Shine Shine Shine (4 page)

While regular people had hair on their heads, she had none. Driving around in cars, walking through stores, she had a secret there that something was wrong. Something was not right. Because of the wig, no one in Virginia knew the secret, except the few close people who had to know it. Her husband. Her doctor. Her mother and child. It wasn’t available to everyone just for the looking, like the woman with the strange growth over half her face, or the man with the ear scar, or the guy with the blown-off hand. It was a different kind of secret, down deep under the wig.

When the wig came off and fell into a puddle, no one was around to help her out. Maxon was up in space, thinking of robots. The children were there, of course, but they didn’t know what to do to help. Bubber could scream, and rage, and tell time without looking at a clock. The baby inside could wave her hands, and make wishes, but no one could put a hand out and keep the wig on her head, when it wanted to come off. The car accident was too unexpected.

The Land Rover was coming at them. First there was Sunny’s closed throat and her braced arms fighting the steering wheel. Then there was the crunching sound, and the jolt. The air bag blew up. The wig flew off. Everything stopped moving. Sunny found her voice immediately, almost before the silence.

“We’re okay, we’re okay, everything’s okay, it’s okay, you’re okay,” said Sunny. “Are you okay?”

“Stop!” said Bubber.

“Bubber. Somebody hit us with their car, but everything is fine. We’re okay.”

Without looking back she reached toward him and put her hand on his knee, pressing down hard so he could really feel it.

“Stop, stop! Stop that
car
!” yelled Bubber. He began to scrabble for his seat-belt latch, reach for his door handle. He was far from crying. His freckled face was red, lips pursed up in outrage.

“YOU,” shouted Bubber through his tinted window. “YOU HIT OUR VAN. YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE THAT.”

“Bubber, stop,” said Sunny. She choked and gagged.

“Mommy, are you going to throw away? THROWING AWAY IN YOUR HAND IS WRONG.”

“No,” she said. “You stay in the van. Stay in your seat.”

She took a look around. She forced both hands back to the steering wheel, to stop them from reaching up to feel her scalp. She tried to press down on the gas and move the van out of the street, or maybe all the way home. She fantasized that they would drive past the wig and leave it there. At home, safe, she could crawl through the cat hole, get under the house. She could live underground in the dark crawl space forever. Maybe snap and snarl at strangers, eat stray dogs, visit Maxon at night through one of the air vents. She would go back into her habitat when he went to sleep. She would darken her skin with the clay that made their backyard so inhospitable to ferns. Neighbors would hear stories about the red-faced zombie that walked back and forth to the mailbox sometimes in the dead of night, mailing off postcards. She could evolve into an opossum. She could evolve into a squirrel. Of course, the van would not move, so she turned off the engine.

Sunny popped her door open. There were neighbors coming out of their houses now. Somebody was running toward her. She felt sick, like she was going to really vomit. She undid her seat belt and removed it from around her belly. Her middle felt full of angry fire, full of rushing currents, as if a comet were charging around inside her, as if the baby had really turned into a fire monster. There was a pain wrapping around her back. She stepped out on one shaky leg and then another. She straightened her sunglasses on her nose. Standing in the middle of her neighborhood, she watched her friends and neighbors coming out of their houses like dirty peasants: apologetic, dingy, afraid. She felt the wind on her head. It felt, of course, good to get the wig off. It always did. That part was indisputable.

She looked up and down her street. The trees were losing their leaves. A Dumpster sat in the street, collecting the refuse of someone’s renovations. Gnarled roots of the trees took up all the space between the sidewalk and the curb, infested with sprouting ferns or little trees, rotten acorns. The driveways, once so regular, were now confusingly askew. The houses tipped toward each other, their mottled roofs sliding off like books on the heads of gawky teenagers. She heard a siren. She heard a baby squawk. She tottered away from the van, afraid to fall along some tangent to the Earth, and slip right off it, to her death.

A man was loping toward her down the sidewalk. She knew this man, immediately. He was the network-news neighbor, Les Weathers: tall, burly, and blond. He must have just got home from work. He still wore the blue suit, yellow tie, silk handkerchief. His hair was still pasted back from his bronzed face in a flat plastic wave. His features correctly registered concern and confusion. Sunny walked unsteadily toward the puddle where her wig was lying like a dead blond cat. If only she could get it back onto her head.

“Ma’am, are you all right?” shouted Les Weathers, sounding like Superman. Others were coming, Rache and Jenny, approaching slowly from their twin brick town houses, leather flats in neutral tones stepping carefully around wet places on the sidewalk.

Sunny nodded. She was a stranger to him. He didn’t know who she was.

“Are you hurt?” someone asked her. Sunny turned to face Les Weathers and looked him in the face. She took her sunglasses off.

“Are you Sunny? Sunny Mann?” he said, eyes full of shock.

She smiled.

“Sunny, you’re bald,” he said.

Of all the times these words had been said to her in her life, this instance was maybe the best. Better than her mother saying it so frankly, better than her nanny saying it so kindly, better than the children in middle school saying it in the different ways that they said it. It was so funny, in a way. For five years, since she arrived in this town, newly pregnant in pink pants with a matching V-neck sweater and dove gray pumps, she had worn her quiet blond wig. She had worn the wig religiously and relentlessly, and all these people had quietly let her wear it. She had a wig with the ponytail, the one with the bun and chopsticks poking through it, the one long and wavy for everyday outings. She had always worn the wig, ever since she first let anyone live in her uterus. But the truth of the matter was, as Les Weathers had just pointed out, that she was bald. Bald as an egg.

She had wondered many times what it would feel like to walk down this very street with her old red plastic glasses and her white bald head shining for all the world to see, but she had almost forgotten it might happen someday. What with this and that and the other, she had almost erased it from her mind. Five years in a wig can really make a girl feel blond. But those three red words in the mouth of Les Weathers stretched across time for her. Sunny. You’re. Bald. Back to the beginning and ahead to the end of her life, all the times it had been said and would be said, ringing like bells. She had to listen.

Sunny walked over to the puddle, picked up her wig, removed a few dry leaves and a broken stick, and shook it like a rag. Then she crammed it back onto her head.

“Call the police,” she said. “Call a tow truck. The van is fucked.”

Jenny blinked, her eyes wide at hearing Sunny curse right in front of a child.

“Rache is calling already,” she said. All the mothers in the neighborhood, who had been standing at their kitchen counters, thinking about dinner, while their toddlers bounced in ExerSaucers in front of Baby Einstein videos, now emerged onto their lawns. The news anchor, all tied up and pressed and clean, stepped back. They all looked at Sunny. She had been bald for sixty seconds. Now she was wearing her wig again, and it was dripping dirty water down the front of her face.

“Good,” she said. “Well, that’s great.”

She went back over to the van and opened Bubber’s door. He was shaking his head back and forth, back and forth in weird mechanical jerks, tapping on his knees. She unhooked his seat belt, put her arms around him, and took him out of the van. Here was the woman in the black SUV that had hit Sunny and taken off her wig. She was just another mom, a dumber, lesser, younger, unimportant mom from a different street, on her way to pick her baby up from its grandmother’s house after finishing up her self-indulgent part-time job at the bookstore downtown. There was an empty car seat in the back. No one was hurt. Nothing bad had really happened. No ambulance was needed.

When Bubber saw the woman from the other van, he put his chin on his chest and made growling quacks, like he wanted to kill her. He was furious and seemed likely to throw a rock. Sunny was afraid to put him down, so she kept holding him. She sat down on the curb and waited for the police to come, waited for the tow truck to come. She knew that the police and the tow truck had to be dealt with, and then she knew that they could walk home and she could put Bubber in front of the computer and she could have a quiet drink of water and watch
Oprah
. She could look at the people in the audience and try to remember who she really was.

Then her stomach turned hard and down low on her abdomen and around her back she felt a pain that was definitely a contraction. Wig or no wig, there was still a baby of some kind inside her, and it was trying to come out.

*   *   *

O
NCE, THEY HAD BEEN
trying to have sex, but Maxon was recovering from a bicycle accident, and Sunny was menstruating.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m leaking fluid from my Tegaderm.”

“Maxon,” she said. “You’re even starting to sound like a robot. You’re leaking fluid from your Tegaderm. I’m bleeding blood from my uterus. That’s the difference between you and me.”

4

Sunny sat in the passenger seat of Les Weathers’s golden Lexus, going to the doctor. Bubber was with the nanny and the minivan was being towed. Everything was being looked after. Did she want an ambulance, after all? No, she did not. Les Weathers had volunteered to take her away to the doctor, and then they were gone. The neighborhood had closed over her bald head the way water in a lake closes over a rock that’s thrown into it. People did what they knew how to do. When all the arrangements had been made, the bald head that had been sitting on the neck of Sunny Mann would not be visible to anyone anymore.

They could try to remember her the way she used to be, when she set the dates for holiday-themed outdoor-decor installation and removal. No Christmas before Thanksgiving. No Halloween after November 2. No Fourth of July until July. All very reasonable. The neighbors wondered if the astronaut husband would still coach the Lego League. They wondered if the Christmas party was still on. The phone tree. The craft swap. Everything. How could they ask her if she was okay? There is a terrible awkwardness to talking to someone who is wearing an obvious wig, when you have no idea why. Did they feel stupid? Betrayed? Or did they just feel frustrated that they couldn’t go on treating her as a close personal friend?

“So,” said Les Weathers, “how long have you been bald?”

“My whole life,” said Sunny.

“Does Maxon know?” he asked. His hand moved from the steering wheel down to his knee, and then back up to the steering wheel. Then he fiddled with the gearshift.

“Of course Maxon knows,” she said.

“What about Bubber?” asked Les Weathers.

“What about him?”

“Does he know?”

*   *   *

A
FEW WEEKS AGO,
the family had been getting ready for lunch in the kitchen. Bubber sat at his miniature table. Sunny had pulled out the silverware drawer for him and he was playing with spoons and stacking them up with one fork between each one. Maxon stood there explaining gravity to Bubber by dropping things on the ground. Bubber stared at his forks and spoons. He always would stare at something unrelated, when he was being told something. The therapists told his parents that he could still use his peripheral vision. Maxon held a pencil up in the air and then let it fall from his bony fingers.

“Can you tell me what gravity is?” he asked Bubber.

“Hot,” said Bubber. “Gravity is hot.”

Sunny giggled behind the refrigerator door, where she was getting lettuce for a sandwich. Maxon said, “Gravity is a force that every object has; all mass has gravity.”

“It’s an attraction,” Sunny put in. “Heat is hot. Gravity is an attraction.”

“When something has gravity,” Maxon went on, “it makes other things come toward it, and the bigger the thing is, the more gravity it has, and the more things come toward it.”

Bubber opened his mouth and then closed it. He began to disassemble his spoon and fork tower. Then he quickly said, “Jupiter has the biggest gravity. Jupiter is the biggest planet. It is a gas giant. Jupiter has the mass of three hundred Earths and a volume of more than a thousand Earths.”

“Even Mommy has gravity,” Maxon continued. “See?”

The dog, Rocks, walked toward Sunny, sniffing for food.

“Look, I’m pulling Rocks over here to me with my gravity,” said Sunny. She picked up the dog and stuck him to her pregnant tummy.

“Mommy is Jupiter,” said Bubber without looking at her.

“I’m not Jupiter. Why do I have to be Jupiter? Why can’t I be something cute like Venus?”

“Uh-oh.” Maxon jerked himself across the floor, pretended to be yanked suddenly toward Sunny. “I think Venus’s gravitational field is getting me too.”

Sunny and Maxon jutted together and began to rotate on the axis of her belly with the dog mashed between them, like two tall people dancing drunk. They careened into the front room, crashed into a chair, and started laughing. Now Bubber was out of his chair and coming toward them.

“Bubber, no! Save yourself! Don’t get pulled into Mommy’s atmosphere!”

He rushed toward them but then began to run around them in a circle. His arms were flat to his sides and he ran with legs slicing like scissors.

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” he said, “I’m just a moon. I have become a moon.”

It was one of the best sentences he had ever said. That night, Sunny had written it down in their treatment journal, noting the use of the word “I.” She had not been wearing her wig at the time.