Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer Read Free Book Online

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,