Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  Of course, even among these types there were endless variations and mutations. Older women had categories as well. Mrs. Smith with her cowboy scarf and bouffant hairdo was in a completely different category from the poor lady in 10B, who was shaped like a barrel, had only a couple of teeth, and wore her gray hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. At any age or within any variety, a woman could, as my mother said, “go to seed” and end up as a slut. Sluts, as far as I could tell, had only one category. That was why they were sluts—only one thing defined them.

  I was not in danger of “going to seed” because I did not have any flowers. And it wasn’t that I really aspired to be a Preppy or a Hippie, I just wanted that quality, ephemeral as it was, that I sometimes saw in photographs. Some called it femininity, others beauty, some said sexiness, but to me it was a form of magic.

  Like a crazed scientist in search of the rarest butterfly, I might go mad in my search. I’d seen older women this had happened to. Roanoke was filled with them, in wigs or dyed blonde or red hair, eyebrows drawn in, lips lined. Bone-thin and taking awkward steps on wobbly high heels, they were like devotees of a religion that no longer existed. And while they were experts in the procedures and rituals of womanhood, the magic I speak of was no more likely to inhabit them than was a bolt of lightning.

  I tried in a variety of ways to emulate the types I’d distinguished. I spent a few weeks wearing the peasant blouse Jill had given me and sitting out at lunch on the grass near the smoking block. Then for a period I wore a denim shirt my grandmother had embroidered for me, but instead of peace signs and rainbows, she’d sewn kittens on the collar and a baby in a bonnet on the back. In my glam-rock period, I ran into the bathroom right after I got off the bus and circled my eyes with black liner until I looked, as I heard a boy say in the hall, like a zombie. When I finally got the rust-colored nylon dress with the ruched sleeves off layaway at J. C. Penney, I was excited. The night before I wore the dress to school, I could hardly sleep, and as I walked down the hall, while there wasn’t much of a reaction, I felt a little more real. I considered the look a hit until lunch, when a boy flipped up the hem while I was carrying my tray and exposed my big white panties. Preppy lasted the longest: a white Lacoste shirt and a pair of khakis.

  I realized none of these measures moved me any closer to the other humans in my grade. I saw that my experiments had served only to make me seem odd and pathetic. I was at sea. My childhood was over. I’d pushed off from the Isle of Kidville and I was now in deep water, without any sign of Adultville in sight.

  I decided I needed a role model, and I didn’t mean my dad, who was on a health kick, drinking ten glasses of water a day and eating only stewed onions. I needed a girl to study and emulate. At Low Valley there were no Discos or Hippies, only girls in baseball shirts, clogs, and multicolored toe socks. I needed information not on the types in the greater world but on the types in my own world. I had always considered Cher my guru. My black-haired goddess. She instructed me sometimes through ESP, but now I needed somebody I could worship in the flesh.

  Sheila was the obvious choice, as I could examine her on the bus to and from school; in my health class, where she sat a few rows over from me; and at lunch, where we sat at different ends of the same long table. For years she had been in a golden, untouchable realm that made making contact impossible. But just recently Dwayne had spotted Sheila’s dad coming out of the gay bar on Williamson Road. This was not as unusual as it sounded. Nearly every month some father came out of the closet. The tiny girl on the gymnastic team had a gay dad. So did the chubby boy who’d worn lederhosen on Halloween. When your dad came out of the closet, your status didn’t suffer outright. It was subtle. Sheila sat at the edge of the girls in her group in the lunchroom instead of in the middle. And while they had roamed Tanglewood Mall together every Saturday, now she walked alone.

  But even with Sheila’s dad being gay, there were no assurances she’d be my friend. I had a lot of work to do. Moving through the hallways, I listened carefully to her complain about hot rollers, saying that Herbal Essences shampoo smelled good but made her hair flat. I heard that round brushes were better than flat ones and that once you sprayed your hair, you should never ever comb it out, though the urge might be overwhelming.

  Once my hair grew out of the dreaded pixie cut, I bought a set of hot rollers, and every day before school I got up at five thirty. First I washed my hair, then I did the blowout, finally rolling long strands around the hot curlers. I secured each with a metal pin. While I had the curlers in my hair, my head was heavy and hot, the hard plastic edges sticking into my scalp. After I took them out, I combed my hair and made a few adjustments with my curling iron. I’d burnt myself twice, on both the wrist and hairline, each scar shaped like a beetle. At first I made the mistake of using the smaller curlers in the front so my hair resembled that of one of the desperate-looking permed-hair girls who hung out on the smoking block. Another day I used so much hair spray that my hair was a solid block and smelled like cheap cologne. Whenever I caught a glimpse of my head, I judged my hair harshly. Flatness or dullness was like a splinter in my heart. My hair had a different agenda than my mind; it had ideas of its own.

  After much practice I started to get it right. In the bathroom mirror, the height and shine were perfect, wavy but not too curly, and lush. Sometimes I felt like my hair was bigger than my body, that I was just a stick figure underneath a sheath of luxurious hair.

  Once I’d mastered my hair I moved on to my clothing. I wore the same few items: a pair of corduroys, a pair of plaid pants, a white blouse or a green one, both with pointy collars, and—on cold days—a green acrylic sweater. My mother, trying to help me, bought me other items—a floral top and even a dress. I’d wear these once or twice, then revert back to my uniform.

  Occasionally, someone made fun of me for wearing the same thing every day, but mostly my clothes seemed to make me invisible.

  In Phase Two of Project Improve, I started keeping track of what Sheila wore every day in the back of my social studies notebook. I had a chart with clothing items on one end, days of the week at the top. She sometimes wore the same corduroys in one week, but never on consecutive days, and she never wore the same top in a single week. She wore only brand-name pants, Lee or Levi’s, which stabilized her outfits. It was important, I learned from her, not to lean too much on any one of the acceptable looks.

  It wasn’t only clothes that I had to worry about. I also had to follow the accessory trends. Since I’d begun paying attention, there’d been a plastic belt fad, a color barrette fad, and a toe ring fad. These fads could not be dismissed, and not only did you have to participate in them, you also had to be at the right place inside the fad, not the trailblazer who showed up first in jeans with teardrop pockets or striped toe socks, but around the fifteenth or twentieth person. If you waited, you could be made fun of for jumping on the bandwagon. Then the items might actually hurt you instead of helping your status.

  I was in a state of constant anxiety over how I would get the fad items I needed. Most recently, I’d seen a few girls, Sheila included, wearing oversize combs stuck into their painter-pants pockets. Though nobody said anything, I sensed this would be the next trend. I made the mistake of asking my dad while he was reading if he’d take me over to the drugstore to purchase one.

  “To buy a red comb?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “You’re on your own then,” my dad said.

  So I walked in the rain down to Revco, only to find they didn’t have large colored combs, just white ones. Though the white girls never admitted it, I knew the trend had started with the black girls wearing Afro combs in their back pockets. There were only a handful of black kids at Low Valley, living in old farmhouses on bits of land between gas stations and subdivisions; their families had been here long before the subdivisions and strip malls started to surround them. Though their numbers were sm
all, they had a lot of power dictated by their fashion sense, which was, as far as I could tell, flawless.

  It was important never to acknowledge that they were the source of the trends. To wear a white comb would be suicidal. So even though it was getting dark and freezing, I decided to walk up the highway to the next strip mall, which had a beauty-supply store. Several cars came so close to me that I had to jump against the guardrail, and my skin under my clothes was chilly and goose-pimpled. I was aware of how stupid it would be to die in search of a giant red comb. The store didn’t have red, but they had yellow. I paid and walked out into the rain, ripped the package open, and stuck the comb into the side pocket of my painter pants.

  It wasn’t only my hair and my clothes. I knew I also had to censor the things I said. I’d worn the same outfit throughout junior high, but I’d also carried around the Big Book of Burial Rites and a few times tried at lunch to begin discussions by asking people if they’d rather be buried or cremated. And it wasn’t only in the lunchroom; in history I’d demonstrated Lido burial by lying out on the floor with my arms crossed over my chest and my face and feet covered with torn leaves I’d brought from home in a Ziplock bag. I’d tried out some of my dad’s ideas, saying trying to define yourself was like trying to bite your own teeth and asking if anyone had heard of the Theosophical Society. For a period I also carried the unicorn girl notebook around and tried to tell the kids who had lockers near mine about the unicorn girl’s antics. I had told a girl in my gym class that the mole on our teacher’s upper arm looked like a flower bud.

  Once I had my hair perfectly curled and my painter pants and cheesecloth shirt combination down, and I’d understood what it was OK and not OK to talk about (burial rites: no; television: yes), I decided I needed practice. To try to approach Sheila and her friends was too risky, so I selected for my dry run a group of girls who sat together at the front table at lunch. They were a clique of no-man’s-land types, a few volleyball players and a girl who made her own clothes. They accepted me right away, even inviting me to a sleepover.

  I arrived at the split-level, my black suitcase packed with a pair of cotton sweatpants and a pink T-shirt. We danced to 45s and made ice cream sundaes. I was doing well until later, when a girl lit a candle and said she wanted to tell ghost stories. None of the stories were new to me, but when the girls started to talk about Tilden Lake I felt myself heading into the danger zone. I held my tongue until I could no longer control myself.

  “When a child dies in the Vinto tribe, they wrap it in leaves and send it down the river in a basket woven from dried flower stems.”

  The girls stared at me; now I had their attention. I wondered if I should move on to the later chapters, which deal with contemporary burial rites, embalming, and cremation.

  “And exactly why are you telling us this?” the chubbier of the volleyball players asked.

  “Last year in civics she went on so long Mrs. Reynolds had to tell her to stop, that she was making us all sick.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “sometimes the oddest things come out of my mouth.”

  One girl whispered into the other’s ear and then they both laughed.

  I’d blown it. It was going to be a long night.

  So I was back to square one. Clothes and hair were simple compared to conversation. Talk hovered around boys, eye shadow, and KC and the Sunshine Band. All the girls thought KC was adorable, but a few also thought he looked gay. Every subject had to be current. You couldn’t talk about foot-binding or Abigail Adams, or how candles were made of animal fat. These were in history and considered weird. Also no talking about whether communism was better than capitalism or if there could be a planet out there identical to our own. Even simple philosophical questions—Do cats have imaginations? What is the greater significance of déjà vu?—should be avoided.

  The best topics were something you’d seen on television, particularly Welcome Back, Kotter, or The Carol Burnett Show, or maybe something funny one of the DJs on WROV said. You could say anything you wanted about your morning hair preparation or how annoying your mother was. You could talk about movie stars and hippies, and if you acted removed, you could also mention suicide, sex, and civil rights, but your tone had to be disapproving.

  At night I stuck my radio underneath my pillow and listened. I had noticed that with my eyes closed, the songs made colors underneath my lids: “My Love Is Alive” a silvery blue, and “Fame” a sort of magenta. Bowie songs were the best, making not just a single color but a whole spectrum of silver, blue, and purple light. But it wasn’t just the notes that were like shining beads; every noise—the rain against the window, the car tires on the main road, even my dad’s snoring—swirled into a kaleidoscope of sound and light.

  I’m not sure why he asked me to come to the VA hospital with him. My dad needed help, he said, with a play a few of the veterans were putting on. I had been to the VA before to drop him off. It was a huge three-story brick building with steep stairs up to the front doors. If the weather was warm there was always a handful of men in wheelchairs out front. Often some guy yelled out a third-floor window.

  Inside the VA my dad was loose-limbed and happy, very different from how he was at home, where he was always lying on the couch, reading. The play, he told me, was based on an oral history project he’d been working on. He took down the men’s stories and typed them up. By telling their stories the men were supposed to get control over their symptoms. The common room, where the play would take place, was already filled with a dozen men. The walls were painted bright blue, and there were vinyl couches against either wall, a wood console television, two strips of fluorescent overhead light, and a cardboard box cut into a trench, pasted with green construction-paper foliage.

  Louie, my dad’s favorite, wore, besides his rain boots, gray pants with large side pockets and a khaki jacket buttoned up to the neck. A red felt cross was sewn on his armband.

  “You’re late!” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Louie.”

  “Do you smell burnt rubber?”

  “No, Louie,” my Dad said. “Nothing is burning.”

  There were a few men in wheelchairs, one young man was missing both legs, and another had a fleshy stub sticking out of his shirtsleeve.

  A guy on the couch jumped up.

  “We’re making a movie!” he said.

  “It’s a play, Richie,” my father said, “and you’re in it. You’re Stretcher Carrier Number Three.”

  Richie nodded. He stood too close to me, and I could smell the scrambled eggs with hot sauce he’d had for breakfast.

  “I’m having a problem,” Louie said to my dad. “I need to talk to you privately.”

  The two of them went into the corner. My dad put his hand on Louie’s back. I watched a nurse walk down the hallway carrying a tray covered with paper cups.

  My father came back.

  “Louie is upset.”

  I glanced over at him; he seemed to be wandering around in a small circle.

  “He’ll act, but he doesn’t want to say the lines.”

  The four men who were going to carry the stretcher all sat together on one couch. They all wore khakis and white T-shirts with red cross armbands.

  “Where’s Tom?” my dad asked.

  “He’s not coming,” the youngest of the stretcher carriers said. “He doesn’t like his part.”

  “Was he a Nazi?” I asked.

  “No,” my dad said, “he was going to play a wounded soldier.”

  My dad glanced at the clock on the wall; in just ten minutes hospital staff and a few visitors would be arriving to watch the performance.

  “Listen up, everybody,” my dad said. “It’s getting close to time. We need one more actor.”

  Richie jumped up.

  “Fuck all of you!” he said. “This is bullshit.”

  My dad had told me some of the men were easily angered. I knew too that while the younger nurses loved my dad’s ideas, the older ones worried that his play
might upset the patients.

  “Will you do it?” my dad asked me.

  “Sure.”

  He got me a white lab coat and wrapped my head with an Ace bandage.

  “All you have to do is lie on the floor and wait.”

  Louie moved closer to me. He had a round face; his pupils were dilated and his forehead was shiny with sweat. My dad told me he had seen a lot of people die in the war, that he had terrible insomnia and sometimes cried for hours at a time. He reached his hand out to me; he had only a pinkie and a thumb.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re going to patch you up.”

  People gathered and my dad narrated the story of Louie running through the water on D-day up onto Omaha Beach, and scratching out a hole to lie down in to protect himself from bullets.

  I lay on the cool linoleum staring up into the light and moaning.

  “Aid man!” my dad yelled.

  As he called out the numbers one through four each man took his place on the sides of the stretcher. Louie cupped my head and moved me onto the canvas. I was lifted up and carried through the audience and out into the hall.

  It wasn’t until April, when all the fire hydrants in town were painted to look like tiny freakish minutemen, that I got the courage to actually speak to Sheila. I’d had a dream the night before that she and I were holding hands and singing John Denver songs. I would ask her if we were going to have our hygiene quiz in health today. I knew it wasn’t until Friday, but I thought this was the best way to make contact.

  My plan was to stop and ask about the quiz as I walked to get rid of my trash in the cafeteria. My hair looked good, and I wore my beige corduroys and a gauze blouse that had been Jill’s, along with a leather bracelet stamped with roses. The problem was that between me and Sheila was a wasteland of chubby band girls and a whole pack of sixth-grade boys with huge eyebrows and gigantic feet. Then there was Pam, the birthmark girl from my bus, who was reading a fat biography of Eleanor Roosevelt while spooning fried rice out of a Tupperware container into her mouth. The beige foundation she used to cover up her birthmark just made her look pathetic. None of the others were likely to say anything to me, but Pam often tried to start a conversation when I passed, telling me that Mrs. Roosevelt was so serious as a child, her mother had called her Granny. Sometimes I toyed with the idea of talking to Pam, but I was only holding on by a thread myself and I couldn’t risk any interaction.