Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  I got up and kept my head down to dissuade Pam from speaking to me. All went well partly because I’d practiced in my room the night before. As I came near, Sheila turned her head and spoke into her friend Heather’s ear. My timing was off, so I passed by, threw my garbage in the trash can on top of a half-eaten hamburger and empty milk containers. On the way back I paused near where they sat, and Sheila looked up at me, but my vocal cords constricted and I just stood there until she shrugged at her friends and went back to telling them how her curling iron wasn’t heating up the way it was supposed to.

  On the bus ride home, I decided to shoot for a less glamorous guru. Sheila sat a few seats in front of me; even after a long day at school, her hair fell perfectly on her shoulders and she smelled like powdered sugar. Her aura was so wide and thick I would have needed a chain saw to cut through. I decided to consider second-rung gurus, such as the drill team captain. She sat with a few drill team members at a middle table in the cafeteria, and as I got off the bus, I made a resolution. The next day I would sit, if not beside her, at least a few chairs down.

  Sheila got off the bus first, as always, and was walking over Mr. Ananais’s lawn. I was already halfway up the hill when I heard Sheila say my name. I turned, waiting for her to call me a lezzbo, but instead she asked if I wanted to watch General Hospital. I knew she was asking because Heather, who had always ridden the bus home with her before, didn’t anymore, not since everyone found out that Sheila’s dad was gay. No matter the reason she’d asked me, I almost blacked out with joy. It was all I could do to act like it was no big deal. Too much enthusiasm left you open to ridicule. I’d seen what the other kids had done to Pam when she talked about Eleanor Roosevelt.

  I followed Sheila to her unit along the main road. All the units in her stretch had trees in the yard, and the large boxwoods were well manicured thanks to Mr. Ananais’s electric hedge clippers. He’d told me that when these units had been built, the owner had been flush and so each had a room-to-room intercom and a wet bar.

  Inside Sheila’s unit, the couch and chairs were pale pink. The glass-top coffee table sat on a white area rug and on top, like a cherry on a sundae, sat a conch shell. Over the couch was a painting of a lighthouse. The ocean motif was carried out on pillows printed with starfish. The room was as dust-free and uncluttered as a model room in a furniture store. No photos of her dad or her family before her parents split up. No photographs at all, only a white vase filled with sea oats and a crystal candy dish shaped like a clamshell.

  Our duplex smelled of tennis shoes and pipe smoke. There were always dishes in the sink, unfolded laundry on the couch. Whenever I walked past the living room, my dad, who could sit still for hours, would look up, his pupils like blots of ink, and read something trippy out of his book. The game is not about being someone, it’s about being no one.

  But at Sheila’s everything was perfect. Even the kitchen, which had our same avocado stove and refrigerator, had been softened by the creamy toadstool cookie jar and the pale-yellow dish towels. Sheila pulled out a real plate, not a paper one with a wicker holder like the ones we used, and shook crackers out of the box and squirted Cheez Whiz on each one. She told me to get Tabs out of the refrigerator. We set the couch cushions against the coffee table, the plate between us, and got ready to watch General Hospital.

  So far I hadn’t explained how, in ancient times, people thought birds migrated to the moon. I hadn’t farted, though at one point I smelled cinnamon and I wondered if Sheila had.

  After commercials for Kool-Aid and Lux fabric softener, we watched Laura walk down the hallway of the hospital. Sheila had a face not unlike Laura’s: pug nose and round cheeks, with long, shiny blonde hair. On the surface Laura was like us. She was a teenager, a few years older than we were. She was sweet and pretty but underneath she was conniving and selfish. In every situation she always let her desire lead her, though she pretended to be innocent. The amazing thing was, nobody seemed to catch on. In fact, everyone loved Laura.

  During the commercial, Sheila got the can of Cheez Whiz and we ate the stuff off our fingers. Sheila’s fingers were long, her tongue pale pink like a kitten’s. After General Hospital was over she led me upstairs. Over her bed, which was covered in a baby-blue corduroy spread, was a poster of Gregg Allman. She still liked him, she said, even though he’d gotten busted for drugs and ratted out his whole band.

  Leaning against the wall was a poster board covered with cut-out Playboy Bunnies. One Bunny held a gigantic key and another posed at the Playboy Club in front of backlit photographs of naked girls. Below the collage on her dresser was a lighter with the Playboy Bunny logo and a pair of satin ears.

  “Walt brought these back from New York,” she said. “He’s my mom’s boyfriend and kind of like my stepdad.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  I had watched “Bunny of the Year” on television last year. It was impossible not to know about Playboy magazine and the Playboy Clubs in Chicago and New York. I’d seen pictures of Bunnies dancing on top of the piano. Everybody knew about Hugh Hefner and the orgies he had at his mansion.

  “Walt says I’d make a great Bunny,” Sheila said.

  I thought this was a strange thing to say, but I could tell how the comment had given her hope.

  “You would,” I said.

  I was worried she would take this the wrong way and accuse me of being a lezzbo, but she just started to tell me that at the clubs there were many varieties of Bunnies: Door Bunny, Hat-Check Bunny, Table Bunny. Each Bunny wore a satin bodysuit that matched her ears and high heels.

  She told me that when they had open auditions, hundreds of girls showed up.

  “Walt is a Number One Key Holder,” Sheila said. “That means he can ask the Bunnies out.”

  “But he’s with your mom, right?”

  “He doesn’t do it because he loves her.”

  This was so romantic we just sat there a minute until Sheila opened a drawer and pulled out a big ball of white yarn.

  “I’m making myself a tail,” she said.

  Sheila passed it to me. I saw how she’d cut all the yarn into same-size pieces and tied them in the middle. But I wasn’t sure if I should say I liked the tail. Should I act indifferent? Sheila’s mouth was in a neutral position but I knew if I messed up, her lips could easily slide into a snide smile and she would say something to humiliate me. When I was embarrassed, the tips of my ears got as red as bell peppers.

  Sheila turned on the radio that sat on her nightstand. “Black Betty” blasted into the room. I was trying to like the song but the lyrics reminded me of how the health teacher warned us when we menstruated we smelled. Sheila sat against the wall on the gold shag, her eyes open, but behind her eyes she was asleep.

  “Ziggy Stardust” came on the radio next. I knew not everyone liked David Bowie, so I kept my expression neutral. You couldn’t like anything that was too weird because then that weirdness jumped onto you.

  “I don’t like David Bowie,” Sheila said. “He can’t decide whether he’s a boy or a girl.”

  I nodded without looking at her. If I looked at her face I knew she’d see I loved Bowie. Instead I concentrated on Sheila’s feet: her toes were long and thin, her nails a lovely pink lavender, and her baby toe was so perfectly formed it looked edible.

  My life was now divided into two categories: time away from Sheila, which had that odd combination of dullness and anxiety, and time with her. Together we had our routine: Cheez Whiz, Tab, General Hospital. Laura was sleeping with an old guy who had seduced her only to get back at her mother. Sheila wouldn’t let me talk during the show, only when the commercials came on. The thing about Laura was that even when she was sleeping with older guys she still looked, with her big wet eyes and golden hair, as innocent as a baby. Nothing she did ever stuck to her, or diminished her. She never seemed to learn anything from her mistakes either, but this was a small price to pay for going through the world doing whatever you wanted.

  After Gener
al Hospital, we did the problems in our math workbook, and then answered the lame questions at the back of the chapter in our history textbook. They seemed designed for people with brain damage. The history class was taught by Coach Carter; all he did in class was tell us to read our textbooks, while he sat at his desk looking at pictures in Sports Illustrated. The brazenness of his lack of interest appealed to me. And I loved how he threw a Nerf football, which he kept in his bottom desk drawer, at the boy in the back who always fell asleep.

  Only once did I make the mistake of mentioning Sheila’s father. I asked where he worked. I could tell by the way her eyes blanked that I’d made a huge mistake. The way the words came out made it sound as if I suspected he was a prostitute and, to be honest, I had speculated, in the privacy of my bedroom, that he might be a male prostitute. I thought of him in his sad little apartment with a collection of sex toys, painting his toenails while he wore girls’ underwear. I waited for her to say something mean about my own pathetic family, but she just sat perfectly still, as if I had not said anything, before walking into the kitchen to get us another can of Tab.

  After our homework we went into her mother’s room and Sheila read from either Sybil or Fear of Flying. Sybil had twenty-three personalities. Two were boys and one was a prostitute. Sheila read how Sybil’s evil mother shit in the neighbor’s yard and then hung Sibyl upside down from the kitchen ceiling. In Fear of Flying, Sheila always read the part about sex being like Velveeta cheese. I was fascinated with Velveeta, how if you melted a slice on top of an English muffin pizza, it melted more like plastic than cheese. I often found myself thinking of the odd texture during my last class. Now I had to wonder if all this time I had been actually thinking about sex. When we got to the part that said His penis . . . is the tall red smokestack of an ocean liner, we’d laugh so hard Tab came out of our noses. But it was the part about the zipless fuck, which Sheila always read last, that really appealed to me. Instead of worrying about the mechanics, the male part going into the female, you could just lie like two people in footie pajamas, next to each other on a couch.

  After Fear of Flying we practiced our Bunny moves. We approached the table, pivoted carefully, and “tailed.” We practiced asking customers for their keys and then responded when they showed them, Thank you, Mr. Pochucknick. We did the Bunny dip: while serving drinks, instead of bending over the table, exposing our breasts, we placed our right foot behind us and swayed our backs to set down the flamingo with the orange slice wrapped around a cherry and stuck with a tiny red plastic sword. We also practiced the Bunny stance, backs arched, hips tucked. We did this only if key members were watching. We practiced “perching” on the back of a chair or sofa, tipping our heads and giving the Number One Key Holders sly smiles.

  At exactly 6:15 every weeknight, Sheila’s mom came home from her job at the makeup counter at Leggett’s. She was violently cheerful, asking me, as she moved around the kitchen, if I had a boyfriend or if I was going to the spring formal. She asked where my dad preached and she didn’t approve when I said he’d given up church. She wore several shades of eye shadow that blended into one another like the tiered colors on a bird’s wing, and her eyebrows were drawn in with black pencil. Walt called at exactly seven, just as she was setting the plates down for dinner. Walt, she’d told me, was from an old Virginia family. His great-grandfather had been lieutenant governor and, while it was true his main income came from lot rentals at several trailer parks, when his father finally died, he would be a zillionaire. I’d watched him get out of his Volvo in a rumpled seersucker suit, his face long and red and his nose looking like it was constructed entirely out of raspberries. Mostly she just listened, her ear pressed into the receiver, but occasionally she said Oh stop that or You’re so bad. I thought this was odd as Sheila told me her mom had met Walt at First Baptist. If he didn’t call, Sheila’s mom fretted, saying he was probably chatting up his secretary, who was clearly after him. While she ate she looked through magazines, compiling lists of hors d’oeuvres to make for Walt’s surprise birthday party.

  On Saturday my mom dropped me off at the mall. Sheila had ridden in early with her mom, as she did every Saturday. She hung around the makeup counter while her mom loaded the cash register and set out the makeup. I had assumed we’d meet in the French Quarter, but unlike me, Sheila preferred the Orange Julius on the ground floor.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said, throwing myself into the orange plastic seat.

  “It’s OK,” she said.

  When things got quiet, Sheila stared like babies do at a point just over my head. Her silence was the opposite of my dad’s. With him, you felt the strong current of his interest and that that interest was not focused on you. But Sheila’s silence was empty, like a dog’s or a cat’s.

  The Orange Julius mixer whirred. The boy behind the counter told the girl he was waiting on that he’d signed up to join the Marines. The orange wall behind Sheila’s head vibrated. I watched people coming into the dark mall from a rectangle of pure light.

  “What’s up with the party planning?” I asked.

  “My mom is obsessed,” she said. “Last night she made three kinds of mushroom caps.”

  Besides being a key-carrying member of the Playboy Club and a trailer-park mogul, Walt was also a Redskins fanatic. His car was covered with bumper stickers and he and his friends from church sometimes caravanned it up to Washington for games. If he stayed home, he took Sheila’s mom to the Fiji Island to watch the game on the TV that hung over the bar. Afterward they went to his place. I imagined Frank Sinatra playing on the stereo, Walt sitting in a satin smoking jacket, like Hugh Hefner, eating stuffed mushroom caps off a silver plate.

  I wasn’t sure what girls did at the mall. My only experience had been with Jill and I knew there was no way Sheila would want to smoke bean pods in the French Quarter bathroom. Sheila just sat there, more like a cow than a dog. Her inertness was horrible and fascinating. I had hoped we’d move from Chess King to Spencer’s Gifts, trying on tops, buying flip-flops or rhinestone studs set into plastic. Mostly I had hoped that kids from school, who also roamed the mall on Saturdays, would see us together. This was the one public place where people could see us together because at school Sheila didn’t speak to me. That hardly mattered, though; my worship of her was too fierce to be called love. It hardly mattered if she never spoke to me at all, as long as I could bind myself to her by a secret vow. I followed her down the hallway at a distance. When she hung around the audiovisual room talking to Mr. Ramin, I waited outside, pretending to search for something in my backpack. Mr. Ramin sat surrounded by overhead projectors and filmstrip canisters, with his feet up on his desk. He wore Earth shoes, a Western shirt with silver snaps, and bell-bottoms with rust-colored stitching on the pockets. Sheila did the Bunny perch on the side of his desk and listened to him talk about his band, Earth Tone, and how they were about to get a record deal.

  Time inside Tanglewood was like time in Narnia: it stretched out like Silly Putty and had no relation to time outside. After we browsed the crocheted penis-warmers and the candy underpants and each bought Playboy Bunny shot glasses at Spencer’s Gifts, we sat on the fountain’s edge and watched the lid of a plastic cup stuck in the bubbling water. I had the feeling Sheila was waiting for someone. Maybe Mr. Ramin had said he would be shopping for drumsticks at the mall music store. Maybe they’d agreed to meet and I was the cover. I’d stand in front of the bathroom while they had sex inside.

  When I asked if she was waiting for anyone, she acted the same way she did when I mentioned her father—completely blank as if I hadn’t said anything. Senior citizens sat around us waiting for the A&W to open so they could get their lunches for $1.99. A group of boys walked by us; one pushed another toward us while the rest laughed. It was funny that I was ugly and Sheila angelic.

  Finally, Sheila pointed, and I saw the woman she’d been waiting for. When I tried to ask her if she was Walt’s ex-wife or some teacher who had tortured her in elementary school
, she put her finger to her lips and grasped my hand, and we followed the woman. The lady’s hair was clearly synthetic, her ankles thick, and her stride a bit too wide. Even though the woman was middle-aged she seemed much younger, a girl even younger than myself, trying to figure out how to apply makeup and walk like a lady.

  She rode the escalator up to the French Quarter and we followed her through the darkened halls, past the wishing well and the thatched-roof shops. She stopped in front of the bridal shop and gazed at the rhinestone tiara and lace veils. The woman moved through the French Quarter and back down the escalator. When she was nearly at the mall’s front door, she looked over her shoulder and I saw up close her heavy foundation makeup and her large, angular nose. Fear flashed over her features as she realized we were following her, and she ran through the doors into the bright parking-lot light.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  Sheila didn’t answer, though I could tell by her flushed face how upset she was. She walked out of the entrance of J. C. Penney where my dad had said he’d pick us up.

  When we got back to Bent Tree we went right up to Sheila’s room where she paced the floor, saying it was gross and creepy to dress up like a girl if you were really a man. She put Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” on her record player. A weird expression came over her face.

  “Make the sex sounds,” she commanded.

  I laughed.