Sunny Rhodes

Marianne Wiggins

We meet Sunny, blonde hair flying, in a red cape, herding goats in the Owens Valley in California, 1941. She comes into the beautiful adobe house her father Rocky built, expecting to hear something of her twin brother who was in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was bombed. But Schiff, through whose eyes we see her, has come in a U.S. Army car on other business. She has wide eyes, cropped hair and no affectations.

Sunny and Stryker, her brother, grew up in this house, but Sunny has no memory of her mother, Lou, a French woman, a doctor, who dies of polio when Sunny is three. Her aunt Cass comes to live with the family at this time. When Sunny is five, she spends two summer months in the mountains with her father and brother, building a cabin and crafting a life in the wild.

At age ten, Sunny finds a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen and begins laboriously working through them, learning French to decipher her mother’s notes. It becomes a connection and Sunny finds she takes after her mother, with good instincts for cooking and gardening. Cass takes her to New York and Paris when Sunny is twelve. Sunny is amazed by the sheer number of people in New York, and surprised by Cass’ upper-class habits. Sunny is particularly interested in fish, since she has never lived near the ocean. When she looks back at her notes from Paris, they are full of fish meals!

By fifteen, Sunny has pledged herself to Jesus, the grandson of the orchard-keeper at Manzanar, who is the constant companion of Stryker and Sunny. Due to an unfortunate incident, however, Jesus must go back to Mexico and cannot be seen in the valley. Sunny sees him occasionally. She stays with her family, opening a restaurant in town which she names after her mother.

Rocky Rhodes has been fighting the water takeover of the valley by Los Angeles. The “water boys” constantly patrol the area. Then, in 1942, the U.S. Army moves in to build a camp for Japanese people caught in the conflict of World War II. Schiff, the camp overseer, falls in love with Sunny. He loves eating at her restaurant, even helps out when she needs him. He is Jewish, a lawyer. Both he and Sunny feel the camp is “all wrong.” 

Sunny tries to help by getting the women at the camp to cook. In the orphanage she finds a little boy with an “M” on his heel. The Rhodes family never hears exactly what happened to Stryker, but he was on the Arizona, and they know he had married a Japanese girl and had twin boys just before Pearl Harbor. What happened to them?

Sunny goes to meet Jesus, who is back in the U.S. as a bracero and a political activist. He has married someone else, as he feels he could never be a match for Sunny. This devastates her. She comes home unconscious and hypothermic, but she has tied herself to her horse. Slowly she recovers. Finding Schiff in the house enjoying her father and Cass’ hospitality, she yells at him. “Go away! You’re not family.” Schiff goes.

Months pass. The camp is up and running, the Japanese organizing themselves. Schiff decides to enlist, hoping to get a crack at Hitler. When Sunny hears this, she confronts him. “I don’t want you to die,” she says. “There are other things you can do.” Schiff takes her in his arms. When he asks her why she changed her mind about him, she tells him about a night she felt abandoned in a boat up near the cabin. Sunny and Schiff have ten days to spend together before Schiff will be sent away. Schiff wants to spend them camping.

Schiff is sent to Hawaii, where he learns that Stryker’s wife was on a plane to San Francisco on the morning of Pearl Harbor. The twin children were separated. Schiff spends the next four years working on a constitution which makes Japan a democracy, once it has surrendered. During that time, Rocky is killed, disappears without a trace. Sunny begs Schiff to return to her, but Schiff cannot. They do not communicate further.

When his work in Japan is complete, Schiff comes back to the U.S. He drives to the Owens Valley, but finds that the Rhodes’ ranch has been abandoned, bought by the Los Angeles water district. Nothing remains at the Manzanar camp except a gatehouse. He calls Cass to ask where Sunny is. She is pleased to hear from him and says Sunny is running a restaurant at Pt. Reyes Station.

Schiff drives to northern California and arrives at a locked Victorian house with three chairs on the porch, a reference to the Rhodes ranch. He first meets the boy from the camp at Manzanar whom Sunny has adopted. Sunny arrives with a wagon full of vegetables. She is noncommittal when she sees Schiff. But she is down a staff member for her evening meal, and he effortlessly fills in. 

After dinner they have a glass of wine. “You didn’t come when I needed you,” she says. “I missed you. I thought you would never come back.” In Japan, Schiff has seen a half-Caucasian, half-Japanese kid who is a dead ringer for Sunny’s adopted son. Sunny feels content. She has said what she needed to, to her father and brother. The most unfinished thing in her life is still her mother. She has begun an amalgamation of her mother’s recipes and her own.

Sunny is a character in Properties of Thirst [2022], a meandering, passionate novel by Marianne Wiggins. She faces the losses in her life with steady work, learning French, teaching herself to cook using her mother’s cookbooks and notes. Self-reliant and bold, she is also well aware of the pain of others and helps where she can. I loved the keen, intelligent story of Sunny and her family, which illuminates history at the time of World War II in Southern California.