Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  He stopped and turned his head.

  “It’s on the list,” he said flatly.

  “Well it’s not Sonny’s,” I said, grabbing it out of his hands.

  “Hey,” he said, “give that back.”

  “It’s OK,” the older guy said, coming up behind us carrying a lamp in each hand. “Let her keep it.”

  Mr. Ananais pulled me away.

  “You have to calm down, koukla,” he said. “The ladies in Bent Tree are sometimes a little crazy. I had a girl come out of her unit naked and go around door to door asking for a cheese sandwich. These ladies will have arguments about anything, how to cook a chicken, or if rain is rain or if it’s drizzle.”

  We watched the movers pull the metal door of the truck shut. I copied the number off the license plate and Mr. Ananais went down to his duplex to call Sandy at work. He promised me he wouldn’t evict her, that he’d give Sandy a chance to pay her rent herself. After the movers drove off, I sat on the curb in front of her duplex under my black umbrella with the blanket over my lap. The light faded like a lamp being dimmed by slow degrees. The sky was green, then white, the air smoky with raindrops and the trees on the mountains darkening. When the rain stopped, steam came up off the asphalt and the cicadas started to pulse.

  My dad came out to talk to me. I could tell my mom had sent him. His beard had grown in and he’d lost weight; his hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Before we got kicked out of the rectory my dad would have told me not to worry, Sandy was a child of God. He’d insist that all people and animals, even snakes and crocodiles, were connected at the root, a solid blob of life. At the end too, when we died, we’d be connected once again. It was only in life that we seemed like separate beings.

  But now he wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I guess you’re not hungry?”

  “No.”

  I thought he might point to the trees swaying in the soft wind and expect me to get all goose-pimply, because the Holy Spirit was moving in the world. He used to do it all the time, and while now it was rare, he sometimes still held his hand up, out of habit, to show that the spirits’ enchantments were not completely dead.

  Instead he pulled a cookie wrapped in a napkin out of his pocket.

  “Just in case,” he said, setting it beside me on the curb.

  I watched him walk back into the duplex. I was mad at him. Without God to protect us, I had to watch over Sandy and help her the best I could. I saw my mother doing the dishes at the sink through the kitchen window and I knew Phillip and Eddie were inside watching television. It got darker. The streetlight came on and moths beat against the glass. Clouds blew sideways and a few stars came out. I was afraid that when Sandy came back, she’d see her empty apartment and swallow a whole jar of aspirin. If I didn’t wait up for her, she might not make it through the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JILL

  On my first day of seventh grade, I waited for the junior high bus by the row of mailboxes down on the main road. I had chosen my outfit only after setting all my options out on my bed and trying on each one. I went through various movements in front of the bathroom mirror before settling on the wide-wale corduroys and the green blouse with the large pointy collar.

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest and angled my head. From practicing, I knew the pose I wanted to present when I stepped on the bus. My chin had to have a delicate look and my lips had to be relaxed and slightly parted. I wanted to look mysterious like a Victorian heroine, with pale cheeks and sunken, glittering eyes. In Philadelphia I’d blown the first day of sixth grade by acting friendly and wearing a shirt I’d tried to sew myself out of calico fabric. I swore I would never let that happen again. I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags. When people asked me where I was from I was going to say Northampton or Old Lyme, as if my life were resplendent with rope swings and sleeping porches. But now that I was out on the bus stop I realized nobody really cared.

  Sheila was the only one I wanted to meet. I’d watched her from our deck, lying out with her girlfriends on towels in her small backyard. She was fully developed, as grown-ups liked to say, and dressed like Julie from The Mod Squad. She wore a choker around her neck, a floral blouse with lace at the wide cuffs, and rose-colored corduroys.

  I was convinced there was a direct connection between breast development and the way girls lost interest in playing jacks and singing along to John Denver songs. In the sixth grade, my friend Kelley had been happy to jump rope with me until her chest began to swell and the creases around her nose got greasy. After that she drifted to the back fence where the boys hung out. I had noticed that once a girl went over she was impossible to get back unless you yourself went over too. Then you could be friends again and talk about pop idols and blue mascara.

  Besides Sheila and Dwayne—a sullen older boy in tight bell-bottoms and a Skynyrd T-shirt—the only other kid at the bus stop was Jill Bamburg. She lived in the duplex next to ours. She looked exhausted, with gray pouches under her eyes. During her mom’s parties, I’d watched Jill and her little sister, Beth, in white nightgowns, and her older brother, Ronnie, use homemade wands to make bubbles the size of small dogs. After the liquid soap ran out, they dropped objects from their second-story window and timed how long it took them to fall.

  I moved closer to Sheila. She smelled like musk oil and Eve shampoo. She jumped away as if she might catch geekiness from me, so I sunk back to where Jill stood. I spoke to her, hoping, idiotically, that it might make Sheila jealous.

  “What a drag school’s starting,” I said.

  Jill looked at me with her flat brown eyes.

  “I guess so,” she said, looking past me up the road to see if the bus was coming.

  Finally the bus pulled up and the double doors swung out with a loud metal click. I got on last and saw Sheila sitting next to a red-haired girl wearing a Tweety Bird T-shirt. Dwayne sat with the boys in the back who were singing a Doobie Brothers’ song. Junior high went from sixth to ninth grade, but Dwayne looked much older; he must have flunked and been held back. Jill sat with a friend in the middle of the bus. Only one girl was alone. She sat by the window, her white-blonde hair long in the front to hide a port-wine birthmark that stained her cheek. She looked up at me hopefully but I decided that sitting beside her was too big a risk.

  I took an empty seat near the front instead. I knew that proximity to the driver offered a certain amount of protection. This period of grace lasted only for the first few days, though. After that, being close to the driver became a liability.

  In school Sheila moved among a flock of shiny-haired girls in colored corduroys, cheesecloth shirts, and Earth shoes. They were like jewels dropped in the muddy hallway waters, with their bright fingernails, glittering eye shadow, and peacock-feather earrings. At lunch they sat together and talked about lip gloss flavors and whether patchouli oil smelled better then musk. They looked so alike it was hard to tell one from another.

  I knew, with my short haircut and knobby knees, that I would never join their group. If I were a boy I would have escaped into a football obsession, comic books, or Star Trek reruns by now, but girls, girls had no such escape hatches.

  I hadn’t always been like this. Before we moved from the rectory I rode my bike everywhere and all the neighborhood kids loved me, because I was the best at making up games. We often enacted scenes from the Bible. My favorite was the raising of Lazarus, where I’d make my brother rub dirt on his face and lie down on the grass. I’d stare at him with my glowing eyes as I commanded Rise!

  But that period was over. In Roanoke nobody cared if you had a good imagination, if you knew everything about mummification rites or had acted out every detail of the burial rituals of the natives in Timbuktu. The teachers at Low Valley Junior High were mostly female, with thick Southern accents, heavy makeup, and carefully teased-up hair. At lunch I saw my homeroom teach
er, Mrs. Remsly, eating deviled eggs out of a Tupperware container. The only men were the grim-faced janitor, the young AV guy wearing bell-bottoms as he rolled his overhead projector down the hallway, and the principal, whom so far I knew only as a deep baritone coming over the intercom, leading the Pledge of Allegiance and asking us not to throw food in the cafeteria. I darted from class to class like a small stunned fish. Nobody was particularly unfriendly, but nobody was nice to me either.

  I needed a guide to help me negotiate the local customs, and that guide had to be Sheila. She had the power. At lunch, I saw the birthmark girl, whose name was Pam, sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. Pam had a Holly Hobbie lunch box and thermos and she ate while she read, not caring if she had milk on her upper lip or a smear of mustard on her chin. She invited me to sit with her, but I pretended I didn’t hear. Instead I sat alone and stole glances at Sheila, who sat with a bunch of girls, laughing and nibbling her sandwich.

  After lunch I watched how expertly Sheila rolled her combination, swung open her locker, glanced at herself in the little mirror she’d taped inside, then pulled out her math textbook. When I walked behind her I wanted to place my finger on her delicate collarbone. I wanted to ingest her like one of my father’s communion wafers and let her instruct me, like Jesus, from the inside.

  One afternoon when I got off the bus, I walked behind Sheila. It was still hot. A warm breeze blew through my hair and in front of 3B I saw the leaves of the ratty sunflowers dropping, the dirt around them dry and red. I’d been rehearsing what to say to her. Saying I liked the braids in her hair sounded too intimate, but complimenting her clogs didn’t seem personal enough. All day I’d weighed which part of her perfect body to concentrate on. Finally I decided to tell her I liked the birds stamped into her leather belt. It showed my eye for detail without being creepy. But before I could say anything, Sheila swung around.

  “Are you following me?”

  “No!”

  “Why are you walking so close to me then?”

  “I’m not,” I insisted.

  “And why did you touch my hair in health class?”

  It was true. During the menstruation movie, while the soap opera music blared and the egg made its way down the fallopian tube toward the uterus, the projector light had been so silver on Sheila’s head that she had not looked real. That’s when I reached out beyond the edge of my desk and set the pad of my index finger gently against the back of her head.

  “I was brushing away a spider.” It sounded lame even to me.

  Sheila looked at me. She had her hands on her hips and her head tilted sideways.

  “Yeah. Right,” she said. “You should just admit that you’re a lezzbo.”

  Jill ran up behind us.

  “Leave her alone,” she said. “She’s just trying to be nice.”

  Sheila looked from me to Jill.

  “Freaks,” she said. “Go off to freakland and do your freakazoid things!” She hurried down toward her duplex, her clogs sounding on the asphalt.

  “Don’t mind her,” Jill said. “She’s a double-dutch bitch.”

  I felt as if my brain had been scooped out with an iced-tea spoon. As Jill talked about Sheila her words moved around the empty space inside my head. True, I was walking up the incline, but I had no sense of my legs moving, just a floating feeling, like a dust mote careening around in an angle of light. I watched Jill’s mouth move.

  She had a painfully long, pale face and hair that fell limply around her cheekbones. At her mother’s parties, men with mustaches drank beers. Along with watching Jill and her sister make bubbles, I’d also watched them play badminton, hitting the birdie back and forth. As the night wore on, their games got more surreal. I’d seen them volley both an ice cube and a banana.

  While her mother didn’t allow after-school visitors, Jill said if I agreed to hide in her bedroom I could sneak inside 11B. But we’d have to be quiet. We slipped through the screen door into the living room and I was confronted by a number of smells: sandalwood, beer, and some third thing I’d never smelled before. The couch sagged and the coffee table was covered with puddles of dried wax. An Indian-print bedspread hung behind the TV and there was ivy dangling from a macramé holder in front of the window. It was identical to the hippie crash pads I’d seen on TV and in movies, but different because instead of grown-ups in tie-dye shirts and macramé belts, it was filled with children. Beth, Jill’s third-grade sister, sat on the floor surrounded by math books. Ronnie, her older brother, was slumped on the couch watching General Hospital.

  Neither of them looked in our direction. Upstairs, Jill had the same room as mine, though hers was decorated more sparsely, with a mattress on the floor and a cardboard dresser. She’d taped pictures from magazines up on the wall, mostly baby animals and photographs of sunsets. In one corner, a giant stuffed panda, whose name was Barnabas, slumped over as if he’d been shot in the back.

  “I didn’t talk to you at first,” Jill whispered, “because I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”

  “Why are you whispering?” I said.

  Jill pointed to the wall.

  “My mom is sleeping.”

  She told me how in sixth grade Sheila had pretended to be her friend but once Sheila got her braces off she’d told everyone at school that Jill was a dirtbag.

  “She announced that I had leg spasms, which was true, but it only happened once. And she said my farts smelled like dog food.”

  “Whose farts smell good?”

  “Hers,” Jill said. “They smell like cinnamon.”

  She shook her head.

  “She’s just the worst sort of person,” Jill went on, “two-faced and a bitch.”

  Jill cast her eyes down to her blanket, a nubby afghan of triangular blue and pink strips.

  “Were you planned?” she asked.

  This was a common question. If you were planned it meant your family wanted you, you’d come into a friendly spot, you were loved. But if you weren’t planned, that was a whole other story.

  “I was,” I said. “But my little brother wasn’t.”

  My parents had never actually admitted this, but my mother had implied it a few times.

  “None of us were planned,” Jill said. “Not a single one.”

  It was hard for me to figure out how this could be true. But before I could ask Jill more about it, her face got very serious. She was suddenly deadly serious.

  “Before we can be friends,” she said, “you need to know that the Bamburgs are a tragic family.”

  “In what way?”

  “In just about every way you can imagine,” she said. “You name it, we’re tragic.”

  She pulled out a drawer.

  “For instance—”

  She took out a black comb with dandruff lodged in the teeth and a key chain with a Harley Davidson medallion. She laid both on the bed.

  “That’s it, that’s all I have left of my daddy.”

  “What happened?”

  “Motorcycle wreck. He’s buried in that graveyard on 419 next to the Taco Bell.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. I never knew what to say when people told me sad stuff. Jill took the comb into her open palm and looked at it as if the thing had the power to transport her back to the sixties when her dad was still alive. I wanted to change the subject.

  “Did you know the lady who lived in our unit?”

  “Miranda? She had a Dolls of the World collection.”

  “What about her ex?”

  “He’s a freaky hippie guy. He threw her clothes off the deck once. But for around here, that’s nothing. Did you know a lunatic roams the woods at night?”

  I shook my head.

  “I heard from a kid in 4A that he loves the taste of children’s pinkies. Eats them like chicken wings.”

  We heard her mom get out of bed. Jill put her finger to her lips as she left the room. It was her job to get her mom a bowl of cereal and bring her the black pants, white blouse, and apron sh
e had to wear to waitress at the Western Sizzler. While I waited, I poked around Jill’s room. In her closet a dress hung sideways off the hanger and a metal back brace lay on the floor over her shoes. On the shelf above, there was a line of dirty stuffed animals. The pink kitten had a lazy eye.

  After her mother left the house and I heard her car head down the road toward the highway, Jill called up the stairs that the coast was clear. By the time I got down, she had thrown the couch cushions on the floor and Ronnie had pulled the bedspread off the wall and tied it around his neck. He was repeating the lines of Barnabas Collins from a recent episode of Dark Shadows. Inside the mausoleum, Maggie was questioning Barnabas about a sheep that had been killed. The creature had been found drained of blood. I watched until the scene changed to Parallel Time and Jill dragged me up to the bathroom, made me get into the tub, close my eyes, and grub through the bathroom shower curtain. I had to close my eyes tight and push through the plastic until I’d moved into another dimension. Once I was there she informed me in a solemn voice that Ronnie and I were now married and she was dying of a brain tumor.

  At five o’clock I told them I had to go home for dinner. Jill seemed to take this as an insult. She cast her eyes down and I thought she would now confide a grisly detail from her father’s death, that his arm had been ripped off in the crash or that his eyes had popped out of their sockets. Instead she asked if I’d follow her into the basement.

  In the dark laundry room she pulled the string that turned on the overhead bulb and reached into the space between the washer and the dryer. She brought out a towel, unfolded it, and lifted up an elongated string bean. I recognized the long green pod as one of the ones that grew on a tree beside the empty foundation up the mountain. It was a big tree with huge ragged leaves and long beans growing down like sci-fi fringe.

  “When they dry out,” she said, “we can smoke them in the French Quarter.”

  Tanglewood Mall, off the highway and about ten miles from Bent Tree, had a special section in one corner called the French Quarter. I’d seen the ads in the paper for the Tennis Villa, where rich ladies bought little white tennis dresses, and Mrs. Smith told me that the port-wine cheese at the Gourmet Shoppe was the most divine thing she’d ever tasted. There was a rumor that when Little Feat came to the Civic Center, the lead singer got a trim at The UpperCut, the French Quarter’s unisex salon.