Authors: Lydia Netzer
“Thank you for letting me know,” he said to Sunny’s words. And without any further hesitation, he turned the page, smoothed out the fresh sheet, and began the day of work. He considered the mother, her smooth golden head, her dour pronouncements, her long illness, but then he tried to put the image right out of his head.
* * *
S
HE DROVE TO THE
YMCA and put Bubber into his swim trunks, because this is what they did after preschool on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Bubber’s schedule was sacred, like a litany, helping him fit into the world. He danced from foot to foot in the changing room, his hand on the door, waiting for her to come along. The pool had an L shape, shallow in the bottom part and deep on the long part for laps. Bubber’s goggles were bright green and his trunks had bugs all over them, red and yellow. When she came along, finally, he flopped into the pool without looking back at her, without noticing, immediately engaged in his own world. Sunny could smell the chlorine, see the rust around the drains, and there was a crippled man in the hot tub, his face pinched and persevering. She had looked into the wide mirrors of the YMCA changing room. Under the fluorescent light her head looked pointier, more gray.
She stood in her skirted maternity bathing suit on the wheelchair ramp that wound down into the pool. Her giant belly pressed against the railing. This is where she always stood. The YMCA rule said a parent had to stay within arm’s length from a child this small. So, there she was. Bubber was a freakishly good swimmer, and he always had been. He had never been afraid, even for a moment, of drowning. In fact, when he was even smaller, he’d walked right off the side of the pool, scaring everyone. Eventually he’d worked out swimming, and now he was an expert. There was never any stimming in the water. Never any banging or shrieking. So they came here twice a week.
Normally, with her wig on, she stood on the ramp, not putting her head in the water. Today, if she wanted to, she could go all the way down, down to the bottom of the pool. She tilted her white head down to look at Bubber. He had a small plastic frog. The frog was jumping on and off a small swim float, assisted by Bubber. There were noises to go with the jumps, something that sounded like rewinding a tape. It jumped on and off many, many times. It looked like he would never get tired of playing with the frog. Sunny’s skin was cold because she was standing under one of the giant vents in the air-circulating pipes. Her head was very cold. In fact, she froze.
Maybe, without a wig, she was a mother who would plunge into the water, feeling it rush warm and cool around her, holding her up. Or maybe at this point in her motherhood, at this advanced state of habitual wig-wearing, Sunny had written onto her flesh the true purpose of her life at that moment, which was just to shut up and watch over the child. The child enjoyed the water, and Sunny only had to stand here and make sure he didn’t die. This was her default position. She stood in the mommy body in the mommy spot. All she had to do, at that recurring moment from about one o’clock until about two o’clock on Tuesday and Thursday, was to tend the child. Did she have to be comfortable at this time? No. Did she have to enjoy the water? No. There were many times in her life when she had been comfortable and had enjoyed water. Now was a time when she was protecting her child and promoted his happiness as the pool enriched his life and developed his mind and body. So why cloud that with her comfort or discomfort? Wig or no wig. This is what she told herself, to prevent herself falling into the water, going deep down, playing with her own feet, looking at the lights.
She was reminded of a time in her life before anyone had looked at her to consider if she would make a great wife and mother. Then it had been lots of fun on the beach. She glided along the hot sand in a string bikini, walking as if she’d invented legs, head greased with coconut oil, floppy hat dangling from one hand. She swam like a dolphin, no swim cap, no tangle of hair around her goggles. Those were good times, but who really cares? There are people walking around with no limbs, or whose children have fallen out of buildings and died, or people who can’t come to the YMCA because they live in some godforsaken rural hellhole. She never knew, before she had a child, the concern she would feel for him. She felt real actual concern.
Sunny had taken swimming lessons as a child. Her mother believed every child should learn to swim, ride a horse, and play the piano. What had occupied her mother’s mind during those long lesson hours? When Sunny had been straining to tread water for three minutes, getting her skinny ass hollered at by the big high-school swimming coach. Was her mother sitting there? She couldn’t remember. Thinking about her? Comparing her, to her extreme disadvantage, to the other swimmers? Maybe her mother was thinking,
That’s my daughter. The bald one
. Emma had been a diver. Had spoken French. Had graduated at the top of her class. Sunny had been a lazy swimmer, prone to spells of floating and underwater drifting. She had spoken very poor German, had majored in something her mother found incomprehensible.
Emma hadn’t wanted Sunny to wear the wig, but the wig made Sunny aspire to so much more. Mostly she aspired to raise a fine set of children, noble children, normal children. In her wig, she looked just like a woman. Without her wig, she looked like something else. She wondered if she, given the choice, would ask to live a different life. If she would change anything about herself, given a magic bottle of pills. What if the hair could come growing in like everyone else’s hair, in stalks and clumps, pushing its way out of her skin to stick up into the air, be pulled and teased. Would she welcome this hair? What would Maxon say if he came home from space and found that she had grown in a full head of hair? What would he say when he came home from space and found she had abandoned her wigs?
Bubber was now playing wild horse and calm horse in the swimming pool. When Maxon was here, Bubber had played this game with his father. Bubber sat astride his swimming noodle and his father holding both ends propelled the horse boldly up and down and all around (wild horse) or in a smooth circle (calm horse). Now Bubber played a more sedate version alone. A child playing with its father screams louder, laughs harder, jumps more eagerly, puts more faith in everything. A child playing by himself is hearing an internal dialogue, and has a listening look, even when shrieking.
“I’m playing wild horse and calm horse,” said Bubber loudly to a nearby child who didn’t understand what he was saying.
That’s what it’s like to be Bubber,
thought Sunny.
No one understands him. He needs more drugs. Or less. Maybe he needs a whole lot less.
With Maxon there, things would be different. They would be playing games on their computers, side by side. They would be going out to dinner to the only place where Bubber could sit still in public. He would pilot them around the city in the car. He would take off the wig, put on the wig, turn the wig into a swan, put the wig on a fence post and pretend to address it. But Maxon was up in space, floating like a man underwater, his limbs loose and swirling. Maybe she would plunge into eight feet of water and turn somersaults, somersaults, eight, nine, ten of them, until she was surging to the surface, her head emerging like a melon. And maybe he would circle around her, like a watchful pike. Everything about them smooth and slick, no growths waving about, no drag on their skin. They would ring each other, slide in and out of each other, all without touching the ground. This is how she pictured Maxon in his spaceship, and herself in the deep end of the pool.
Looking down on the tiles of the wheelchair ramp, she noted a little blob of something. The little blob was red and gelatinous and it drifted around at the brink of the water on the slope of the wheelchair ramp, within easy reach of anyone’s baby. Sunny imagined that just today some other mother, standing here guarding her other toddler, had expelled a lump of something from her before it could become another baby. It had stayed there on the blue cold tiles, like a corpse on a lonely beach, and that other mother walked away from it because she didn’t want to spend any more afternoons standing cold ankle-deep in water, and she hadn’t even cleaned it up, because she was that mad.
10
When Sunny got to the hospital to visit her mother that day, she saw things differently than she had the day before. Yesterday, it had been all beautiful, where her mother was sleeping. Now it was not beautiful at all. She parked in the visitor lot, next to the familiar red brick building. It had looked like a castle before; now it looked like a prison. The day burned around her as she walked down the hallways of the hospital with Bubber clutched firmly by one hand. Her hips swiveled around her pregnant belly and everything inside it. The halls smelled of chicken broth, urine, and disinfectant. Doors opened and closed with a hissing sound. Humans walked like androids in purple scrubs. They shuffled around in booties. They rotted on their walkers, on their gurneys. Everything happens in a hospital: the birth, the life, the death. But no one wants to be in a hospital, where everything happens. They just want to get out.
On the way into the ICU, Sunny had to pass a lot of shuffling walkers. Go by a lot of gum-chewing nurse’s aides. Everywhere she went, bloated faces, white and paunchy, turned toward Sunny like moons coming into view. One minute she could see the person’s ear, hair, or the back of their heads. The next minute she could see their flat faces, then their faces with eyes a little wider open. Some people smiled politely. She remembered how it felt to be mistaken for a cancer patient. People’s pity and fear running all around her like photons.
At the doors of the ICU she had to push a button and talk to the nurse to get in.
“I’m here to see my mother, Emma Butcher,” she said. Her voice sounded just like it usually sounded. It went into the little microphone just as usual.
The doors hissed open and immediately began to close again, so Sunny and Bubber had to hustle through. Inside, there was a dry, cold smell. The rooms of the ICU radiated in a semicircle around the nurse’s station, curved around the white floor like glass boxes in a row. Sunny began to cross over to her mother’s room, and a nurse said, “Mrs. Mann?” Sunny nodded at her, turning to face her. A young nurse with a brown ponytail. The nametag said her name was Sharon. The woman recognized Bubber and the pregnancy, but she had not known Sunny without the wig. She waved Sunny on. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know.”
Sunny and Bubber held hands as they went through the glass door. Bubber’s other hand was snapping and snapping. How would her mother feel about seeing Sunny with no wig on? Would she sit up in the bed, throw back the covers, and cheer?
The robots were breathing for her mother. One clicked up and down with an accordion inside, pumping in the air and sucking it back out. One swished the liquids in and out of her, good in, bad out, in murky plastic tubes and containers. All around the room, there were these machines in clumps. It was dark and she could see their monitors and dials lit up. On the floor were a couple of old Band-Aids, pulled off an IV site. On the walls, peeling masking tape held up drawings and pictures of Bubber. They were everywhere, on the paper-towel holder over the sink, on the breathing machine, all stuck up with this yellowing tape, all askew.
Then there was her mother, on the bed. Always a tall lady, her mother had shrunk and twisted down. Her spine curled. Her head was hanging off to the side on the pillow, where the breathing tube was inside her mouth, and a large sore had formed on that side of her face. Someone had covered the sore with Vaseline, but it was still red. Most of her hair was gone, and the rest was brushed into comb rows. Her mother’s eyes were closed. Her chest went up and down. Her hands and feet were swollen, puffed balloons of yellowed spotted skin. Sunny put her hand on one of her mother’s hands, and it was cold. She rearranged the blankets on her body. The body looked like it had already begun to decompose, and yet breath and fluid was being rushed into it by the machines, and taken back out. Life was being simulated. A pinch would produce a pain response.
Sunny sat down in the chair next to the bed where she habitually sat. Bubber climbed up on the bed where he habitually climbed, and sat still with his book. As her mother had gone from her own home, to Sunny’s home, to the ER, to the ward, to the ICU, Bubber and Sunny had sat next to or on top of this or that bed, watching the journey like tourists on a boat ride, looking at alligators. Now Sunny stood on the riverbank, up to her knees in sucking mud, watching the gators gnawing their prey. She hadn’t done anything but watch those gators for two weeks. What kind of monster watches an alligator eat her mother, and does nothing but click her teeth together? She started to cry. Once her mother had said to her, “Sunny, whatever happens, I am on your side. I will always be on your side. No matter what.” Now her mother lay in this situation, so twisted and with her insides falling apart.
* * *
W
HEN
S
UNNY WAS LITTLE,
she’d had a pony. The pony was rotten and naughty, but Sunny had fallen in love with him the way an eight-year-old girl does with a horse, and there was no other pony that would please her. His name was Pocket, and he was adorable, a bright bay with a white star on his forehead. Unbridled, he was as sweet as a lapdog, and followed Sunny around their farm, batting his eyes. She could even sit on him and propel him with her knees and a soft lead rope, and he never fought. However, when Sunny tried to ride him with a saddle and bridle, he became a pony of nightmares. He acted as if there were burrs under the girth and daggers under the saddle. He would flatten his ears and mince along angrily, and sometimes pop up his head unexpectedly, several times flipping his nose all the way up and hitting Sunny in the face with his poll, the bony bump horses have on the top of their heads.