hardly look at the pictures of her work. It didn’t interest him at all. But the robot matches its facial expression to the expression of the person with whom it is conversing.
He stood there, his head almost brushing against the ceiling of the little kitchen, nodding and smiling, and constantly looking back at her, sitting there so grown, so different from every other woman he had met in the meantime. So this was the voice at the other end of the phone. He had not seen her for three years. She had changed a lot. He felt, suddenly, the urge to act. He felt himself, suddenly, want something. Want something beyond a mathematical expression or the resolution of a logical question, beyond installing recessed lighting properly, beyond closing his eyes and opening them again. He wanted her, properly his. He felt like he felt when he was hungry. He knew what was supposed to come next.
“Do you want to go canoeing tomorrow?” he asked.
“Canoeing? Like, you mean, after the funeral?” she said.
The mother had been crying in the other room. Sunny had been crying, too, before Maxon came. But she thought she would be okay to go canoeing after the funeral, as long as the mother was going to be okay without them. She said she would.
The funeral was in the morning, a quiet affair in a little white church down the valley. The service was read by an Episcopal priest from Philadelphia, one of the mother’s friends. The church was lent by the local congregation, but against the wishes of the local minister, who would not have been happy with Nu’s animist beliefs. The church was packed, full to the aisles and out into the foyer for this woman, for some the first outside their race they had ever met. A crack shot with a rifle, a master chef, and a faithful friend.
That afternoon, Maxon arrived in a truck to pick Sunny up, with the canoe in the back. He had lowered it down out of his own garage, but she didn’t know that. She wore bike shorts, a loose tank top; he could see her bikini poking out under it and it moved him in his body to see that. She slung some sunscreen into an old yellow backpack, added a water bottle, a few granola bars, and a towel. Her mother had gone to bed upstairs.
“Will this be okay?” she asked. In high school they had gone canoeing all the time. They knew exactly what to bring. Now he was unsure. Would they need more things, now that that they were grown-up adults? She hadn’t brought marshmallows and Yoo-hoo. He didn’t think that meant anything other than being an older age. He saw the way her hips spread out, stretching out the sides of her shorts at a different angle than they used to stretch.
“It’s fine, let’s go,” he said.
The weather was gorgeous. A warm breeze ruffled the Allegheny River but otherwise it was almost like a lake in places, perfectly mirroring the dense green of the mountains on either side; the water grasses underneath the water were like mermaids’ hair, swept back in the invisible current. They talked easily, pointing out new construction on the bank between Emlenton and Parker. Pittsburgh people were moving in, building little chalets along the river, dumping loads of gravel down their driveways, laying concrete, importing Jet Skis.
When they were kids, there was a yearly raft race down nine miles of the river. The mother had always encouraged them to enter, each year building a more insane and complicated contraption. Maxon would organize the project on a concept in physics, and then Sunny would decorate it beyond the capacity of science. Once Maxon had actually had to haul their raft down the river, marching stoically along the bottom while Sunny bailed water. That year, Nu sat smoking a cigar atop an elaborate conning tower they had built, pulled down the Allegheny by the future rocket scientist. Now the raft race was a thing of the past, too dangerous for kids today. Maxon felt the memories coming in.
“Let’s stop at the flats,” said Maxon. “And go swimming.”
At the flats below Petersburg on the Crowder River, all the local kids had found a safe place to play in the river without worrying too much about current or getting over their heads. This was to the township what the beach was to any seaside town, an excuse to take your clothes off in front of your friends, a meeting place, where the girls could pretend to concentrate on tanning, the boys could pretend to concentrate on dunking each other, and the little kids could splash around on the rocks. There were a few short weeks in July where western Pennsylvania turned hot, and with no air-conditioning, the locals flew to the river for relief.
From the Allegheny, Sunny and Maxon turned upstream where the rivers converged, and after paddling hard to get under the railway trestle of the Belmar bridge, they found themselves in the calmer, clearer, shallower waters of the Crowder. Sunny peeled off her tank top and her shorts, and dove into the water, neatly avoiding the underwater rocks, and surfacing again, laughing, like a seal.
Maxon paddled on, slowly, and then rammed the canoe up onto the upstream side of a river rock that jutted out of the water near the bank. Under the water, everything was coated in fine silt, clinging to the rocks and plants. It was thick, like jelly, and you could swish it off with your hand or stamp your foot on it and it would flutter and spray through the water, turning the water muddy for a few seconds, until the current flushed it on and the river was clear again.
Maxon stepped out of the canoe onto the rock with a long flat foot, and then yanked the canoe farther up on the rock, to make sure it was stuck fast. When he turned to look at Sunny she was out in midstream, floating, sticking her toes out of the water to examine them and flapping with her arms to keep from drifting away. In the years they had spent apart, she had definitely changed. But he still recognized her. He recognized her movements, yes, and her physical shape. He recognized the tone of her voice and he noted persistent mannerisms and favorite vocabulary, although that had changed a little.
But what he realized, looking at her there splashing in the water, making a star with her body and then contracting down to do a somersault, was that he really recognized her, down inside. He knew that, if the planet was spun like a top, and stopped suddenly, and he was asked to point her out, that he could do it. There might be crowds and crowds of people all in gray, with gray hair, and gray eyes, and in order to be identified they would have to be logically processed according to age, and intelligence, and financial merit. He would not know any of them. But he knew Sunny, he knew her without looking, without asking. She would be there like a lightbulb in a basket of wool. She would be there like a red balloon in an asteroid belt. She was the only one, ultimately, in the whole world who mattered. She was the only one he would have known anywhere. How he wanted to insure that she would only be his. He had a ring in his pocket. It looked exactly like an engagement ring should look. But he had no script. He was on his own.
LATER, THEY STRETCHED OUT on a wide, warm stone. Sunny ate a granola bar, but Maxon couldn’t eat. He gulped the water, wiped his mouth, and lay back in the sun. She had been talking, talking, talking like she always did, the sound of it as pleasant to him as the breeze ruffling the pine trees. The sky was blue above his head, an impossible Pennsylvania blue of mid-July. It was as perfect and safe a moment as he could recall in his life. If only she would never stop talking, then he would never have to begin.
She lay back, finally, with a deep sigh, and it was quiet. He had no idea what she had been saying, but she seemed relieved.
He went up on one elbow, turned his body to face her. Now was the time for him to create an utterance, something to say.
“Sunny,” he said. His voice caught and he coughed. She went up on one elbow, too, now facing him. Her brow furrowed.
He looked at her, the big dark alien eyes, the delicate nose and rosebud mouth. He traced the fine line of her jaw, saw the soft wrinkle where it met her ear, the skin of her neck so pale and invisible, her jutting collarbone, her beautiful tiny breasts. He felt a feeling in his heart that was powerful love.
“Yes?” she said.
“Sunny, are you all finished with having sex with other men?”
She smiled. She laughed.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all finished having sex with other women?”
He stared at her. He didn’t know what to say back. He hadn’t had sex with any other women.
Her eyebrows went up; that meant she was surprised. “Maxon?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh, baby, are you telling me you haven’t had sex with anyone but me?”
“I have not,” he said. He was unsure whether she was pleased or disappointed.
“The very last time you had some sex was with me at the 4-H fair?”
“Yes.”
“All those years ago?”
