Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  Twice my mom had taken us to the mall, but both times she’d only wanted to shop for bargains at J. C. Penney, and I had had to run after Phillip, who had a terrible habit of wandering off in department stores.

  At the end of the first week of school, Jill persuaded her mom to drop us off at the mall. I told my mom that Mrs. Bamburg would be shopping with us, even though I knew she planned to go off to the Ground Round across the road and drink beer with her friend.

  The bean pods, wrapped in tinfoil and stuck in Jill’s Mexican shoulder bag, made a muted rattling sound against her hip as we moved through the mall.

  “They have samples in the cheese shop,” Jill said, “the sweetest cheese you’ve ever tasted.”

  “What kind is it?”

  “How should I know? What I’m trying to tell you is that it tastes good.”

  We walked through Penney’s and into the mall. So far Tanglewood was the only Sun Belt part of Roanoke. Under a cathedral ceiling, a fountain bubbled beside soaring palm trees. I actually felt like I’d been transported to one of the planets I was always reading about in science fiction novels. We passed Chess King, Jeans West, Merry-Go-Round, where a whole carousel of suede fringe vests were on sale. I was still confused as to why we couldn’t just smoke the pods up in the woods in back of Bent Tree.

  Jill was on a mission, leading me toward the French Quarter, the mall’s soft, sweet center. Under a brick archway lay a darkened expanse of small shops with thatched roofs and gold windows. We roamed the dim corridors past the window of the Tennis Villa, where a white dress shimmered, smelled fresh-ground coffee wafting out the door of Lock, Stock, and Barrel, and passed the Seven Dwarfs, whose window featured imports from Europe—Hummel figurines, music boxes, crystal ashtrays. The mannequin in the bridal shop had blue glass eyes and long eyelashes. She stared across the corridor to the mannequin in the Hancock’s men’s shop window, in a sports coat and leather driving gloves.

  Jill swung open the door of the restroom in Le Brasserie, the French Quarter sidewalk café.

  I’d hoped for gold-leaf walls and French-looking light fixtures but was disappointed. The room was painted an institutional green and the sink was stainless steel, though once Jill turned off the lights, knelt, and lit the candle, the walls turned sepia. She unwrapped the tinfoil and placed one pod after another on a paper towel. Then she passed me the white peasant blouse with red embroidery around the neck that she insisted I wear for the ceremony.

  Jill felt all the people in Bent Tree had known each other in earlier lives. All the souls gathered together in the duplexes had always been linked, first in the same Indian tribe and, before that, as members of a royal French family and, before that, as slaves owned by the same Pharaoh. Each time it was different; I could have been her mother in one life and in another we might have been married. My father might have been my son or even my boyfriend! She was hoping to be able to see back into some of the lives, or maybe even get some information that would help us free ourselves from Bent Tree and go into what she called another dimension.

  “Are you sure the door is locked?” Jill asked.

  I checked again and nodded.

  “OK then,” she said, holding the first pod to the candle’s flame. The tip caught, glowed orange, and, when Jill held it to her lips, a single tendril of lavender smoke rose up in the dark air between us. She passed the pod to me. The wet tip tasted like a dried leaf and the smoke was grainy against my lungs.

  “I’m feeling something,” Jill said, closing her eyes. “Something like I’m an Indian in the olden times. I can see a bowl of dry corn in front of me and two naked children playing with a hoop.”

  The scene she described was directly from an illustration in our social studies textbook.

  “What about the future?” I asked.

  Jill clenched her eyes tighter, and the candle sent an angle of underwater light over her face.

  “I see a fish,” she said. “It’s staring right at me!”

  Jill opened her eyes.

  “Go on, take another puff,” she said. “Maybe you’ll see something.”

  I sucked on the end of the pod and held the smoke down in my lungs. I expected to feel light-headed and see a lava-light show, but instead I saw a ranch house made of red brick with green shutters. There was nothing remarkable about the house, but something about its very normalness bothered me. When I opened my eyes, Jill was staring at me, her eyes wide and sad in the dark.

  “I see myself sitting at a desk,” I said.

  “Are you writing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Try to see,” she said. “It’s important.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined black letters against white paper.

  “It’s a story about a walrus.”

  “A walrus?” she said.

  I laughed a little and I saw Jill’s face pinch up. Her features rearranged themselves and her cheeks got red.

  “If you’re not going to take this seriously,” she said, “then we should just forget it.”

  “What?” I said, trying to hold back my laughter. “You don’t like my story?”

  “You’re making fun of me!”

  “You saw a fish!”

  “It was a catfish with whiskers.” Jill shuddered. “And it looked a little like my daddy.”

  “Black fish are often the bearers of terrible news,” I said. “Sometimes they even come to warn sinners about the apocalypse.”

  Jill stood up and threw the bean pod into the toilet, where it sunk with a sharp hiss. She jammed the unlit bean pods into the trash can. Then she unlocked the door and ran out into the French Quarter.

  I searched the mall for an hour. I looked in the arcade, Orange Julius, even the girls’ section of J. C. Penney, before I finally found her downstairs in the back of Spencer’s Gifts looking up at an oscillating black-light poster, green and orange diamonds shifting round and round. The colors were not comforting like the golden images of my View-Master or the emerald and sapphire hues of the church’s stained-glass windows. Neon-pink daisies grew out of a skull’s empty eye sockets. Above us, the speaker blasted “Free Bird” so loud it seemed we had fallen into a pocket of stillness between the notes of the song.

  “My mom says God hates our family.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “How do you know that God doesn’t hate us?”

  I just knew, but I couldn’t prove or explain. My dad thought God, if he existed at all, was powerless. But Jill felt God was strange, terrifying, and real. Her face in the strobe was pale and eerie. Her eyes were sunken, and all I could think of was how in health class Sheila had told us that if you went to the edge of Tilden Lake at night, threw in three stones, and said the Hail Mary backward, a satanic Mary appeared and threw a dead baby at you. I could see the black lake water and the top of Mary’s head breaking the surface, her neon-blue face sliding up out of the dark.

  The night before Halloween, I lay in my bed, imagining spirits seeping out of the earth, swirling in the air over Bent Tree. I finally drifted off but I didn’t sleep long. It was still dark when I awoke to the sound of a voice calling my name. I wasn’t really surprised; I knew it was just a matter of time before creatures from the netherworld tried to contact me. I . . . hear . . . you, I whispered slowly. But the voice just kept on saying my name until I realized the voice was outside, and that Jill was standing in the street in front of our duplex, her ski jacket pulled over her nightgown, her feet stuck into her brother’s huge tennis shoes.

  When she saw me at the window, her face lit up and she motioned wildly for me to meet her down at the front door. I pulled the knob and she shoved her social studies notebook at me, showing me the list she’d written out in pencil. As I read, she leaned over me, her face pale and anxious. Under the heading Haunted House, she had written Dracula’s Cave? Mad Scientist Laboratory? Dr. Frankenstein Workshop? Under the heading Games, she had written Bobbing for Apples, Musical Chairs, Drop the Clothes
pin in the Milk Bottle, The Limbo.

  Jill looked at me, her black pupils huge even in the near-dark.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “In the night I started thinking about sickos that stick razor blades in candy apples.”

  I was familiar, through my mother’s stories, with how hippie drug culture had collided with freaky homeowners to create lunatics who seemed to enjoy poisoning candy in an effort to kill off neighborhood kids. I’d heard about the heroin-sprinkled chocolate-covered raisins, needles stuck into Snickers bars, cyanide in Pixy Stix.

  “But what can we do?” I said. I ran my hands up and down over my goose-pimpled arms. The sky was gray and low and branches blew around all over the side of the mountain.

  “We’ll have a party,” she said, “a safe place so the creeps can’t kill them.”

  I was learning that Jill had the spark and intensity of a downed electrical wire. Her notebooks were filled with lists. Ten Qualities of a Friend. Why Dogs Are Better than Cats. How to Survive in a Blizzard. She was always the first to raise her hand in class, and even though she’d ended up getting only eleven votes, she’d run for class president, telling us during her speech that she would make chocolate milkshakes available for sale in the cafeteria and that for the winter dance, she and her team would build a Transylvanian castle, transforming the gym into a Gothic wonderland.

  During the physical fitness tests in gym, I’d watched her hold on to the metal bar. The narrow muscles of her neck stood out like hot-dog meat, and as she grimaced I saw her skull and collarbone, her skeleton gripping the bar for dear life.

  She was determined to educate me about the ways of Bent Tree, as if the place were a country of its own with history and ritual that only she could impart.

  First, practical danger. The guy who lived with his mother in 3B might offer to take my picture. He’d say I had a certain look and imply he had contacts in Hollywood. NEVER EVER EVER go into his duplex under any circumstance.

  There was an older lady who lived with her sister in 9A. They might seem friendly but it was important never to be seen speaking with them.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because they’re Eldridges!”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You don’t know?” Jill was incredulous.

  I shook my head.

  “Their ancestors took in Union soldiers during the Civil War.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said.

  “Not really,” Jill said. “Once a traitor, always a traitor.”

  She told me to watch out for the Christers in 2B, 7A, and 20B.

  “They have big smiles and they act all friendly,” she said, “but the next thing you know they’re offering to drive you to their prayer group.”

  People moved out at the end of every month; August and January saw the biggest loss of occupants. She’d watched and written down lists of the things she saw floating out duplex doorways: a taxidermied cat curled up on its satin cat bed; a giant Styrofoam strawberry; a red, white, and blue life-size cutout of Evel Knievel. In the boxes left behind, you could find treasures: zodiac medallions, Mexican handbags, ponchos covered with dog hair.

  She believed that Mr. Ananais had a secret yin-yang method of pairing people in adjacent duplexes so that they balanced each other out. Next door to her family lived an out-of-work brakeman for the railroad, a sweet chubby guy who ate hamburger patties and heated up Tater Tots for dinner every night and who told Jill and her brother stories of ghost trains and haunted railroad stations. Without him living in the building, Jill was convinced the place would rip free of its foundation and float into the sky. And beside Sheila was a lady who was so annoyingly friendly that she balanced out Sheila’s bitchiness. I could see Jill was right. Mrs. Smith, who lived next to us in 12B, loved Nixon and was still sad because the South had lost the Civil War. Her duplex was filled with teddy bears and Civil War memorabilia. The year before, she’d been chairwoman of the Daughters of the Confederacy’s Civil War Ball. According to Jill, Mrs. Smith balanced out my dad’s hippie tendencies. (He now believed Jesus was a real person, a rebel like Che Guevara or Cesar Chavez. God, he was convinced, was as much in the rushing Roanoke River as inside any church.)

  The thing that haunted Jill was how once people moved out of Bent Tree they seemed to disappear completely. People claimed they were moving to cheaper apartments like Sans Souci over on Garst Mill Road or Guilford Manor out by the airport. But Jill had never seen anyone after they left. It was as if, after pulling out of the entrance, they entered another dimension completely.

  I was learning that when Jill got an idea in her head, it was hard for me to resist joining her. I put on my clothes and we walked to Kroger, where we used our babysitting money to buy mini candy bars, pretzels, potato chips, and a turnip. Jill said her Grandmother Brendy told her that turnips would protect us from evil spirits. Back at Bent Tree, we went to work cleaning up her family’s duplex. All afternoon we worked, wiping down the bathroom and the kitchen, vacuuming the shag, and trying to air out the living room.

  We let Ronnie choose from Jill’s list of party themes. He opted for Mad Scientist Laboratory. He boiled spaghetti for guts and twisted apart a few of Beth’s dolls for body parts. He wasn’t all that interested in looking like a mad scientist with crazy hair and a white lab coat. Instead, he wrapped his mother’s boa around his neck, outlined his eyes with black liner, and played his Bowie record on 78 so the music elongated. I had noticed Ronnie’s fondness for eyeliner and that around the house he sometimes wore Jill’s skinny turtlenecks. As we cleaned, we heard him laughing maniacally into his cassette player.

  Beth mixed Kool-Aid in a plastic pitcher and set out Dixie cups. She poured snacks into bowls and arranged them on the table, then retreated to the bathroom to draw dots on her cheeks in imitation of Pippi Longstocking.

  Once we finished cleaning, Jill and I lay on her bed making a schedule for the party; our legs were touching and she pressed her shoulder into mine. Jill smelled like muddy rainwater and her breath still had the afterburn from the bag of barbecue potato chips we’d split on our walk back from the grocery store.

  Was I a lezzbo? This I considered a very good question. I didn’t really know what lezzbos did. When I closed my eyes at night, I never imagined our naked bodies twined together. I envisioned the two of us walking up the side of the mountain holding hands. I thought of myself like a tree or a flower. I had longing, but it was not explicitly aimed at anything.

  At four, with his hair gelled back, the boa around his neck, and lipstick blood flowing from both sides of his mouth, Ronnie went to wake Mrs. Bamburg for work.

  “Bad news,” he said, speaking with a sexy-evil Transylvanian accent. “She does not answer.”

  “I’ll get her up,” Jill said.

  Jill had a trick to lure her mother out of bed. She put on the Allman Brothers, went to the kitchen, and got out a can of beer.

  “It’s near the anniversary of Duane’s death,” Ronnie said. “Hearing that might make her worse.”

  “Oh, you’re right!” Jill said, running back to the stereo, lifting the needle, and putting on the new Thin Lizzy single her mother had brought home from Woolworth’s.

  I followed her up the stairs. Even though I’d spent as much time as I could with Jill, I’d seen her mother only a few times. She had a frizzy perm and wore wire-rim glasses above her chubby cheeks. She looked more like an older sister than a mother and, like an older sister, she was usually too tired to do anything around the house. Jill did the laundry, made the beds, cleaned the bathroom. Mrs. Bamburg brought home groceries, once a week, but she just left the food on the counter for Jill to unpack.

  “Mom,” Jill called through the door. I stood in the hallway. I remembered trying to lure Miranda out of her bedroom. Maybe we should sing a song. Jill and I knew the lyrics to several John Denver songs and to “I Got You Babe.” She was always Sonny so I could be Cher. I tried to stand very still, so still I could feel my h
eart pump and my brain hum.

  There was no answer. Jill turned to me and motioned that I should stay in the hall. As she opened the door, I saw that with the curtains closed, the room was dark. Her mother had the comforter pulled over her head so her body in the bed resembled a mountain range. Warm air tinged with cigarette smoke spilled over me and into the hallway.

  Jill went to the blinds and raised them a few inches, then sat on the side of the bed.

  “Please, Mom,” she said.

  From under the covers her mother gave a grainy moan. Jill tried to pull back the comforter but her mother held it tight over her face.

  “I’m sick,” she said. “I need you to call in for me.”

  “But I did that yesterday!”

  “I don’t feel good,” she said. “I can’t go in.”

  “You got to,” Jill said, yanking the comforter.

  The soles of her mother’s feet were chalky. Her toes looked delicate and sad, the baby toe curling into the bigger one beside it as if it were lonely.

  “Give me back my blanket!” she said, sitting up and reaching toward Jill.

  Jill didn’t say anything, just stepped away from the bed so her mom couldn’t reach her.

  Downstairs Jill picked up the receiver and dialed the restaurant. She asked to speak to the manager.

  “This is Jill Bamburg.”

  She listened, nodding her head vigorously.

  “Yes. But. No sir. OK.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “If she doesn’t go in today, she’s fired.”

  This news, delivered by Jill through her mother’s bedroom door, elicited only a grunt. Her mother slept on as we filled the buckets and dropped apples into the water, rolling and shiny. Jill taped the picture of a pumpkin Beth drew on the front door and we made a list of the children we knew who lived in Bent Tree. There were eleven all together, plus two babies and, of course, Sheila and Dwayne, the older kid from the bus stop. He was what the kids in school called a dirtbag, but all I really knew was how he tortured us on the bus, dared us to lick the seats, and called all the younger boys faggots.