Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  At least I didn’t have the curse yet. One of my friends had gotten the curse at nine; during gym a line of blood ran down her leg, staining the canvas edge of her tennis shoe. I knew I was “developing,” as my mother so annoyingly called it. I knew too that it was natural, but I felt like a skinny monster.

  What if the hairs filled not just my underarms and crotch but kept growing until I was covered with hair like a werewolf, thick strains growing over my forehead and around my eyes? I was getting puffy as well, and while I knew I was moving away from my old self into a new place, I didn’t want to look like the Playboy Bunny I’d seen on television with the huge breasts and wide idiotic smile. I still prayed that I might swerve away from being that sort of creature and toward something else entirely. I felt my forehead. If my chest could puff out, why couldn’t my forehead develop a horn? I got so excited by this idea that I got out my journal and tried to sketch a unicorn girl. But the horn looked like one on a rhino and I couldn’t figure out how to draw the bone moving out of my forehead. I drew several variations of hooves, but it was tricky to make them delicate; I had heard that female unicorns were so sensitive, they never stepped on living plants.

  None of my pictures satisfied me, so I wrote instead about how the unicorn girl ran away from her duplex up into the forest. There she lived among the deer and baby foxes, eating raspberries and soft leaves. She loved the taste of moss and she often had tea parties for the squirrels where she made cakes by mashing crab apples with butternuts. In the night she stared down at the duplex windows floating in the dark like little rafts of light.

  All the next week Sandy emerged from her duplex each day at noon looking sleepy and carrying a six-pack of beer; she lay out in her leopard-print bikini and sunglasses. Eddie watched television inside. Sandy’s skin nearly purple, she seemed as drunk off the light as from the beers she popped one after another. I watched her pitch the cans toward the trash in time with whichever song was on her transistor radio. I tried to force my thoughts away from her, thinking about Barnabas Collins, or trying to decide if I should go down to the fridge and see if we had any cheese. But Sandy had found a latch door into my head and stuffed her body inside.

  I couldn’t stand just watching her. I pulled on my bathing suit, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and left the cool duplex for the blinding outdoor light. The only sunglasses I had were a pink pair from when I was little, but I figured they were better than nothing.

  As I stood at the foot of her lounger, I saw how pale my skin was in comparison to hers. I asked if I could lie out beside her, and to my amazement she said yes. I hated my bathing suit with its pattern of strawberries and eyelet ruffles. Sandy said it was cute, but I knew it was babyish. She smelled like dirt and radiator heat and once I lay there I began to feel like a larva, pale and glassy beside her.

  Sandy talked, pausing only occasionally to sip her beer. When she leaned up to spread oil over her legs, her bikini top gaped open and I saw her nipple and large areola. I listened to her voice with my eyes half closed, watching the skin around the crotch of her bikini; I saw a bevy of black nubs that made my eyes unfocus.

  She told me Sonny was not really a good person; he sometimes told people they needed root canals when their teeth were fine. He called his teenage sons lazy and said they smelled bad. Sonny never listened, just waited for his turn to talk. She had thought she loved him, but now she realized she actually hated him.

  “To be perfectly honest,” she said, “I’m still stuck on Eddie’s father. But I fucked that up by fooling around when he went off to Vietnam.” He had a new girlfriend now and she was the one who got to fly over to Hawaii to meet him when he got R and R.

  She spoke about herself with a certain distance, as if she were talking about a character on General Hospital.

  “When I think about it,” she said, “I can see what a terrible person I am.”

  “I don’t think you’re a terrible person,” I said.

  “But you would, Jesse, if you really knew me.”

  After that she was quiet and I could hear the hot wind in the leaves.

  “Sonny took me to the grocery store and let me buy whatever I wanted.”

  She didn’t know what she would do if he didn’t help with the rent and the car payments. No way could she ask her family for money. Her parents had five teeth between them and the house she grew up in, if you could even call it a house, didn’t have indoor plumbing.

  “I’d rather gnaw my own arm off than go back there.”

  The sun beat down. Tree leaves singed around the edges, curled forward like burnt paper, and my skin was dry and stiff no matter how much baby oil I spread over myself. The weeds looked brown and miserable. Sandy’s radio said we were in the dog days of summer, then a buzzer rang over the airwaves and the DJ told us it was time to turn or burn. The sun made a slow lava lamp under my closed eyelids, and I felt my head getting swimmy and realized how thirsty I was. I asked if I could go inside her duplex and get myself a drink.

  Inside Sandy’s unit it was dark and cool. All the furniture looked like it was underwater and covered with algae. It was true I was thirsty, and I drank down a jelly glass filled with water and then another, but I also wanted to be inside Sandy’s house. I thought about going upstairs into her bedroom and lying across her water bed, and while I liked the idea of my bare skin against her fuzzy bedspread, I knew I would leave grease stains. What if I just quickly held one of her bras against my bathing suit top? She kept several hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Once I thought of this, the urge to do it was magnetic. It would be like holding Wonder Woman’s bodice against my chest. Who knew what superpowers would spark from the material into me? I started toward the stairs, but then I saw Eddie and Phillip through the back window, making their way through the trees down the side of the mountain. All afternoon they’d been in the hooch, a tree fort made of particleboard with a skull drawn in Magic Marker on the door. The one time I’d been allowed inside, Eddie told a story about how his father had to unload a helicopter filled with body parts.

  I walked out the back door and handed Sandy a beer; Phillip and Eddie ran down the raw edge of red dirt, toilet-paper rolls of ammunition taped to their T-shirts.

  Their tennis shoes sent up a cloud of pink dust.

  “Why are you running?” Sandy said.

  “The gooks are after us!” Eddie yelled.

  “You’re not supposed to call them that!” Sandy said, but by the time she finished talking they had disappeared back up into the trees.

  That night, while we waited for my dad to get home from work, my mom browned hamburger in the Teflon skillet and I stood over the trash can and peeled potatoes. The wet strips curled off the blade and landed in the garbage in artistic configurations.

  Mom was talking about rich people again, her voice growing lively and familiar. Mrs. Vanhoff was pencil thin and always wore her hair up, highlighting her long and elegant neck. The Vanhoffs had been in last night’s newspaper eating lobster thermidor at the Hotel Roanoke.

  “Carolyn Vanhoff is head of the mayor’s art council, and I heard she takes tennis lessons with the pro at the club.”

  She sprinkled the Hamburger Helper flavor packet over the ground beef.

  “Every January she goes off to a spa in North Carolina to lose the few pounds she gains over Christmas.”

  “You and Dad should go away,” I said. “I could watch Phillip.”

  “Your father? Take me on a vacation? Like that’s ever going to happen.”

  A peel flew off the blade and stuck to the wall. I wanted to defend my dad, but what could I really say? That he read a lot, that he had a great vocabulary, that he helped people. These would only get grunts and eye rolls from my mother. I decided to change the subject.

  “Sandy is having trouble with her boyfriend,” I said.

  I thought my mom might like this information, but I could tell by how she pressed down the spatula so grease oozed out of the hamburger that she
did not.

  “I hope you’re not looking up to that woman,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know Sonny is married.”

  “Separated,” I said.

  My mom swung around, holding the fry pan in front of her. It was rare; she’d gone from a solid 5 straight to a 2. The grainy hamburger and the greenish grease pooling in the tilted pan looked disgusting.

  “Jesse, you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

  At least they’re people I actually know, I wanted to say to her, not strangers I read about in the newspaper. My mom would rather pretend to have relationships with people than actually deal with our real-life neighbors. But I just grunted and ran out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and slammed the door to my room.

  I held my View-Master to my eyes, pushed the lever down: Alice’s head poking out of a thatched roof, then the wide, menacing smile of the Cheshire Cat. The colors reminded me of the stained-glass windows in my dad’s old church, gemlike and glorious. But I couldn’t move myself into the tiny 3-D colors like usual, so I tried to read the book I’d gotten from the library on worldwide burial rituals. I was on the part where mummies, after being swathed in linens, are first placed into one coffin and then a second. Through the wall I could hear Mrs. Smith playing hymns on her piano. She had a long list of things that were bad luck. Some of them were obvious, like breaking a mirror, but others I’d never heard before, like sweeping after dark and cutting your fingernails on Sundays.

  I had always felt it was good luck that my mom was prettier than all the other moms, and that even though she didn’t dress up anymore, she couldn’t help but look stylish in her paisley head scarf and big dark sunglasses. But now her face was the color of a mushroom and she had velvet bags under her eyes like a zombie in a monster movie. Incrementally, she had transformed from the mom I used to love into a creature, weepy and miserable, a dark thing to be afraid of in the middle of the night.

  “You’re getting good color on your front,” Sandy said as I spread my towel beside her on the grass, “but you need more on your back.”

  It was late in the afternoon. Shadows fell over our toes, but the sun was still hot. We lay before the mountain like virgins about to be sacrificed. I pulled down the side of my bottom, to show her the line of lighter skin.

  “Malibu Barbie!” she said, as she shook the baby oil and iodine and squirted a glossy puddle between her breasts.

  “He still hasn’t called,” she said, motioning to the phone she’d pulled outside, which now sat on the welcome mat. Eddie sat beside it. He had on a pair of huge stereo headphones that had been accessorized with tinfoil sticking out at odd angles.

  “He’s in the Head Crusher,” Sandy told me matter-of-factly.

  “My eyes are going to squirt out of my head,” Eddie yelled cheerfully, as he turned the page of his comic book. He wore his father’s recon gloves, the tips of the fingers cut out, he’d told me earlier, so he could better grip his weapon.

  “I’m sure there are good reasons he’s not calling,” she said, laying her head against her arm. “Emergency root canal, or that lazy son of his might have gotten busted.”

  I watched sparrows rub themselves with dirt in the ditch beside the driveway and listened to Mr. Ananais mowing down by the road. Lulubell lifted her furry head and looked at me.

  My dad came out of the duplex in his bell-bottoms, a striped shirt, and a wide tie. He was going to his second job at the psych center, but before he got in the car, he walked over to where Sandy and I lay.

  I sat up and pulled my knees into my chest; he held his hand over his eyes, blocking the glare, so he could better see us. I was terrified he’d say something stupid, tell Sandy about my rashes or that as a baby I was always constipated.

  “Not much sun left,” he said.

  Sandy pulled off her sunglasses.

  “There’s enough for me, pastor,” she said.

  Before we left the rectory, everybody called him pastor—even people who didn’t go to church called him that. Now, though, the title embarrassed him; he blushed and looked up into the trees blowing around on the side of the mountain.

  “Help your mother with dinner,” he said.

  “Yes sir.”

  He walked back to our car, got in, and started up the engine.

  “Your father,” Sandy said, “is a good-looking man.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a looker.”

  “If you say so,” I said, rolling over onto my stomach and pressing my cheek into the grass.

  When Sandy let me in she was dressed for her night out with the girls: white short shorts and a puffy-sleeved blouse tied high up to show off her belly, and her hair teased up and sprayed. She looked like one of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. I had to admit she was disturbingly tan.

  Eddie was already asleep, and when a horn honked, she jotted a number on a pad by the phone and said she’d be back no later than eleven. I got myself a jelly glass full of Pepsi and a handful of Fritos and watched a made-for-TV movie about a senator’s daughter who ran away to join a bunch of hippies who lived in an old school bus. The head hippie—a long-haired guy in an embroidered vest and dirty jeans—took the senator’s daughter to McDonald’s, where he searched through the garbage for food. He tried to get her to eat the food he’d retrieved, but the senator’s daughter couldn’t make herself taste the limp, leftover fries. Then there were scenes of hippies handing out daisies and swimming in rivers. I got bored and turned down the sound.

  I’d brought my favorite book, Half Magic, with me, and I opened the pages to where the oldest boy presses the magic coin firmly into his palm and all the children are suddenly transported to the court of King Arthur. The idea that certain objects had magic powers, a concept I’d clung to for so long, was starting to seem ridiculous. I’d also lost the ability, which I’d once reveled in, to pretend I was an animal. I used to spend whole afternoons thinking kitten thoughts or hiding in my closet like a shy baby deer. I’d imagine I was a mother badger living in a civilized badger hole, with a tiny stove and wooden breakfast table.

  It was depressing, really, to be stuck always in my own skin. For a short while when I was small, between the time I realized I was myself and when I knew I had to stay a girl, I thought I could go back and forth between girl and boy. I used to imagine I could trade my body for a boy’s. It wasn’t until I said I have a penis, and watched my parents’ faces break apart in laughter, that I realized I’d have to stay a girl forever. I turned the sound back up on the television. On the screen I could see the head hippie and the now-hippified senator’s daughter. She was barefoot, in a patchwork dress with a braid of leather around her forehead. They had returned to the McDonald’s, and they were foraging food left on the tables just out front. The head hippie fed the half-eaten hamburger to the hippie girl, the camera lingering on the girl’s lips as she took the hamburger into her mouth. I could tell by the sad music that played over the closing credits that I was supposed to feel sorry for her. But why? Because she didn’t have money for a fresh, clean hamburger? Or was it because she looked different in her hippie dress from the straight-looking people sitting around her? I thought I knew the real reason. Any girl who didn’t do what her parents wanted had clearly been brainwashed. Now that she was eating garbage, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be in some courtroom singing in Latin with an X carved into her forehead like the Manson girls.

  Though I hadn’t realized it till now, whenever I thought of Miranda’s ex-husband, he always had the same wild eyes and long auburn hair as Charles Manson—Charlie, as the girls called him, who could handle rattlesnakes without being bitten and bring dead birds back to life. I walked up the stairs, pushed Eddie’s door open, and stood in the doorway watching his little chest rise and fall a few times, his hair so white it glowed in the dark like the tail of a comet. With one arm he clutched his Dapper Dan doll, the thumb of his other hand in his mouth. I went into Sandy’s bathroom. It was st
ill damp from her shower, and the humid air was scented with musk.

  I pulled the neck of my T-shirt over to look at my white strap marks, then lifted up my shirt and stared for a while at my stomach. It was a golden brown, the fine hairs white. Then I examined several darker hairs I’d found earlier that day under my left arm. One of the things I liked best about babysitting was that I had time to look at myself as much as I wanted. Each new hair meant I was moving closer to the Danger Zone. Once my body flooded with hormones, I’d become vulnerable to the whims of men. Men, it wasn’t hard to see, ran everything, and once a girl got breasts and all that went with that, men had wizard power over you, they could make you do anything they wanted.

  Sandy had left her bathing suit hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and before I even realized it, I had pulled the bikini bottoms up over my jeans and fastened the top over my T-shirt. I decided to practice a move I’d seen Sandy do when she bent down to tie Eddie’s shoe. It was a small gesture, but I’d been fascinated by how she’d collapsed her skeleton to the ground with concern and focus. I broke the movement into parts. First there was the noticing of the thing that needed your attention. Your face showed a sudden focus as the knees began to bend. The next part was the hardest to do smoothly: you floated downward without any effort, gentle as a flower petal. With my fingers I simulated tying a shoelace before releasing back up into the regular stream of time. As I stood up I tried to look satisfied in a small-time way, but my face in the mirror looked deeply satisfied, as if I’d just prevented World War III or something.