Sunny Side Up

A splash panel offers a bird’s-eye view of Sunny and her grandfather driving along a narrow road surrounded by orange groves. They finally arrive at Pine Palms, a retirement community near Vero Beach on Florida’s eastern coast. Sunny sees elderly people golfing, strolling, and talking together. Surprised, she asks her grandfather whether any children live in the community. He tells her no and says that Sunny will need a visitor’s pass to stay with him. They go into a small office building, where Sunny gets a picture ID. An elderly woman comments that she loves the new Polaroid cameras. An elderly man named Sal retorts that he hates the smell of Polaroid pictures. Sunny looks at a map of Florida and asks how far they are from Disney World. Sal proclaims that Disney World is a tourist trap. A borderless panel shows Sunny thinking of the two men as modified versions of Snow White characters: “Old White” (her grandfather) and “Cranky” (Sal) (17). Sunny is appalled when the woman at the desk starts flirting with her grandfather. The woman hands her an ID badge and tells her to keep it with her at all times. As Sunny and Pat leave the office, the woman tells Sunny to have a good time, and Sal tells her not to get eaten by anything. The final panel of the chapter is a closeup of Sunny’s worried and surprised expression.

The narrative flashes back to June 1976, and the setting shifts to Sunny’s family home in Pennsylvania. The panels gradually zoom in to show that the house’s mailbox is painted red, white, and blue to celebrate the upcoming Bicentennial. Inside the house, family portraits line the stairway walls, and bedroom doors line both sides of the upper corridor. On one door, there is a large red stop sign. From a bedroom farther down the hall, a baby’s wailing is depicted. Sunny’s bedroom door is cracked open; it features colorful art and stickers. Inside the room, Sunny and her best friend, Deb, are reading magazines. They see an ad for a new shampoo: “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” and they begin joking around about “a shampoo that [makes] everything terrific” (27). When Sunny unguardedly suggests that it could make her brother terrific, she quickly covers by pretending that she is talking about the crying baby rather than her older brother, Dale. She tells Deb that her mother is inviting Deb’s family to join an August family vacation at the seashore. The following page shows a happy Sunny surrounded by thought bubbles in which she pictures the many fun activities that she and Deb will enjoy during the vacation. The two girls agree that this will be their best summer ever.

Back in the narrative present, Sunny and her grandfather arrive at his apartment. Two elderly women, Teezy and Ethel, arrive for a visit. They are wearing old-fashioned long skirts and cardigan sweaters. They hand Sunny a homemade welcome gift, but she does not know what to make of the Barbie head and torso with its long, blue macrame dress, and she is even more disconcerted when she realizes that the dress is a toilet paper cover, holding an actual roll of toilet paper. She politely thanks them, but her grin is stiff and uncertain grin. That night, when Sunny gets ready to go to sleep, her grandfather shows her that the sofa is a hide-a-bed. She eagerly climbs in. He provides her with an extra blanket and retires to his own bedroom. Unfortunately, Sunny soon discovers that the sofa bed squeaks constantly. She tosses and turns, trying and failing to find a position that does not cause noise. Her facial expressions grow more irate. In the second-to-last panel, she seems to have finally found the right spot and sighs happily as she closes her eyes. In the final panel, her eyes grow wide and startled and her eyebrows drawn together in irritation as the bed emits another “SQUEAK!!!” (39).

The next morning, Pat sits at the dining table doing a crossword puzzle and drinking coffee. He cheerfully greets Sunny. A borderless panel shows Sunny’s reaction: a slouching and slitty-eyed Sunny stands in her pink nightgown, her hair a chaotic mess. She yawns as she sits down to eat cereal, but she perks up when her grandfather announces that he has “BIG PLANS” for the day. Sunny engages in a daydream of Mickey Mouse welcoming her to Disney World. Pat then reveals that he plans to go to the post office. With a comical attempt at a smile, Sunny responds politely that this will be “terrific” (43). At the post office, Sunny and Pat wait in line. Pat is whistling happily, while Sunny slumps slightly and looks down at the floor. The following day, Pat announces big plans again, and he and Sunny go to the grocery store. The day after that, Pat’s big plan for the day is to go to the community’s swimming pool.

As they walk to the pool, Sunny is very excited, but when they reach the pool, the experience is not what she imagined it would be. Sal blows a whistle at her as she runs toward the water; he demands to see her visitor’s pass. She recalls going to her community pool in Pennsylvania last month with her older brother, Dale. All of the young people were sitting along the edge of the pool, waiting for the “adult swim” time to be over. Dale was irate because only one adult was swimming, so he persuaded Sunny to get in the pool with him despite the rules, saying, “Trust your big brother!” and “Rules are stupid” (49). They began a game of Marco Polo, and all of the other kids jumped into the pool to play. The lifeguard blew his whistle, but no one listened. Now, completely alone in the retirement community’s pool, Sunny feels isolated and bored.

The splash page introducing Chapter 6 foregrounds the edge of a water hazard on a golf course; murky green algae puddles around the taller grasses at the edge of the water, giving the scene a swamp-like appearance. A sequence of textless images follows: Sunny tagging along with Pat on the golf course, Sunny alone on the edge of the pool, Sunny huddled in silence between Teezy and Ethel as they chat and watch television, and Sunny standing in line with her grandfather at the bank. Gutter space and the characters’ changing clothing indicate that several days are passing.

On one particular morning, Sunny’s cereal runs out, and when she takes a different box from the pantry, she sees that it claims to have a toy surprise inside. She is excited, but when she dumps the cereal into her bowl, the “surprise” turns out to be a pack of cigarettes that Pat has hidden. She gives her grandfather an angry, accusatory look. “I quit smoking” (56), he claims. He says that his doctor suspects his persistent cough is emphysema and has recommended that he quit smoking. Sunny pointedly asks him about why there are cigarettes hidden in the cereal. “For emergencies?” (57) he suggests, looking flustered.

That afternoon, Pat takes Sunny into the clubhouse at the golf course so that he can pay his greens fees. She meets a boy her age. He is carrying a Swamp Thing comic book. When Sunny asks what Swamp Thing is, he tells her about Swamp Thing and also describes the Hulk. Sunny admits that she has never read a comic book. The boy introduces himself as Buzz, the son of the Pine Palms groundskeeper. He explains that he was named after Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut. Sunny says that her name is “Sunny, like Sunshine,” because her mom “likes hippies” (62). Buzz shows her where the clubhouse keeps a stash of peanuts, and they sit down together to snack and talk about comics.

Chapter 7’s introductory splash page features a wider view of the golf course water hazard. Buzz and Sunny decide to spend the afternoon picking up lost golf balls, which they can turn in for a nickel each at the pro shop. Later panels pick up the action as they walk toward the pro shop, their shorts pockets bulging wide with golf balls. Near the water hazard, two elderly men are golfing and accidentally send a ball into the water. When Sunny hears them say “Guess that one’s gone” 67), she immediately heads into the water to retrieve it. Buzz is distracted by counting the balls they have found, and when he realizes where Sunny has gone, he shouts frantically to her. The panels cut back and forth between Sunny happily bending down in knee-deep water to fish the ball out and Buzz pointing and trying to warn her about Big Al. When Sunny finally sees where he is pointing, an alligator is revealed to be slowly emerging from the water, blinking and yawning. The next panel shows Sunny, arms and legs outspread and hair standing on end, levitating out of the water with fear. She drops the golf ball. Her feet and arms are a blur of motion as she rushes out of the water. She reaches the shore and bends over, gasping for air. Buzz asks her whether she got the ball.