Lydia Netzer: Shine Shine Shine

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.

ONCE, 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.”

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.”