Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

“I don’t want to.”

  “Do it now or I’ll tell everyone how after gym class you smell like vegetable soup.”

  I weighed my options. On the one hand if I didn’t make the sex sounds Sheila would betray me by telling everyone I smelled, but if I did it, she might betray me worse by telling everyone I’d made the sex sounds. I closed my eyes and let the sex sounds come from deep in my belly. I panted and made the vowels last a long, long time.

  “OK,” she said, “that’s enough.”

  One day, during a commercial break while we were watching General Hospital, Sheila told me her father’s landlady had called to say that her dad was missing. She said this without looking at me, looking straight ahead at the Magnavox screen, as an ad for Tang played.

  “Where do you think he is?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” Sheila said. “My mom called my aunt, his sister, in West Virginia and she hasn’t heard from him. He just stopped showing up at the bank where he worked.”

  “Maybe he wants to start a new life?”

  “All I know is, if he doesn’t come back soon, his landlady is going to take his stuff to the dump.”

  Sheila hadn’t seen him since he tried to speak to her after she got off the bus six months ago. When he called on the phone, which he hadn’t done for a while, both Sheila and her mom hung up as soon as they heard his voice. He’d finally gone away, like she and her mother were hoping, probably to a gay place like Greenwich Village or Atlanta.

  “He can fuck whoever he wants,” Sheila said, “and I’ll fuck whoever I want.”

  I had heard that sex put you in a great mood, but whatever Sheila was doing with Mr. Ramin, making out, going to third base, cunnilingus, blow jobs, whatever, only made her more anxious. I knew Sheila went into Mr. Ramin’s AV room, and he locked the door and taped black construction paper over the window. Now instead of zoning out during GH, she was jittery, chewing her cuticles and spilling her Tab on the white carpet.

  Most days after General Hospital she wanted to do beauty rituals, mash avocado in a Tupperware bowl and slather it over our faces and lie down with slices of cucumber over our eyes. If our skin was oily we made oatmeal and pressed it over our noses and foreheads. Because I had a few red spots on my chin I had to have a milk of magnesia mask.

  Sheila made me scrub my face with salt and lemon juice. She used a tape measure to check the space between my thighs, just below my private parts, and told me it was too wide. The fashion magazines said an inch to an inch and a half was the proper space; less than that meant your legs were too fat. More than that meant your legs were too skinny.

  We mixed peanut butter and eggs, put it on our hair, wrapped Saran Wrap around our heads, and heated our gooey scalps with a blow dryer. We made a bucket of tea and stuck our heads into it. We mashed bananas and cornmeal to rub on the bottoms of our feet. We did sit-ups to make our tummies flat, and rotated our ankles to make them thin. Sheila read that beatings with oak leaves improved circulation, so we collected branches up in the woods, bound them with yarn, and she hit my back until the skin was pink and raw. We started the paleolithic diet, eating only hamburger and nuts, and then switched to the lemonade diet, drinking lemonade mixed with cayenne pepper. We spent one whole afternoon trying to catch a snake, as Sheila had heard Asian beauty experts used them for massage.

  We made lists, as the magazines instructed, of our most hated body parts. My list read: (1) head (2) torso (3) waist (4) arms (5) heart. Sheila said I couldn’t include heart, as it was inside the body and we had no idea what it looked like, if it was ugly or beautiful.

  After that we went on to Bunny practice. We’d graduated from our bathing suits to the black leotards Sheila’s mom had bought us. We clipped on the paper cuffs we’d made from poster board, securing them with cuff links borrowed from Walt. We wore black bow ties that we’d found in the J. C. Penney boys’ shop. We’d also sewn tails to the backs of our leotards. Once our uniforms were completed with Sheila’s mother’s high heels, we practiced tailing the nightstand, and then we did the Bunny dip, asking Mr. Hefner (he was our only customer at this point) if he wanted a cocktail. We ran through the stance and the perch, judging each other on a scale of one to ten. If I got less than a five, Sheila morphed into the Bunny mother and gave me demerits and told me I’d never be Bunny of the Week. Then Sheila turned on the radio and we danced on top of her bed, pretending it was the grand piano at the Playboy Club.

  After that, Sheila wanted to play orgy. Everybody knew the Bunnies were the key elements in Hugh Hefner’s orgies at the Playboy Mansion. So we rolled around on Sheila’s bed until we were both flushed. She got a carrot from the fridge and made me watch her give Hugh a blow job and then said I had to get up on all fours so she could do it to me. Afterward, sweaty and disheveled, we got trays from the kitchen and high-carried them around the living room to Sheila’s favorite 45, “Love Machine.”

  For Walt’s surprise party, Sheila’s mom had a stack of albums she was testing by the stereo. Walt and his friends were fifteen years older than Sheila’s mom. They’d all gone to Virginia Tech, wore heavy college rings, and loved to play golf, driving around in the cart wearing their Redskins baseball caps. They were obsessed to the point of madness with Redskins football and talked about Billy Kilmer as if he were God. Walt loved to mention that while all the other pussies wore double-bar helmets, Kilmer was the only quarterback who had the balls to wear the one-bar mask.

  Sheila’s mom wasn’t sure what sort of music Walt liked. He’d said he enjoyed the jazz they played in the Playboy Club, but she also knew he liked Bread, and the radio in his car was tuned to the oldies station. She’d bought half a dozen records and listened to each with a worried expression. Would Walt and his friends like Burt Bacharach or Dusty Springfield?

  She was worried about the food too. She wanted the food to seem high-class and so she tested punches, one with Sprite, lime sherbet, and vodka; another with pineapple juice, rum, and frozen strawberries. In the fridge there was always a plate of deviled eggs sprinkled with curry power or celery sticks spread with pimento cheese or cucumber finger sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off. We were encouraged to sample the food and give her our honest opinion.

  One day when we got home from school, Walt was waiting in the living room. He sat on the couch in his white golf shirt and polyester shorts drinking a can of beer. His nose was red and his eyes bloodshot.

  “Hi girls,” he said.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “At work,” he said, sitting up on the edge of the couch. “I was nearby and I thought I’d stop in and see if you might want my expert opinion.”

  “On what?” Sheila said.

  “You all want to be Playboy Bunnies, right?”

  Sheila nodded.

  “Well, go get your outfits on and I’ll let you know how authentic you look.”

  Sheila looked over Walt’s head and into the wall. She had perfected keeping her brain in another sphere from her body.

  “OK,” she said.

  I followed her up to her bedroom. I assumed we’d lock the door, or call her mom from the phone upstairs. But Sheila just moved like a robot, pulling open a drawer and grabbing two black leotards.

  “Hurry!”

  I tried not to stare at Sheila as we changed. Her full breasts, so white compared to her tan, flat stomach, slender hips, and thighs. Her pubic hair was blonde so I could see the pink slit between her legs. It was supposed to be nothing, us changing in front of each other, but it was everything.

  We helped each other attach the homemade Bunny tails, the white cuffs we’d cut out of poster board.

  Sheila rolled gloss over her lips. Cotton candy flavor, with just a tinge of pink. She threw her head down, fluffed up her hair, and then swung her head up again, looking at her face in the mirror that hung over her dresser.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said.

  I walked down the stairs behind her, watching her tail and the fishnet tights against the skin of her thig
hs.

  “Hot dog!” Walt said as we entered the living room. “You girls look fantastic.”

  Sheila’s face was still as she walked over the carpet. I followed her maybe a little too close behind.

  “Your friend is a bit stiff,” Walt said, tipping his beer up to his lips. “She should relax.”

  I nodded.

  “What about me?” Sheila asked.

  Before he could say anything she threw herself down onto his lap. She sat the way I used to sit on my Dad’s lap, with her legs thrown over his knees and her head on his shoulder. He moved his arm around her in a way that was not at all fatherly.

  “You, doll,” he said, pressing his lips into her forehead, “are perfect.”

  After Walt left, we went up to Sheila’s room. She said she needed a sequined tube top stored in a milk crate at the back of her closet. If I found the tube top I could have anything else I wanted in the crate. Sheila had given me several items of clothing and I treated each like a shred of holy scripture: the black Bunny leotard of course, but also a terry cloth tank top and a pair of white shorts with red piping. I’d always wanted to look through her closet, smell her nightgown, and touch the material of her dresses. I climbed into the closet and squatted down over her shoes.

  Then I heard the door shut, and Sheila pushed her desk chair against the knob. I was left in the dark, confused and unsure how to proceed. If I asked to be let out, I knew Sheila would be less likely to let me out. Really it wasn’t that bad, there was a comforting smell of musk and talc and I could relax and not worry about what I said or if I smelled bad. I knew, too, that I deserved to be locked in the closet. I needed to change; I was too nerdy and awkward. I hadn’t been able to access beauty or light. In the closet I might transform, from sweet Patty to Tania, a glamorous rebel.

  Sheila walked to her bed; the springs shifted as she lay down and opened up a magazine. Maybe if I didn’t say anything, she’d let me out in half an hour. I was like a load of laundry in the washer; once she felt I was clean, she’d let me out. At least a half hour passed. I smelled my own sweat and I was getting thirsty. I stood up behind the rack of dresses.

  I thought of the girl kept in the box under the man’s bed, how she lay there in the dark and didn’t try to escape. I’d read that after a while he let her go home and visit her mother, but she always came back and got right into the box.

  “Let me out,” I finally said, pushing at the door. “This isn’t funny.”

  “Why should I let you out?” she said.

  I tried to think of a good reason.

  “I have to pee.”

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “Let me out,” I said again.

  “Say you want to give David Bowie a blow job.”

  I had to think. If I said it, she could easily tell everybody at school I wanted to give David Bowie a blow job without including the fact I’d been forced to say it while trapped in a closet.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m going to walk down to the Hop-In,” she said. “Want anything?”

  “Let me out,” I said. “I want to walk with you.”

  “I’m sending him in now,” Sheila said, “and he’s going to fuck you really good.”

  I sat down again on the shoes, my head sandwiched between the hems of her dresses.

  “Say you want to be fucked really good.”

  “I want to be fucked really good.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “You act so sweet and innocent, but I knew you wanted it.”

  When I got home my face was pink in the bathroom mirror and I was sweaty under my clothes. I lay on my bed for a while, trying to calm down and waiting for a good song to come on the radio. No good songs came so I turned on my cassette player. I’d taped my favorite Bowie song, “Starman,” every time I heard it come on the radio, so I could listen to it over and over. The first few notes were cut off, but the fact that it sounded scratchy made it seem like Bowie actually was up on the moon.

  I liked how he said boogie; people used the word all the time in a stupid way, but Bowie said it like a little prayer. The way he said it reminded me of Jill. I jumped up off my bed and decided to call child protection again and see if they’d tell me where I could find her.

  The lady told me that Jill was no longer in their system.

  I took the phone book on my lap and looked up the number of Woolworth’s and asked for the Pet Department. I knew her grandmother had worked there, but the guy who picked up said he’d never heard of a Brendy Minkler.

  I walked down to Dwayne’s duplex and knocked on the door.

  “What do you want?” he said, stepping out on the slab of concrete.

  “Do you know where Jill is?”

  He looked at me. I could see that his little mind was moving but whether he was building up a lie or telling the truth was impossible to tell.

  “Actually I just heard from her.”

  “Are you bullshitting me?”

  “She called in the middle of the night. Said she was living out in Bedford with her grandmother.”

  “Did she give you a number?”

  “No,” he said, “but she was shit-faced drunk. She said all kinds of crazy stuff.”

  I ran all the way up the hill and into my duplex, throwing myself at the wall phone in the kitchen. I called information and asked for the number for Brendy Minkler and then dialed. I listened to a few rings until a message came on saying the phone had been disconnected.

  One afternoon, after school, while I was in the closet, Sheila said she’d let me out only if we could show my dad our Playboy outfits.

  “You mean just the leotards?”

  “No,” Sheila said, “I want him to judge us like Walt did, to see if we’re doing a good job.”

  I wanted to get out of the closet but I knew that my dad did not want to see me dressed as a Playboy Bunny.

  “He’ll get mad,” I said, “and I won’t be able to come here anymore.”

  Sheila just turned on the radio and sang to a Carpenters song. I could tell by the way the light was fading at the bottom of the door that it was getting late.

  “Let me out!”

  “Promise.”

  “OK.”

  Sheila made me call my dad and arrange for him to come over to her duplex after work. I told him we had a surprise for him. I knew he figured we’d drawn a forest scene on poster board or set up a science experiment.

  We got into our outfits and practiced a few Bunny dips. Sheila wanted to grade my performance, but I kept slumping my shoulders. I heard our car pull into the driveway and my dad open the car door. I pulled my sweater over my leotard and put on my painter pants.

  “What are you doing?” Sheila said.

  “I can’t go through with this.”

  The doorbell rang and Sheila ran down the stairs with me following behind.

  “Pastor,” she said, “thanks for coming”

  She said the word with a sort of giddy respect as she grabbed his arm and pulled him into the living room. My father didn’t want to minister to the people of Bent Tree, he didn’t feel qualified anymore, but once again he was being forced into it. He stood in the white living room, trying not to stare at Sheila’s outfit, staring instead at the conch shell on the glass coffee table.

  “What’s this about?” he said to me.

  “We need your advice,” Sheila said.

  “For what?” my dad said, taking off his jacket and handing it to Sheila.

  “For God’s sake, cover yourself up!”

  “No thanks,” Sheila said, trying to Bunny-dip away from him.

  “I insist,” he said, throwing the blazer over her shoulders.

  Sheila’s face got red.

  “We want you to judge us on how we walk.”

  “You walk fine,” my dad said. “What’s all this about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, pulling him out the front door and toward his car.

  I convinced my dad that Sheila was trying o
ut a Halloween costume. He didn’t buy it completely but it settled him down. She called me after dinner desperate to go to the Coffee Pot where Mr. Ramin’s band, Earth Tone, was playing. I lied to my mom and we walked down the highway, arriving as it was getting dark. Sheila flitted around the back door trying to get somebody to tell Mr. Ramin she was waiting outside. I hung around the parking lot. The neon beer sign shone red against the asphalt. The Coffee Pot was a log cabin with a giant red coffeepot balanced on the top as if God’s hand might reach down, pick it up, and pour a gigantic mug of steaming coffee. Inside Mr. Ramin beat on the drums and the singer wailed as if he were trapped inside a wet mitten. When the door opened a puff of smoke escaped and the music flamed up like a fire encouraged by gasoline.

  I leaned against the side of a pickup truck and looked over the parking lot at the strip mall across the street. The moon was full and, because we were down in the valley, mist rose up off the ground. I moved outside the oval of entrance light. Winter had morphed into spring. The bugs were loud. In a truck a few parking spots away, a man handed a joint to a girl in a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off. At the other end of the parking lot, a group of men passed a flask around and smoked cigarettes.

  I walked to the back door and watched Sheila talking to an older man in a leather vest. Near my feet was a patch of moving jagged-leaf light. Mr. Ramin came out and he and Sheila walked to the other side of the building and went behind the Dumpster. I watched the patch of light so long I convinced myself it was a soul trying to get my attention. How could I help the poor soul? I laid gravel in the shape of a cross and repeated some words my dad had taught me three times. I thought of going over to Sheila and Mr. Ramin, pulling her away from him or maybe just standing near them as if I were part of whatever they were doing. This would be creepy but undeniably exciting.

  Sheila yelled my name and I popped up from where I sat. She was running toward the road.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, moving between cars and then onto a block of tiny white houses, all glowing pale purple in the dark.