Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  I knew what was coming.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to be in the movie?”

  “Not if I have to show my womanhood.”

  “You could think of it like a stepping stone.”

  The overhead light made his blond hair glitter and his eyes, while vacant, were the prettiest shade of blue.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I nodded.

  He jumped on the bed and kissed me.

  “You won’t be sorry, I promise!”

  He kissed me again full on the mouth and turned and walked out of my room and down the stairs. I heard the front door close and I watched him moving into a cone of light and then out again into the dark. Each time he moved into the streetlight in his white pants and shirt, his hair shone like a movie star’s.

  After an hour of trying to get to sleep, of turning my pillow over and over, I decided to pray. But this time I wasn’t going to pray to Cher, with her black hair as powerful as crude oil, or to Bowie, with his red hair and different-color eyes, or even to a giant mushroom, imagining myself lying prostrate under it. I wanted to contact God directly, but the ways I’d been taught to connect didn’t really work anymore, it was like trying to talk on a phone with terrible reception. Maybe it was because God was gone. On TV I’d hear hippies say that God was dead, but what was left after someone died? A hole, a space that was just as affecting as when they were alive. Just because the body was gone did not mean someone was not real. I was going to pray into the hole, yell down: Do I really have to bare my womanhood?

  I’m not sure exactly what I expected. Only in the Bible did God speak to people directly; these days He occasionally showed His image on frosted windows or dirty dish towels. I’d never heard an actual voice, though sometimes my attention had been focused in a way that felt outside my control; I’d noticed a drop of water falling from the bathroom faucet, or the weave of the material of my jeans. I waited, I knelt until my legs got numb and I heard Phillip in the shower. My knuckles were white, my teeth clenched, but bits of my brain were falling asleep. I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was the business card lying on the night table. McCabe had given it to me on my way out in case I changed my mind. I grabbed it and walked across the hall into my parents’ bedroom. I sat on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver. Under Glen’s name was printed UNIVERSAL INTERNATIONAL STUDIOS. I dialed the number. I was afraid my mother would come in and catch me calling long-distance. We never called long-distance. We never called anybody until the rates went down after eleven.

  “Stay Bright Laundromat,” a woman said with enthusiasm.

  “What?” I said.

  “We close at midnight.”

  I hung up. My palms sweat. I dialed the number again.

  “Stay Bright Laundromat.”

  I slammed down the phone. The number must be printed on the card wrong. I unfolded the sheets McCabe had given everybody who auditioned. The words were purple and I could tell the sheets had not been printed but run off on a mimeograph machine, like my father’s church bulletin. A few words had been misspelled, blocked out with XXXs, and then retyped.

  Maybe the number had changed since McCabe had had the cards made up. I dialed information and waited for the California operator. I asked for the number of the studio.

  “Are you sure you have the name right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Checking again.”

  I listened to the rushing silence over the line.

  “There is no listing under that name.”

  I hung up, walked into the living room, and sat down on the couch. The radio dial on the stereo glowed and I watched the lighted windows of the duplexes down the main road. My dad came in, closing his umbrella; he looked exhausted from his shift at the psych center. I turned on the lamp.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Now?” he said.

  “Glen McCabe asked me to show him my womanhood.”

  “That movie guy? You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, thank God for that,” he said, walking over to the phone. He picked up the receiver. “I’m going to call the police.”

  The next morning Glen’s car was gone, but people started to show up as usual and Dwayne, who assumed he was out scouting locations with Mrs. Smith, got everybody in orderly lines. After a while Mrs. Smith came out and said she hadn’t heard from Glen since yesterday but that the police had called and asked a few questions. She looked small and worried, telling everybody that he must have had an emergency meeting out of town. People moaned when Dwayne announced auditions for the day were canceled.

  It took a few days for it to sink in that no movie was going to be made. No grand battle scene with thousands of extras, no ballroom scene with a full orchestra. James Taylor would not be playing Jubal Early.

  Dwayne got his Hancock’s job back. I’d see him through the window lying on his couch after work with his oxford unbuttoned, doing bong hits. He claimed he’d known all along that Glen was a fake, that he’d promised him a cut of whatever money they made off of dopes who wanted to be movie stars. It didn’t make sense. Had he really wanted me to show McCabe my womanhood for the ten-dollar application fee?

  On Saturday night I could have hung around outside the pizza place down in the strip mall by the highway or lain on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. If I were a boy I’d have shot hoops or worked on my karate moves, but for a girl there was only one kind of adventure. I walked down the hill to Dwayne’s duplex. As he opened the door, I threw my skeleton against his skeleton. It was like we’d lived our whole lives, died, lain down in the dirt, and were now meeting as elements. He put his arms around me. Over his shoulder I saw the little altar on top of the television, one of his mother’s dangly earrings, a postcard of Little Sorrel, Jackson’s horse, and a star-base bullet that Dwayne claimed had killed his great-great-grandfather in the Civil War.

  CHAPTER SIX

  JESSE

  The morning I got up for my first day of tenth grade, my parents were sitting on the couch. My mother’s face was white, but she was smiling. Dad, on the other hand, was gray, exhausted. My mother said after school we were going to have an important family meeting.

  What would the meeting be about? I asked diplomatically. The night before they’d had a terrible fight, yelling, slamming doors. My mother screamed you want us to eat air and my dad said that actually there was a sect of monks who trained themselves to survive only on oxygen. My mother went from a 3 to a 1, and my dad fled, left the house, and drove off in the car. I couldn’t tell if they’d made up or if they’d decided to end everything. My parents responded together that we’d have to wait and see.

  I was feeling queasy by the time I climbed on the bus fifteen minutes later and caught a whiff of vomit and cleaning fluid. One of the little kids from the earlier elementary-school run must have thrown up. The wheels rolled into a pothole and I was tossed in the air and had to hold on to my seat. Dwayne had dropped out of school to work and Sheila was going to the Christian High School in Salem. The only person I recognized was Pam, who sat in her usual place a few seats behind the driver, her long bangs over her birthmark, her nose, as usual, inside a fat book. Halfway to school, she turned and looked at me.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You look sick.”

  “I think my parents are going to split up.”

  “Join the club,” she said.

  “Your parents are divorced?”

  “Mine never even got married!” she said.

  I waited for her to explain further but her eyes drifted back to the pages of her book. She was famous for sneaking a library book onto her lap and being so mesmerized by it that she wouldn’t even hear the teacher call her name. The door clunked open and a kid got on carrying his black tuba case. The driver yelled at the boys in the back who were chewing tobacco and spitting brown juice out the window.
As we turned off 419, into the high school lot, Pam told me how Eleanor Roosevelt often read straight through bath time and, sometimes, while sitting up in a tree. Eleanor was terrible at making conversation and so she’d go through the alphabet to come up with things to say. A–apples. Do you like apples, Mr. Smith?

  I glanced around to see if anybody was laughing, but nobody seemed to care what we were doing one way or the other.

  At Cave Spring High, which went from tenth to twelfth grade, the halls were not as noisy as they were at Low Valley. Boys didn’t jump on each other’s backs pretending to ride each other like horses. Girls didn’t scream when they heard a surprising bit of gossip. I’d expected to be threatened with a knife while watching kids copulate. I’d expected to be offered Thai stick and to watch girls snort coke in the bathroom off their geometry textbooks. But while there was a strong undercurrent of sex and misery, the students moved subdued through the hallways.

  My homeroom teacher, a middle-aged woman with a small, shriveled face, looked over us female sophomores with contempt poorly disguised as cheerfulness. In health class, the eager young student teacher told us our first unit was to be on grooming. We’d each have to do an oral report on some aspect of our morning routine. Hands shot up to volunteer to talk about hot rollers and curling irons.

  The only teacher who appeared nervous was Mr. Higgins, who taught sophomore english. He paced the front of the classroom in black dress pants and a blue button-down, his face pink. He spoke in an unhinged way about infinity. On the board he’d written out a quote by Emerson:

  A sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies.

  He had a lunatic’s enthusiasm for the Transcendentalists. He told a mesmerizing, if tangential, story about taking a bee out of his little sister’s white ankle sock. How tiny her foot was and how hard she’d tried not to cry. Pam, who sat beside me, was clearly as thrilled as I was by Mr. Higgins’s energy. He was like the preachers on television, but instead of God’s law, he was talking about the possibility of becoming pure love. My classmates rolled their eyes at each other while he spoke, but I felt that, like Cher and Bowie, he had a message intended especially for me.

  In the hallway, Pam made the boys uneasy; when she passed they looked down at their tennis shoes. In the locker room a girl whispered something to Pam. She put her hands over her face but she wouldn’t tell me what the girl had said, and she didn’t want me to tell the teacher. High school, she’d hoped, might be different than junior high, but clearly that wasn’t true. I felt bad for her, with her slumped shoulders and marked face. I reached a hand out to her, but she just shrugged me off and quoted Muhammad: When people throw garbage on you, remember that it’s their garbage.

  When I got home my parents were sitting on the couch again. My dad had on his suit and my mom wore her good dress. My brother was called down from his room and we all walked outside and got into the car. I sat next to my brother just as I had on the drive down to Roanoke from Philadelphia. He started to cry. My mom turned and told him softly that there was no need. I knew we were headed to Sans Souci to see where my dad was going to live. I figured he was the one who had decided he was not rooted in our life together. We’d visit him on weekends, he’d make us eat his terrible cooking. I’d used to long to hang out with my dad in his bachelor pad, where we could sit reading, him with his Alan Watts book and me with my Big Book of Burial Rights, no one moving from a 3 to a 2. But now that it was happening all I felt was carsick.

  My dad did not drive the car toward the airport and Sans Souci; he turned into a subdivision not far down 419. The place was called Nottingham Hill, and we passed a split-level with a speedboat parked in the driveway and one with a deer figurine beside a boxwood bush.

  “Are you getting divorced?” I finally shouted.

  My mother turned around as we pulled into the driveway of a red-brick ranch with yellow shutters.

  “No, silly,” she said. “Your father and I bought a house!”

  As I got off the bus the next day I saw Jill holding hands with a dozen kids out by the flagpole. She wore a long prairie dress with a white collar. A boy with a receding hairline asked God for protection from the Devil. He asked Jesus to walk alongside each of them through the hallways and into every classroom. Jill’s eyes were clenched shut, but when she opened them and saw me, she ran over and threw her arms around me.

  I’d been hoping to see her, but now that she was in front of me I felt angry. After she hugged me she started to talk fast, telling me that after the Swensons’ she’d been placed in another foster home. It wasn’t a bad place, just weird, with odd smells and hot-pink towels. Her grandmother had finally gotten custody of them last Christmas and they’d moved into her trailer in Bedford. Now they lived in Sans Souci.

  “The big news is my mom came back,” she said.

  “Where was she?”

  “She won’t say,” Jill said. “The only clue we have is a tattoo on her ankle of a rattlesnake.”

  “Weird!”

  “She just came in the front door, got a beer out of the fridge, and threw herself down on the couch.”

  “Why didn’t you ever call me?”

  “I kept meaning to, but the more time went by, the more I got afraid to dial your number.”

  Her accent was thicker than I remembered. She was still skinny and hunched, and her face was pale and beautiful like a girl in an old painting. She asked if I wanted to ride the bus home with her one day after school.

  Jill was in standard while Pam and I were in accelerated, so we had different lunch periods. I ate my tuna fish sandwich. There was something really sad about the tuna fish sandwich, especially because the bread was soggy and mayo was smeared onto the plastic bag. We were finally buying a house and moving. I knew this was supposed to make me feel good. But instead of making me feel more substantial, somehow I felt less so, like a ghost girl roaming the hallways with my feet floating above the floor. Between me and everything there was a space, like an enormous canyon I could never hope to bridge or cross. It was like I was dead. A ghost girl didn’t need to worry about being popular, and it didn’t matter if she was sitting beside the freakiest girl in the whole school. Pam tried to cheer me up, which was pretty ironic. She reminded me that Mr. Higgins had told us the Transcendentalists felt unseen things were eternal and that the life inside us was like a river. She told me that when Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to swear, she said Oh Spinach!

  After lunch I gave my report in health on how shampoo buildup dulled hair and how important it was to rinse your hair now and then with cider vinegar to cut soap scum. I had a picture of soap scum on a bathroom tile to illustrate my point. The girl after me explained how by using an ice cube you could numb your eyebrows before plucking, and the girl after that showed us how to clean our pierced ears with a peroxide-soaked cotton swab.

  Pam walked up to the front of the room swinging a tote bag. She was supposed to talk about highlighting your hair with lemon juice. She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote nevus flammeus on the board. After she set the chalk down, she looked out over us, gazing into each of our eyes before taking a damp washcloth from her bag and running it over her face. The makeup came off beige and greasy and her birthmark revealed itself as purple-red with a lattice of tiny black capillaries just under the skin. It was as if she were showing us that while she could pass for human, she was actually a space alien and that, on her planet, people’s hearts were located not in their chests but inside their cheeks.

  I wanted to shout Stop! Go back! Have you lost your mind? But it was too late; a space had opened, one rawer and realer than the classroom we’d originally entered. All eyes fixed on Pam. She didn’t seem shy or embarrassed. All her movements were matter-of-fact. I was reminded of how, on the rare occasions she spoke up in class, she always said something so wise that the teacher had a hard time believing she was not reciting a quote from a book.

  She told us h
er birthmark was often called a port-wine stain or other nicknames, such as salmon patch, stork’s bite, or angel kiss. The medical term was the word on the board. Nevus flammeus. For a long time, she explained, people had thought birthmarks were caused by things your mom had done while she was pregnant. You’d get a red patch if a jealous person touched your mother’s stomach; you’d get a red patch if someone slapped her face, or if she’d been frightened by an animal. Saints sometimes had red marks that were reported to give them divine power. A woman with a mark on her forehead might say she could cure babies of colic. All of these were false. Nevus flammeus was just a bunch of blood vessels all in one place, too close to the skin’s surface.

  “I’ve been called Kool-Aid face, throw-up face, fire face, monster,” Pam said. “Also sambo, retard, cootie queen. I’ve been called ugly in so many ways—ugly monkey, Ugly Mcfugly—I’ve lost count. You’d think by now we’d be too old for name-calling but the first day of school someone called me cutworm. It was worse in the fifth grade. A boy said I was possessed by the Devil. On the playground he’d sneak up on me and make devil horns over my head. Pretty soon all the kids were doing it.”

  Pam held up a jar of white cream.

  “It was after that that I started to use this. And I’m going to show you how I do it.” She stuck her fingers into the stuff, spreading it over the mark that stretched from her forehead almost down to her chin. When it was covered she looked like she had sunscreen over half her face. Then she squeezed the thick beige foundation onto her fingers and spread it out in a circular motion. As she did this her real face disappeared and the one we all recognized came back into focus.

  Sans Souci consisted of two rows of three-story apartment buildings surrounded by gravel parking lots. Jill and I walked from the bus stop with a fat girl named Bitsy, past the reeking Dumpster full of diapers, pizza boxes, and a busted lamp shade. The Bamburgs’ apartment was on the second floor. The living room had a low ceiling and walls painted industrial gray. An electric cord hung down from the overhead light and connected to the back of the television.