Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  “What happened?” I said, running after her.

  She wiped her eyes against the back of her hand.

  “Did he do something to you?”

  “Yeah,” she said, stretching the neckline of her shirt to show a dark spot.

  The skin was unbroken and I knew it was a hickey. Deep purple marks I’d seen all over the necks of what my mother called the trampy girls who worked at fast-food restaurants. A girl at Hardee’s had linked mouth marks that ran like a choker around her neck.

  We walked toward Bent Tree, into a subdivision of ranches with lawn jockeys painted white, past the donkey pulling the cart filled with plastic flowers, the miniature windmill, and the cast-iron teddy bears. Our shadows stretched out in front of us and the moon was large and bright.

  When we finally got to Sheila’s duplex, where I was supposed to be spending the night, I saw that her mom’s car was gone. It was not unusual for her to stay overnight with Walt. Across the street was a Pacer. Mr. Ramin was sitting inside smoking a cigarette. Sheila told me to go on inside.

  I walked into the dark duplex and stood for a minute by the front window. I could see that Sheila had gotten into the passenger side of the car, and in the moonlight I saw Mr. Ramin’s profile.

  While I waited, I perched on the side of the sofa. I had on the T-shirt with the Bunny logo Sheila had lent me. I saw that the light was on in our living room and that my father was reading by the lamp. I knew he would not approve of my Bunny lifestyle.

  I didn’t care. I was a Bunny in training, like a ninja but with a better outfit. As I waited for Sheila to come back, I practiced my Bunny dip and imagined having a long conversation with Hugh Hefner about which drink was better, an old-fashioned or a martini. After about an hour, I decided to check on Sheila. I pulled the curtain back and looked out the window. The moon had disappeared behind clouds and I couldn’t see what was happening in the Pacer. I wanted to sleep in my own bed but if I came home in the middle of the night I knew my father would be suspicious about why the sleepover hadn’t worked out. I thought about going out and interrupting whatever Sheila and Mr. Ramin were doing so that maybe Sheila would come inside. But I knew she’d be furious if I did that. I got the metal tray from the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and practiced the high-carry back and forth across the living room. I did this for so long my arm got sore and I had to rest.

  The day of Walt’s surprise party, I got down to Sheila’s duplex hours early, at eleven. We were going to lie out in the sun before we started our beauty ritual. The big news was that Sheila’s mom had agreed to do my makeup. She had brought home her kit from the department store.

  We stretched out in the sun, turning over every half hour and pushing our straps down so we would not have any pale marks. She told me how she and her friends had once hiked up the hill so they could see the porno movie at the 220 Drive-In. She’d seen on the shining screen a penis the size of a tree trunk hovering over a woman’s gigantic mouth. The mouth was open and black and the monster penis had disappeared slowly inside.

  Ever since Sheila had started to lock me in the closet, she’d begun acknowledging me at school. Most days after General Hospital, she’d open her closet door and without a word I would get in and sit on her shoes. She’d close the door, not even bothering to put the chair under the knob, while she did her homework or painted her nails.

  At school she sat with me at lunch and we talked about Laura and Scotty, who was cute but dim. Once she’d even come to my locker and said she liked the picture of Cher I’d taped to the inside.

  We went over what our duties would be at the party: make and deliver mixed drinks, empty ashtrays, and carry around plates of stuffed mushroom caps and clams casino.

  After we were dark enough, we got the jar of mayonnaise out of the fridge and smeared it over our hair. Then we mixed dirt with lemon juice and spread it over our cheeks and foreheads to make our pores smaller. We lay on the bed and Sheila read from her mother’s new paperback, The Happy Hooker, by Xaviera Hollander. I was surprised her mom would read a book about a prostitute. But Sheila explained that Walt had given her the book as a joke. Sheila read the parts that might help us understand our clients at the Playboy Club. She read that bankers were the best customers and that stockbrokers were a horny bunch of brothel creepers. When the stocks go up, the cocks go up became our favorite line. I wasn’t sure yet if I was headed toward being a good girl or a whore. I’d been hoping for a little bit of both, but listening to Xaviera, I began to think there was no middle ground—you were either one or the other.

  At five we took showers. I’d brought over my hot curlers and so we both, after blow-drying, wrapped our hair onto the hot white plastic. Sheila put on her makeup, while Sheila’s mom, who was also in hot curlers, took me into the bathroom.

  “OK, Jesse,” she said, “you ready?”

  I nodded, gazing over the thirty kinds of sparkly eye shadow and the ten shades of lip gloss and blush that she’d brought home from the store.

  She shook a bottle of foundation and spread the paste over my face. She’d already done her own makeup and penciled in her eyebrows, which at some earlier point she must have plucked off completely. She’d used gray shadow, which made her eyes look large and supernatural. She was, I realized, as beautiful as my mother.

  “You’re young to have such dark circles,” she said, pressing the concealer over the bags under my eyes, then blending in the foundation.

  “I get anxious,” I said, “and it’s hard for me to sleep.”

  “It’s the Devil,” she said. “He’s tormenting you.”

  I knew she was talking about the local Satanists. According to the newspaper, they drank cats’ blood out of crystal goblets and had fires where they burnt Bibles along with red satin underwear. Black masses performed in basements included the sacrifice of both hamsters and mice. Mrs. Smith claimed the Satanists sent away for books of incantations to cast spells on the elderly. My dad said all this was crazy. He said he’d never seen people so obsessed with the Devil as people in Roanoke. It wasn’t the nightly news without at least one report of some demonic activity.

  At my school in the morning, the Christian Athletic Association prayed out by the flagpole and, at lunch, Crusaders for Christ prayed beside the smoking block, asking God to free the stoners from the Devil’s snare. I had even seen the principal, his eyes clenched shut, his face flushed, begging for protection.

  “Do you ever pray to Jesus?” Sheila’s mom asked.

  Here we go.

  “No,” I said.

  Actually I did pray. Sometimes I prayed to the memory of the altar at our old church. Not on Sunday mornings but in the evenings, remembering the times after dinner that I’d snuck over to run around on the dark altar, with its linen cloth muddled in gold light. On the altar I’d seen a lady in her coffin, the skin of her face slack and her features completely still, and also a bride so pregnant that the zipper on the back of her dress had to be safety-pinned. I believed that the altar was a soft spot, an opening between our world and the infinite one. Now, though, God was mundane, something old and pretty, but broken, like the bronze door handle, or the odd crystal from a chandelier, things you might see in a box at a junk shop. At times I still felt the open God feeling, not so much in objects but in the space around them, like in the space around the couch or the area between the lamp and my bed: it was in that vacuum that something might happen, though it was impossible to know how to pray to nothingness and if it was crazy to do so.

  “Well, you should pray,” Sheila’s mom said. I could see her lip liner and how she had expertly filled in the color by using both gloss and lipstick. “You need to accept Jesus as your personal savior.”

  A few girls in school had been talking about getting saved, not just the usual pack of Christer kids but even the regular kids: a few of the cheerleaders, and a handful of girls on the drill team. After the assistant football coach got saved, most of the team followed. It was like the flu, my dad said,
everybody was catching it.

  “If you let Jesus in he will wash you clean. Close your eyes,” she said.

  I felt the wand with the soft sponge moving over my eyelids. In the dark, I saw streaks of light moving from one side to the other over my eyeballs. Maybe this was the moment. After I had my face made up, I would finally transform. I’d become shining and whole in an instant.

  “If you accept Him all your sins will be washed away and you’ll be like a little baby.”

  I didn’t want to be like a baby lying in a crib. I wanted to go out into the world, I wanted to sin, I wanted to sin a lot.

  At seven, after we’d painted our nails and spread lotion over our tan arms and legs, we pulled up the black tights and our black leotards, clipped on our cuffs, and hooked our bow ties. Our hair was huge. The bell rang and the first couple arrived: Walt’s college roommate from Virginia Tech and his girlfriend. The couples kept coming until finally Walt drove up and we all crouched in the dark living room. He came in, calling out, and we sprang up and Sheila flipped on the lights. Walt put a hand against his chest, took a step back, and his mouth fell open. Sheila’s mom threw herself on him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He hugged her back and smiled.

  Sheila and I took our Bunny duties very seriously. I carried gin and tonics on my tray and delivered them with a perfect Bunny dip. Sheila passed a tray of mushroom caps from couple to couple. One man stared at her for so long his wife nudged him.

  “You all look soooo cute,” the wife said.

  I picked up empty glasses and dumped ashtrays into the trash. One man grabbed my ears off my head and stuck them onto his own bald one.

  After lots of drinks, the couples played musical chairs. I’d played this game at birthday parties when I was little, but this version was different. The men sat on the chairs the whole time, while the women scrambled whenever the music stopped to find a seat on the men’s laps. The women had to jump onto the men and the men hugged them and snuggled their faces in the women’s hair. The one lady without a lap was out and, while everyone laughed, I could feel she was humiliated. It finally got down to Sheila’s mom and another lady in a pink dress and white go-go boots. When the music stopped Sheila’s mom was farther away, but she threw herself through the air and landed on the birthday boy’s lap.

  After musical chairs was over, Walt went into the bathroom with the lady in the pink dress and go-go boots. Sheila’s mom stared at the bathroom door from the living room. “Fly Me to the Moon” played on the stereo. Black eyeliner tears ran down either side of her nose. No one said anything to her. A couple of the men who weren’t too drunk looked at her as if they might go over and try to say something to comfort her, but they didn’t. The women looked away or looked down at their shoes. Sheila didn’t say anything either. She just looked at me and walked slowly up the stairs. I followed and we lay down on her bed, silently looking out the window at the streetlight. After a while Sheila got up, walked over to the closet, and opened the door.

  Mr. Ramin, it was rumored, had taken off for Canada, where the cops could not arrest you for sleeping with a minor. At least that’s what Dwayne told everybody on the bus. After they got caught in the AV room, Sheila got two weeks’ suspension. Her mother grounded her, and the only sign that she hadn’t killed Sheila was the globe of light shining through the shade of her bedroom window.

  Sheila came back to school for the last few days of junior high. She wouldn’t speak to anybody. She sat alone on the bus and at the far end of the last table in the cafeteria near the garbage can at lunch. The cheerleaders pretended to bump into her every time they brought their trays back. Eventually, she fled to the smoking block. The kids out there with their hunched shoulders and dark circles under their eyes were vampires, and now Sheila was one of them. I watched her, in an angle of sunlight, doing the Bunny stance all by herself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DWAYNE

  On the last day of ninth grade, on the bus back to Bent Tree, Dwayne and I fought about the Civil War. He said, as he always insisted, that the Confederate soldiers were just fighting for what they knew. I inferred the Confederacy was a lot like Nazi Germany. Dwayne lost his cool completely, yelling about how his great-grandfather had nailed horseshoes to the bottoms of his boots to make them last longer and that he’d had to wear the uniform of a dead man.

  He stood behind my seat, even though the driver yelled at him to sit down. He no longer wore his Skynryd T-shirt and faded army jacket. Instead he’d dressed up for the last day of school in a blue oxford and khaki pants, with his hair slicked back with gel; he reeked of his dad’s Old Spice.

  “You think the world would be perfect if you could just get rid of us rednecks!”

  “Wouldn’t it?” I said.

  At first I thought he was going to spit at me; his face collapsed in on itself and he made a noise in his throat and put his hand up to cover his eyes. He flung himself into the backseat and turned into the corner so no one could see him cry.

  After that it was like he’d found a trapdoor at the back of my head. When I saw a layer of dust on the base of a lamp, I wondered would Dwayne feel like I did, that it was the smallest snowfall in the world? When I swung open the refrigerator door my eyes went first to the bologna in white butcher paper, a food I knew he liked. What was Dwayne’s favorite color? My guess was ivy green. “My Eyes Adored You” came on the radio. Did Dwayne agree it was a cheesy throwback and should be dynamited off the dial? I spent a lot of time playing back things he’d said to me over the years and trying to figure out if they had some secret message. When he said he liked my shirt with the brown piping was he serious or did he really think I looked like an idiot? When he asked if I wanted to go riding with him, I knew I should say no, but I just nodded my head.

  I told my mom I was going to a friend’s. She asked a few questions. What did my friend’s father do? Insurance. Would they drive me home? Of course. I made up some stuff about the mom being a nurse and how my friend was first chair on flute in the high school orchestra. While I spoke to her, I sang the Carpenters song “Top of the World” in my head. I had taken to doing this while she told me about the plans for Rose Kennedy’s birthday or that Teddy Kennedy was still drinking. My mother knew something was off; even as out of it as she was, she could sense I was lying.

  I sat in the backseat beside a twelve-pack of beer. Dwayne’s friend Larry drove and Dwayne sat in the passenger seat. I recognized Larry from pictures in the newspaper. He had blond hair with dark eyes and handsome features. He was the son of Louis Hancock, who owned the store in the French Quarter where Dwayne worked. He’d gotten into trouble in Blacksburg, where he’d been at college.

  Besides my brother, I had never been alone with boys before. Should I ask about football or horror movies? If you didn’t know their lingo, boys made fun of you. As the jeep turned onto 419, I found it hard to believe that I was actually sitting in a boy’s car. And I was with Dwayne, the same Dwayne who’d gotten suspended from school for spray-painting curse words on the wall of the boys’ bathroom and setting a pile of towels on fire in the locker room, the same Dwayne who was seventeen and going into 10th grade because he’d failed both sixth and seventh grade, the Dwayne who had given me an Indian handshake so violent my wrist was sore for a week.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything, as he started to talk about Hutch. How all day people came into the store and told him he looked exactly like the TV character. He broke down a fight scene from a recent episode, first pulling his arm back, then tucking his head sideways. He gently punched the dashboard and then sunk back deeper into the seat.

  “All you talk about is Hutch,” Larry said. “I’m sick of it!”

  “It’s just not fair,” Dwayne said, “that David Soul gets to be Hutch and I just get to look like him.”

  People loved to look like famous people. Sheila loved that she looked like Laura, and my mom often mentioned how, when she was younger, people said she looked like Grace Kelly. There was a
girl in school who looked like Jodie Foster and a boy who looked like David Cassidy. Even our neighbor Mrs. Smith was always pointing out how she looked just like Mrs. Robert E. Lee. But what good did it do to look like a famous person? You were not that famous person, you didn’t even know them, and looking like them didn’t make you their sister or cousin. It made you smaller, not bigger, to look like somebody else, as if the famous person had swallowed you whole and you were just a tiny worn-out doll stuck inside their stomach.

  “You could be an actor,” I said.

  “You are not getting it,” Dwayne said, turning around to glare at me. “I am Hutch!”

  Drops of water stabbed the window and it started to rain. Steam rose up off the asphalt. The headlights lit up the monkey grass and milkweed by the side of the road. Splotches of blurry gold-and-red light came through the window.

  “Hellhole number one,” Larry said as we pulled into the parking lot of the Ground Round. The Ground Round parking lot was the best lot in all of Roanoke. It had spaces in front but also in back. In back the kids hung out along the tree line or near the Dumpster. Back here it wasn’t glaring with dusk-to-dawn lights like most of the lots on the highway; there was just a single lantern suspended near the restaurant’s back door. The downside was the stench of fryer grease. Also, the manager came out every now and then and chased everybody off.

  Tonight the lot was packed with cars and clumps of kids standing under umbrellas. Larry hit the brakes and slowed the jeep to a stop. They checked out all the cars. Not seeing any vehicles they recognized, they pronounced the Ground Round lame. Larry spun the wheels a bit on the wet pavement as we pulled away from the lot.

  We moved on to hellhole number two, the Happy Clam. The Happy Clam was a seafood restaurant that featured beach music at night. Beach music was a throwback to fifties swing. For some reason the rich kids loved to dance to it. The dance was called the shag and had lots of turns and twists and was maybe fun to do but really stupid to watch. We parked in a big lot completely devoid of character. I was unclear why we didn’t go to the Pizza Inn, with its dark and cozy lot. Even the Hardee’s lot had more charm. The band must have stopped because kids streamed out, boys wearing madras pants and Izod shirts and girls in bright pink or yellow wraparound dresses.