Lydia Netzer: Shine Shine Shine

Deep in darkness, there was a tiny light. Inside the light, he floated in a spaceship. It felt cold to him, floating there. Inside his body, he felt the cold of space. He could still look out the round windows of the rocket and see the Earth. He could also see the moon sometimes, coming closer. The Earth rotated slowly and the spaceship moved slowly, relative to the things that were around it. There was nothing he could do now, one way or the other. He was part of a spaceship going to the moon. He wore white paper booties instead of shoes. He wore a jumpsuit instead of underwear. He was only a human, of scant flesh and long bone, eyes clouded, and body breakable. He was off, launched from the Earth, and floating in space. He had been pushed, with force, away.

But in his mind, Maxon found himself thinking of home. With his long feet drifting out behind him, he put his hands on each side of the round window, and held on to it. He looked out and down at the Earth. Far away, across the cold miles, the Earth lay boiling in clouds. All the countries of the Earth lay smudged together under that lace of white. Beneath this stormy layer, the cities of this world chugged and burned, connected by roads, connected by wires. Down in Virginia, his wife, Sunny, was walking around, living and breathing. Beside her was his small son. Inside her was his small daughter. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there.

This is the story of an astronaut who was lost in space, and the wife he left behind. Or this is the story of a brave man who survived the wreck of the first rocket sent into space with the intent to colonize the moon. This is the story of the human race, who pushed one crazy little splinter of metal and a few pulsing cells up into the vast dark reaches of the universe, in the hope that the splinter would hit something and stick, and that the little pulsing cells could somehow survive. This is the story of a bulge, a bud, the way the human race tried to subdivide, the bud it formed out into the universe, and what happened to that bud, and what happened to the Earth, too, the mother Earth, after the bud was burst.

IN A HISTORIC DISTRICT of Norfolk, on the coast of Virginia, in the sumptuous kitchen of a restored Georgian palace, three blond heads bent over a granite island. One of them was Sunny’s head. Hers was the blondest. The modest light shone down on them from above, where copper pots hung in dull and perfect rows. Polished cabinetry lined the walls; and a farmhouse sink dipped into the counter, reproduced in stainless steel. A garden window above it housed living herbs. The sun shone. The granite was warm. The ice maker could produce round or square crystals. Each of the women perched on stools at the kitchen island had long straight hair, meticulously flattened or gently curled. They clustered around the smallest one, who was crying. She clutched her mug of tea with both hands where it sat on the countertop, and her shoulders shook while she boo-hooed into it. Her friends smoothed her hair, wiped her eyes. Sunny smoothed her own hair and wiped her eyes.

“I just don’t understand it,” said the small one, sniffing. “He said he was going to take me to Norway this summer. To Norway!”

“Norway,” echoed the one in the lime green cardigan. She rolled her eyes. “What a joke.” She had a hooked nose and small eyes, but from her blowout and makeup, her trim figure and expensive shoes, people still knew that she was attractive. Her name was Rachel, but the girls called her Rache. She was the first one on the block to have a really decent home gym.

“No, I want to go to Norway!” the little one corrected her. “My people are from there! It’s beautiful! There are fjords.”

“Jenny, it’s not about Norway, honey,” said Rache, the smooth loops and fronds of her golden hair cascading down her front and onto her tanned and curvy chest as she leaned over. “You’re getting distracted.”

“No,” said Jenny, sobbing anew. “It’s about that bitch he’s fooling around with. Who is she? He won’t tell me!”

Sunny pulled back from them. She wore a chenille wrap around her shoulders and operated the machines of her kitchen with one hand while the other rested on her pregnant belly. She went for the teakettle, freshened Jenny’s tea, and handed her a tissue. These were Sunny’s best friends, Jenny and Rache. She knew that they were having a normal conversation, this conversation about Jenny’s husband and his infidelity. It was a normal thing to talk about. But as she stood there in her usual spot, one hand on the teakettle, one hand on her belly, she noticed an alarming thing: a crack in the wall right next to the pantry. A crack in this old Georgian wall.

“It’s not really about her either, Jenny, whoever she is,” said Rache. Sunny gave Rache a stern glance behind the other woman’s head. Rache returned it with eyebrows raised in innocence.

“He’s a jerk,” Jenny said. “That’s what it’s about.” And she blew her nose.

Sunny wondered if her friends had noticed the crack. It raged up the wall, crossing the smooth expanse of buttercream-colored plaster, ripping it asunder. The crack had not been there yesterday, and it already looked wide. It looked deep. She thought about the house, split down a terrible zigzag, one half of the pantry split from the other. Bags of organic lentils. Mason jars of beets. Root vegetables. What would she do?

But Jenny wasn’t done crying. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do!” she burbled for the third time. “I have the children to think of! How could he let me find this out? How could he not be more careful?”

Sunny imagined the house falling apart, with her as the fault line. Maybe with Maxon in space, the house had given up on maintaining appearances. Maybe it would crumble into the earth without him, without the person standing in the husband spot. Everything changes, everything falls: Jenny’s husband, rockets to the moon, the wall containing the pantry.

“Shh,” said Rache. She reached for the remote, turned up the volume on the kitchen TV. Sunny saw that the microwave read 12:00. She pulled the wrap tightly around her and two fingers fluffed up the bangs on her forehead. On the screen, the news was starting up.

“Oh,” said Jenny. “Time for Les Weathers.”

“Now there’s a man who would never do you wrong,” said Rache, cocking her head and winking at the set. The women watched wordlessly for a few minutes while a tall blond man with a squared-off face and twinkling blue eyes reported on a local fire. He leaned just so, into his desk, and he used his broad hands to gesticulate. His concern over the fire appeared real, his admiration for the firemen tangible. He had a bulky torso, heavy on top like a trapezoid, with big arms. He was more than just a suit on the television, though; he was relevant and immediate to them, because he lived three doors down, in an immaculate gray townhouse, behind a thick red door.

“He’s like Hercules,” said Jenny through her tears. “That’s what he reminds me of. Les Weathers is Hercules.”

“In makeup,” said Sunny dryly.

“You love him!” Rache accused.

“Shut up. I’m not one of his worshippers,” Sunny said. “The only time I’ve ever really talked to him at all was when I asked him to take that wreath down in January.”

“Not true! He was at the Halloween party at Jessica’s!” Jenny said, momentarily forgetting her troubles. “Plus he interviewed you on TV, when Maxon was doing PR for the mission!”

“I meant talked to him alone,” Sunny said. She stood with her legs wide. She could feel, or could she not feel, a tremor in the house. In the crawl space, something was reverberating. Something was coming undone. A train passed too close, and the crack widened. It reached the crown molding. Is this what labor would feel like? Last time, she had an epidural, and gave birth with her lipstick perfectly applied. This time she planned to have an even bigger epidural, and give birth in pearls.