Shine Shine Shine (29 page)

He had been told the argument would be about something stupid like what kind of tea he had been supposed to buy, but would really be about something else. About him leaving. He had to listen to the words she was saying, but he had to understand the things she was feeling: fear, loneliness, abandonment, worry. He stood across the kitchen island from her. The kitchen island was covered in cool granite, granite that looked like leather, that felt like the surface of a meteor. Bubber had been put to bed, it was ten o’clock at night. When he came out of the office, she was banging dishes around in the kitchen, and then within minutes they were on opposite sides of the kitchen island, and fighting.

“What am I supposed to do for all this time? Two weeks in Florida, a week on the mission, more time after that. Am I supposed to just put a plug in this baby hole and not let it out? Am I supposed to just turn off the processes around here, shut it down, and wait for you to get back? I don’t have an Off button.”

“No” was all he could say. “I’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

The kitchen was lit artistically, recessed lighting in the ceiling dropping down a gentle glow around the copper pots. Behind her, the state-of-the-art refrigerator. Behind him, the farmhouse sink recast in silicon. Deep, wide, perfect for canning, picturesque. The back of his head reflected in the window over it. The back of her head was a gray interruption in the glistening nickel of the fridge.

“So, I just carry on, then, all by myself. That’s great. Perfect. Well, you know what? I quit. I fucking quit. I say lights off. Shut it down. I want out of this sweater, I want out of this house, I want out of this city, I want out. I’ve been holding things up on my shoulders for too long, I want a break! I want to not be a mother for five fucking minutes!”

She waved her hands around, rubbed at her cheek. She never, of course, drove her hand through her hair or pressed upward on her forehead, or shook her head vehemently from side to side.

“So go out, do what you want to do, I’m here now, safe and sound. I can help you. Go take some time for yourself,” he said. He said the words “time for yourself” as if it were one word. Like bicycling.

“I can’t just go out, Maxon, and leave it. Do you not understand this? I am Mom, twenty-four/seven. It doesn’t end because I am not physically with you and your child. I am always Mom. It’s right here with me, inside me, this makes me Mom, whether I’m here or there or passed out drunk in a ditch in the city, I’m still the mom, it’s just then I’m the shitty mom. You, you leave. You’re the scientist, you’re the builder, you’re the astronaut, you’re the cyclist, I’m none of those things. I’m the mom, that’s it. I’m saying, I just want a little break to try and be someone else, but I can’t have it. It’s impossible.”

Behind her the automatic ice maker clicked on, dumped out a load, clicked off.

“Honey, it’s all about priorities.”

He knew as soon as he said it that it was wrong. He had to remember what this fight was about.

“All about priorities? That’s rich. That’s really fucking rich. This from the man who gets up at dawn to bike, stays at work as long as he can, sometimes until after dark and then shuts himself in his office all night. Here I am pregnant with another baby, another child of yours that’s not going to know what the front of your face looks like! They’re going to see streaming lines of code across your eyes, a reflection always, your screen on your face, that’s their father.”

“Now, that’s not right. That’s not true. That’s not right or true.”

“You don’t help me when you are here. You might as well go, be well, live on the moon, colonize space. I’ll just be here pushing around the dishes, the laundry, the dishes, the laundry, and outlining my lips, wearing my stockings, and lining up my dove gray pumps in the closet.”

“I don’t expect you to do that. No one expects that. You make yourself do that.”

“Yeah, well, what do I expect me to do? What does he expect me to do? What does this one expect me to do?” She pointed upstairs at Bubber and then to her belly. “There actually are no expectations of me, Sunny, this person. It’s just me, this slot, this role, this mother. What I’ve got to do as her, to be her, and those expectations are clearly defined. Clearly defined. You, in fact, are the only one that can’t see them. Because you don’t see anything that’s not written down in black and white! Look at me, Maxon, I am dying here! Motherhood is death, do you get it? This me that you see, this thing standing here, this is a dead thing covered in a shell. I am dead. Maxon, I’m dead!”

“You don’t look dead,” he said.

“Maxon! I am not a fucking robot! You cannot determine whether I am alive or dead just by looking at me!”

Her face was blotchy and striped with tears. Her wig, her immovable wig, was perfectly coiffed, glistening, real. Her hands wrung at each other, and she hit softly on the countertop. She was crying.

He remembered the hermit crabs they had brought home from Cape May when the mother took them there on a trip. They’d kept them in a bucket next to the bathtub until they crawled out of their shells and died. Sunny had wept and mourned, holding the strange little shrimps in her hand and talking to them while she choked with sorrow. The mother firmly forbade morbid rituals; no funerals were allowed. Later he found out in a book that the crabs hadn’t really been dead, they were just trying to find new shells, and shedding their exoskeletons. Had they been left alone, they would have lived. But they were thrown out on the compost pile, covered in the next day’s cabbage leaves, the following day’s watermelon rind. If Sunny felt dead like those crabs had been dead, then Maxon had failed her, and he was sorry.

“You don’t even know me, Maxon!” she shrieked. “Do you know what I have done?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re just going to go, up in space, and leave me here with your children? This thing I am? This bastardization that I have become?”

“I thought you said it was necessary. I thought you wanted me to go.”

“Maxon, do you know how your father died?”

“He froze in a ravine.”

“He froze in a ravine because I left him there.” Sunny choked in her throat, like she was coughing and talking at the same time.

“I know.”

“You know? You don’t know. You never knew.”

“I know because you told me. You told me years ago. You were standing right there when you said it.”

Maxon remembered clearly, the dinner party. Sunny told a story about her father dying in a ravine, and he had known, without a doubt, that she had really meant that his father died that way, and that she had seen him dying, and that she had done nothing. Maxon had already taken in that information, at the time she had said it.

Sunny paused.

“You knew?”

“Yes. You said his leg was shaped like a sigma. You said he was covered in pine needles, don’t you remember? Everyone knows pine trees don’t grow in southern Burma. It would have been deciduous—”

“You knew and you said nothing?”

“I said something. I said ‘wow.’”

“Maxon,” said Sunny. “There is a way to respond when someone tells you they killed your father. You elevate your voice an octave, you increase its volume, you make an expansive hand gesture, you raise your eyebrows, you shout something like ‘WHAT?’ or ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU HAVE DONE THIS!’ and you … you don’t just carry on as if nothing had happened!”

“I forgave you,” he said. “That happened. That is something that happened.”

“What?”

“I forgave you that night, before you even stopped talking, I forgave you. I forgive you. I forgive. It’s okay.”

She threw herself into him and wrapped her arms around him so tightly that the wind came out of his lungs in a whoosh.

“Oh, Maxon,” she said. “Don’t ever die. Don’t ever, ever, ever die!”

Maxon had written down everything he had eaten for the last seventeen years. He had a resting heart rate of thirty-two. He had a graph to indicate the wattage he had emitted in an eighty-seven-mile bike ride yesterday. But he could not stop himself from dying.

24

In 1987, the Yates Mall was built at the crossroads of Route 8 and Highway 32. There was a traffic light there, the only one for many miles. In the middle of some cow pastures, down the road a piece from Bickton and about two miles from Pearl, a mall was built and it had a Sears at one end and a Bon-Ton at the other. At this time, there was a gas station at the corner and a lumber mill next to the mall and that was it. People came to the mall blinking, putting their hands in front of them to make sure they didn’t walk into any windows. They found a fabric store, shoe shops, an eyeglass store, a pharmacy, a small cafeteria, even a cinema with two screens. People said that Yates County was finally civilized. The local paper said that such crassly generic consumerism would kill local commerce and crush the mom-and-pops in the oily boom towns around.

Over the next few years the intersection blossomed. It found added to its commercial enterprises a Home Depot and a Burger King. Then a small and disorganized amusement park. Soon a newer and more sparkling gas station set up shop to compete with the older one, setting pay-at-the-pump and instant submarine sandwiches against grit and a mechanic. A roadside ice-cream stand opened up within view of the traffic light to compete with the Jolly Milk, which was a mile away.

In 1993, a Wal-Mart was built across from the mall, and editorial writers at the local paper threw up their hands and gave up the region to multinational trade death. Hardware stores on main streets everywhere closed. Clothiers despaired. Purveyors of grocery shook their fists at the heavens. One small man with a tire store next to the bank in Oil City committed suicide. By 1995, the Yates Mall, once heralded as the advance guard of civilization, closed in deference to the big-box cavalry across the street. The building emptied, was boarded up, and a permanent sign was erected out front: SPACE FOR LEASE. 1000
×
500, 1500
×
500, OR WHATEVER.

Naturally, the local high schoolers took it over as a make-out zone. Before the mall, they had an abandoned railroad car off a siding on the other side of the river, past Franklin, but you had to walk half a mile to get to it, and while there were mattresses, there were also snakes. The Yates Mall was better, because it was bigger, and a parked car in the lot was inconspicuous because the theater was still open for one showing a day. Of course, there were also more dubious operations being enacted inside the shell of Yates Mall than just the pregnancy roulette. Sometimes the players in these games overlapped, the meth dealers and the amorous teens, the amorous dealers and the meth-ridden teens. After a couple of years, there was a lot of junk on the floor.

Maxon and Sunny were sixteen when they first entered the closed part of the mall. It was Saturday and they had gone to a matinee, legitimately parking Sunny’s little car in the parking lot, leisurely strolling into the theater. Sunny had a pocket bottle of vodka in her bag, and during the movie she applied herself to it earnestly, until by the third act she was loopy and groping.

“Maxon,” she whispered loudly. “Maxon, let’s go to the Bon-Ton afterwards.”

Going to the Bon-Ton meant slipping away to any number of hidden locations within the abandoned mall, tucking oneself and one’s partner into a corner, and doing it. Maxon knew this. The Bon-Ton happened to be the biggest empty department store, but it wasn’t the only one. There was also a Sears and there were many other smaller stores. In Maxon’s mind, the mall was a rabbit warren, with bunches of little rabbits stuffed into holes rutting at each other. Maxon couldn’t imagine doing that with Sunny. They were boyfriend and girlfriend. They kissed and pressed their bodies up to each other. But to be naked, in a closet, pushing into her wetly, he could not imagine.

“No,” he said. “You’re drunk. Let’s get out of here. We can go to the A-frame before we go home.”

The A-frame, still as abandoned as it was when Maxon was a little boy, was their own secret shack. But they didn’t use it for sex. They used it for sobering Sunny up, cooling Maxon off, escape.

“No,” she insisted. “I want to go to the Bon-Ton like the other kids do. Why can’t we? What’s the big deal?”

She went off into a fit of giggles and bent over in her chair, in the dark. Her hand clutched his thigh and squeezed, traveled up a few inches and squeezed, up and squeezed, and then it just stayed there, her fingers tapping up and down.

“Fine,” he said.

They staggered out of the theater, one of several couples intent on the same mission, veering quickly right when the rest of the moviegoers veered left and out the doors. The kids split up, each couple taking a separate hallway as if by mutual assent, and Sunny grabbed Maxon’s hand and pulled him firmly along.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Renee told me where to go,” said Sunny. “Come on, hurry. It’s a secret.”

At the back of a store that had once sold wooden crafts and furniture created by local artists, she yanked open a door and led him through it. There was no light, but Sunny rummaged around beside the door on the inside, found a flashlight, and flicked it on.

“I found it!” she said, as if to herself.

She slammed the flashlight down on the desk, pointed upward, and a warm yellow light illuminated the room. It was bigger than Maxon had anticipated. Maybe it was the office and the stockroom. There were rows of metal shelves along one wall.

“Take your clothes off,” she told him. “Come on, come on. No, wait, wait a minute.”

From her pocket, Sunny pulled out the vodka, half empty, an incense stick, and a condom. She pushed the incense stick into a groove in a ceramic holder there on the desk, lit the end of it, flicking impatiently at a lighter that was already there. The smell of bergamot bloomed in the corner, pushing back the mustiness a little, but there was still a chill. In the corner was a pile of body pillows, scavenged from leftovers at Sears, and there was a stack of sheets, some still wrapped, some just folded, some discarded in a pile in the other corner. The room was fifteen feet by eighteen feet. They had been standing in it for forty-five seconds.