Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

“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 instructed, 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?

She shook her head and opened the “Maria” envelope. It was fat, stuffed with material. Inside were stills and movie posters from the movie Metropolis , including an original of the art deco film poster from 1927. At one point these treasures had been displayed in their office in Chicago, but these were also victims of the purge. Although Sunny hadn’t cared enough to personally oversee their destruction as she had with her own pictures, she had demanded that they be put away, permanently and forever. Maria in the movie was a woman transformed into a robot, and the pictures Maxon had kept in his locked drawer were all pictures of Maria in her metal form. Basically a bald robot with boobs. Sunny had to smile. Well, if Maxon was keeping robot porn, at least it was a bald female humanoid and not R2-D2.

She felt the bottom part of her belly tighten and a pain shot across her like a bolt of lightning wrapped around her gut. She clutched herself with both arms and crumpled up around her baby. She could feel the tightness of the muscles there; it felt like a rock. The pain twisted through her, stretched around into her back, and she found herself rocking back and forth and moaning. The nanny had taken Bubber to the pool in Maxon’s car. She could call the hospital, but how stupid.

She decided that after she opened the third envelope she would lie down, drink some water, turn on CNN, and take her mind off the baby. When the nanny got home, they would go to the hospital. She could wait until then. The contraction waned, the fist around her middle relaxed, and she took a deep breath. It was as if it had never happened, the relief was so complete. She wondered if it had really been that painful. Maybe she had been imagining things.

She slipped her finger under the seal of the small white envelope and ripped it open. There were two sheets of notepaper, penned in her mother’s spidery, formal hand. The first was addressed to Maxon, and the second was addressed to Sunny. She read the Sunny one first.