Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

WHEN SUNNY WAS LITTLE, she’d had a pony. The pony was rotten and naughty, but Sunny had fallen in love with him the way an eight-year-old girl does with a horse, and there was no other pony that would please her. His name was Pocket, and he was adorable, a bright bay with a white star on his forehead. Unbridled, he was as sweet as a lapdog, and followed Sunny around their farm, batting his eyes. She could even sit on him and propel him with her knees and a soft lead rope, and he never fought. However, when Sunny tried to ride him with a saddle and bridle, he became a pony of nightmares. He acted as if there were burrs under the girth and daggers under the saddle. He would flatten his ears and mince along angrily, and sometimes pop up his head unexpectedly, several times flipping his nose all the way up and hitting Sunny in the face with his poll, the bony bump horses have on the top of their heads.

Sunny was convinced he was in pain, so they dragged Pocket through expensive and lengthy visits from every veterinarian in the area. The last vet finally told her mother that the horse was just smart, and strong, and had decided not to be ridden. He would have to be broken of this behavior. In the vet’s opinion, he was not suitable for a child. Sunny remembered pleading with her mother that she couldn’t bear to hurt Pocket, that it would stifle his spirit. Heavy with prepubescent emotion inspired by Black Beauty and other fictional accounts of horse abuse, she swore she would never forgive her mother if she sold him or hurt him. She would just ride him bareback, and not worry about showing or the rest of it.

They had a little riding ring on the property, dug out of the meadow, fenced and spread with cedar chips, and her mother told her, after that final vet left the farm on that day, to saddle Pocket and meet her in the riding ring. When Sunny arrived there, walking beside her pony, she saw her mother holding a bat. Her pale face was grim, her long golden hair wound into a braid, and she was wearing pants, something she rarely did.

“You can’t ride!” said Sunny.

“Of course I can. I was alive before you, you know.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Give me that pony,” said her mother.

“No!” cried Sunny. “You’re going to kill him!”

“If he dies, it will be his choice,” intoned this fierce, pants-wearing woman. Sunny shrank from her.

Her mother snatched the reins from Sunny’s hands and sprang up into the saddle with surprising agility for someone who Sunny had never seen voluntarily come near a horse. Pocket was a big pony but her mother was still taller, so the pair made a ridiculous sight. She spun around and trotted through the gate of the riding ring. She called to Sunny, “Shut the gate.”

Around and around went Pocket, trotting tensely. Her mother kept the reins in one hand, and held the bat in the other, ready to do anything with it—Sunny had no idea what. Her mother posted cautiously, almost crouched in the saddle, and the pony seemed unwilling to misbehave. She asked him to slow to a walk and then cued him to canter. At this offense, Pocket lost his concentration, pinned his ears back, and began to swing his head.

“No,” she barked. “No, you may not.”

Up came his neck, up came the poll toward Emma’s face, and down came the bat, striking him squarely between the ears. Sunny screamed.

The horse’s poll is hard if it hits a little girl in the face but it’s also a nerve center, and Pocket went down. Her mother pushed away from him as he dropped, and fell to the side, then scrambled over to the prostrate horse, still conscious, and grabbed him by the nose. The bat had rolled into the weeds. She wrung the soft part of his nose in her fist and shouted at him, “Don’t you ever hurt that child, don’t you ever make her cry, or I will bury you, and your worthless carcass, do you hear me?” With each “ever” she laid a solid punch on his nose right between his nostrils. Sunny was terrified and impressed.

Pocket staggered to his feet.

“Come on, Sunny,” her mother called to her. “Your turn.”

Sunny silently mounted, put her feet in the stirrups, picked up the reins, and had the safest and most satisfying ride she’d ever had on Pocket. Her mother mounted the fence and sat silently on a fencepost by the gate. From then on, that’s where she sat every time Sunny worked that pony. No matter what else was going on, there she was standing watch. Pocket had his moments of disobedience, every now and then, but he never again swung his head up to hit Sunny in the face. And he never regained quite the same degree of haughty nastiness. Periodically, as he was being groomed or bathed, her mother would come past and twist his ear, first gently and then more sharply in her hand. “Does the pony like it here? Does he like his nice home? Does he enjoy being alive? Does the pony know how lucky he is?” And Sunny knew that Pocket never forgot that day when someone took a bat to his head.

Eventually she outgrew Pocket. Her mother bought her a bigger, nicer horse. But her mother never sold him. He lived out his life on the farm. When Sunny went to college, Pocket and Emma missed her together. And when he died, it was a very sad thing.

A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago, Sunny had said the words “Mother, the only thing that’s wrong with you would fit into a walnut!” It really didn’t seem like anything could be that bad. She had expected to spend a lot more time with her mother, maybe have to find her a retirement home. Maybe visit her on some Caribbean coast. Sunny and her mother had both been misled by a wrong diagnosis. Actually, there were raging tumors loose in her mother, bigger than a walnut. So those months of sneaking pain pills and leaving her weeping in the bathtub, in retrospect, seemed cruel. But before she knew, she had lain down next to her mother in her mother’s own bed, and her mother, all full of disease which no one could perceive or understand, had shifted around gently, slowly on her heating pad so she could hold the pregnant Sunny in her arms. “Don’t worry,” she had said to her mother. “You will be up out of bed tomorrow. It’s just this lousy diverticulitis. Step away from the almonds.”

In order for Sunny to go on with her life, she knew that her mother had to get better and be alive. But still, in order for Sunny to feel right leaving the hospital today, she felt with new and unfamiliar urgency that her mother had to be allowed to go ahead and die. In terms of everything medical, there was nothing to be done. It was a place of paralysis. She had not allowed herself to see it, but it was real. Sunny felt very alone in this world. The only way she could keep breathing was to stroke Bubber’s arm and her mother’s arm, together. It was just so awful. If Maxon were here, he would probably lean over her shoulder and say something hideously inappropriate, like, “Do you want to hear a few dead baby jokes?” Then she could move around and slap at him. As it was, she could just sit still and curse him for going up into space at a time like this.

Maxon would never say, “I can’t go up into space at a time like this.” A schedule had been made, a timetable decided, after all. But he could say, did say, with her so pregnant and her mother in ICU, “Of course you don’t need to come and see the launch. It would be unnecessary.” And she could say, did say, “Everything is fine, fine, fine.”

The doctor came into the room. Her mother’s doctor was a small, fat man with a messed-up hand, and he was a bit of a joker. Three of his fingers were fused together, and the whole thing was cragged around like a hook. One of his favorite jokes was to reach his hands up toward the sky and say, “Lord, make my one hand like the other!,” and then he would pretend to crag up his other, good hand, just like the fused hooked one. This had been funny during the misdiagnosis of diverticulitis. Not now during the death of cancer.