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.
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.