Shine Shine Shine

by Lydia Netzer

  “Really,” said Stan. “You might say it kind of runs in the family. The NASA family.”

  Sunny and Bubber stayed in Stanovich’s office at Langley for the rest of the night. In fact, when Sunny took a blanket and pillow into the lounge to get some sleep, Bubber stayed in the office with the other men. He was perfectly happy to play with the robot parts, finger the machines, and say absolutely nothing to anyone.

  Up in the rocket, Maxon had laid out his plans for landing the rocket and the robots on the moon. Gompers hesitated.

  “I don’t know, Mann,” he said. “We’re going to do it, but only because there’s nothing else to do.”

  Phillips said, “Hey, Genius, who told you it was okay for you to do my job?”

  “Shut up, Phillips,” said Gompers. “Unless you have another plan.”

  “Phillips,” said Maxon kindly, “of course I can do your job. If I couldn’t do your job and everyone else’s job up here, I wouldn’t have come.”

  Phillips stared.

  “No disrespect, sir,” said Maxon to Gompers.

  “None taken, son,” said Gompers. “Now let’s hope you’re right.”

  *

  WHAT THEY HAD DONE to conceive the second baby had taken only a few minutes. It had happened under the wig, under the sheets. It was on Maxon’s timetable, but this time there was no resistance from Sunny. “You’re right,” she said to him. “It’s time to have another baby.” They did it on purpose, all the while knowing that something was wrong with Bubber, that something was wrong with Maxon, that something was wrong with Sunny, that something was wrong with her mother, that something was wrong with everyone else. They did it knowing that a flawed thing would be the result of this effort, and that they would be expected to love it anyway, in spite of, because of. She had containers in the cedar closet labeled “maternity.” It would all be managed handily by the girl who had become a blonde. They would replace themselves, Sunny and Maxon, in the world. They would do what was required of them by evolutionary law.

  But the pregnancy of the girl who had become a blonde had changed into the pregnancy of the girl who had always been bald. And the certainty disappeared. The laws were unwritten, the map faded. It was Maxon’s baby, and Sunny’s, and anything could happen. There were no expectations that could be logically brought to bear. The baby could be born a miracle.

  26

  In the morning, Sunny received a phone call from the hospital. Her mother had died in the night.

  There is a real elevation of the conversation, when death and birth come into it. Nothing is unspoken. Everything underneath comes out, and the darkness spills up into the everyday language. You talk about dark things because you have decisions that need to be made. There is no subtlety when you have to decide between cremation and burial, or tell someone whether or not you want to be sedated through it all.

  There was a moment, when Sunny was sitting at a small, cheap desk at the hospital, on a rolling office chair, when she forgot her mother’s maiden name. Then she knew she was coming unhinged. But she kept signing paperwork anyway, kept the pen going across the paper. In the normal course of your life, do you have any dealings with the coroner? No. Do you have any reason to say the word “autopsy”? Never.

  As an orphan, you are alone. There is no one on the Earth watching, when you say, “Look at me!” There is no one standing in the gap between you and oblivion, putting up her hands, and saying “Stop.” You have come this far surrounded, and now you must continue without defense. As a pregnant person, Sunny had to hide herself from this exposure. She had to protect the baby from this distress. So as her mother’s ship disappeared, sinking below the horizon, and her own ship sailed up into the wind, she had to let it go without fireworks, without searchlights, without a trumpet blast. Almost without remark.

  Sunny decided against a funeral. She decided that her mother would be cremated. These things were going to be handled by the guy at the mortuary, and she signed the release form that authorized him to take possession of the body. This transfer would take place somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. Her mother would exit out the back of the building. Sunny did not know what her mother would look like, at that point. It could be really terrible.

  There could have been a funeral in Yates County, where all of Emma’s friends could attend. There could have been a funeral in Virginia. But Sunny could not arrange a funeral now. She knew her mother would say, “Whatever makes it easier for you, dearest. Do whatever you need to do. I don’t care.” So her mother would be cremated. It all seemed so impossible that she wanted to tell the mortician to check carefully and be sure her mother was dead. She wanted to install a brightly colored button on the inside of the kiln: “If you are alive and being wrongfully cremated, PRESS HERE.” It had been so slow, this dying. Maybe it was not completely done, in spite of what the doctors said. Maybe there were still some synapses firing, some spirit to be resurrected and intone the words “Good job, Sunny. You are great. You are handling this really well.”

  “Are you doing okay back there?” a nurse asked her. She had been given two black pens with which to sign all the papers. A pen and a backup pen. But the first pen had worked just fine.

  “I’m done, I think,” Sunny said. “I think I’m done.”

  *

  DEATH IS GRUESOME. THERE is nothing romantic about it. Decay, both cruel and gentle, starts immediately. Raised on a farm in farm country, Sunny was not a stranger to death. She had seen dead birds, cats, many deer, a dead horse lying in a pasture, kicked it over and over, and shouted, “Live! Live! Live, goddammit!” She had even raised a sheep as a 4-H project one year, unclear on the term “market lamb.” Nu built it a dog house which Sunny decorated with fresh flowers every week, and they painted “Blossom” over the door. She fed it from her hand, brushed its face, and knew complete shock and horror when at the end of the county fair it was sold to a local butcher. After that she hated sheep. “I thought you knew,” the mother said. “I thought you knew what it meant.”

  Other kids raised animals to sell at auction year after year, and Maxon was one of them. He raised a pig every year, starting at age nine, except the year he was eleven, when his pig died inexplicably in June. He had always kept his money separate from his mother’s little hoard, in stump stashes in the woods and around town, locations known only to him. From his own funds, he paid for his stock, paid for its keep, kept scrupulous accounts. During the week of the fair he would mingle with the other boys, all in torn jeans and Western shirts. Their scruffy boots knocked against the cement floor in the pig barn as they stepped up from the dirt road that wound through the fairgrounds. Their tough knuckles scraped against the various gates and fences rigged with twine and latches to keep the pigs in pens. The little boys were junior versions of the big boys, getting more taciturn by the year, growing patchy facial hair, adopting a favorite ball cap, sprouting Adam’s apples.

  After the sheep fiasco, Sunny didn’t raise any more market animals, but she took her horse to the fair every year, and stuck close to Maxon every day. All the high-school kids hung around in the pig barns, sitting on the slatted fences, chewing gum and pushing each other. There were the horse barns, where girls spent hours picking up every turd and hanging streamers from their horses’ stalls to win the Good Housekeeping prize. There were beef barns, where the ponderous steers had their tails teased up into perfect balls of hair. But the pig barns were where the pocket flasks were passed around discreetly, where a slanted gaze could catch fire and lead to a raucous nudge. The boys smelled a little, the girls all wore ponytails, and the space in the middle of the torso was frequently grasped and pulled with a roughness that led to horseplay.

  Pigs are earthy; their proximity may lead to carnal thoughts. Showing a pig at a county fair is a dangerous business, and the great relief that follows makes you giddy. Pigs are never really trained, no matter how arduously you practice them, and they’re vicious as wild dogs sometimes. For every group of kids in the r
ing with their pigs on the loose and a curved stick in their hands to guide them around, there was also a group of dads, alert, carrying plywood sheets. The purpose of these sheets was to shove down between two pigs that started going at it. On pig day there was usually blood drawn, and the event always drew a crowd. The kids who won the showmanship trophy moved low, crouched right down over their pigs, watched the judge like a cat. They carried a scrub brush in one pocket and a squirt bottle in the other, and always with their pronged stick ready to hook the pig’s ear and drag it off its purpose. Maxon never won showmanship, because he wouldn’t make eye contact with the judge.

  It was on the last day of the 4-H fair, during the last summer before Maxon would go away to college. He had a scholarship to MIT, and Emma Butcher was paying his room and board. He was eighteen. Sunny had felt restless all day, had not wanted to dive into the partying that was going on, especially with the seniors. She and Maxon sat on the fence down in the warm-up riding ring attached to the big arena, where the equestrian jumpers were loping in big circles, getting ready for their turn in the ring. The competition was fault and out—one knock of a hoof on a jump and that competitor was out of the running. You had to go clean, clean all the way around, and there was no second place for coming close. Maxon watched the horses peacefully, his skin browning in the August sun. But Sunny fidgeted next to him, kicking at the fence, tearing pieces from a little knothole with her thumb.

  “Maxon, I feel jumpy and weird,” she said, squinting across the dusty ring toward the bleachers. She could see her mother and Nu sitting next to each other under a golf umbrella.

  “What’s the matter,” he said to her mechanically.

  “Let’s take a walk,” she said. She slid off the fence, brushed the back of her jeans with both palms, pulled a sun hat out of her pocket and clamped it on her head.

  They walked, hand in hand, across the warm-up ring, pausing to let the cantering horses go by, and went out at the gate. Sunny waved to the mother, and the mother sat up straighter, turned to watch them go. She shook her head back and forth at Sunny, back and forth, but Sunny only waved again. She was too far away, and the day was too hazy for any communication. She turned her back. They went up through the fairgrounds, past the volunteer fire department’s food trailer and the little cotton-candy stand, past the bunny building and the big hall where the floral arrangements and craft projects were judged. They went right out through, past the shed where the fairgrounds people kept the tractors and mowers and stored hay and lumber, and into the woods.

  They walked silently, trudging along, uphill now and out of the grounds. Maxon kept up with her, held her hand just right, not too tight, not too loose. If they just kept walking they would head right into somebody’s fresh-mown hayfield, so she stopped them there in the woods, with the fairgrounds stretched out below and behind them. They were almost to the top of that hill. The cicadas buzzed and there were rocks there, protruding from the earth, just like near to their own houses, in their own familiar forest.

  “Let’s stop,” she said. “I need to show you something. Before you go.”

  “What is it,” said Maxon. He looked so old to her, so real, such a man. She knew that when he went away to college, he could continue changing, getting older, his bones more prominent, his eyes deeper. She pulled her hat off and set it there on the rock. Maxon stood ramrod straight. His torn jeans hung low on his hips, his Western shirt just the same as all the other boys’, tugged tight around his shoulder blades. In his jeans pocket there was a knife. In his shirt pocket, a folded guide, a schedule of the day’s events. She motioned for him to stay where he was, and she took off her sandals, put them neatly beside her hat. Now her feet felt the cool dampness of the forest floor, the dark dirt under pine needles. She pulled off her jeans and then stood there in her blue T-shirt and flowered panties.

  “Maybe you should sit down,” she said.

  He sat down. His knee poked out of a hole in his jeans as he crossed his legs underneath him. He rested one palm on each of his thighs. What did he think was going to happen? She had imagined this scene many times. She was not drunk. She was not crazy. She was doing what she needed to do, for him. Her mother could train him how to shake hands and express regret. It was for her to teach him this other stuff. She knew her mother would not let them get married. He was going off to college, to belong to some other girl that he would meet. So she had to prepare him. She told herself firmly, feeling a low breeze on her legs, that she was doing this for him. It would not be fair for him to go out into the world with no idea what a woman was all about. She had read enough about it, and discussed it in detail with Renee, who had been an expert for at least two years. She had come close to showing him before, at the Bon-Ton, she remembered vaguely, but as she said to Renee, nothing happened. Today, something would happen. She had a very strong feeling that this was her last chance.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she told him. “Don’t worry.”

  She reached down and pulled off her panties, removing her legs one at a time, and then she folded them on her shoes. When she turned to face him, his jaws were clenched. She walked over to him.

  “This is it,” she said. “This is me. This is girls. I thought you should see one before you go away.”

  Maxon was silent. She stood in front of him.

  “Give me your hand,” she said. “I’ll show you. This is how you start it, you kind of just pet down over it, on the outside. You can go all down the legs, and all up here.”

  She took her shirt off, and she wasn’t wearing a bra. He couldn’t reach her properly from where he was sitting, so she led him over to the rock and brushed off some leaves and branches, then stretched out on it. It was warm under her back. There were a couple of little rocks poking her, which she removed. Then she felt comfortable, the mossy rock almost cradling her butt, like it was made for her. Maxon knelt beside her, like he was at an altar.

  She said, “Stop praying,” and he laughed. They both laughed. The air moved around them.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Now touch me all over but not there. Like you’re trying to just barely touch me. And don’t grab.”

  She waited for the feeling that Renee had said would come, kind of like burning, she had said. But she felt, instead, something lifting up inside and moving around, like a churn that rose to meet his fingers.

  “Okay,” she said, and spread her legs. “Look at it. Don’t worry or think about it too much. It’s fine. I want you to.”

  She shut her eyes, imagined him looking at her, and she felt herself prickle and tingle, something tight and straining in her hips. He would be frowning, his eyes bright, examining her like she was a snowflake, or a locked mechanism, or a squirrel caught in somebody else’s trap. She opened herself with her fingers, so he could see all parts of her. She told him what the parts were for. She showed him where to touch, how to move his hand. It was like reading an instruction manual for a package just opened, she reading to him because she was the one holding the paper, but both of them blind, putting the pieces together into a shape they could not anticipate, watching it come together. She felt a swarm of bees beginning to boil in her, raging under her sternum, spiraling into her groin. She heard him take a sharp breath in, but his hand continued to do what she told him, the tough skin of his farmer fingers pressing against her, his other hand touching down lightly over her skin.

  “Oh, Maxon, just do that again,” she said at the end of her breath. “Keep doing that, as slowly as you can, for as long as you can. It’s perfect.”

  She forgot the rock she was on, forgot the 4-H fair, forgot the long anticipation of the dreaded absence, his going away, his eventual marriage to another woman, his distance, his death, the face of her mother mouthing the words, “No, no, no. Not Maxon. Not him!” She was only there with him right in that moment, in the space between his hand and herself, and when she felt his mouth close over her breast, and when she felt him enter her, so strong behind the hand still moving as i
nstructed, and felt him shudder over her, down through his body, through himself, it all came out of her, all the things she thought to teach him, that one important lesson, closed between them, and simultaneously learned. She locked him into her, she dragged him closer, and dearer, and she cried for him, and made him promise never, ever, to leave her at all.

  *

  AT HOME IN VIRGINIA, Sunny stood before the locked desk. She had her files out, stacked on the chair. She had pulled aside the chair, removed the blotter, the calendar, the bookends, the telephone, and the picture frame. The drawer that was locked was a small one on the right side at the top. In her hand she was holding a hatchet she’d found in the garage. It was red, almost comical, like the cartoon version of what a woodsman would have. She didn’t know where it had come from; maybe Maxon used it in the yard. But it was sharp.

  Sunny swung the hatchet at the top of the desk and it bit into the slick veneer. It did not bounce off, it did not slide, and it did not slip. She meant business. A thick crack formed in the top of the desk as the top layer snapped. She lifted the blade high over her head and swung it again. Of course it was sharp. Maxon would not be a person who would keep a dull ax. He might keep a secret drawer, but not a dull ax. She swung again, and again. The hatchet crashed through the top of the desk and a hole opened big enough to get her fingers in. She pried up a shiny layer of veneer, and then used the ax, in one hand now and this time in smaller bites, to help her smash aside enough of the underlying wood that she could reach inside that drawer. There were papers inside.

  She laid her tool on the other side of the desk and pulled out three envelopes through the splintered wood. The first one was large and manila, and had been labeled “Sunny” in Maxon’s bold block print. The second was labeled “Maria” in the same text. The third envelope was small and white, and had no label.

  She turned around, wiping her face, clutching the envelopes in her hand. She felt the ghost of a contraction rock through her torso, and leaned her butt back against the broken desk. She opened the “Sunny” one first. Inside were pictures of herself, bald. They weren’t pornographic or even provocative. But there were no wigs in the pictures. Sunny smiled as she looked at each one, slowly turning them over. When they had moved here to Virginia, she had eradicated all evidence of herself as a person without hair. She had burned the evidence in their backyard grill. She had not noticed there were pictures missing from the purge, but here they were. He had saved them. Sunny felt another contraction. Had it been five minutes? Three?