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
