Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  The tree line was scattered with stuff people had dumped: a television with a smashed screen, a plastic bag of clothes, a broken-down playpen. Vines covered everything. I’d always thought of nature like the happy woodlands in my childhood storybooks. But now I was frightened by the large shiny leaves, the heart-shaped ones veined purple, and the ones small as doll hands covered with white hairs. The trees seemed angry; I felt if I turned my back, they might poke a sharp branch into my heart. I wanted the woods to be a place where I might make friends with a fawn or see a unicorn. I wanted to meet a squirrel wearing a little vest or a frog walking on his hind legs, leaning on a tiny carved cane.

  Eddie felt none of my anxiety. Once we got a few yards into the forest he insisted that no girls were allowed in the hooch, that he and my brother would walk the rest of the way alone. I watched their thin legs moving over the packed dirt path. Where they made a sharp right, the trees thickened first to dark green and then to black.

  When I got back, our nearest neighbor, Mrs. Smith, was standing in her doorway wearing a housedress with metal snaps down the front. She wore her hair teased up in a beehive and smoked a cigarette with a long dangling ash.

  “Would you mind getting me my newspaper, honey?” she said. “That boy threw it onto your side.”

  I pulled the paper out from under the ratty boxwood.

  “You all moved in?”

  “Still unpacking.”

  “Where you all from?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Up there,” she said. “My Lord!”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “I hear your daddy’s a preacher.”

  “He was one. But he’s not anymore.”

  Mrs. Smith frowned. She was the sort of character I’d imagined lived down South. Someone who made fried chicken and loved okra, someone who watched the Grand Ole Opry on television.

  “Was it him I heard up in the middle of the night?”

  “Either him or me,” I said. “We both have trouble sleeping.”

  “Y’all and me both,” she said. “I haven’t gotten more than a couple hours’ worth since my husband passed.”

  “When was that?”

  “Twenty years ago,” she said. “But it feels like twenty days.”

  Her cheeks sucked in as she pulled on her cigarette and let the smoke out of her small nose, the stream thick and gray.

  Eddie’s mother, Sandy, lay out on a lawn chair beside her unit in a leopard-print bikini, spreading oil mixed with iodine over her legs. When she turned over on her stomach, she undid her top so her back was bare. To me she was exotic as a lizard soaking up the sun. Listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd on her transistor radio and drinking a can of beer. I stared for a while at her brown back and perfectly shaped butt from my bedroom window—until she glanced in my direction and I went back to unpacking my few possessions, hanging my dress and arranging my shoes in the closet. I had three pairs of shoes: red Keds, sandals with tire-tread soles, and a pair of Mary Janes that my mother had made me pack but that I swore I would never ever wear again even if someone held a gun to my head.

  I opened the box that held the old encyclopedias I’d gotten at the Philadelphia library sale. Wedged in between the volumes was my baby doll, Vicky, her ratty sleeper scrunched up under her arms and her blue glass eyes clearly frustrated. I could tell she was mad I’d left her in the U-Haul for so long, and so I let her lie on my chest and I stroked her bald head as I sang “American Pie,” the song that was now always on the radio.

  After a while I got up and peeked out at Sandy. She had turned back around and was eating orange Cheez Doodles out of a big plastic bag. I went out to see if we had any mail and to get a look at her up close.

  As soon as I came out our front door, she raised her sunglasses.

  “Are you a teenager, honey?” she called to me. Her voice, like a little girl’s, made no sense coming out of her brown body.

  “Almost,” I said, walking over to her chair.

  “You babysit much?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to appear too anxious, but I was thrilled she might actually hire me. My heart fluttered. It was as if I were talking to a goddess from another galaxy.

  “For who?”

  “My brother mostly, but once I watched a new baby while its mother got her hair done.”

  “Sounds good,” she said. I realized from the way she waved her hand that she was going to offer me the job no matter if I’d said I’d watched sea monkeys and babysat goldfish.

  “Could you come over at seven? My boyfriend is taking me out to dinner.”

  When I arrived that evening, Sandy’s boyfriend opened the door. Sonny was a tan, thin man with huge white teeth, his hair feathered back perfectly like birds’ wings. I’d heard from Eddie that he was an oral surgeon and that he was rich. He poured himself a drink from a decanter with a gold top. Sandy’s living room was filled with spider plants hanging in macramé holders. One wall was mirrored. There were ceramic lamps with large silk shades and a geometrical print suspended on the wall over the long, low, brown couch.

  “I hear you’re a Yankee,” Sonny said, turning back toward the living room. He wore an Izod shirt with the collar turned up, khaki pants, and loafers without socks.

  I nodded.

  “We’ll try not to hold that against you. Right, Eddie boy?”

  Eddie, who sat on the couch holding a Tonka cement mixer, turned his head slowly, squinted his eyes at Sonny as if trying to remember who he was, shrugged, and went back to the television.

  I sat down next to Eddie on the couch.

  “What are you watching?” I said.

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

  It was early in the evening on a Saturday; the cartoons were long over and the sporting events too. Eddie slumped his body against mine. He was the kind of kid who would lean on anybody. Though I’d known him only a few days, he was already all over me, wanting to sit on my lap and hold my hand.

  As Sonny lifted his glass to his mouth, I heard ice clink against his teeth. At first I thought he was watching the stairs, waiting for Sandy to come down, but then I realized he was staring at my profile.

  “Let’s see what else is on,” I said, turning the channel. Though Eddie protested, I knew we were near the part where the Child Catcher appears with his greasy hair and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang changes from a kids’ movie into a horror flick.

  I kept waiting for Sonny to stop staring at me, but his gaze was insistent. I wondered if I didn’t have a smear of sloppy joe on my cheek. I sunk down deeper into the couch. Finally Sonny reached over and put his cold hand on my chin.

  “Open up, honey,” he said.

  I didn’t want to, but with his fingers pressed against my jawbone what else could I really do? He turned my head toward the lamplight and looked carefully down my throat, tipping my head from side to side.

  “Those wisdoms will have to come out,” he said. “Tell your folks when it’s time I’m their man.”

  Footsteps on the stairs. Sandy appeared in a powder-blue dress with ruched sleeves and a puka-bead choker. Her eyes were lined with black like a baby raccoon’s.

  “Whoa-wee,” Sonny said, standing. “My own little Cleopatra!”

  “No jumping on my water bed,” she said to Eddie, sounding like a girl playing the part of a mother in a high school play. She wrote two numbers on a pad by the phone and picked up her leather patch bag. She leaned down and Eddie reached his pale arms up around her neck and squeezed. He held her head tightly, whispering something into her ear that made Sandy smile.

  “Whoa there, little man,” Sonny said, winking at me. “She’s your mama, not your girlfriend.”

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Eddie ran upstairs and got his Hot Wheels case and a bunch of bright orange segments of track. I helped him set them up in the kitchen. He showed me, by bending the top of the track up between two soup cans on the counter, how the little green car with the racing flames had no trouble making
the antigravitational loop-the-loop. He placed two ramps facing each other so when we released a car from each end the Hot Wheels smashed into one another. After a while the collisions got boring.

  “I’ll tell my mom you’re my favorite sitter if you give me some ice cream,” Eddie said. “But if you don’t I’ll say you talked all night on the phone.”

  Eddie was clearly experienced with babysitters. I admired his negotiating skills.

  Swinging open the freezer door I saw TV dinners, frozen pizzas, and two different flavors of ice cream: cherry and butter pecan. The lower fridge held gallons of soda and thick packages of cold cuts in white butcher paper, a delicacy in my own house. They had strawberries and Cool Whip. They had every kind of cereal: Cap’n Crunch, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms. I used the scoop to curl the ice cream into coffee cups and we ate it while we watched The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

  I knew everything about Cher, how her first memory was of being lost in the woods, that she’d had a dog named Blackie and two imaginary friends, Sam and Peter, who were lumberjacks. Ever since I’d first seen her a few years ago in her fur vest and elephant bells tied up with rawhide lacing, I knew she had a message for me. I let Eddie eat Cool Whip with his fingers right out of the container so he’d stay quiet as Cher came out in her red and purple gypsy dress and hoop earrings to sing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.” She sang in her low, muddy voice with a certain remove, as if she were embarrassed by the song’s rawness.

  Eddie fell asleep while I was washing the cups. I watched him, the freckles over his face and his tiny rib cage moving up and down, before I picked him up, his body warm against my chest, and carried him up the stairs to his bed.

  “My dad brought me a monkey home from Vietnam but the monkey stopped eating, all its hair fell right out and it died,” he said sleepily. I pulled the covers up around him. The air conditioner was high and the room felt chilly. “I like you,” he said. “You let me watch as much TV as I want.”

  I closed his door and stood in the hallway on the gold shag carpet. The walls were covered with sepia-colored mirrors. I looked at my reflection. If I stared long enough I could convince myself that I had nothing to do with the body before me; it was like I resided someplace else entirely and this body was just a puppet that I controlled by remote.

  Sandy’s room was beside Eddie’s, one wall covered with the same smoky glass, the curtains and the bedspread printed with leopard spots. Everything in Sandy’s house was oversized. Even her cat, Lulubell, had a fat furry stomach that dragged on the carpet. I looked through Sandy’s colored eye pencils and Mary Quant lipsticks. The stuff was all of a good quality, much different from my mom’s dime-store lipstick and clumpy mascara. My mom had given up on glamour. She had an all-or-nothing philosophy; if we didn’t have money to buy clothes in real materials like linen and silk, she’d just go around in housedresses and white athletic socks.

  I was different. I was drawn to the objects of womanhood. To me they were sacred items: the mascara wand, the cotton balls, the leopard-print panties with the pink bow I found in Sandy’s dresser. My mother wore white bras and big cotton underwear and insisted I do the same. She said lingerie was for tramps.

  I kept snooping. Sandy’s closet was jammed. There were a dozen white uniforms—she worked at a nursing home—and lots of party dresses. Many had sequins and were nearly as flamboyant as the ones Cher wore on her show. Sandy was like a tiny Cher, small enough to fit into the parameters of life at Bent Tree. I wondered if I should risk trying one on. Sandy was so petite she was almost exactly my size. I pulled a slinky green dress with a beaded bodice from the hanger.

  Once I had the dress on I looked at myself in the mirror. Over the past few months I’d grown so much I looked like a big freak and my hair was cut short just like my brother’s. It wasn’t unusual for people to think I was a boy. Just the day before, the pharmacist at the drugstore had said to my mom, Two boys! How nice. I knew everyone was waiting for me to turn into a young lady and so sometimes I practiced; I had a few moves I was working on. I tried to walk like a woman, to get the rhythm of my hips just right, so that the motion was smooth. I’d noticed that teenage girls always moved as if people were watching them. It was important somehow to move like people were watching you, so that people would eventually watch you. I moved on to the next gesture I was working on: the hair toss. This move was modeled after my fifth-grade teacher. She’d had thick brown hair that lay lightly on her shoulders, and every few moments she would lean back and give her head a little shake. Since my hair was cropped short, I wrapped a towel around my head, stood in front of the mirror, and tipped my head back. But no matter how many times I tried to move like my old teacher it was always too jerky, like someone had told me I had a spider on my neck.

  I shook the towel off my head and lifted the dress over my shoulders, then arranged it back on the hanger and pulled my clothes back on. As I was hanging the dress in the closet I heard a car door slam and tires peel out roughly on the gravel driveway. I ran down the stairs and threw myself over the back of the couch. Sandy flew in the door, dropped her bag on the table, and got a wine cooler out of the refrigerator. She plopped down beside me on the couch, shook off her high heels, and put her feet up on the coffee table. Her black mascara was smeared. The skin below her eyes was pink and puffy. I could tell she’d been drinking.

  “That jackass is never going to marry me,” she said. “I don’t know why I keep fucking him.”

  She swigged from her bottle and stared at the label.

  “But if I break it off, where will I be?”

  I was watching her small perfect feet, the toenails blood-red and shiny.

  “You’re so pretty,” I said. “I can’t believe you have any problems.”

  “Right!” Sandy laughed.

  I could tell what I said had made her remember how young I was, and she jumped up and pulled a five-dollar bill from her wallet.

  “I hope it went all right,” she said. “He can be a handful.”

  I took the money but I didn’t want to leave. I had heard adults swear only a few times; my dad said “shit” when he got really angry. But the way Sandy swore was different; it made what she said raw and affecting. I wanted her to keep on talking that way to me all night.

  “Why do you keep fucking him?” I said.

  “Oh honey,” she said. “Don’t talk like that. It’s just not nice.”

  At home, my father was already in bed and my mother sat sideways on the couch, with her legs under her, eating from a plastic container of grocery store macaroni and listening to Camelot on the record player. In Philadelphia she’d met with a reducing group that made her wear a pig’s mask if, during the weekly weigh-ins, she’d gained more than a pound. My mother had worked in a department store. On Saturdays, her day off, she sometimes sang along with the records of Camelot or Fiddler on the Roof. I knew to stay in my room. If I came out, she’d tell us how sad it was that Jackie Kennedy had lost two babies; Arabella was stillborn and Patrick Bouvier died just a few days after his birth. Or she’d yell at me for leaving dirty clothes around or opening up the refrigerator door so long all the cold got out.

  As she opened her mouth, I prayed she wouldn’t tell me again that James Vanhoff had won the State Junior Tennis Championship two years in a row and that he was now on the board of the Roanoke Historical Society or, worse, about the woman who claimed she was possessed by a devil or the toxic mold particles that were suspended in the air all around us. And I was in luck; she just asked me if it went OK, and all I had to do was nod.

  I’d set up my stuff in Miranda’s old room. On the little wooden table beside my bed I’d placed my busts of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare. I liked the way I’d painted Emily’s necklace with tiny dots of gold, and I’d highlighted Shakespeare’s gray hair with silver streaks so he looked like a superhero. My Venus flytrap had survived the journey. I had to remember to place a grain of raw hamburger into its clawed blossom once a week. My record player was
in the corner beside my box of 45s, and I spread out my posters, one of a kitten and another I’d gotten from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an Egyptian with eyes outlined in sparkly black. I loved how you could never tell the girl Egyptians from the boy Egyptians and how they were all so ridiculously glamorous.

  From where I lay on my bed I could see my dad through his open bedroom door across the hall. He was under the covers reading his Ram Dass book. The relief he’d felt after we left the church was fading; at first when I asked how God would find us outside the rectory, he’d laughed and told me God was everywhere, you didn’t need any particular prayers to find him. But now he seemed worried; he stayed up late every night reading and writing in his notebook. Though he wouldn’t admit it, I think my dad was disappointed in Roanoke and the world outside the church; neither were the paradise he’d imagined.

  Even though I had my things around me and my dad was nearby, being in Miranda’s old room was still spooky. My room felt penetrable. I had taken precautions, moving my mirror directly across from the window, dumping salt in all the corners to ward off bad spirits, and keeping cloves of garlic on the windowsill to scare off vampires. I felt for the bottle of sage I’d taken from the kitchen spice rack—a safeguard against ghosts—and now kept under my pillow, and I knew my squirt gun, full of holy water, was in the top drawer of my dresser. True, I’d blessed the water myself, but I figured as a minister’s daughter I had some powers, though they were probably diminished now that my dad had left the church. None of these things made me feel safe. I imagined the ex-husband crouched in my closet, his eyes rolled back to white, and I could almost feel the black hairs growing out of the pink skin of my underarms and down between my legs. I figured the sooner I became a woman, the sooner the ex-husband would be threatening me with a knife. It didn’t seem fair that I had to change shape. I wished someone would have asked me; I might have said yes but I would have liked a choice.