Shine Shine Shine (33 page)

D
EATH IS GRUESOME.
T
HERE
is nothing romantic about it. Decay, both cruel and gentle, starts immediately. Raised on a farm in farm country, Sunny was not a stranger to death. She had seen dead birds, cats, many deer, a dead horse lying in a pasture, kicked it over and over, and shouted, “Live! Live! Live, goddammit!” She had even raised a sheep as a 4-H project one year, unclear on the term “market lamb.” Nu built it a dog house which Sunny decorated with fresh flowers every week, and they painted “Blossom” over the door. She fed it from her hand, brushed its face, and knew complete shock and horror when at the end of the county fair it was sold to a local butcher. After that she hated sheep. “I thought you knew,” the mother said. “I thought you knew what it meant.”

Other kids raised animals to sell at auction year after year, and Maxon was one of them. He raised a pig every year, starting at age nine, except the year he was eleven, when his pig died inexplicably in June. He had always kept his money separate from his mother’s little hoard, in stump stashes in the woods and around town, locations known only to him. From his own funds, he paid for his stock, paid for its keep, kept scrupulous accounts. During the week of the fair he would mingle with the other boys, all in torn jeans and Western shirts. Their scruffy boots knocked against the cement floor in the pig barn as they stepped up from the dirt road that wound through the fairgrounds. Their tough knuckles scraped against the various gates and fences rigged with twine and latches to keep the pigs in pens. The little boys were junior versions of the big boys, getting more taciturn by the year, growing patchy facial hair, adopting a favorite ball cap, sprouting Adam’s apples.

After the sheep fiasco, Sunny didn’t raise any more market animals, but she took her horse to the fair every year, and stuck close to Maxon every day. All the high-school kids hung around in the pig barns, sitting on the slatted fences, chewing gum and pushing each other. There were the horse barns, where girls spent hours picking up every turd and hanging streamers from their horses’ stalls to win the
Good Housekeeping
prize. There were beef barns, where the ponderous steers had their tails teased up into perfect balls of hair. But the pig barns were where the pocket flasks were passed around discreetly, where a slanted gaze could catch fire and lead to a raucous nudge. The boys smelled a little, the girls all wore ponytails, and the space in the middle of the torso was frequently grasped and pulled with a roughness that led to horseplay.

Pigs are earthy; their proximity may lead to carnal thoughts. Showing a pig at a county fair is a dangerous business, and the great relief that follows makes you giddy. Pigs are never really trained, no matter how arduously you practice them, and they’re vicious as wild dogs sometimes. For every group of kids in the ring with their pigs on the loose and a curved stick in their hands to guide them around, there was also a group of dads, alert, carrying plywood sheets. The purpose of these sheets was to shove down between two pigs that started going at it. On pig day there was usually blood drawn, and the event always drew a crowd. The kids who won the showmanship trophy moved low, crouched right down over their pigs, watched the judge like a cat. They carried a scrub brush in one pocket and a squirt bottle in the other, and always with their pronged stick ready to hook the pig’s ear and drag it off its purpose. Maxon never won showmanship, because he wouldn’t make eye contact with the judge.

It was on the last day of the 4-H fair, during the last summer before Maxon would go away to college. He had a scholarship to MIT, and Emma Butcher was paying his room and board. He was eighteen. Sunny had felt restless all day, had not wanted to dive into the partying that was going on, especially with the seniors. She and Maxon sat on the fence down in the warm-up riding ring attached to the big arena, where the equestrian jumpers were loping in big circles, getting ready for their turn in the ring. The competition was fault and out—one knock of a hoof on a jump and that competitor was out of the running. You had to go clean, clean all the way around, and there was no second place for coming close. Maxon watched the horses peacefully, his skin browning in the August sun. But Sunny fidgeted next to him, kicking at the fence, tearing pieces from a little knothole with her thumb.

“Maxon, I feel jumpy and weird,” she said, squinting across the dusty ring toward the bleachers. She could see her mother and Nu sitting next to each other under a golf umbrella.

“What’s the matter,” he said to her mechanically.

“Let’s take a walk,” she said. She slid off the fence, brushed the back of her jeans with both palms, pulled a sun hat out of her pocket and clamped it on her head.

They walked, hand in hand, across the warm-up ring, pausing to let the cantering horses go by, and went out at the gate. Sunny waved to the mother, and the mother sat up straighter, turned to watch them go. She shook her head back and forth at Sunny, back and forth, but Sunny only waved again. She was too far away, and the day was too hazy for any communication. She turned her back. They went up through the fairgrounds, past the volunteer fire department’s food trailer and the little cotton-candy stand, past the bunny building and the big hall where the floral arrangements and craft projects were judged. They went right out through, past the shed where the fairgrounds people kept the tractors and mowers and stored hay and lumber, and into the woods.

They walked silently, trudging along, uphill now and out of the grounds. Maxon kept up with her, held her hand just right, not too tight, not too loose. If they just kept walking they would head right into somebody’s fresh-mown hayfield, so she stopped them there in the woods, with the fairgrounds stretched out below and behind them. They were almost to the top of that hill. The cicadas buzzed and there were rocks there, protruding from the earth, just like near to their own houses, in their own familiar forest.

“Let’s stop,” she said. “I need to show you something. Before you go.”

“What is it,” said Maxon. He looked so old to her, so real, such a man. She knew that when he went away to college, he could continue changing, getting older, his bones more prominent, his eyes deeper. She pulled her hat off and set it there on the rock. Maxon stood ramrod straight. His torn jeans hung low on his hips, his Western shirt just the same as all the other boys’, tugged tight around his shoulder blades. In his jeans pocket there was a knife. In his shirt pocket, a folded guide, a schedule of the day’s events. She motioned for him to stay where he was, and she took off her sandals, put them neatly beside her hat. Now her feet felt the cool dampness of the forest floor, the dark dirt under pine needles. She pulled off her jeans and then stood there in her blue T-shirt and flowered panties.

“Maybe you should sit down,” she said.

He sat down. His knee poked out of a hole in his jeans as he crossed his legs underneath him. He rested one palm on each of his thighs. What did he think was going to happen? She had imagined this scene many times. She was not drunk. She was not crazy. She was doing what she needed to do, for him. Her mother could train him how to shake hands and express regret. It was for her to teach him this other stuff. She knew her mother would not let them get married. He was going off to college, to belong to some other girl that he would meet. So she had to prepare him. She told herself firmly, feeling a low breeze on her legs, that she was doing this for him. It would not be fair for him to go out into the world with no idea what a woman was all about. She had read enough about it, and discussed it in detail with Renee, who had been an expert for at least two years. She had come close to showing him before, at the Bon-Ton, she remembered vaguely, but as she said to Renee, nothing happened. Today, something would happen. She had a very strong feeling that this was her last chance.

“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.

*   *   *

A
T HOME IN
V
IRGINIA,
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.