Authors: Lydia Netzer
The new mother looked at her husband and his potted plant. He wore a black linen shirt unbuttoned over a shining chest, and a ridiculous fishing hat. Her baby slept in her bed, between her body and her arm, wrapped in a long orange cloth. Its lashless eyes closed like the eyes on a statue of a saint, which can have no hair or eyelashes either. Her white-blond hair fell around them both like a metal curtain, smooth as polished rock. Her level blue eyes stared, her lips spread in a beatific smile. She had exchanged her bloody gown for a gauzy wrap, the color of burnt salmon. She lay like a long slim knife in the bed. At the top of the knife was her beautiful head, chiseled out of bone. She was as serene as a pool in a cave.
She let her husband pick up the baby and hold it in his arms. She watched him hold it up to the light and look deeply into its face and droop his sagging cheeks next to its nose. She looked at him and saw that he was old. She wondered what exactly she had done to herself, marrying such an old man, and having his child here in the hotness of Burma. Had it been a dark and tousled baby, mewing loudly, or a ginger thing squawking, she would not have felt the same heartbeat in her throat. When she saw him holding her strange baby with his sweating paws, she knew she had to take her baby back to America, where she could be real. Burma was a dream, their mission an escape. Her baby would engage, would fire up like a rocket, and would burn in this world. She would not drift in the murmured prayers of her father. She would not languish in the jungle. The Buddhist nurses had left her, so that when she could get up, she could leave. She could leave all the way. She could rethink old decisions. Having a baby makes you do that.
But instead they took her back to the small cottage at the bottom of the big mountain, and they kept house together. Turns out, it was hard to leave Burma. Turns out, she had been stuck the whole time. She named her baby Sunny because of the eclipse. The father had to relent. After all, he had not been there when the baby was coming. He had been down on the coast, collecting specimens. So the baby’s name was Sunny Butcher.
* * *
W
HEN
S
UNNY TURNED TWO,
they were still in Burma, and she had not grown any hair. She was still nursing, and still sleeping in her mother’s arms. Her mother braided sun hats for her out of fabric, out of reeds, and out of yarn. They hired a nurse, Nu, who helped Emma take care of the baby and with the house. Sunny walked around in a tiny head wrap, with her round belly protruding from a saffron kimono. Her features stayed elfin, her shoulders and limbs fragile, but her head was enormous. She was a strange-looking child. The local Chin people smiled and nodded to her. To them she looked like one of the monks who kept coming to convert them back to Buddhism. The men reached out to her with two hands. The women would not touch her garments. Although the Chin mostly worshipped the Christian God, they adhered to their native traditions.
The father had wanted to name the baby Ann because of Ann Judson, one of the first missionaries to penetrate Burma. Ann Judson was the victim of many fevers and eventually died of one. In her day, the locals censured Christian missionaries by locking their feet in fetters and raising them up until only their shoulders were touching the ground. What with the mosquitoes attacking, this was a difficult punishment to endure. That was before the British took over Burma, which was before the Communists took over. A whole lot of Christians had come to Burma, and to the Chin province, over that century.
The last missionary to arrive was Sunny’s father, with his beautiful wife. When they first established themselves in Hakha, Emma was twenty-three and Bob was forty. They built a pretty wooden church next to the industrial housing complex. Christians had been meeting in buildings around Burma for over a hundred and fifty years. Their church was just one more church. A single round fan at the back of the sanctuary moved air through the congregation. The wife sat in pew one with her knees pressed together and off to the side. She wore American-style ladies’ hats and craved crisp untropical fruit. Her husband struggled to teach her the language, insisted on speaking Chin at the dinner table, over the rice and vegetables.
One year after their arrival, all the missionaries were thrown out of Burma. Burma was purged of foreigners altogether, both of the missionary and commercial variety. Men in gray uniforms from the other side of the mountains knocked on the Butchers’ door and put them out of their house. They left everything, running immediately to India, where Bob sat in the kitchen of his missionary friends, broadcasting a radio show in Chin. He did not use the term “counterrevolutionary.” Emma worried, would they have to go back home? She could live in Burma with her enthusiastic husband, but could she live in America with him? Could she be a pastor’s wife, and hold Bible study meetings in her house? She prayed that she would be allowed to stay in Asia. It seemed easier.
Loose in India, she wandered in a slipstream. She only hummed through the hymns. The mountains interfered with the radio signal, and Bob Butcher went back to the States, but Emma wouldn’t go. He left his beautiful red-lipped wife in India with the other missionaries and went home, determined to find a way to come back under legal cover, as a businessman, or a scientist, or a diplomat. She slept in a hammock on their screened porch. She spent her time in India teaching the local children how to read, but she never imagined having a child of her own. She couldn’t imagine something good coming out of the thing they did together that was necessary to make a child. She didn’t want the sex between her and Bob to have any lasting effects. When she rose from the bed every morning, she saw herself walking away from it and from what was left between the sheets. They never talked about it. It only happened at night, when she had already been asleep. It was as if she had to be sleeping for him to approach her. He couldn’t approach her if she was able to see it coming.
This was the way he had first come to her, in the middle of the night, when she was asleep in her father’s house in Indiana.
She had gone away to college and come back, back to her austere parents and their brutally efficient family farm. He had come for a week of prayer meetings, a fire and brimstone speaker who moved the whole church to their knees. She had known him since her childhood, because he came every year and they always hosted him at their house. First he came with his wife, who died in childbirth, taking the baby with her to heaven, and then alone, dramatic and intense, knocking glasses over at dinner and giving her blessings, his hand on her head. That night, when she was back from college and he was visiting, she was asleep under her lemon yellow patchwork quilt, and then she was awake, looking at him in her room. The clock ticked beside her. A shadow moved across the ceiling.
“I choose you, Emma,” he told her, his voice hoarse. She had never heard him try to speak quietly before. She had heard him shouting, ranting, pleading, even crying. “I choose you to go with me to Burma.”
She felt cold wonder. Was it a dream? She had seen him only in a suit, behind the pulpit, everyone listening in rapt attention. Then in his shirtsleeves, tie pulled open, at the dinner table, telling stories. When she was twelve, he had baptized her in the river, and the testimony she gave was that she wanted to be more genuine in her faith, not just say the words, but live the life. She had ridden in the back of his truck, with the other kids who had waited all year to be baptized during the revival week. She saw his big shoulders bumping along, one hand on the wheel, one hand clutching the top of the doorframe, as if lodging himself firmly in this world.
He was with her, in the dark, in her room. It was now a private time between the two of them only. She felt paralyzed, and special. How could she not? Within the confined world of the church, the community, the Christian college she had attended with its fumbling, guilty boys, he was a shining celebrity. Her parents would be proud. And what else was she going to do? Next to him, no one else seemed completely alive. She felt twelve again, nervous, unready, and yet proud that she was a woman to him now. Proud that she knew what to do. She had never spoken a full sentence to him. But she could be the one to go to Burma with him, be his helpmeet, and replace his dead and sainted wife.
He was breathing heavily. He was standing next to her bed with no shirt on, her sleepy eyes could see only the top part of his body, broad chest shining in the dim light from the moon. She felt her body lying flat in the bed like a paper doll. What would it be like, this thing? A shiver went up from her stomach. His breath filled the room.
“Can I come to you, Emma?” he asked. She saw his brow furrow. She nodded.
Then he had pulled aside the covers and she felt the chill of the air. He looked down at her, her belly, her legs. Then he was with her in the bed, his knees on either side of hers. His one big hand pushed down the flannel waistband from over his hips, his other pressed on her collarbone, rubbing and rubbing. His penis came out of the top of the pants and she felt it, warm on her leg in the sudden cold of the dark room, smooth and hot, nudging at her, pushing all around over her panties. His square chin was all she could see above her, the rest of his face pointed up and toward the sky. She shifted her hips up to meet him, put her arm around him and her little hand down in the bottom part of his warm back. He moved his hot hand down from her collarbone, down over her breast, fingers dragging urgently down to where he felt her, dug into her, opened her up. His body felt heavy on top of her, everything he did so forceful, so demanding. Now his forehead was on her shoulder, his hips twisting, and the sounds he made were groans. “Oh, oh,” he said. “Oh, god, it feels so good.” But then he could be charming. He could say, “Oh, honey, I know it hurts.”
* * *
A
FTER A YEAR IN
exile, Bob brought his wife back into Burma. He brought a field laboratory with him to study the medicinal qualities of orchids, under the auspices of the University of Chicago. The Red Guard was burning churches in China. It was a time for persecution and torment. The Christians had to come in under the cover of secular jobs, when they could get them. Or they had to surrender the gospel to the natives, and hope they would continue to dispense it among themselves. Bob Butcher was now overtly a scientist, but he was still secretly a missionary, holding meetings in the bedroom of their new two-room house in Hakha. Communicants huddled around the spindly bed.
The husband and wife lived this lowly way for a dozen years. Emma planted tea in their little garden. Bob whispered sermons and clinked test tubes together, distilling oils. Always the couple would go to sleep peacefully, separately, in their own space. Then in the night, there would often be the urgent waking, the desperate clutching, big hands around her upper arms or grasping her hips, his hot mouth on her, separating her, driving into her. And then all the grateful exclamations. “Thank you. Oh, god, thank you.” Sometimes she could feel she was still in a dream. Sometimes she woke up full when his rigid thrust was already inside her, his body already drenched in sweat.
Bob had had a vasectomy after his first wife died on the delivery table. He knew, at the time, that it was God’s will. Emma had known there would never be babies, had felt it her calling to be his wife, this man whose tragedy had taken away his will to reproduce. When she thought about children, she wished the idea away, thinking of their sex together as so separate from the kids she saw all around. Then she became miraculously pregnant at the age of thirty-seven. No one expected it. The couple celebrated mildly, each privately horrified. The husband announced his accomplishment to his secret congregation. “My wife, Emma, is going to have a baby,” he said to them. They nodded quickly, smiled, and showed their approval by patting each other on the arm.
Would she die in delivery? Would the baby be a sweaty, demonstrative little man? No. Sunny was born, she grew, and she learned to walk in the village. She sat with her beautiful kimonos among the ratty dogs. Nu washed the diapers, burned fruit to the gods on the back porch. The daylight hours under the mountain increased. In the village, their secret mission was safe, because most of the Chin State of Burma was stubbornly Christian. No matter how many Bibles were burned, more Bibles could be got from India, or smuggled in from the USA. Everything was safe and the family would stay on indefinitely, until Sunny was an old woman, and her head wraps got dirty and her mother died.
3
Sunny was a woman without any hair. She was born without hair, and had never grown any. Not eyelashes, not armpit fuzz, not leg hair. No hair on her head anywhere. At times in her life, she had wondered if the world could ever be truly beautiful for her, for a girl this bald. At other times, though, she had felt that her life was like any other. Now she was nearing the age of thirty. Although she was not the only bald woman in the world, there had never been very much research done about what was wrong with her. It was difficult to say. Kind of freaky, how they couldn’t explain it. From childhood and girlhood, and on through the time of getting married and having a child, this strange baldness kept sickening her. Her mother was sick with something more regular. She had cancer. Her life was coming to an end. That was also difficult to say.
It’s dark inside the body. The things that go on there cannot be seen. When anyone has an organ going bad, or some blockage, or a leak, those things happen silently, and without light. No one can witness those things. The wet silence takes over, in there. Are there any noises? Does the liver have a sense of touch? Every baby spends its first months in there, in the dark. Every son waves its arms in front of a blind face, and every daughter opens a blank mouth to make no noise. And inside the baby, another blackness. But no sound. A human grows and fades in the blackness and silence inside its skin. Sunny had come up bald from the cradle, and stayed bald throughout her life. She had been born at some point, and at some point in the future she would die. What happened in between was one long, hairless episode.