“Oh, fine,” said Sunny. “You get her. I’ll get ready.”
Sunny put on eyebrows, eyelashes, makeup, matching pajamas, a silk robe, and then sat looking at herself in the vanity mirror in her bathroom. She had experienced moments in her life when she realized that she was actually alive and living in the world, instead of watching a movie starring herself, or narrating a book with herself as the main character. This was not one of those moments. She felt like she was drifting one centimeter above her physical self, a spirit at odds with its mechanical counterpart. She stood up carefully. Everything looked just right.
“Is she coming?” she said to Maxon, who had come back into their room, and was putting on a shirt, buttoning it all the way to the top.
“Yes, she’s coming. She’s up.”
“Now you say, ‘I’ll get the car,’ and then you drop your keys, or, no, let me think. You can’t find your keys,” said Sunny, standing by the door, directing the
“My keys are right here,” said Maxon. “Are you all right? Do you want me to carry you?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Sunny. Her contractions were weak. “Offer to carry me, but I refuse. I say, this is perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. I say, women have been doing this since the beginning of time. And then you walk into a wall.”
In Maxon’s Audi, a car seat was already installed in the backseat, behind the driver. Her mother got in and sat behind Sunny, both hands on her shoulders. As Maxon sped toward the hospital down that empty street, Sunny cried quietly every time her body hurt, but she was excited, so excited to see the baby, and make sure it had been made properly. She felt she was on her way to receive an award. She was on her way to witness the results of all her hard work. Every time Sunny cried, her mother squeezed her shoulders. When they arrived at the hospital, Sunny threw up in a bucket.
“I’m sick!” she cried to her mother.
“It’s all right,” her mother said. “You’re doing fine. But this wig. Surely, you—”
“Don’t you dare take it off me, Mother,” Sunny growled, tightly curled around another contraction. She grabbed the bucket and heaved into it, bile and foam oozing out over her bared teeth. “You don’t touch me. I will put you out of the room.”
A doctor came and asked how Sunny was doing. She asked for an epidural. She asked for a towel, a mirror, and she dabbed at her face, pressing down her eyebrows, counting out the space between the contractions. She puked again, her stomach empty. The room seemed to swirl around her every time she vomited, and when it righted, she had to check that no one had removed her wig. She had to check that her mother was still there. Maxon had gone out into the hall. “Are you okay, Dad?” said the nurse. “No,” said Maxon. “I need to go.” The doctor did a pelvic exam.
“She wants an epidural,” said her mother. “Get it.”
Another doctor came in and made Sunny sit up and lean over. He stuck a pin into her spine, releasing a drug that caused her bottom half to go numb. Instantly, she stopped feeling the contractions. She stopped feeling anything. One more foaming heave, and she was done vomiting, too. Her body gave up, stopped trying to assert itself. It lay still. She closed her eyes.
“I’m cold. Get Maxon,” she said. “The vomiting is over.”
Her mother went out in the hall, and when they both came back in, Sunny had her handbag in her lap and was fixing her makeup, smoothing her hair. Knees bent up on the blanket, hair spread out on the pillow, she wondered if she was ready to become a mother. She pointed to a mirror lying on a countertop.
“Maxon, get that mirror. Stand down at the end of the bed and hold it up.”
“Dearest,” said her mother, “that’s for looking down there when the baby comes out.”
Sunny knew what it was for. That it was for watching the baby’s head emerge. But she needed to see the baby’s mother first, and make sure that the mother was okay. In the mirror, she saw a woman lying on a pillow, dressed in a hospital gown, about to give birth. The woman was flushed, the woman was wide-eyed, the woman was in all ways exactly what her baby needed her to be. Sunny looked sideways into the mirror so that her mother was in the picture, too, long glossy blond hair neatly tied in a bun, eyebrows perfectly groomed, a silk scarf at the throat. She looked at her mother inside the mirror and her mother looked back and smiled. Sunny breathed a deep sigh and lay back on the pillows. The mother put a hand out, as if to touch her on the head, but then drew it back, and patted her on the arm. Maxon put the mirror down.
Two hours later, everything was still perfect. Maxon had fallen asleep in a chair, and the nurse had turned down the lights in the room, saying that Sunny might as well rest. She might as well get ready to push, because the contractions were steady, and things would be moving along. They had punctured her water bag, and had stuck a little curved wire up into her, inserted it under the baby’s skull, where they could monitor his heart rate and humanity. They had wrapped another monitor around Sunny’s belly, so they could measure the contractions. Sunny saw the needles skip across the page, drawing on a paper which fed out from a machine beside her bed. She could feel her belly get hard when the needle skipped up a hill, and feel her belly get soft when the needle dropped back down. It was as if the needle itself were moving her muscles for her, and not the other way around.
She didn’t know if she could push, because she didn’t know what pushing would feel like. She poked absently at her calf, and felt nothing. She couldn’t move her legs. She tried to sleep.
The doctor came back in and felt around inside her, and told her she was ready to push. The lights in the room went up, Maxon was told to stand next to her head to count, and her mother stood on her other side, and held Sunny’s hand. It was all coming into place, every piece of the picture in order, and yet Sunny felt herself floating, drifting away, up out of herself. She tried to anchor, tried to moor herself in the body, in the physical fact, but it was too hard, and she kept rising up, like coming to the surface of the pool, something you can’t seem to stop yourself from doing. It was as if she had been moored to herself by her legs, and once they were numb she was free to drift, whether she wanted to or not. Don’t balloons get kind of scared, floating up through the sky above the grocery- store parking lot? After all, where are they supposed to go now?
“Okay,” said the doctor. “You know what to do. We’re going to push in time with the contractions. We’ll push to ten, and then rest and wait for the next contraction.”
“How will I know when to push?” Sunny asked from far away. “I can’t feel anything.”
“I’ll be watching the tape,” the doctor gestured toward the paper feeding out of the machine next to her, “and I’ll tell you when a contraction is coming on.”
Sunny nodded. She held on to her mother’s hand on one side and Maxon’s hand on the other, like anchors, keeping her down in this body. She pulled hard on them, and pushed hard at the baby inside. Yet between her hands, in the middle, bits of her kept floating away. Up in the air, between the two of them, between their heads, she heard their voices, as if they were talking, taking this moment to have a conversation.
“Maxon,” said Emma. “I have to tell you something.”
“Yes?” Maxon said.
“You know your project, and your research you’re doing now; it’s so interesting.”
“Yes,” Maxon said.
“Push,” said the doctor. “Come on everyone, count! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!”
“And they want you, right, to see it through, don’t they? Don’t they want you to go to the moon?” The mother’s tones were golden, soothing. She was holding Sunny’s hand but it was as if she were taking Maxon by the hand.
“Yes,” Maxon said. “But Sunny doesn’t want it. She told me.”
“I think,” she began, and then her smooth lips pursed together as she paused. “I think that you
“Sunny says no. Sunny doesn’t want it,” repeated Maxon.
“Sunny doesn’t know what she wants,” said the mother. “Or what she needs. Do you understand me?”
Maxon said nothing. Sunny, drifting in the air, waited for him to speak.
“Sunny needs me to go?” said Maxon.
“Well, the whole world really,” said the mother kindly, generously. “The whole world needs you to go to the moon. But in a sense, Sunny needs it most of all. Don’t you agree? What would you say, if you agreed?”
