Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

She breathed lightly, even climbing the hill the rest of the way home. She breathed up in the top part of her body, her eyes wide open. The rising moon illuminated the whole of the fields around their house. The house lay nestled in the hemlock trees, beautiful cottage full of warmth and love and the welcoming arms of her mother and Nu.

Two days later they found Paul Mann. He had died of exposure after falling, drunk, into a small ravine. His last bottle was found beside him, smashed. His frozen face was lifted up, pointed toward the sky, features frozen in place. Later he thawed out, was buried, and allowed to rot. The Butchers took Maxon on the ski trip to Vermont; his mother was happy to let him go. She had a lot on her hands. He was not missed.

AFTER THE CRAFT SHOW, Sunny went home. Bubber was napping and the nanny was drowsing on the sofa, half watching Oprah . Sunny dropped her keys on the table. It was so peaceful; she could hardly believe it. When you are sitting on a three-legged stool and you’ve kicked out all three legs, but you’re still sitting upright, must you assume that you’re just so good, you levitate? Or must you assume that you were sitting on the ground all along? When there’s nothing left to burn, maybe you have to set yourself on fire.

What gruesome sight would it take for her friends to reject her outright, for them to recognize that she was foreign, unworthy? There’s a woman with a mole over half her face. There’s a woman who can’t stop talking about her therapy appointments. She had envisioned rejection, renouncing, she had envisioned being drummed out of the neighborhood, her cardigans cut to rags, her minivan repossessed, but she had not anticipated that what might happen was that they would sort of kind of identify with her. That this, the baldness, would make her more like them, not less. That she had not envisioned.

Her BlackBerry buzzed in her bag. She took it out and pushed the button to retrieve a text from Angela Phillips, the wife of another one of the astronauts on board the rocket. “Don’t turn on TV,” it said. “Call Stanovich.” She felt her heart race. She dialed the number for the Langley research center, got Maxon’s research partner on the lunar-colony project. He was crying.

“Sunny,” he said, “the rocket has been hit. It’s been hit by a meteor.”

“Is he dead?” she croaked into the phone.

“They don’t know,” said Stanovich. “They’ve lost communication with the rocket. Sunny, I’ll miss him so much. Are you going to be all right?”

As if she would be. As if she would not die without him. How could Stanovich know them, and still not know? But it was not uncommon. They were both so private. There were not a lot of love notes scattered about the house. People wondered, or asked her sometimes, how could she be married to Maxon? How could she keep on loving him in spite of his obvious deficiencies? She might say, How do we love each other? We love each other like naked children in a strange jungle, when every stump turns into an ogress, each orchid into a lump of maggots. We didn’t say, “I love you,” just as we didn’t, after a day of wandering lost in the trees, turn to each other and say, “We are the only naked children in this jungle.” Everyone else was just a jaguar or a clump of dirt. Sometimes it comes to that desperate state, when you have to cling to each other and be alone. When no one else can truly matter. She thought, Ours is one of the epic loves of our generation. Possibly of all time. Who cares if no one sees it, walking by? This story is a love song. Who cares if history won’t remember?

THE SUN WENT ON through the sky and down. Bubber went to sleep. But Sunny turned on every light in the house. She went to her wig room and stood in the doorway, her breath coming to her in rags. She had the same falling feeling of someone who has decided belligerently to climb a slate roof, and who has fallen off that roof, and is headed for the ground. She went to the wig that was closest to the door and slipped it off its resting place. This particular one was her go-to girl for all occasions, a masterpiece of blond waves and tresses, long and unstyled. She picked it up in her hands and quickly settled it on her head, felt its weight on her, felt it squeezing her head back into its regular, proper shape. She put her hands out and turned to the right, turned to the left. She walked slowly back out into the bedroom, into the hallway, and all through the house.

As she moved through the rooms like boxes all stacked over the foundation, she pressed the walls out into their usual shape, lifted the ceilings above her, nailed down the floor with every step. This beautiful house, this sacred temple of her life, built on everything that was normal and expected, and purely good. A sanctuary for their lives, to guard against the intrusion of the weird, the lapping waves of the past. This was her old life, this was the way it was before, everything in its place. The house a manor, a statement, an edifice, instead of just another elaborate cap for another sewage pipe, like every other sewage-pipe cap down the street.

Under the chandelier in the foyer, she paused. Her shoulders were paralyzed under the weight of trying to put it all back together. She could barely move to answer the door, but there was something there. Someone stood out on the step. It was Rache.

“Hello, Rache,” said Sunny, swinging the door open. Her voice was intended to sound like it always sounded, saying those words. Rache was holding Sunny’s bowl, which she had left at the party. The bowl that held the braided honey loaf, constructed in such a stupid fit of optimism. Rache’s face twisted when she saw the wig.

“Sunny? What are you doing?” Rache swept into the house, slammed the bowl down on the kitchen counter, and whirled around to face Sunny. “Why is that wig back on your head?”

“I … you heard?” Sunny began.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” said Rache. “You’re not putting on a wig, okay? That’s not happening.”

There was nothing to say. Rache looked like she might come at Sunny across the room, rip the wig off her head, give Sunny a slap on the mouth. But the wig sat on her head, doing its job, keeping the roof up, keeping the stars up, keeping the planets aligned.

“Do you think we give two shits about your bald head?” Rache asked. “We don’t. We—we don’t care. There’s not one of us hasn’t—”

Rache put her hand against her mouth. Sunny felt her throat closing up.

“We don’t care. We don’t want you to wear it.”

“I know,” Sunny said. “It’s fine. It’s not you. It’s not for you, it’s just for me, and for, my life.”

“Putting that thing on your head is not going to put the rocket back on course. It’s not going to unkill anyone. And it’s not going to even work: we all know.”

Rache paused. She reached out and put her slender fingers around Sunny’s wrist.

“Sunny, you have to understand that you are not so special. I know it’s been rough, but you are not the only person in this world. You’re not even the only bald person.”

“You’re not bald,” said Sunny.

Rache pulled at her own blond hair. “Who do you think is under here, Sunny? What is here? Under this hair? Did you—do you know that I fucked her husband? I fucked him, I fucked Jenny’s husband.” Rache was talking in a whisper now, her mouth pulled down at the corners, her voice rasping over her tongue. “Jenny’s husband, and she’s so nice, she might as well be a basket of kittens. Are we in love? No. But I fucked him anyway.”

Rache took a handful of her hair in each fist. “Bald,” she said. “And the rest of them. Bald. Trust me.”