Shine Shine Shine (5 page)

*   *   *

S
UNNY PUT HER HANDS
on her face, then slid them up onto her head and pulled off her wig. She laid it in her lap and started picking the dirt out of it, trying to smooth it out. She had another contraction, the fourth one she’d had since the accident, and waited for it to pass. The pain in her back was like someone hacking her apart with an ax.

“Yes, Bubber knows,” she said.

“So, it’s kind of like dentures,” said Les Weathers. “You take it off to sleep?”

“Like dentures,” she said hollowly. “You know what, Les, can you pull over here?”

She got out of the car. They had been approaching the Granby Street bridge, and she crossed in front of the condos by the shore, walked briskly up the sidewalk over the water. She leaned over the railing, looking down on another creeping branch of another river wandering lazily back through the Norfolk neighborhoods like ivy. She took the wig in her right hand. She looked it over, inside and out, and then hurled it as far as she could into the water. It made a light landing, soaked, and floated. She watched it there for a while and then walked back down the bridge, reloaded herself into Les Weathers’s Lexus, and shut the door again. She had walked forty-six steps out in the open air without her wig in Virginia.

*   *   *

O
NCE, WHEN
B
UBBER WAS
a baby and Maxon was away at a conference, both she and Bubber had the flu at the same time. Nothing she had at home was working to get him to sleep, so she’d run out to get him different medicine and she had not worn her wig. She was just too sick and tired to bother with it. Throwing on a sweatshirt with a hood and sunglasses, she tightened the pull cord around her face, grabbed baby Bubber, ran out the door, and drove to a drugstore outside her neighborhood so no one would see her. She was standing in the parking lot, getting Bubber out of his seat, when an old man hollered at her from across the parking lot. He walked closer as he called to her.

“Hey, mama!” he said.

“Hey,” she said under her breath, from inside her hood and behind her sunglasses.

“Hey, you can’t say ‘hey’?” he said, staggering closer. She saw that he was drunk.

“Hey,” she said louder, and forced herself to smile. Now he was between her and the store.

“That’s my NEPHEW!” shouted the old man. “Now that is some shit that stink! Give me high five.”

He threw his hand up in the air and Sunny walked forward. She touched her hand to his hand on the way by. His hand was dry, hard, cold. She pushed on, marching determinedly into the store.

“You! You!” he called after her. “Stay beautiful, you hear? Stay beautiful.”

Inside, Bubber threw up in the shopping cart, dribbling innocent baby puke down his front as he sat in the basket with his legs sticking through the holes. She had nothing to wipe it with. It was a total disaster. On that night Sunny knew she could never leave the house without her wig again. There was no way to half-ass it. She had to fully commit.

*   *   *

“W
OW, YOU’RE LIKE AN
addict flushing your drugs,” said Les.

“I have more wigs,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve never seen you without that wig, until today,” he said.

“They all look like that wig, but with different styles. You know, ponytails, braid.”

From the bridge, the doctor’s office was right around the corner. Les Weathers let her off at the front entrance. Before she got out of the car, he put his hand on her hand.

“I am not going to think any differently about you, now that you’re bald.”

“Okay,” said Sunny.

“I mean, I probably have no idea what it’s like, being bald, but I’d like to think I could try to understand what you’re going through anyway. If you want to talk about it.”

Sunny looked down at his hand on hers, and he removed it.

“Do you want me to go in with you? I can stay for ten minutes, twenty minutes. I have to go back to the studio to do promos, but I can call them, tell them I’m walking right onto set. I’m worried about you. Maxon would have wanted someone to take care of you.”

Sunny tried to picture big, blond, perfectly shaped Les Weathers sitting next to her at the doctor’s office. He would lean forward at that certain angle, steeple his fingers, and ask just what their options were. He would stand by the door while she got her instructions, looking patiently at his watch. He would wear a big toothy television grin. On the rare occasions she had been able to drag Maxon to a baby appointment, he typically sat in the waiting room behind a potted plant, thumbing his PDA, or briskly paced the halls, cleaving the air like a knife.

“No thanks,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Rache is coming to pick me up. I have my phone.”

What would Rache say when she found that Sunny had thrown out the wig for good? Maybe she would tell Sunny that it was all because of stress, that they could go pick another wig out of the closet, and forget the whole thing. Rache would be nervous, would definitely want things back to the way they were. “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,” Rache had said. “Just go. It’s fine.” As if she just wanted bald Sunny out of her range of vision. Les Weathers, though, was always going to be Les Weathers. He seemed to really want to stay and help. Sunny reached up and flipped down the visor in front of her seat. She carefully, slowly peeled off her fake eyelashes and eyebrows, dropping them into her bag. She looked at him and blinked, hairlessly, and then got out of the car.

“Good-bye, Baldy,” said Les Weathers, and he made his signature wink and finger point, like every night after the news. “I’ll see you around town.”

With that, he drove away.

5

When she got to the doctor’s office, she sat down in the waiting room, in a chair with her back to the window, her face to the door. She had to sit down because another contraction was coming. The receptionist didn’t know who she was. Maybe the receptionist thought she was a man. Sunny reached a white hand out to the round end table. The hand wanted to grab a lamp. The hand wanted to smash a lamp. It couldn’t be helped that the place looked like a furniture store, with everything so perfect, perfect. Area rugs, bronze statuettes; the room sang in harmony with itself. With different carpet, it would have made a good living room in Sunny’s neighborhood. It was a doctor’s office passing as a living room. A decorator trying to think like a pregnant woman.

“Hello, are you all right?”

“No,” said Sunny.

The doctor knew all about Sunny, because he had examined her and everything. But the receptionist did not know. So she was another person to be shocked by bald Sunny that day. It was spreading like a ripple. Lots to talk about. Lots to remember later, to report at the dinner table. Sunny sat like a rip in one of the landscape paintings on the wall, a little hub of disbelief in the center of a perfectly good hallucination. She got up, picked up her bag, and marched through the door without being called back by the nurse. She went straight into the doctor’s office. He looked up from his tape player. He had luxurious curls all over his head, honey brown, shiny, floating around his skull like a sandy cloud. And there in front of him she baldly said, “I can’t have this baby. You have to stop it. It cannot happen.”

It was something she’d known the moment she felt the first contraction, sitting there in the curb beside her wrecked van, with the cool puddle water dripping down the back of her neck. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to have a baby anymore. It was that she couldn’t have a baby.

She had been living so quietly, so wigged, in such a perfect shape, for many years, as if asleep. Dreaming of a husband, a baby, a choice of ceiling fans, an entire cabinet just for different foils and plastic wraps. There, in her sleep, she had been drifting and rotating through a set of arcs and orbits within which she could provide the proper wife and mother behaviors. When the wig flew off, she woke up out of her sleep, she dropped out from her orbit, scattered across the sky on every different vector, every crazy angle. She felt sure that there was a small and human-shaped person inside of her. She knew that there was a hole the size of a quarter through which that person was supposed to get out. This was not mathematically possible. This wasn’t healthy. No one could expect her to do this. It was as if she fell back through the years to the point she’d never been a mother at all. Never had hair at all. Just a scared kid.

“Sunny, why are you not wearing your wig?” the doctor asked.

“It fell off,” said Sunny. “During the car accident, it fell off, into some mud. So I threw it in the Elizabeth River on the way over here.”

“And now you’re feeling like you can’t have the baby?”

“Yes. It’s not natural. It’s not normal.”

“Well,” said the curly-haired doctor, “I hardly think that’s correct. You’re just shaken up. We need to check you out, of course, get those contractions stopped. But you’ll be fine.”

Sunny sat down in a chair. Her bald head shone in the pink light of the un-hospital consultation room with its totally-real wooden desk and green shaded not-fluorescent lights.

“I am not a person who gives birth,” said Sunny. “I’m not equipped for it. I’m not right for it.”

“You’ve done it before, Sunny. Obviously.”

“That was different. Maxon was here. And everything was working then. Now nothing is working. I’ve spent a long time preparing myself, and, you know, all that has to be redone. All that work is lost. It is wiped out. I have to start over and do more work. I need more months to prepare.”

“A baby isn’t like a whiteboard,” said the doctor. “You don’t just start over.”

“I’m afraid for the baby,” said Sunny. And she thought,
I’m not fit. Not this body. Not this head. Not this person. I’m not fit to be a mother. You don’t know what I really am.

At this point another contraction came, and Sunny grabbed the tastefully upholstered arms of the consultation chair. She ground her teeth together. The doctor leaned toward her sympathetically.

“Let’s look at the ultrasound and check the baby’s positioning,” said the doctor. “And then we’ll get you off your feet and onto fluids. Then we’ll see where we’re at.”

Sunny started to cry. Her face became red and wrinkled. She knew it.

Later, she lay on the ultrasound table, wearing a hospital gown. Having no hair makes a woman look indeterminate, with regard to gender. When she was lying on the examination table, wearing her blue striped hospital gown, her bald head exposed to the world, it would have been hard to say whether Sunny was a female or a male. It didn’t help that she was tall and had narrow hips. Even pregnant, she had a flat chest. She could have been a kind of gawky alien man lying there, swollen with an alien child. Underneath her gown she had on gigantic surgical pants. When the doctor came in, and asked if she was ready, he seemed to be taking a good hard look at Sunny. Sunny’s nose was good, her chin delicate, her eyes deep and dark, and her mouth rosy. Without eyebrows and eyelashes, though, it was the face of a statue, up on top of that man or woman body.

The doctor rolled up on a round stool beside the bed, and folded the gown up over Sunny’s chest. Down on her great white belly there was still a hole, a little indentation from where she was attached to her mother in the womb. What happens to the pipe underneath the belly button, once the umbilical cord is cut? Sunny knew that hers was still there. It would be there forever, leading nowhere. Leading out. During pregnancy, the hole had turned inside out. It had done this with Bubber and it did it again now. The truth she had realized, while pregnant with Bubber, was that down deep at the bottom of that awful, shameful hole where her mother had been attached, roped onto her, was a small, small mole. This small, dark mole at the bottom of her belly button became real to her only when pregnancy turned her belly button inside out, and she saw it for the first time. This was something about pregnancy which research could not explain. How the perfect parabola of her pregnancy belly could be augmented by this extra bump, and how that bump could have its own bump. She said to Maxon that if she walked straight into a wall, that mole would make first contact. And Maxon said, “Babe, why walk into a wall, if it’s just going to cause you to question the integrity of your parabola?” And then she said, “Okay, a tangent line then. A tangent line.”

The doctor powered up the ultrasound machine, drew it close to her side, and squeezed some clear lubrication onto her skin. He put the white wand down into the cold jelly and turned to face a grainy little monitor. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He moved the wand back and forth, back and forth, and turned it rhythmically. Lying down flat on her back, Sunny’s body felt better. There were no contractions. The grainy shapes on the monitor changed and flowed over each other pleasantly. Only a trained eye could have identified organs being shown. For Sunny, they could be lunar mountains. Fish guts. Dark forests. If Maxon were beside her, would he be squeezing her hand? If Les Weathers were beside her, would he really be Les Weathers, Channel 10 News?

“Don’t you want to see your baby?” said the doctor.

“Well, is it all right?” she said.

“Look,” he said.

If Maxon was looking at that moment into a computer monitor up in space, in the crew cabin of the spaceship that was carrying him to the moon, then maybe he was seeing what she was seeing. He could focus his eyes purposefully on the white noise on the monitor in the spaceship, and see the baby’s features blurring out to meet him. “Hey!” he would call out, his face creasing in a wide, toothy grin. He might shout. He might pump his fist in the air, full of joy, like with a high score, something unrelated to work. But he will not call his astronaut buddies to come and look, show off the screen like a wallet flipping open. No. He will not open her up to his friends and show off what he had put there, what was growing there because of him. No, no, he sits silently, shoulders hunched over, glasses askew, and takes it in all by himself. He would not call anyone over. He has to take a measurement, note a change in the diameter of the skull since the last reading. He puts out a finger to touch the beating heart. Covers it with his finger and uncovers it. Covers it and uncovers it.