Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

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 again 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.

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.