Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

Dear Sunny,

It was so hot in Burma. I wonder if you remember. Yet you were always so cool in your little robes, you never seemed to sweat. I think it’s the hair on most people that makes them appear sweaty. Yet another benefit of your condition. The Chin people loved you, and they all wanted to bring you presents. I tried to throw all of their presents away when we left, but Nu saved most of that stuff and brought it with her when she emigrated. There are beautiful things, handmade things in the attic of the farmhouse that you may want to unpack and discover someday with Bubber and the baby.

I wanted to bury myself there in Burma, or evaporate myself. But when you came along, I didn’t want that anymore. I did what I did because I wanted to save you, to keep you from living in your father’s world. I thought that being in Burma would suffocate you, that being of a different race in addition to being bald there, and a zealot’s child, would make you so strange that you would have no chance of ever finding out who you really were. I worry now that maybe that is who you really were, that bald white baby under the mountain in Burma. What would have been your life, if we had stayed? I don’t know. Maybe I should have let you find out.

I don’t apologize for doing it. I want you to be happy, most of all. It is all I’ve ever wanted. From the time you were born, I was a mother first, and everything I did was for you. No one else mattered. I know you think that’s what you’re doing too, and I do apologize for railing at you over that damned wig. I’m just thankful for all the years you didn’t wear it.

Please don’t pursue Chandrasekhar and his witch doctor potion. He was a thief; he stole what he could of your father’s research. At one point, I tried to meet with him and stop him, but our lawyers told me there was really no point. It was such a small thing that he managed to pirate, and it didn’t work anyway. I promise you, it would not have worked. If your father had been able to develop it, maybe. But he died. I’m sorry for all of that.

Sunny dropped the sheet to the floor and read the second sheet.

Dear Maxon,

I am going to die from whatever is wrong with me right now. There is something you need to tell Sunny after I am gone. I was the one who turned in Sunny’s father to the Communists in Burma. I am the reason that he was killed. Please do not tell her until after I am dead. Choose a good moment, when she is feeling well and has had something to eat. Tell her clearly and calmly, with no movement in your face. Afterward say you’re sorry, and hug her with both arms. Then give her my letter.

Love, Mother

“You’re a murderer,” said Sunny out loud. “You’re a murderer.”

She remembered the perfect face of her mother, the young pale face in pictures from Burma, so ruthlessly serene. She remembered her mother’s body on the farm, sharp like a blade, hand clutching a broom, or a hairbrush, or a handful of envelopes. The way she had looked when Maxon got his acceptance letter from MIT. She remembered the hungry look in her mother’s eyes when she looked at Sunny across the top of her glasses, the way she said, “Sunny, you can do anything you want in this world. Be happy. Be free.”

And then her water broke.

Sunny stepped out the door. The afternoon buzzed too brightly around her, all the salt in the water in the air crackling her skin, all the leaves refracting the sunlight into her eyes, the entire neighborhood twisting like an abdominal muscle in distress. She held the side of the porch railing, dragging her feet all the way around to the steps, and then she lurched down them one by one. She needed to keep moving during the contraction in order to avoid falling deep into the panic that was under it. There was a flow from her uterus; it gushed a little as her left foot hit the sidewalk, sending a trickle down the inside of her thigh. She gasped. The belly tightened around the baby, and her spine felt broken in half; in the back of her at her waist there was definitely a knife sticking in. She choked but could not cough, it had gripped her too tightly, and she tried to bend forward to relieve her back, clinging so tightly to the porch railing. From somewhere outside herself, she thought there should be a voice in her ear, telling her to breathe. Otherwise she would pass out. Then it subsided.

She left the house where she had lived. It’s a monster house, she thought. We’re in it, we’re monsters, and we’re making more monsters. It might as well have a bell tower and iron grates across the windows. It might as well have a stone dungeon full of skeletons and a gibbering aunt locked away in an attic. There would be a sitcom about them. In order for the plot to work, they had to live exposed as monsters. The Manns had been keeping undercover, under wraps. The grandma, a murderer. The father, a robot. The mother, a freak. The son, a danger. The daughter, who even knew? Now a newspaper story would be published. Or something like that.

She needed help. I need help, she thought. She couldn’t go, red-faced and straining, to her girlfriends. She needed a stronger arm, a more upright salvation. She couldn’t go down to the main road and lie down in traffic. No one would agree to kill her. She couldn’t go back and crawl under the bed, cry “I want my mother!” She couldn’t sob “Maxon, help me!” The only person she could think of that was stalwart enough to help her, that was unmoving enough to be of assistance, was Les Weathers. It was to his trim and elegant town house that she now drew her sagging body.

ON BUBBER’S BIRTHING DAY, everything was different. She woke up in the middle of the night with a contraction, firm and insistent. There was time to shower before the next one came, time to put on a wig before the next one after that. She tugged Maxon on the shoulder. “It’s time,” she said, just like the women said in movies and on television. “Maxon, it’s time.” He woke up, instantly alert.

“Okay. Let’s get Mother,” said Maxon.

“What? Do we have to?” Sunny said. “Can’t we just go?”

Maxon rubbed his face, pulled on his pants. “She came down here to see the baby being born. Don’t you think she wants to go to the hospital when you’re in labor? That’s where it’s most likely to happen.”

“It’s the middle of the night. She’s asleep.”

“We need her,” Maxon said. Sunny paused. She felt the strange thing happening in her uterus, and felt the foot of the baby roll across her belly just below her ribs. She would like to have her mother there, because she was such a strong supporter. However, her mother would not approve of the wig. She had been disapproving of the wig since the beginning of her visit, when she met Sunny at the airport and said, “Who are you?”

“Oh, fine,” said Sunny. “You get her. I’ll get ready.”

Sunny put on eyebrows, eyelashes, makeup, matching pajamas, a silk robe, and then sat looking at herself in the vanity mirror in her bathroom. She had experienced moments in her life when she realized that she was actually alive and living in the world, instead of watching a movie starring herself, or narrating a book with herself as the main character. This was not one of those moments. She felt like she was drifting one centimeter above her physical self, a spirit at odds with its mechanical counterpart. She stood up carefully. Everything looked just right.

“Is she coming?” she said to Maxon, who had come back into their room, and was putting on a shirt, buttoning it all the way to the top.

“Yes, she’s coming. She’s up.”

“Now you say, ‘I’ll get the car,’ and then you drop your keys, or, no, let me think. You can’t find your keys,” said Sunny, standing by the door, directing the I Love Lucy episode that Maxon clearly hadn’t seen.