wandered in off the street, no one would have known what to do about it.

  Jenny had brought every portable surface in the house to the fore in her modern Tudor palace, little side tables carrying felted catnip balls, the dining-room table hidden under an assortment of quilted handbags and hats. Ladies of the neighborhood floated around through the front rooms: the foyer with its grand staircase, the den with its grand fireplace, the dining room with its grand mural, a Welsh countryside painted on the wall next to the French table beside the German windowpanes. Jenny was no gifted designer, but her husband had a bank account without a bottom. With adultery and divorce beating their wings in the air, she was not moved to conserve his cash.

  As soon as Sunny’s foot touched the beautiful planks of Jenny’s foyer, her body knew just what to do. She drifted into the kitchen, complimented the renovations, set down her platter, and chose a perfect slicing knife from Jenny’s silverware drawer.

  “What is it, Sunny?” asked Jenny sweetly. She was putting on a brave face. The husband was in the dining room, wearing a tweed jacket and a leather golf cap, his long white hair pulled back in a horrible little ponytail. He had piercing black eyes and a nervous mouth. But Jenny was keeping her distance. With her friends around her, she would carry on.

  “It’s braided honey loaf,” Rache interjected. “Norwegian, you know.”

  “Dutch,” said Sunny.

  “Oh, neat! I want to try some … later.” Jenny moved off gracefully to praise Angela’s mother’s handbags.

  Sunny stood there at the sideboard, looking around the gleaming heads and smooth shoulders of her neighbors. They were good people, and smart people. She did not feel, without her wig, that she was suddenly better than them, that they did not deserve her. Instead, the opposite. Here they were, unsuspiciously they had brought her into their fold, let her rise to the top of their pecking order, had listened to her advice, had followed her lead, and now she had betrayed them. She could feel them avoiding her gaze when she faced them, but felt their eyes on her behind her back. In some ways, she was invisible, but in some ways, they couldn’t take their eyes off her.

  Then a strong knock sounded on the door, and it flew open, revealing a familiar figure in the doorway, bold and sure. Les Weathers entered the room. The women went to him like butterflies. They offered to take his jacket, they led him to the food table, pressed a plate into his hand, a fork. Their voices lilted up an octave. Suddenly Jenny’s husband, who had been telling a story of how he got beat up half a block from home, walking to a party at the Hardisons’ last New Year’s Eve, was abandoned. They had all heard that story anyway. Here was Les Weathers of Channel 10 News. He greeted them, flashing his white teeth, patting shoulders and nodding, but then Les Weathers made a tall, blond beeline for Sunny.

  He took her by the elbow, bent his head toward her in concern, and said, “Sunny, are you all right? How’s the baby? Hanging in there?”

  “We’re okay,” said Sunny.

  “Oh, good,” said Les Weathers. “I’m glad to see you out and about, taking in the nice fall air.”

  “Yes, well,” said Sunny, “I need to go soon. To the hospital.”

  “What’s wrong?” he gasped, instantly renewing his posture of concern. “More contractions?”

  “No, it’s my mother.”

  Les Weathers furrowed his brow and the few ladies around Sunny said “aww” and “ooh” sympathetically. They knew about the mother, how she had been retrieved from Pennsylvania in an advanced state of death, and how she had been lingering at the hospital.

  “How is she, Sunny?” asked Rache. “Is she conscious? Did she say something?”

  “Oh, I took her off life support,” said Sunny. “She’s dying. She’s going to die now.”

  When she said these things, she felt her rib cage weaken. In her mind, she saw the slice of muffin she had been holding fall out of her hand. Someone dove for it, scooped it into a napkin, disappeared it. She imagined Les Weathers’s strong, broad arm around her, and she almost felt herself leaning into his starched shirtfront, his sternum smelling briskly of lime and confidence. She wanted to cry and scream and wail, there in front of everyone, her face twisted up and red, her hands clawing apart his hairdo, pulling his ears off. But these things didn’t happen. The muffin stayed in her hand. The box of feelings she had packed in the hospital room remained packed, and nothing escaped it.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Les Weathers, more to the gathering of women than to Sunny.

  “She’s okay. She’s had a rough time. But she’s dealing with it. Look.”

  “I feel bad,” Sunny said, and coughed a little bit. She saw herself, as
if from across the room, keeping it together, mouth solid like a line across her face. How much she longed to scream it out at them: I FEEL BAD! I FEEL BAD THAT I PULLED THE PLUG ON MY MOTHER! I KILLED HER AND I FEEL BAD! SHE IS GOING TO DIE! But she would not. She would not be something that would be remembered for years, something people would tell their husbands about later, tell their sisters about on the phone. No, they would not talk about some wrinkled tearing thing clinging to the big man with the ironed curls of hair and the cleft chin, squeaking and spouting. They would report, instead, the smooth alien in the peasant top, saying calmly, “I do feel bad that I pulled the plug on her.”

  “Sunny, you must have had to!” Rache put in, and Jenny put one hand on Sunny’s back. “You had to let her go, and it was time! You did the right thing.”

  How could it be the right thing to kill something that’s alive? How could Rache know anything, when Sunny had been lying to her from the start? But she put that thought in the box, and she closed the box. And the screaming, and the tearing at herself, and the crawling under her bed to wait for death, all was packed into the box, and the box was shut, and taped shut, and she would not open the box, or think about the box.

  “She was alive, and now she’s going to die, and it’s my fault. I did it,” she said.

  “Ridiculous,” thundered Les Weathers. With one hand wrapped tightly around Sunny, he picked up a chocolate-chip scone in the other and gesticulated definitively before putting it into his mouth with a flourish. “You’re not some criminal. You don’t go around killing people. You’re just a woman. A bald woman. And you just do what you have to do.”

  Chewing the scone, he warmed to his topic. “We all do hard things, Sunny. Losing my wife Teresa was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it had to happen. Did I abandon her? No, she ran away from me. Did you kill your mother? No. Through your inaction you allowed her to die. But everyone told you to do it. The court, the doctor, even your own husband. You did the right thing. It was for the best.”

  19

  In the winter of the year when Sunny was eight years old, Maxon was nine. She and her mother wanted to take Maxon skiing but his father said no. They were going to go skiing, wrapping up in parkas and snow pants, fuzzy hats, goggles, scarves, until no one could distinguish Sunny from a regular child with a regular head all full of glossy ringlets or straight layers. Maxon, they felt sure, would benefit from going skiing. From getting out of the valley. They all would. They were going to drive to Vermont. But his father said no.

  Nu also said no, said they were crazy, freezing to death in the snow, but Emma was adamant. She had bought a pale blue ski jacket for herself and goggles for both the children, which they wore while pulling each other on disk toboggans around the yard. Paul Mann said the boy was needed at home. Needed at home, when there were five other brothers, all older, all working on the property in their various capacities: lumberjack, bulldozer, meth cooker, etc. Why this one small other brother was needed so greatly when they could never remember to feed him, the Butcher women could not comprehend. But he was not allowed to go and Sunny was very angry about it.

  *

  IN THE WINTER THERE was no bicycling, no trail ride, and not even any time for play after school, because it got dark and cold so early, so they both rode the bus to Sunny’s house, where they ate, then walked through the valley to Maxon’s. Then Sunny ran back, Maxon-style, brushing the trees with her hand, climbing and clamoring up the hill in a rush while Nu stood at the back door worrying and waiting. She went with him that night on his walk home; they left right away after school with hot sandwiches in their pockets, so Nu wouldn’t worry. They cut a wide angle through the valley, not a direct route. It was cold, the pines were shrouded in ice, every little branch a glass filament, and the wind brought the boughs tinkling down around them, raining crystals. Their boots crunched in the snow. The creek, frozen at the bottom of the valley, was an ice sculpture of a creek, frozen in motion, all the little waterfalls. They stopped there, by Maxon’s stump cache, which they had turned into a fairy throne.

  “All hail the king the fairy!” cried Maxon.

  “Come all the fairy come to king,” yelled Sunny. “Die the enemy the fairy evermore!”

  “A feast the fairy come!” shouted Maxon. He brushed off a log where they often sat to talk or pretend fairy courts, and they sat down to eat.

  “The wolf tribe come the feast,” Maxon said through a mouthful of ground beef. “The hawk tribe say death to the wolf tribe.”

  “The hawk tribe bring the penitence,” said Sunny. “Bring ten penitence the feast, keep all the wolf tribe cold the snow.”

  They went on like this as they ate, doing their pretend in their own words, garbled and fast. It was all wound in with the tribes of the forest, the wars they were in, the plots they had played out, the characters they had invented. Maxon had it all worked out in visuals around a particular stand of trees, like a data map. Sunny tried to understand him when he talked fast, tried to talk back, faster. She was the one who was reading a whole lot of children’s literature, so she had a fair amount to offer, even though she wasn’t of the forest as he thought he was. They both sensed it getting darker. They threw the last bits of their food into a crook of a nearby huge bent tree, as an offering, and they knew it was time to move on.

  “Maxon,” she said finally, slower. “You so fear the father.”

  “Not fear I the father,” he said, still in the play speak. “Fear I the mother.”

  “Maxon,” she insisted. “You are afraid of him. Why? What does he do to you?”

  Maxon turned to her with a black look, and the revelation that loomed was terrible enough without showing itself. Simple enough, common enough, but it hurt her badly. She put her arms around him. “I love you, Maxon, the fairy king, the boy the forest, love you I forever.”

  He grinned, not looking her in the eye, and pushed her off. He raced for home. “Do not follow, Sunny, the bird egg, the river rock! Get to the home! For safe! For tomorrow! Run!”

  She watched him go, knowing they had lingered too long in the dusk, feeling the bone-chilling damp settling on her, inside her expensive mail-order coat. She knew she should turn around and run straight up the hill for home, but she didn’t turn, she followed him, slipping between the trees, boots soft on the snow. She saw him run up the hill, zigzag, touching the trees as he ran. As if he were blind and finding his way. She stayed at the tree line as he ran down the slope and across through the field, slipping through the layers of barbed wire, now a black spot against the glowing white field of snow. He went into the house, for a moment outlined in a yellow rectangle, and then gone, the bang of the ill-fitting screen door loud in the falling dusk. When she turned back to the trees it was darker still. She could make her way easily, it was familiar to her, it was the hawk tribe territory, and she knew the trees and the ferns and the old log where a battle had taken place over the remains of a long-dead doe.

  The only place she had to be careful, in taking a more direct route home, was among the big rocks on the hillside. Where the mountain got steep on their Butcher side of the valley, there were huge rocks protruding from the earth, the product of some eruption millennia past, giant hulking things honeycombed with deep ravines, dangerous in the dark. As she skirted the rocks, she heard from within their labyrinth depths a small cry.

  She thought maybe a deer had fallen into a crack, gotten trapped between two of the steep sides of the rock. A deer or maybe a bear. Her heart raced. A mountain lion could crawl out. A deer would be impossible to lift by herself. She would go back and get Nu. She should go back now, immediately, and get Nu. Her mother would say, “Yes, Nu. Go and see what it is.” Nu would go by herself and save or kill whatever was there. And yet, she had to be sure of what she had heard before she left, so she went down on her knees in the snow, and crept over to the edge of the ravine. Down there, something was moving. It was a man. It was Paul Mann. It was Maxon’s father.

  “Jesus Christ, th
ank you,” he wheezed. Then louder, “You there! Who is that? Who is up there?”

  Sunny said nothing. The man’s legs were twisted under him in the shape of a Z; he waved his arms, but clearly he could not move. He was covered in pine needles, from where he had pulled down the earth around him, trying to dig himself out. She smelled liquor on him, even from ten feet above him, and she saw he was wearing only a T-shirt and his filthy suspenders, his work pants.

  “Who is that?!” he repeated, aggressively. “That you, Maxon? Get your ass home and get your ma. Get your brothers. I thought I was going to freeze to death in this shithole waiting for one of you shit-for-brains to stumble along here. Where you been? Over there sucking face with that bald little bitch? You go get your ma, right now. Did you hear me? Move your ass or I’ll make sparks on it!”

  Sunny removed her head from above the hole. Her pulse was racing; she felt like her eyes were going to pop out from the way her blood was pounding in her face.

  “What were you doing on our property?” she said very clearly, in her sternest little girl voice.

  “Who’s that up there? Come back here, let me look at you,” he said.

  She pulled off her hat and stuffed it in her pocket, unwound her scarf from her neck. The bitter chill of the advancing evening bit into her warm skin, but she let it, felt her ears tingling and her breath freezing in her nose. She stuck her head back over the lip of the ravine, and let him see her against the sky.

  “Oh, ah, Suzy, Suzy, it’s you. Ah, I’m sorry I thought you was somebody else. Run and get someone now, you got to help me out of this hole, honey,” he crooned. She sat there looking at him for a few seconds, memorizing the sight of him in the hole, because she knew this was a moment she would never get back.

  When they left Burma, when they stood in Rangoon about to board the steamer to take them on the long journey to San Francisco, to Chicago, to this night under these stars, under this rising moon, over this pleading man, her mother turned her back toward the city, toward the strange harbor, and told her, “Look, Sunny. Look at what you are seeing now and then close your eyes and think it in your head, so you will never forget. You will never again see what you are seeing now, God willing. So take a good look so you can remember it. This is the place where you became you.” She could still remember, dimly, five years later, the outlines of the pagodas, the low flat government buildings, the walls of the harbor. And now she looked at this person in the hole, Paul Mann, and thought hard about his outlines, the shape of his body, locked in the stones. Then she removed her head again from the lip of the ravine, replaced her outerwear, and marched toward home.