Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  My dad had no interest in Julie, but I studied her, watched her sit on her plush couch, drinking white wine. I assumed she was too glamorous to be interested in us. But one night, after my dad went to his second job, my mom came down in her good dress, a burgundy linen number with a boatneck and high heels. She smelled slightly of mothballs and wore red lipstick. Julie was coming over for a drink!

  I went back to my science notebook, filling in the names of the trees beside different-shaped leaves. When the bell rang she ran to the door. To my mom, every aspect of a woman’s appearance translated into particular information. Womanhood for her was a cult with hundreds of secret symbols. A turquoise ring meant one thing worn on the index finger, something completely different on the pinkie. When Mrs. Smith wore a red scarf tied sideways around her neck it was OK, but when Sandy wore a red scarf as a belt my mother called her a Gypsy. I was afraid my mother would not approve of the way Julie’s white enamel necklace hung around her neck or the way her toenails were painted orange, but she welcomed her and thanked her for bringing wine.

  “Git!” Julie said to me as my mom opened the bottle and poured the clear liquid into wineglasses. “I want to chat with your mama.”

  I retreated upstairs, but only to the top step. Julie had a movie-star Southern accent. The accent implied that sure, she was living in Bent Tree, but for her it was a choice rather than a jail sentence. I listened to my mother. I couldn’t make out her exact words, but I was more worried about her tone. When she was intimidated her default mode was condescension.

  Phillip wandered out of my parents’ bedroom where he was setting up a Lincoln Log complex—a large fort and several outbuildings all filled with plastic farm animals and green army men.

  “It’s stuck,” he said, holding up the canister of Lincoln Logs.

  “You must have spilled chocolate milk in there or something.”

  His eyes were slick in the dark hallway as I used my thumbnail to level the tiny log up.

  To me dancers were like angels or fairies, but better because they were real girls. I loved the movies about the girls who spent all day practicing, practicing so hard beautiful beads of sweat broke out on their faces. They stayed up all night dancing until the sun came up. They had the intensity of nuclear reactors. Julie had been one of those girls! One of the lucky ones who turned into a story, a fairy tale. Yet she’d landed in Bent Tree, and that’s where the mystery lay, that’s why I couldn’t sit there any longer; I had to go downstairs, open the cupboard, take a long time picking out the jelly glass, finally choose the one with Fred Flintstone, open the refrigerator door, look dramatically from the orange juice to the pink Kool-Aid to the milk, finally pick the milk, tip the glass container of milk, get two Oreos from the package on the counter, and arrange them first on top of each other, then like wheels, side by side.

  Unfortunately, the whole time I was in the kitchen my mom was talking about the singing career she had before she met my dad. I knew all the lines by heart, how she sang Cole Porter songs at a jazz club. She was both playing it all down, like no big deal, I was a jazz singer, but also hinting that if she had not gotten married she would have been a superstar! I opened one of the kitchen drawers; inside were instructions on how to use the washing machine, tacks stuck into cardboard, a clay ashtray Phillip had made in kindergarten, a jagged piece of linoleum. I had no idea what I was looking for, but when my mom asked I said a pencil eraser.

  “Honey,” Julie said, winking at my mom, “go over and check on Kira for me.”

  “I have a lot of homework,” I said. “I think I’ll just stay here.”

  “Get your butt over there!” my mom said.

  I could tell she was a little bit hysterical, but in a different way than usual; she was at 3, but giddy.

  “I’ll go,” I said, “but if I fail my math test it’s on your head, not mine.”

  Julie laughed. I heard them both laughing as I walked over the flat dirt and onion grass to the Bamburg duplex.

  I knocked. It took awhile, but eventually Kira opened the door. She held a real white rabbit in her arms.

  “Hi,” I said, “your mom sent me over here to check on you.”

  She looked at me without any expression.

  “I’m thirteen,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”

  I didn’t say anything. In her footie pajamas she looked like a fat baby who’d taken too many vitamins and had grown a hundred times its normal size.

  “You might as well come in,” she said. I followed her through the living room and up the stairs. Her room was like the girl’s room in the furniture store at the mall: white dresser with gold detail, a white canopy bed covered with pink pillows, plaques of pink-cheeked girls in patchwork frocks, porcelain-headed dolls held on pedestals, and a collection of kitten figurines. But she was not the sort of little girl who should be sleeping in the bed, who sat on the rosebud spread carefully changing the clothes on her delicate dolls. She looked more like a frog-girl. I felt sorry for her—she was like Pam at school, somebody I pitied.

  “Nice room,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “It’s a little cramped.”

  “You had a bigger place?”

  “A house,” Kira said. “But we lost it.”

  “How can you lose a house?”

  “The bank took it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. That’s a mean thing for the bank to do.”

  “It’s OK,” she said, throwing an arm up. “Who needs property!”

  Her imitation of her mom was spot-on. She dropped her hand back to her rabbit’s silky ears. His eyes were pink and sinister but I still wanted to hold him. I’d always wanted to be like the girls in books who partnered up with serious cats to solve crimes. On the days we weren’t solving crime, I imagined, the cat would lie on my lap while I read. In Philadelphia I’d put a salamander in a shoe box with a rock and some grass, but overnight on the porch he was attacked and killed by giant red ants. I kept a cricket in a jar with holes nailed through the lid and another time a caterpillar. I’d named the cricket Herman and the caterpillar Fuzzy Woo, but both got so limp and depressed I eventually let them go.

  “Can I hold him?” I asked.

  Kira looked at me carefully.

  “I’ll be real gentle,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” Kira said. She began telling me Snowball’s life story. She and her mom were on their way back from the beach in North Carolina when they stopped at a bar to use the bathroom. It was one of those dark places that smelled of BO and cigarette smoke. Right away Kira saw the glass aquarium by the popcorn machine. Inside was a huge snake, and shivering in one corner was a baby rabbit! Kira burst out crying and begged her mother to buy Snowball. At first Julie said she was being ridiculous, but Kira screamed so loud that Julie finally said OK. It took Snowball a year to get calm enough to listen to music, and he still couldn’t sit through the reading of a whole bedtime story.

  “You can just set him in my lap,” I said. “I won’t even touch him.”

  Kira shook her head.

  “He’s extra twitchy because not only did he end up in the tank with the snake, but the whole reason he got there, this is what the bartender told my mom, was that his mother was ripped out of her rabbit hutch and eaten by a German shepherd.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  Snowball twisted in her lap as if he’d heard her talking and was reminded of his near-death experiences.

  “It’s OK, bunny boy,” Kira said, going into a higher voice. “You are King Bunny, aren’t you, yes you are. And all the chipmunks, the squirrels, the mice and the moles, they all come kneel down to Snowball, that’s right, Snowball, Prince of the Forest.”

  I looked up at the ceiling and saw a few brown dots in one corner. I remembered how Jill and I had shaken a bottle of Coke and then let it fly all over the room. This was after we’d lit a Vogue magazine on fire on the deck and then walked across the first floor only on raised surfaces—kitc
hen countertops to the dining room table to the arm of the couch, all the way out the sliding glass window to the deck rail, where Jill had lost her balance and almost killed herself.

  “There’s a man in the woods who eats children’s fingers,” I said. “He lurks around Bent Tree at night looking in the windows.”

  This got her to stop talking.

  “What kind of man?”

  “A crazy man,” I said.

  “Did he escape from jail?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s the ex-husband of a lady who used to live in our duplex.”

  She looked at me.

  “He killed a girl in 16A by eating off her pinkies.”

  “Why didn’t he eat the other fingers too?”

  “Pinkies taste like chicken wings.”

  “You know,” she said, “I can sort of see that.”

  It was late when Julie came back. Kira hadn’t wanted to play Mystery Date or get down her Ouija board. Snowball was her only real topic of conversation. I ran down the stairs where Julie gave me a sloppy hug, her small, tight breasts pressing into me; she whispered in my ear that I should come over whenever I wanted.

  At our duplex, my dad still wasn’t back. In the last few weeks he’d been meeting with his dream-interpretation group out in Fincastle. At each meeting everyone related a dream and then they’d discuss it first in Freudian and then in Jungian terms. The leader, who had Gestalt training, felt that every person in a dream was the dreamer. To hear my dad talk about the group made me miss Jill. She had insisted that while she dreamt her soul slipped out of her body and actually visited the places and people she saw in her sleep. She flew to the ocean floor and then toward a person who looked like both her daddy and Abe Lincoln.

  In my room, I stuck my transistor radio between my mattress and pillow. I’d learned I could still hear the music, which came up through the feathers, traveled mysterious as smoke into my ear canal and spread like dark glitter inside my brain. I was hoping to hear Cher. Her voice was best at night. Jill had told me that birds sang different songs in the night than in the day, and it was the same with Cher. To hear “Half Breed” at night was like a religious experience. But no such luck. “Cat’s in the Cradle” was on and then “At Seventeen,” two songs so sad they made you want to kill yourself. “Jackie Blue” after that, not a bad one but not what I had in mind.

  I heard my dad come in the front door. I liked to hear about the dreams. While some were boring, others fascinated me. I ran down the stairs.

  “How was it?” I asked him.

  He was sitting on the couch taking off his shoes.

  “How was what?”

  “The dreams!”

  “There was a good one about a bird flying out of a baby’s mouth.”

  “What kind of bird?”

  “Sparrow.”

  “What about Jude?”

  I liked Jude’s dreams best; in one a fish asked him for a piece of chewing gum, and in another a white tulip turned into a kitten head.

  “He wasn’t there.”

  He lay down on the couch and picked up his Alan Watts book, throwing his bare feet up on the cushions and pulling a blanket up to cover himself. I said good night and went back up to my bed. I reached my hand under the pillow, turned the dial, and the sound—static mostly—came back up. At first I was worried it was Gregg Allman. But as the static cleared I heard Elton. I loved Elton. He was like Bowie, if Bowie were less fantastic and a whole lot chubbier. You couldn’t worship Elton like you could Bowie, but what he lacked in star power he made up for in desperation. His voice soared up into my brain; he was talking about the princess perched in her electric chair and how sugar bear had saved his life.

  When I woke up the next morning my mother was already out of her bathrobe, and when I got home from school the shag had been vacuumed and the kitchen counter swept of crumbs. She’d put away her photo albums, set candlesticks on the table, and placed a tapestry—given to us by a Chinese missionary—over the back of the couch. She set out on the coffee table The Family of Man, a book of photographs that showed, among other things, a just-born bloody baby, and Surfacing, a book my father told me was about a woman who went insane.

  Phillip was running the vacuum.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he said. “But at least she seems happy.”

  After my dad left for the psych center and my brother settled into my parents’ room to watch the portable television, my mom changed into a good dress, the polka-dot one with the full skirt, put on lipstick, and arranged cheese cubes on our nice serving plate. She put A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on the stereo and turned on our lamp with the brass base and linen shade. She sat sideways on the couch, looking through Town and Country magazine. She tried to act cool, as if she set herself up with hors d’oeuvres and paged through magazines every night. But I could tell by the way she kept glancing over to Julie’s apartment, staring at a tiny version of herself in the mirror over Julie’s couch, that she was a little unhinged. A 4 moving to a 3.

  I’d spread my notebook, graph paper, and pencils all over one corner of the living room in an effort to mark the territory as my own. But once Julie arrived and my mom opened a bottle of wine and they sat down on the couch, laughing and smiling widely into each other’s faces, I was banished to my usual spot at the top of the stairs. From this vantage I could see down the stairwell, which was covered with the same gold shag, now matted flat. At the foot of the steps lay my brother’s sneakers and on the hook above hung a baseball cap and a black umbrella.

  I could hear best if I leaned in between the bars of the wrought-iron railing.

  Julie complained about her last class of the day, an exercise class for what she called “old fatties,” many of whom couldn’t even, God bless them, touch their goddamn toes. My mother laughed and complained about how boring it was to fold towels and make beds, how she hated the mangy shag. I got bored listening to them trade complaints back and forth. I crept back down the hall to my room and read for a while about the Zoupee people and how they buried their dead in blankets woven out of fern fronds.

  By the time I came back to the steps, Julie was deep into her life story. Now this was more like it! After her reign as Miss North Carolina, she’d gone to New York City, where Eileen Ford herself told her she would never make it as a model and the girl she met in the waiting room at Wilhelmina had turned out to be a lesbian. A lesbian! I leaned farther between the black metal poles.

  Phillip came out of my parents’ room and interrupted my eavesdropping. He pointed to a picture in the back of his comic book of a man flying through the air with a jet pack strapped to his back.

  “I want this,” he said.

  If he talked too much my mom would hear us.

  “I’ll get it for you,” I whispered.

  “Really?”

  I nodded, and he ran back into my parents’ room.

  After New York, Julie had come to Roanoke and worked as a bank teller, doing occasional local commercials for beverage distribution centers and car dealerships. In a moment of weakness and insanity she’d married her high school sweetheart, a beefy guy whose family owned the local supermarket. They moved into a split-level over in Windsor Terrace. This was the largest subdivision in Roanoke, with hundreds of houses, all on small lots, saplings tied to stakes in the yards and silver TOT FINDER stickers on the upper windows.

  Her husband and his friends spent weekends in the basement drinking beer and eating mixed nuts. It didn’t take her long to realize she had made a mistake. She tried to tell him that the house depressed her. He said that in time they’d have a bigger one, in time they’d have everything they needed. She felt like she was drowning. When he was at work one day, she took the car and started driving. She was hours out of Roanoke when she realized she was going to drive all the way to LA.

  Right away things were magic out there. She found a cute studio apartment and got an agent; small TV roles were offered
to her within the week she arrived. Parts playing receptionists, nurses, waitresses—all of them, she had to admit, were dumb blondes, but heck, she was in fucking Hollywood. She even played a tennis bunny in a film starring a famous comedian, a guy with one blue eye and one brown eye who was very into spiritualism. It was on the movie set, sitting in her trailer, that she realized how late her period was and that she was pregnant. When she called her husband to tell him, he was thrilled even though she had left him without writing a note. He told her to come on home.

  My butt was sore and I could feel parts of my brain, in the back somewhere, turning in for the night. I peeked into my parents’ room where my brother was sleeping sprawled out on the bed, holding a plastic saber. I pulled the bedspread up to cover him and turned off the light. In my room, moonlight came through the blinds and I pulled down my corduroys, pulled my turtleneck over my head, and put on the oversize T-shirt I had taken to sleeping in. I kept my door open and listened. I wanted Julie to go back to her own duplex, to hear my mom wash the dishes, set them in the rack, then climb the stairs, go into her bedroom, undress, and get into bed.

  But it was not until much later that I finally heard the front door close. I jumped out of bed and saw my mom walking Julie to her front door. As my mom walked back, Julie called out to her and blew a kiss. My mom pretended to catch the kiss in her fist and push it down into her pocket.

  Every night my dad worked, Julie came over. She and my mom drank wine. When Julie was around my mom seemed like a different person, as if she had been kidnapped and replaced by a glamorous imposter. It was all just too much. Julie was coming over in the morning, too, after we left for school. When I’d get home in the afternoon, all the signs would be there: cigarette butts in the ashtray, mugs with coffee residue, and jelly glasses that smelled of wine in the sink.