Finally, after school one day, she spoke to me. She’d seen Beth rooting in the garbage cans beside our house, gnawing at a stale honey bun, then using a stick to shovel applesauce into her mouth.
“Beth is a little weird,” I said. “Did you know she was a math genius? She can do problems even God couldn’t figure out.”
My mother looked at me with an expression I was familiar with—she’d had the same expression when I tried to tell her that tomatoes were giant berries or that the reason I’d gotten a D on a test was that I’d had amnesia. She knew something was off, that what I said was only part of what I actually meant.
“No,” she said slowly, “I wasn’t aware of that.”
“It’s very weird,” I said.
“I haven’t seen Mrs. Bamburg lately,” my mom said. She sat on the couch and set her laundry basket beside her. “Her car is always sitting in the driveway.”
Now that she was talking to me again, I wanted to confess everything to her. I’d tell her the Bamburg kids were hungry, how they had no money for toothpaste or laundry soap, how Beth had a cough she could not get rid of and Jill was so worried about the rent she was lucky if she slept a few hours a night. But I couldn’t betray my friend.
“That’s because Mrs. Bamburg got a job as a guard at a warehouse,” I said. “She works all night and sleeps all day.”
“Those poor kids,” my mother said, shaking her head.
I knew she was satisfied for now, but that it was only a matter of time before she found out that Jill’s mom was missing.
I ran over to Jill’s to warn her that my mother was suspicious. I found her upstairs sprawled over her bed. I expected that after I told her, she would ask me to help her run up into the woods and live off the land. Living off the land was an interest we shared. Jill wanted to build a hut with a moss-covered floor and a hole in the roof so the smoke from our fire could escape up into the night. She wanted to steal the goats from the petting zoo up at Mill Mountain. They looked so miserable chained to the mesh fence. We would let them eat wildflowers, then milk them and make goat cheese. My notebook was full of the furniture I planned to build by weaving together branches with kudzu vines, and I had the ingenious idea of stuffing pillowcases with leaves for our mattress.
But Jill didn’t even change positions on the bed. Her head was tipped backward; the ends of her hair brushed the shag. Tented beside her was her mother’s copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
She was sick, she told me, of using pages of the telephone book for toilet paper and eating stale hot dog buns.
She didn’t seem to care that my mom might find out her secret. “Whatever happens,” she said, “I’m going to try and be philosophical about it.”
I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed that I hadn’t tried harder to cover up about her mom being gone or if she was just exhausted. I watched her eat one-third of the Little Debbie cake I’d snuck over, carefully leaving some for Beth and Ronnie. I tried to get her interested in a game of Scrabble or Frustration. She just lay there with her eyes half-closed.
Finally, I picked up a safety pin sitting in a bowl next to her bed.
“Let’s become blood sisters,” I said.
She sat up.
“Let me go first,” she said.
She stuck the pin into the pad of her thumb and when she pulled it out a small bead of blood appeared.
I stuck the needle into my thumb, a prick that was cold and then warm as a dot of blood rose up. We pressed our thumbs together and our blood mixed.
I never found out who called social services. My mom denied it. Anybody could have seen Beth eating out of the garbage. Jill warned her to stop, but she was relentless, going from duplex to duplex, picking out pizza crusts and half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches. Whoever called, the result was that early on Saturday morning, the Bamburg children filed out, youngest to oldest, followed by a chubby lady carrying Jill’s back brace. Jill had on several layers of clothing, her two favorite sweaters, and both her mom’s suede coat with the fur collar and her ski vest with the rainbow on the back. I ran outside in my nightgown, and when Jill saw me her face flooded with a huge and ludicrous smile.
After they drove away, I went back into the house. Phillip was on the couch, watching cartoons, eating Cap’n Crunch one by one out of the box. My parents were still asleep. I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom and tried to stare at my face so long it would no longer seem like mine. Then I hunched my back, opened my eyes wide, and ran the water, pretending to do the dishes the way Jill did, with quick mechanical movements of my hands. I pretended to lay the dishes out beside the sink to dry. I did this until my dad knocked on the door, asking about the endless running water. When I opened the door, his hair was hanging around his face and he wore his seminary T-shirt over his pajama bottoms. I slipped past him.
In my room I walked back and forth from wall to wall thirty-three times. As I paced, the light moved incrementally over the shag. I figured if I used Jesus’s age any evil spirits in the room would be blasted out the window.
When my mother called me down to lunch, I went, but I could not eat any of my cheese sandwich and potato chips. I just stared at the food until the tiny holes in the bread looked huge and the chips made a grease stain on my paper plate. At first the grease spots looked like the chain of Caribbean islands, but after I stared long enough they looked like the freckles on Jill’s collarbone.
In my room I set up all the objects I had crushes on, starting with an empty Avon perfume bottle shaped like a puppy. Always before, when I’d touched it and smelled it, I felt a small expansion, as if part of my heart were warm Silly Putty. But this wasn’t working. None of my other crushes—like the silk scarf with huge pale-pink roses or the spoon with the filigree handle—had any effect on me.
Finally I took my book on burial rites off the shelf and stared at the front cover. It was the only thing I had that always worked. I’d checked it out of the library three times in a row and I never intended to give it back. I’d decided if the librarian, a skinny lady who always had red lipstick smudged on her teeth—which made it seem as if she’d been eating live chickens—ever said I couldn’t check it out anymore, I would wait until it was checked back in, take it off the shelf, sneak into the bathroom, throw the book out the window, and then go around outside and pick it up. Who else in Roanoke could possibly need the Big Book of Burial Rites as much as I did? Who would pore lovingly over the description of widows, sometimes girls as young as sixteen, throwing themselves into the flames of their husbands’ funeral pyres?
Now, though, I was afraid to open it. I was afraid that it too might have lost its power to comfort me. I traced the letters on the cover with my finger and lay for a few minutes with the weight of the book on my lap.
I couldn’t help myself. I opened it up to Chapter Six and stared at the photograph of the rogyapa, or body breaker, who used a sledgehammer to disassemble a body so vultures could freely eat the organs. The caption read: The rogyapa’s cheerfulness makes it easier for the soul of the deceased to move out of purgatory and into the next life.
I flipped back to the chapter about the sokushinbutsu monks who spent years trying to mummify themselves. First they ate only nuts and seeds, then bark and roots, and then, for the last month of their lives, they drank poison tea. Finally each monk locked himself into a stone tomb, barely larger than his body. In the tomb there was just a breathing tube and a bell. Each day while he was still alive, the monk rang the bell; when the bell stopped sounding, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed. Three years later the tomb was opened and, voila, there was a tiny mummified monk! The living monks carried the body to the altar and worshipped it as a Buddha.
I closed the book and went downstairs to see if I could find some nuts in the kitchen cabinet. I ate a handful of walnuts. On Monday I could buy a bag of sunflower seeds at the Hop-In. Roots and bark would be easy to come by up on the mountain. Only six more years until I’d be locked inside a cryp
t in the lotus position, my body so lean and untasty even the maggots would not want me.
My father came downstairs into the kitchen. He was on his way to his second job at the psych center. When we lived in the rectory, I’d often see him walking across the lawn between the church and rectory in his black surplice and white robe, his silver pectoral cross swinging around his neck and a smile on his face. Now he worked not only nine to five at the VA hospital, but also at the psych center most nights. He looked tired out all the time, distracted. He wore his blazer with the frayed lapel, a wide pink tie, and bell-bottom jeans.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said, grabbing the keys off the hook on the wall and heading out the door.
I got out the Fred Flintstone jelly glass, my hands shaking as I poured the milk up to the top of his hairdo. My beautiful friend was gone. I stared at the green wall phone.
You had to believe really hard to make anything happen. It was like God—you believed in Him to make Him exist.
Call me, I mouthed, shooting out a beam of light to wherever Jill might be now.
All weekend I’d lain across my bed with my head tipped back—exactly as Jill had—staring up at the ceiling, sending out SOS signals from my brain to hers. Several times in the night, I stood in the dark kitchen and commanded the phone to sound. By Monday, as I got dressed for school, I’d convinced myself I would never see Jill again, that she’d been sent to the orphanage in the country. I’d never seen the actual building, just the metal sign on the highway that read DANDYLOCK GIRLS’ HOME. Maybe she’d gone berserk like the runaway girls in made-for-TV movies, cutting off chunks of her hair with a switchblade and screaming swear words. In that case, I figured, she’d be down at the reform school in Richmond.
I’d been at Low Valley Junior High only a few months, but I’d heard stories about girls who disappeared. Kids said one girl was a prostitute now in Atlanta, and another had run away with an old man to France. An eighth-grade girl who’d disappeared the year before had shown up one day in home economics, just as our teacher was going over how to ferment pickles. The girl told everyone she’d spent a year at a private school in New Orleans, but Jill said everyone knew a guy on the football team had knocked her up and she’d been sent down to relatives in Florida while she was pregnant. It was not unusual for girls to disappear, to turn into stories, but it was rare for them to come back, to change back again into girls.
As I suspected, Jill’s seat in homeroom was empty, and the teacher, knowing we were friends, asked if I knew where she was.
“No ma’am,” I said.
The intercom crackled to life and the principal, Mr. Powers, told us, in his intense Southern accent, that anyone participating in a food fight in the cafeteria would be suspended and that our football team, the Mighty Eagles, were still undefeated and, on a side note, that the new smorgasbord restaurant out in Salem was delicious.
The door flew open while the principal praised the potato salad and there was Jill, waving a note for the teacher. She wore her favorite cheesecloth shirt, blue cords, and a pair of new fur-lined clogs. She took her seat and smiled at me, mouthing I missed you. I was so happy I felt I might float out of my chair and up to the ceiling.
She opened her notebook, the one with the to-do lists, and wrote furtively, every now and then glancing up to smile.
“We got split up!” she said to me once the bell rang and we were out in the hallway. “I don’t even know where Beth is!”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“I’m with a brakeman and his wife out by Tilden Lake. I sleep in their dead daughter’s bedroom!”
Everyone knew Tilden Lake was haunted.
“Is that the girl who comes out of the lake asking why the fish ate her eyes?”
Jill shivered.
“I have to sleep in her room!”
“That’s creepy.”
“She was a cute little girl, I have to give her that. There are pictures of her up all over the house.”
In our first-period class, Jill asked so many questions about Chairman Mao—Did he have false teeth? What was Mao’s opinion on foot binding? Did he believe in dragons?—that our social studies teacher had to tell her to let somebody else have a turn. In health class she seemed idiotically interested in the five food groups. Even in English, which was her most hated subject, she wrote a poem about a girl waiting for a soldier in a bus station.
Little girl. Little girl.
Who will catch you?
You sit on
the bench beside the mother
with her baby
and the black lady
reading her Bible.
She seemed to be set at a higher speed than usual, fluttering her fingers, cracking her neck, pulling her legs up under her body. At lunch, she quickly lifted out of her bag a ham sandwich, an orange, and a homemade brownie wrapped in plastic. I could tell by the careful way she set each item on the table how much the food meant to her.
“Now that the police are searching,” she said, “it’s only a matter of time before they find my mom.”
It was pretty clear to me she was using words to make a little ledge for her to stand on. I nodded, but I didn’t think her family would be coming together anytime soon. If her mother hadn’t come back by now, she was probably out in California. Or she might have passed out of her human form into a small mummy sitting lotus-style in a cave someplace.
Jill’s eyes kept sliding down the length of the table to where Dwayne sat with some of the boys from the bus. Dwayne was talking about sacrificing frogs to pagan gods and using black magic to communicate with Duane Allman. On the bus that morning, without Jill there to protect me, he’d dared me to pull up my shirt, and when I refused he called me a lezzbo. He called poor Pam “Kool-Aid face” because of her birthmark and dared her to French kiss him. I had no idea why Jill would have any interest in him, but on her way back from the trash can she slowed in front of him and jutted out her skinny hips.
During gym, we played volleyball, the girls’ class against the boys’. Jill stood in the front by the net, across from Dwayne. He stared at her, and I could tell that Jill was discombobulated. Something about his gaze made it impossible for her to think. Mid-game, after he’d spiked the ball so hard it knocked off Pam’s glasses, he spoke to Jill, but I was too far back to hear what either said. The girls’ gym teacher, Mrs. Popsic, kept squatting down, clasping her hands together straight out in front of her, and shouting, “Got it!” whenever the ball came near where we both stood. Mrs. Popsic was the cheerleading sponsor, a middle-aged lady with short hair. On game days she helped the girls decorate the football players’ lockers, taping construction paper signs—GO GET ’EM EAGLES—to the painted metal and placing candy bars on top of the jocks’ textbooks.
After the volleyball game, the locker room rang with girls’ voices. I hated the large white-tiled room with the multiple shower spigots because: (a) I hated to be naked in front of anyone but myself, and (b) I’d once seen a prison movie where inmates got stabbed in a room that looked exactly like that one. Blood clinging to white tile was not an image I’d ever forget. The only way you got out of taking a group shower was to go up to Mrs. Popsic and say P. This meant you could use one of the half-dozen private showers. I said P once a month because I didn’t want the other girls to know that P had not visited me yet.
After we showered—which for Jill and me just meant running into the room, sticking our butts into the spray, and then running back out into the locker room—Jill pulled on her four-leaf-clover underpants and white bra. She was the slightest bit ahead of me development-wise. While I had the smallest swelling around my nips, as Jill called them, and a few stray black hairs between my legs, Jill had a puff of hair under each arm, and her breasts, while small, were definitely there. I worried that Jill was going away from me, transforming from a girl who was willing to listen to my Disney records and even occasionally play with my dolls into a teenager who wanted to read Tiger Beat, talk
about Bobby Sherman, and write the names of boys over and over in her notebook. Her eyes would deaden and she’d be another zombie girl roaming the hallways of Low Valley with shiny hair and an add-a-bead necklace.
Jill hummed and stared down at the floor where the metal bench support bolted into the cement.
I turned to my locker, pulled up my jeans with the raindrop pockets, and started to button my shirt.
“Get dressed,” I said with my back to her. “We’ll be late for the bus.”
I saw Mrs. Popsic in her office, the walls covered with Eagle Pride posters and black-and-white photographs of sports teams. I sat on the bench to pull up my socks and, as I sat there, Jill took a step—still in her bra and underwear—out into the middle of the locker room. At first I thought she was going to the fountain for a drink of water. Instead, she ran out the double swing doors and into the hallway.
The girls got quiet and watched the door swing back inside. I ran to the door and pushed it open a crack. I saw the boys’ faces. One in a striped short-sleeve shirt let his mouth fall so far open I could see his silver fillings. Dwayne, in his beige corduroys and big Confederate flag belt buckle, had an expression on his face I can only describe as gratitude. At first Jill just stood there, like a deer caught in the headlights of the boys’ stares, but then she twirled, her eyes closed, her arms swinging at her sides, her bare feet moving over the linoleum tiles. Jill’s back was white in the bright hallway lights, her spine like a string of pearls running down under her skin.
Mrs. Popsic dragged Jill into the locker room and stood beside her while she dressed, asking her over and over: Had she lost her mind? Did she think a prank like that would get her anywhere? She yanked her toward Mr. Powers’s office. When Jill came out, her face was red and wet. She told me later that Mr. Powers had threatened her with his fraternity paddle, then picked up the phone and dialed her foster mom, Mrs. Swenson. Jill begged me to ride home with her on the bus.
Sister Golden Hair: A Novel Page 10