Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

“She is holding on,” said the doctor.

“You’re kidding,” said Sunny.

“She won’t hold on for long,” said the doctor.

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I have to go.”

The doctor gave her a withering glance.

Only Maxon could have understood what she was doing. It was as if there was a waterfall of glass, and only eating the glass would keep it from cutting the baby and Bubber, so she was eating the glass up as fast as she could. She couldn’t pause in her glass consumption to explain things to doctors. Her mother was holding on. For now, she was holding on. Her decision, not Sunny’s. Her choice. Maybe she would get better after all. Sunny packed the box, full and firm, and took Bubber by the hand.

“Kiss Grandma,” she said to Bubber. “We have to go.”

“But wait. We’ll have to move her to another room,” said the nurse. “She can’t stay in ICU now.”

“Fine, call me,” said Sunny. The weight of the whole hospital was resting on her lungs, crushing the baby. She had to leave. She had to walk her legs away, and take her children away. It was a point of motion. After a slingshot has been pulled back far enough, it has to be shot. It cannot stay there forever.

THE MOTHER WAS NOT dying. The mother was living. The mother was thinking. Inside the dark cocoon of her deathy body, there was thinking going on. Weightless, she maneuvered through her memory and what else was inside already. She stayed tethered, always, to a thread of pain and grief that kept on clutching her back into her arms and legs, into her torso where the tumor was eating away. But she remembered everything that she had ever seen. It was just a matter of dragging it up to the top, and shaking it out, and turning it over.

Sunny’s first memories were of Burma. When she was three years old, Sunny and her parents were sitting around the dinner table. In the center of the table was a bowl of fish curry. On another plate was a roasted chicken. Then there was a green tomato salad. The family knelt around the table on blue velvet cushions, and there was a blue cloth spread under the plates. The father stretched his hands out to each side, and her mother and Sunny took hands with each other and with him and he said a blessing over the food. An electric fan in the window sprayed puffs of air and the scent of palms back and forth through the room, ruffling a few loose strands of Emma’s hair.

There was a knock on the door. She saw soldiers on the doorstep. Emma picked up her child and held her aside, out of the way. Nu came and took her then, sheltered her. The father was flustered and pink. Boots came in on the floor. Flies were on the curry. The fan went back and forth. Sunny was afraid. Her mother was still chewing a bite of dinner, swallowing, trying to get it down.

The father had been exposed as a Christian missionary and was immediately taken captive by the military junta. He understood them perfectly when they explained themselves. General Ne Win himself had approved his execution, the soldiers told him. General Ne Win just wanted to do things right. He did not deny that Bob Butcher was a fine scientist. Any who knew him might have volunteered to say that he exhibited nothing but the most excruciating charisma and honor. He never offered any woman his left hand, or touched any man on the top of the head. But the general had to, as he put it, crush all who sought to weaken the union.

But how did it happen these men in gray from over the mountain came again to their door, and penetrated the laboratory, and opened the secret cabinet full of Bibles and hymnals? Who told the tale that led the flat-faced soldiers to take Bob Butcher down to the post office, along with a dusty box of smuggled whiskey which he had attempted to use as a bribe? No one wanted money in Burma. You could bathe yourself in emeralds that you dug from your backyard, but you couldn’t eat them, smoke them, or use them to kill your neighbors. Look at the stupas, covered in gold. But no one can get a bus across town. So who cares about the clinking offering of one sweating missionary?

AFTER HER HUSBAND WAS taken away and the door had been slammed in their faces, Emma Butcher’s heart raced in her body. She went into their bedroom with her small daughter, holding her by the hand. She took a golden nat, an image of one of the ancient Burmese gods, out of her dresser from underneath her nightgowns. While her daughter watched, she put this nat, The Young Lord of the Swing, into the living room of Sunny’s dollhouse in the corner. From a pocket of her robe came a stick of incense, which she lit, hand shaking, and placed in front of the little house. Sunny came to kneel beside her, with Nu. Nu was stern and smiling; she sang a song. They watched the godlet sitting on the little rag mat before his bamboo chairs and table. Sunny ran to the kitchen and came back with a grape. This animism the women of the house had hid from Bob Butcher the way he had hid the Bibles from the Communists. Over her dozen years of service, Nu had taught it to Emma, and Sunny had learned it from the both of them. Everyone sneaking around having their religious ceremonies. Baptism and fruit sacrifice. Communion and incense. Smells and bells.

Emma prayed for blessings and protection. Life went on without her husband. A letter came to them after a week. Bob Butcher was imprisoned in Rangoon and his execution was set to happen in four days. She called Sunny in out of the tea garden and began to pack up the house. She gave Sunny a small linen bag and told her to choose whatever treasures she could fit inside, not too heavy to carry herself. Sunny chose the golden nat and some of her braided hats. A flowering branch from one of the garden trees. The family teapot. Emma packed a few of their clothes and then meticulously gathered all the notes from her husband’s research. She filed them all into a leather case with a collection of bottles and vials, and everything that was left she gave to Nu along with a packet of money. Sunny cried when she left her nurse, saying “Nu-nu” over and over. Emma cried, too, and said, “Nu, as soon as I can, I will send for you. Don’t worry. We will see each other again.” They left the cottage at the bottom of the mountain forever.

They traveled to Mandalay on one seat of a terrible bus, Sunny on her mother’s lap, holding her nose and sometimes crying. Emma sat erect, her face without tears. She kept her eyes forward and her mouth quiet, even her tongue. She used a little money to buy them some sour food that they did not like, that Sunny would not eat. She wished she could nurse her daughter again, but Sunny had weaned. It would make her feel better.

They came to Mandalay this way. From the dusty place they stood, on the shore of the Irrawaddy River, it was not beautiful. Kipling notwithstanding, they could see neither the Moulmein Pagoda nor the dawn coming up like thunder. They could hear wind in the palm trees, though, carrying dust along with it, a dry wind that made them thirsty and twirled Emma’s hair and the ends of Sunny’s head wrap. In the end, they found a way to get down the river, in a ferry piloted by a fat man who traded their journey for Emma’s personal Bible. It took ten hours to get to Rangoon.

The triangle sails of the round-bottomed fishing boats made sharp peaks against the horizon. The pointed horns of water buffalo marked where the animals were dragging plows along or wading in the shallow water. Nothing else rose up. Small farming villages hugged the shores of the warm flat river and long teak canoes slipped along, driven by poles or paddles. Emma clutched Sunny to her chest and gripped their bags between her feet. Nearby, an old person sitting in a large basket was lamenting being born a woman. A young monk crouched on his heels under the railing. His head and even his eyebrows had been shaved in an initiation ritual. Emma shuddered. No one could sleep on a boat like this, even on the Irrawaddy River. You couldn’t tell a regular monk from a government spy wrapped in an orange blanket.