Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

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.

SUNNY 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.

ONCE, WHEN BUBBER 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.

“WOW, 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.

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.