Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  “No, it doesn’t, ass. It smells good. Virginia doesn’t smell like this.”

  “The air in Norfolk, Virginia, has eight percent more sodium chloride in it.”

  “Be nostalgic, Maxon. Remember something.”

  They were driving on rolling hills, in and out of farmland and woods, down Route 38 and all across Yates County. They passed dilapidated barns on the verge of falling down, gutted roadside stores, little creeks, cows in rows, and pointy little white churches. Sunny felt a familiar and unwelcome warmth and connection to the place. She felt guilty she had not been home more often. She had left her mother alone. All because she did not want to face her in a wig. That was wrong.

  “Okay,” said Maxon. “I remember when the guy who lived right there turned out to be a pervert.”

  “Bad,” said Sunny. “Nostalgia is supposed to be warm. It’s supposed to create a warm feeling.”

  “Okay,” said Maxon, “I remember that in August of 1991, it was so hot we couldn’t go upstairs for a week.”

  “Not literal warmth!” said Sunny, smacking him in the arm. “Please tell me you don’t need this explained.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” said Maxon. “I’ve erased those years.”

  “Don’t you love me, Maxon?” said Sunny, falling into a familiar trope. It was this way she signaled to him that she was done talking. It was one of many scripts she had written for them that they played out on a regular basis.

  “I do,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Tons,” he said.

  “How many tons?”

  “A Brazilian tons.”

  At the corner of Route 38 and a road called Bear Run, she suddenly clutched his arm.

  “Maxon. I have an idea. Let’s go see your mother instead.”

  *

  ONE MILE OFF THE main road, over a hill and down through the woods and over a one-lane bridge that crossed a mountain stream, they pulled up to Maxon’s old house. The original house was barely visible, piled all around with firewood in measured, regular stacks. The old barn, once stuffed so full of oily implements, piles of forgotten roofing tiles, tins of unguents, copper pipes, and other detritus, was now wide open, stacked with clean, orderly lumber. Out in the pasture that had once been dotted with foraged cars and mangy sheep was what appeared to be a fully functional mill, a rain of sawdust issuing from an opening on one side, a forklift in operation bringing in new wood. Maxon’s makeshift bicycle shop was gone. In its place, a lath cutter.

  “I don’t want to see my mother,” said Maxon.

  “What the hell has she done with the place?” marveled Sunny, stepping out of the car. “We were just here, five years ago, Maxon. It was a pit.”

  “She married that guy from Butler,” said Maxon. “Come on, let’s go. This is uncomfortable. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say, ‘Hello, Mother. I am just stopping by to say hello, since I was in the area. This is my wife and child.’ And then wait and see what she says. I’ll help you.”

  “She’s never seen the—” Maxon began.

  “The what?” Sunny asked. “Child or wig?”

  Maxon got out of the car, too, stood with one hand clamped on the roof, one hand clamped around the doorframe still. In the back of the car, Bubber woke up.

  “Get Bubber out, would you?” said Sunny, brushing off her beautiful cream-colored maternity pantsuit, smoothing it over her belly. “Let’s go knock.”

  But they didn’t have to. A man was coming up out of the barn, covered in a fine dust of wood shavings. He was maybe sixty. He took his hat off as he approached.

  “Y’uns want firewood?” he asked politely. “I got lots, real dry.”

  “No,” said Sunny. “We’re here to see Mrs. Mann.”

  “You know Laney?” he said. He looked incredulous.

  “We do,” said Sunny, her arm now wrapped protectively around a sleepy Bubber. She picked up the boy, held him on her hip, kissed him soundly on the head. “Is it okay if we go up to the house?”

  “Uh, it’s Laney Snow now. I’m her husband. Nice to meet you, Ben Snow.”

  They shook hands. Maxon looked at her, and his face correctly registered surprise.

  “Mom,” said Bubber quietly. “I have to go potty.”

  “Oh, sure,” the man said. “He can use the bathroom up ’ere too. Let me show y’uns in. Laney’ll be real glad to see you. She’s been doin’ books all day, she’s pretty close to crazy with all them numbers and what all. Be glad to see some visitors.”

  The man took them toward the door of the old house. Instead of the frenetic clutter Sunny remembered, it was clean, neat. Still old, but cared for.

  “Hey, Laney,” he yelled, swinging open the door. “You got friends here to see you, girl. Get on out here and say hello.”

  “Come in,” came a high voice from inside the house. “Come on in, I’m in the kitchen.”

  Maxon hung back, saying he would wait outside, but Sunny pinched his arm, propelled him onward until they were standing in a bright little kitchen.

  *

  THE LAST TIME SHE had been in this kitchen, it was the summer after Maxon’s first year of college. When school got done in May, he’d gone straight to Europe, cycling and backpacking up and down the Alps and the Pyrenees, following bike races and sleeping anyplace he could plug in his laptop. He came home in August, with just a week to spare before he went back to school. She expected him to come rushing right over, burst into the kitchen, ask Nu for something to eat. She waited, but he stayed away, for three days, and no one at the Mann house would answer the phone. She felt irritated and confused. After all, she was going off to college herself in a few weeks. He had written her, e-mailed her, called her on the phone. Why would he not want to see her, to say hello and good-bye?

  Her disappointment finally led her to action, and she marched across the valley, yanked open the door to his house, and went right in. She found him alone, sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of towering piles of paper and rubbish. The kitchen was dim, grim, and dirty; there were piles of dishes and papers, bags of fabric, garbage, and what looked like a squirrel’s nest on the counter. The space right around him was clear, and he was typing on his laptop, his head bent low over its blue light. He wore faded jeans and nothing else, and his head was shaved, tanned in stripes from his bicycle helmet. She knew he had been shaving it for her. The sight of his rib cage, his sternum, his collarbones, made her physically ache for him. She wanted to hold him, and feel him breathing.

  But he was upset; he told her she had to go. “Sunny,” he said. “You can’t be here.”

  “Why not?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  He stood up and came toward her, as if he was going to touch her, grab her, clamp her in his arms, but he stopped.

  “Wait. I have to tell you something,” he said. “I was in France a few weeks ago. And I wrote a poem.”

  “You wrote a poem?” In the middle of her confusion, she had time to be incredulous.

  “Yes, I wrote one.”

  “An actual poem, like with words and feelings and stuff?”

  “With words.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “No, I didn’t write it down.”

  “Well, can you tell me what it was? Do you remember it? How are you going to remember it?”

  “I remember it.”

  “But you won’t tell me what it was?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Maxon?” She felt like she was going to cry.

  “Your mother wouldn’t like it,” said Maxon. “She wouldn’t want it. She doesn’t want me to see you at all.”

  “Well, when will you tell me? When she’s dead?”

  “I don’t think I can ever tell you. And you have to go. But I want you to know that I wrote a poem for you. You should know that.”

  Later he called her on the phone, and asked her to forgive him. And then he went back to Massachusetts, and she did not see him aga
in for years.

  *

  BENEATH THE YELLOWED CEILING light, at an old Formica table, the woman that had been Laney Mann sat before a ledger book, a receipt book, a checkbook, and a pile of paper scraps, a No. 2 pencil in one hand and a pink eraser in the other. She looked up. Sunny was amazed. Where there had been hulking flesh, there was now a trim old lady. Where there had been strange facial hairs, there were now gentle wrinkles. The gaping holes in the rotten teeth now invisible behind a meek smile, neat hair tucked into a braid.

  “Well, innit nice,” she said, as if automatically; then when she saw Maxon she stopped.

  “Maxon?” she said.

  “So how y’uns know each other?” asked her husband.

  “Why listen, Ben,” she began. She half stood up, her hand reaching out to Maxon, who still stood by the door. “This here is my son Maxon that you never met. You know, he’s the youngest of ’em. He’s, ahhh…”

  “A scientist,” put in Sunny helpfully.

  “Yeah, he been a scientist down there in Virginia,” said Laney. “What you working on, lemme see, I know, I learnt this from Emma. Rockets, right? You gonna fly a rocket?”

  “Yes,” said Maxon.

  “Where, right up to the moon?” asked Ben.

  “Yes,” said Maxon.

  “Well, innit nice!” said his mother. “That’s real nice!”

  Everyone looked at Maxon.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said. “I am just stopping by, since I am in the area. This is my wife and child.”

  Laney picked up the teakettle and began to fill it from the jug on the countertop. She looked Sunny over and nodded approvingly, clucking to herself.

  “Well, honey, I’m real glad you didn’t stay married up with Emma’s girl. She was … well, I was always real grateful how Emma paid up for your school and all your travels. But she always knew you kids could be with others that were, ah, better suited. That kind of thing just ain’t right. So now look, you got such a pretty new wife, little boy, you’re doing real good.”

  Maxon stood, stunned, his face registering nothing. Sunny felt a prickle of triumph. The wig worked. She was immune.

  “Who’s this Emma’s girl,” she asked Laney, helping her reach a box of tea the old woman was stretching for on an upper shelf, before she could retrieve her footstool. “Your first wife? Huh, Maxon? Was she pretty? Should I be worried?”

  “No, no,” said Laney, counting out her little bags of Lipton. “Poor thing, she was … bald.” She whispered the last word, one hand discreetly over her mouth. When she was trying to be subtle, Sunny could see the remnants of the old Laney, the fat and desperate Laney, laid over her face. The eyes leaping from side to side. The chewing movements, when there was nothing in her mouth.

  “Bald, you mean bald like she shaved her head?” Sunny said, pushing the envelope, reveling in the feeling of real human hair cascading expensively down the sides of her face, rippling over her collarbones, pooling on her shoulder blades.

  “Let’s just not say nothing ’bout it, dear,” said Laney, poking a tea bag into each of four mismatched cups. “Whatchoo say your name was? Maxon, whatser name?”

  Maxon made a gurgling sound, and Sunny interjected, “Alice. My name’s Alice.”

  “Well, Alice, it’s just all done in the past. Nothing but past. There’s a lot we just leave behind, right, Maxon? A lot we just set right there in the past.”

  “I don’t drink tea,” Maxon said.

  “Well, would you like Kool-Aid? I got some Kool-Aid for your boy. Real nice apple Kool-Aid. You like Kool-Aid, honey?”

  *

  THEY PICKED UP SUNNY’S mother from the house across the valley. They shut up the house, turned off the water, drained the pipes, and dripped antifreeze into the drains, all while the emaciated Emma sat on her sofa, wrapped up comfortably, listening to Bubber read to her, letter by letter, from a book of chemical formulas and equations. It was the one he had picked from the shelf, and Emma had said, fine, fine, whatever he likes. Sunny watched her doting like a grandmother, fondling his ears, cupping his head in her hands, and she felt bad for denying her mother all of this love for the last four years. Her reaction to the wig hadn’t even been that bad. Four years ago, when the wig was new, her mother had been irate. Now she just looked kind of sad, and asked Maxon if he liked it, and Maxon didn’t know what to say.

  They paid the disgruntled Hannah, packed up the car, and locked the house. The mother, in the backseat next to Bubber, was quickly asleep, propped up on pillows and swathed in the ancestral quilts.

  “I think she looks pretty good,” said Sunny. “What do you think?”

  “She looks pretty good,” said Maxon.

  “And your mother, can you believe it?”

  “What?”

  “She looks so good! And married to that nice guy, running a business, who would have ever thought it?”

  “I hate her now more than I ever did before,” he said.

  It was dark now, the headlights swept before them in the road, lighting up battered road signs, carcasses in the ditch, one hand-lettered sign with an arrow on one end that said CLARKSON RONDAYVOO. The up-and-down motion reminded Sunny of driving around when they were teens, Maxon always stone sober, allowing her to be a little drunk, a safe amount of drunk, enough to cling to him and laugh, put her feet up on the dashboard and sing along to radio songs.

  “Because of her loving Alice so much?” Sunny asked quietly. “Or because of, just everything?”

  Maxon said nothing. She looked over at the familiar outline of his profile against a window in twilight, his jaw so tough, his fists wrapped around the steering wheel like they were strangling it, every knuckle tight, every vein popped out. He filled the whole seat, right up to the top. His curls almost touched the ceiling in the van. She put her hand in his hair and stroked his scalp, let her hand trace down the back of his neck. She saw his knuckles relax.

  “Don’t be mad,” said Sunny. “She’s proof that people can change. Look what she was, and look what she is now. She’s completely different, Maxon. Don’t you see that? She’s completely, totally different and from what? From finding the right guy, from doing the right things, from putting her feet in the road that leads to normal. She did all the outward things to be the thing she’s trying to be, and now she’s good at it. She’s normal. Anyone would say it, driving up there. No one would ever suspect what she was.”

  “She’s the same,” said Maxon. His knuckles poked out again, angry. “No one can change. Stop trying to change him. Why can’t you just love him exactly the way he is?”

  “I do love him,” said Sunny, her hand still circling in Maxon’s hair, soothing him, loving him. She thought about how everything that was important to her, deep down inside, was in this car. She was glad they had gone to pick up her mother. Once she was healthy again, she could help with Bubber. She was an expert in teaching little boys how to behave. Had she not been so worried about showing her mother the wig, she would have enlisted her help years ago. “I love him so much that I want something better for him, something better than what we had. Everything about us is so complicated. I just want to save him from that. Let it be simple. Let it be obvious.”

  Maxon didn’t know what to say, or he didn’t want to say it. He stayed quiet until she asked him to tell her he loved her, many miles down the road. And he did.

  23

  Maxon saw the Mare Orientale and knew that they were above the moon’s dark side. The Mare Orientale, one of the biggest of many scars on the moon’s gray face that had been brought about by meteor strikes. Planets are round, like the shape of an eye. And the galaxies unfold in spirals, like water in a funnel. The shapes, perfectly rendered, repeat throughout the universe. You could always know the shape of a planet, or the shape of a moon. Round. A droplet of water, the center of a flower, a ripple around a falling rock, the moon’s protected lava pipes where he’d planned to house his Heras—all perfect. A circle is the hardest shape to draw for a human,
but the easiest shape to find naturally occurring. A circle is an easy shape for a robot to draw. Any shape is easy for a robot to draw.

  Inside the cargo module, the Hera clicked and buzzed. She was cutting the pieces for the comm unit, meticulous work that she carried out meticulously. Maxon knew that her work would be perfect, but it was taking a long time. Meteor strikes, like thunderstorms, like meiosis, were unpredictable. Meteor strikes did not exist between lines of code, or in a laboratory setting, or in Maxon’s brain, usually. But the one meteor strike he had experienced was a recognition of the value of meteor strikes. He noted and wondered at the sight of the moon, where there was not one spot, not one square mile unmarred by the scar from a meteor. It was the home of random. It was defined by it.

  Maxon turned his head to the moon’s horizon and saw a sliver of blue emerging, a sliver of white and blue. The Earth was rising.

  “This is something not a lot of people have seen,” he said to Bubber. “You should pay attention to this sight of an Earthrise.”

  “Okay,” said Bubber.

  They gazed at the Earth, so very small, the swirls and spirals of clouds twisted over the surface of blue and gold. Outer shape such a perfect curve, and yet all over it, a mess of vapor. Maxon looked down at the moon and thought, The marks of meteors are circles too. The most random, unpredictable, powerful event in the history of life, and it leaves a mark like a ripple in a pond.

  “Dad,” said Bubber. “Are we running out of time?”

  “Yes,” said Maxon. “I really don’t think there’s enough time.”

  “What will run out first?”

  “The air,” said Maxon. “I’ll run out of air.”

  “Tell the robot to hurry up,” said Bubber.

  “It can’t,” said Maxon. “Anyway, hurrying up will make a bad result.”

  “Can you go back and get more air?” asked Bubber.

  “I could,” said Maxon, “but I don’t want to leave her.”

  The Hera unit clicked and whirred, now welding without sparks.

  “Why don’t you just bring her back to the rocket? She doesn’t need a space suit.”

  Maxon sniffed. He looked at the Earth, now full, just over the lunar horizon. It was a beautiful sight, so messy and perfect. He thought about the real Bubber, back at home. Maybe sitting in school with a blue pencil in his hand, maybe listening to his iPod and tapping his toe, driving Sunny crazy.