Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  I couldn’t say no. Jill’s new bus had a driver who was so fat he had to enter through the back emergency door. Jill said that when he died he’d have to be buried in a piano box. The kids on bus 22 were quieter than the ones on my bus. They sat in groups talking softly to one another. We got off by the side of the road in a wooded area near a mailbox with a red reflector, and Jill took my hand as we walked up the long gravel driveway toward the black lake. The wind off the water was cold and damp. My legs goose-pimpled under my pants.

  The single-story house had a wreath made of plastic flowers on the door, an American flag flying from a pole in the yard, and, on each side of the porch, silver balls sitting atop concrete pedestals. Mrs. Swenson, a woman with short frosted hair, answered the door. She was wearing a Christmas sweater.

  She told me to wait in the living room while she and Jill talked.

  I called my mom and told her I was at Jill’s, then I sat on the colonial couch and stared at the spinning wheel in one corner of the room. A big picture of the dead daughter hung over the fireplace. She was definitely a cute little girl, sitting on Santa’s lap with her uneven bangs and lopsided smile. A glass-fronted cabinet held a collection of teacups. One had a handle shaped like a lobster claw. Through the wall I heard voices, but for all the sense I could make the sounds might as well have been water. When Jill finally came out, her smile was wide and idiotic.

  “That was awful.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “Mrs. Swenson told me she’d been upset enough for several lifetimes and if I ever do something like that again, they’ll give me back.”

  “Did you promise to do better?”

  Jill nodded her head vigorously.

  “I am so going to do better! I’m going to study more, really study, not just fill in the blanks of my workbooks, but try to actually learn something. I’ll find Beth and Ronnie, I’ll make a million calls if I have to. I’ll even go door-to-door with their picture. I decided while I was sitting in Mr. Powers’s office that even if God does hate our family and he has cursed us for all eternity, I’m just going to beg him for help.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should advise Jill to beg God. What would my dad say? He didn’t seem to care if my brother or I said our bedtime prayers. Used to be he’d sit on the edge of the bed and recite along with me, Now I lay me down to sleep, and then I’d ask God to bless my family, my doll Vicky, the old peach tree in the yard. He’d let me go on and bless anything I wanted.

  “Beg him,” I said. “It’s worth a shot.”

  It was all a crapshoot, as Jill used to say. I knew you could find a certain relief in begging God—it had helped me—but on the other hand, God never answered directly and that was always depressing.

  “That’s not all, either,” Jill continued, almost breathless. “I’m going to write Mrs. Nixon and ask her to help seals and whales. I’m going to visit sick children in the hospital, the really sick ones that freak everybody else out, the ones with brain cancer and leukemia. Whenever I see old people I plan to go right up to them and ask if I can help carry their groceries, or help them up the steps. I am going to do a lot around here, too. I’ll start doing the laundry and maybe even cooking.”

  We sat on the chilly floor and played Yahtzee, Jill jiggling the dice around in the leather cup much longer than was necessary. With all the odd smells and the calico couch, it felt like we were visiting some older relative, a great-aunt we hardly knew. The pictures on the walls were prints of barns and farm animals, and the only books the Swensons seemed to have were a book on building your vocabulary and another one on knitting. Mrs. Swenson eventually went out to her Bible study at church, instructing Jill that there were cold cuts and cans of Coke in the fridge and that we could watch television in the basement. She said she’d drive me home when she got back. Her voice was a little weary; she was not a mean person, it said, she was trying to be reasonable.

  Downstairs two La-Z-boy recliners sat in front of a big television in a wood console. Jill switched around the channels but the static was too bad to really see much of anything. In the corner was a dry bar with brown leather stools. On the bar sat a bamboo container of plastic swizzle sticks like the ones they gave out at the Fiji Island. A stack of small rooster napkins sat beside glasses with images of Easter Island.

  Jill went behind the bar and lifted up a bottle filled with gold liquid.

  “Don’t you think we deserve a drink?” she said, that nutty smile spreading across her features.

  “I thought you were going to do better?”

  “I’ll do better after we have a drink,” she said, pouring a few inches of the liquid into two of the Easter Island glasses and filling them up the rest of the way with Coke. The Coke hissed and spit, sending up a tiny wisp of steam.

  “Do you really think this is a good idea?”

  “Probably not,” Jill said, “but let’s do it anyway!”

  After our first drink, Jill began to sing in fake French, a sort of goofy lullaby. The Coke was sweet and warm. I’d only ever had a glass of spiked eggnog, and another time, I’d snuck one of my dad’s beers, but now as my glass emptied and Jill went back to talking about how much she hated Mrs. Popsic—in her tennis skirt and sweater with the school emblem, an eagle, on the pocket—I felt something inside me shift. It was like I was finally able to lie down after years of standing. I felt a peace I had not felt since we’d left the rectory. I understood why grown-ups drank. The stuff was like a potion in Alice in Wonderland, the bottle marked EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT.

  After our second drink, Jill decided it was time to walk around the lake. She got a flashlight from a drawer and we walked out into the dark.

  At first the cold felt fantastic and the lake shimmered behind the house—black, with purple and a line of silver here and there. The cold wind off the water was the Holy Spirit; it did not just flow over us, we were caught up in it. Jill walked too close to the water; once her foot slipped on the frosty dirt and she nearly fell in. I told her to come back up to the path, but she just stepped rock to rock. It was so cold I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers, and the warm feeling in my stomach was turning into nausea. In the circle of light I could see foamy brown pond scum and sticks that had gathered against the muddy edge of the lake.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Jill asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to think about it.”

  “My mother told me when my dad had his first wreck, the one before the one that killed him, I wouldn’t kiss him in the hospital.”

  “You were probably just scared.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but I still feel awful about doing my daddy like that.”

  Wind rushed off the water and into my ears. Everyone believed Tilden Lake was haunted. It wasn’t just the Virgin Mary; some said a little dead girl lived at the lake bottom in a cave made of amethyst. She ate raw catfish, biting the heads off first and then peeling back the skin with her teeth. Others said they’d seen her around the lake’s edge wearing a little pink bathing suit. Jill was going out farther on the rocks, which were slick with algae and unsteady under her. She didn’t seem to care that her shoes and her pants were wet to the knees.

  “Let’s go back!” I said.

  Jill swung around.

  “You’re not going to like what I am going to tell you,” she said. “But promise you’ll go along anyway.”

  “OK,” I said, figuring she’d tell me she wanted to try to sleep in the woods, build a lean-to and start a campfire. This spot had a lot of potential. There was a fairy circle of birches and a soft patch of moss. Finally we would live off the land.

  “Dwayne is going to meet us.”

  “What?”

  “He’s waiting at the other side of the lake.”

  “Are you crazy?!”

  “We’ll just say hi and come right back.”

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not going.”

  “Fine,” she said, “I’ll go by
myself.”

  She took off down the path, running. I followed her, but I was terrified at the thought of meeting Dwayne. What if he killed us, and we went down to the lake bottom and had to live with the little dead girl in her cave? I hadn’t come to a lot of conclusions about the afterlife but I didn’t want to spend it with a ghoulish toddler. The trees around us were made of black ice, and when they moved in the wind, the sound was as delicate as a dozen chandeliers. The tiny chimes had made me feel that Jill and I were changing into unicorn girls, moving through a black glass forest toward our mysterious fate. But now that it became clear that our fate was to meet Dwayne, it all seemed pointless and pathetic. Dwayne was the perpetrator of Indian handshakes and wedgies, the boy who was the best in the school at making fart sounds with his hand shoved into his underarm.

  We came out of the tree line. Dwayne held up his lighter so we could see his long greasy hair and hunched shoulders encased in a circle of muzzy light. In Bent Tree I’d seen him sitting on a lawn chair in his duplex living room, watching a black-and-white television balanced on a cardboard box. His dad, a skinny man with a red nose, sold used cars at a lot out in Vinton. One time on my way to the bus stop in the morning I’d seen his dad asleep in his car, his face pressed into the glass and his legs hanging out the passenger-side window.

  “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Dwayne yelled.

  “It was totally dark,” Jill said. She waved her flashlight over the lake surface, showing the jagged moving water.

  “Shit,” Dwayne said. “We didn’t have nothing but this lighter.” When I heard him say we, I realized there was someone behind him. I could make out a large expanse of shoulder, square head, creeping sideburns. He wore a black nylon jacket with a fur collar that made him look like a cop.

  The mountain above us was big and black. I could just make out the tips of the tree branches where they seemed to melt into the sky. I wanted to go home; my parents would be worried. Now that we were here, what exactly was supposed to happen? This new Jill was different from the old Jill. Even though it was dark I could see her eyes had enlarged, and she was standing with her hands on her hips in a way I’d never seen before. She was like the girls on Dark Shadows, all smooth hair and cheerfulness at first, but pretty soon black circles would appear under their eyes and they’d lie around all day, dreaming of blood.

  “Should we walk out to the middle?” she said, motioning to the dock with the diving board at the end. I was worried she was planning to do something dramatic, take off her clothes and jump into the water. I knew this would be more suicidal than dramatic, because the water was freezing and Jill couldn’t swim.

  “What do you say, Julio?” Dwayne asked in that voice boys used exclusively to tease each other.

  “Yeah, man,” Julio said, though I was pretty sure his name was not Julio. Dwayne walked beside Jill and Julio walked next to me. I kept my hands deep in my pockets as if they were attached to my hips. I did not want to chance random hand contact. When I looked at him sideways, I saw that his face was solemn, and I realized this was not easy for him either. Dwayne had probably promised that I was tall and beautiful. I was tall, that part was true, but I was not beautiful. I was sure when he first saw me a few moments ago, he was disappointed that instead of looking like Julie from The Mod Squad, I looked much more like Huck Finn.

  My heart struggled like a trapped sparrow. Between the boards of the dock, I saw the water pitching. At the dock’s end we stood and looked up at the stars, pinpricks in black paper, their reflections smashed up in the moving water. I felt we had entered the firmament that my dad had told me about, that vast black nothingness before God made the earth and the sun and all the animals. He’d also said that in medieval times, people thought mice and rabbits were made out of the extra bits left over after God made the bigger animals like lions and bears.

  I thought of saying this aloud—it might be interesting to the others—but the wind was loud in the branches and on the water. We turned back in silence and walked off the dock and toward the overhang with the picnic tables.

  Once we were out of the wind, Dwayne pulled Jill away from me, and Jill raised her arms as if it were impossible for her to stop him. They went to the corner, where I couldn’t really see anything but the light reflected off the zipper of Jill’s ski jacket.

  Julio sat on a picnic-table bench. He hooked his hand into my elbow and pulled me toward him. I would have pulled away, but I lost my balance and fell onto his lap. I sat there, panicky and teetering like a porcelain figure on the back of a whale. To be polite, I felt I had to sit there for at least a few minutes.

  “So what’s your real name?”

  “Guess!” Dwayne yelled from his corner. Boys always talked only to each other, no matter who else was around.

  “Harold?” I guessed.

  Dwayne snorted.

  “Harold is a perfectly good name,” I said.

  “If you’re a faggot,” Julio said.

  Dwayne laughed.

  I tried to pretend I was the unicorn girl talking to Mr. Brown Bear about the taste of violets and how we missed the porcupine who lived behind the gas station. But Julio’s lap was nothing like the bear’s and my fantasy did not hold; I started to panic.

  “What are you all doing over there?” I yelled to Jill.

  “You’re like a rabbit,” Julio said. “Just settle down.”

  I was afraid if I leaned too close to his face, I would be blotted out completely.

  “I have to go,” I said. I pulled away from him, jumped off the platform.

  “Just relax,” Jill yelled to me. I didn’t look back. I was already on the path.

  As I got near the road, two cones of light passed over me and I realized Mrs. Swenson was back early from Bible study.

  I turned and saw that Jill was behind me. We ran faster than I thought two girls could run, branches smacking our bodies as we hurled ourselves through the woods and around the lake.

  By the time we got back, the car lights were off and Mrs. Swenson was just a dark figure standing on the porch. I could tell she’d been inside already to look for Jill. She was now gazing at the dark water. I heard Jill trying to regulate her breath as we hid behind a stand of trees close to the porch.

  “It’s me,” Jill said.

  Mrs. Swenson turned toward Jill’s voice, trying to make out her shape in the darkness.

  “Don’t you know me?” Jill said.

  Mrs. Swenson stood there quietly before she went back into her house and closed the door.

  Jill didn’t show up at school the next day. When I got home that afternoon, I called the Swensons. Mrs. Swenson answered and said Jill was gone. She’d run away and nobody knew where she was. Her grandmother hadn’t heard from her and Dwayne claimed he hadn’t heard from her either, but by the way the corners of his mouth turned up I knew he might not be telling the truth. Rumors went around the school. Stories about how Jill had run away with a pot dealer, how she’d been kidnapped by a bunch of bikers and taken to Mexico. These, while horrible, bothered me less than Sheila’s story: she claimed that Jill had fallen into Tilden Lake and drowned.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JULIE

  Mom glanced up now and then from her photo album to watch the new tenants moving into the Bamburg duplex. I still thought of it as Jill’s place even though I hadn’t seen her or the rest of her family for three years, since I was twelve. A single guy had lived in 11B since the Bamburgs moved out, a pale young man who worked at the Jiffy Lube on 419. Last week, without warning, he’d packed up his beer-can collection and left. My mom and I watched the new woman carrying boxes and her daughter coming in and out of the living room. The girl cradled something white and round in her arms that I assumed was a stuffed animal.

  Mr. Ananais told us the woman, whose name was Julie, was a former Miss North Carolina and that she owned a dance studio out in Salem. She wore a wraparound skirt over a white leotard. On her thin wrists hung big silver bracelets, and her long
brown hair spurted out of a ponytail at the top of her head. I assumed my mom would say she was just like Sandy, who, since she’d broken up with Sonny, had a different guy sleep over every month. But my mom wasn’t ready yet to render her verdict; Julie’s possessions confused her. Chrome lamps, a crystal champagne bucket, a sheepskin rug—all too glittery for my mother’s taste, but she had to admit the stuff was expensive. After unpacking, Julie hung a mirror over her beige leather couch. It reflected the wires flowing out of the back of our television set and my mom sitting at the table in her bathrobe.

  Nixon had resigned and I’d gotten my period, but not much else had changed besides my bra size. The world went on: Patty Hearst got kidnapped, Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon, and the Weathermen bombed the State Department. Though time had passed and I was now fifteen, I felt trapped like a bug in amber. I was stuck in place while my dad kept seeking. Over the years he’d had many phases. First he got interested in past-life regression, convinced that all his current problems were connected to unresolved problems in his past; in one life his father had beaten him and in another his little sister had drowned. After that he’d joined a group that practiced rebirthing. Birth, he explained to me, was traumatic. The baby learned the world was hostile. But through rebirthing the participant felt a saturation of divine love. I sat in the car and did homework during one of those sessions. The screams that came from the Unitarian church basement scared me. When he came back, he seemed flushed and a little crazy, his eyes darting around the road. He told me the woman who’d been reborn had really gotten into it. She’d even, like a baby, peed her pants.

  “Yuck!” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  I thought he’d be mad, but he just laughed. Currently he was going to a dream-therapy group and reading Alan Watts. The books lay piled up on the coffee table. When I walked by he’d look up and say, “Get this! You are an aperture through which the universe is exploring itself.” God, if he existed at all, was just as much in the Long John Silver’s as inside any church. He told me Christianity was a sort of playacting. He didn’t need scripted prayers or creeds to reach divinity; he, like everyone, needed to find his own route. When he looked back at our time in the rectory—a time that was to me as precious as it was remote—all he felt now was regret.