Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

by Darcey Steinke

  In the kitchen I could hear the upstairs neighbors laughing and, through the wall, “Free Bird.” There was an uncovered pot of beef stew on the stove and, in the fridge, a twelve-pack of beer and a jar of mayonnaise.

  Jill started to tell me how she went to both Sunday and Wednesday church services. At her church sometimes people looked up at the ceiling as if they were seeing right through the roof and spoke in tongues. Others were slain in the spirit and fainted. Now she felt closer to Jesus than her own family. He was always nearby, sitting on her bed or walking beside her through the halls at school.

  She read her Bible every morning, during lunch, and at night.

  “So you found God?”

  I tried to sound bored.

  “He found me,” Jill said. “I was too lost to find anybody.”

  “Lost how?”

  “First I started drinking. Then huffing. When I was huffing I would go with anybody.”

  Jill looked down at her hands. She’d bitten her nails down to nubs but her fingers were still long and elegant.

  “What does Jesus tell you?”

  “It’s personal,” she said. “He doesn’t want me to say.”

  I remembered when we’d smoked the bean pod in the bathroom at the mall and Jill had seen the black catfish that looked like her dad.

  “Jesus will talk to you, too, if you ask him,” she said.

  There was a mildew smell coming from the wall adjacent to the bathroom. I did not want to do a Bible study. Jill was talking about Jesus like he was her boyfriend. I just wanted to leave. But the clock said my father wasn’t supposed to pick me up for another half hour, so I’d have to sit in her room and listen to her testimonial.

  Jill’s bed was made up with the same afghan she’d had at Bent Tree, though now it was in tatters. She didn’t have a dresser. Her clothes were carefully folded and stacked against the wall. I watched her move around the room. The skin on her face was grayish with lavender pouches under each eye. She had on that long prairie dress, the white one with the lace collar. Everything she did irritated me. I had loved her once but now I didn’t even want to look at her.

  She put “Stairway to Heaven” on the portable record player she’d found in the Dumpster. According to the newspaper this was a song the satanic kids loved, but Jill claimed it was about Jesus.

  “Buying a stairway to heaven means the lady is tithing,” she said. “And with a word she can get what she came for. The word is the Word of God!”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  She could tell I was unmoved, unyielding to her lover boy Jesus.

  Jill reached up to the top of her closet and got down her Ouija board.

  “Did you know there were unicorns in the Bible?”

  “Unicorns?”

  “Numbers 23:22. God brings them out of Egypt and is for them like the horn of the unicorn.”

  The Ouija board’s box was cracked at the sides from heavy use. In Philadelphia, I’d been to a birthday party where girls got out the Ouija board and asked if the boys they liked liked them back and how many kids they’d have. But I’d heard darker stories too, about the girl who’d started talking in the voice of Jack the Ripper and how during one session a toaster had flown off the counter and smashed on the floor. I watched Jill unfold the board on her bed. On each side was a different occult symbol: a sickle, a moon, a crown, a raven. The wooden planchette was shaped like a triangle.

  “Are you sure your minister would approve?”

  “I’m careful,” she said, turning down the music, squeezing her eyes shut, and interlocking her fingers.

  “Saint Michael, archangel, our protector against the wickedness and snares of the devil, thrust into Hell all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of our souls. Amen.”

  She opened her eyes and asked: “Do you want to ask the first questions or should I?”

  “You go first,” I said, as we put our fingers on the planchette.

  “I’ll start with the basics,” Jill said. “Lord Jesus, are you here?”

  The planchette moved to the Y. Then the E. Then the S. Y-E-S.

  “You go now,” she said to me.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Just ask anything.”

  I had a lot of questions for the Son of God but none I really felt like asking through a Ouija board.

  “What is your favorite color?”

  The planchette moved. R-E-D.

  “I could have guessed that one,” I said.

  Jill knew I wasn’t taking this seriously, just like the bean pods in the mall bathroom. But now she was less angry than determined to convince me that Christ was real.

  “I have one,” she said.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Is my dad in heaven?”

  The planchette hesitated then jerked hard to the right and spelled out M-I-S-T.

  “That’s weird,” Jill said. “My dad is a part of the weather? I don’t know if I like that.”

  “It’s a nice word, though,” I said. “Maybe he’s lost inside the letters.”

  I heard a car horn outside and I looked out the window to see my dad looking skeptically up through the windshield at the apartment building.

  I jumped up and said I had to go.

  Jill grabbed my hands.

  “You think I’m pathetic, don’t you?” she said.

  “I don’t,” I said, pulling away.

  “I can see it on your face. You think I’ve gone crazy.”

  Dad beeped again, longer this time. I picked up my book bag and Jill followed me to the front door.

  She hugged me so hard I felt her breasts pressing against me. She turned her head, her breath warm in my ear.

  “How was it?” my dad asked when I got into the car.

  “Weird,” I said, looking out my window. “Jill got saved.”

  My dad nodded.

  “She thinks Jesus is talking to her.”

  “Maybe he is.”

  I went from a 5 to a 3. My heart valves thumped, silver threads shimmered at the edge of my vision.

  “Man suffers,” my dad quoted, “only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

  “Pull over,” I said. “I want to get out.”

  “What’s wrong?” my dad said, his voice shaken.

  He was surprised I was angry, that this question, to me, was a real one. I was sick of his bullshit. Either God existed or He didn’t. If He did, my friend Jill was not crazy; we were.

  That night, I lay on my bed. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the radio. It wasn’t as sad as “Cat’s in the Cradle,” but I still found my eyes getting warm and water leaking out of them. It was almost better when Jill had disappeared.

  On Monday she ran up to me while I was getting books out of my locker. She pushed a mound of tinfoil at me.

  “They’re brownies,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  I knew she wanted me to invite her over to Bent Tree. I knew, too, that seeing her should have made me feel better, but I had an empty place in my chest. Though I had found Jill, it was like I had lost her. And every time I saw her, praying in her long dress out by the flagpole, reading her Bible in the cafeteria, that spot got bigger and started to hurt, until I had to run into the bathroom and lock myself into a stall to get ahold of myself.

  On the day before we moved into our new house, my dad and Sandy’s fiancé, Steve, loaded all our furniture except the beds and the dining room table into the U-Haul. I heard Mr. Ananais’s brush moving back and forth against the hallway wall. Already he’d painted over the doorway where Dad had marked our heights, and filled in the holes where Phillip had shot the wall with his BB gun. The kitchen smelled of ammonia instead of hamburger, and the windows, without curtains, flooded the duplex with light.

  I’d packed my clothes, wrapped my perfume bottles in newspaper, my busts of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, taken down my Egyptians—even my Venus flytrap was going over to the new
house. Last were books. The one Pam had lent me, on Eleanor Roosevelt, went on top. Pam talked to me about Eleanor’s ideas, how she’d done very specific things to help people poorer than herself. Pam knew a lot about the congressional bills the first lady had gotten passed and she could talk about them for a long time, in a passionate way. She kept a notebook filled with quotes by famous women. Her favorite: As a woman I have no country. As a woman the whole world is my country. She and her mom were Quakers. A Quaker, she told me, sat in silence. Every summer she spent two weeks in New York City with her dad and his friend Henry. They ate dumplings in Chinatown and went to see French films at the revival movie theater in the West Village. Besides her dad, Pam had correspondences going with three pen pals, one in Ohio, one in California, and one in Brazil! She told me sometimes a good idea got stuck in her head behind a mediocre one. And she thought cute things—babies, kittens, puppies—were actually dense patches of God.

  My dad was going to drop me off at Pam’s house so I could spend the night, and then pick me up in the morning and take me directly to the new house. I set my horse notebook, my nightclothes, and my toothbrush inside my little black suitcase. We planned on finishing the story we were writing about Mr. Higgins’s college days, how he’d read philosophy while lying on his bed and taken long walks in gardens. We were both completely obsessed with our English teacher. On Friday, he’d told us how Thoreau’s friends had spread wildflowers over his dead body at his funeral and on the black board, he’d written a dream from Emerson’s journal.

  I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world.

  Pam and I had looked at each other. We wanted to eat the world too! Pam had read some of my unicorn girl story and she liked it so much she wanted to make a Super 8 movie. Already she had gathered props: a stuffed squirrel, an old saddle, and a bunch of dried lavender. I was going to write the screenplay and Pam was going to direct.

  Downstairs my mother sat at the table. Instead of old photographs she looked through paint-color samples, putting them against squares of carpet. “What do you think?” she asked me, holding up a patch of orange against a brown carpet.

  “I like it,” I said.

  I knew now never to say what I really thought. It was better just to tell her what she wanted to hear. With this strategy I was even able to feel for her; it was more pity than love, but that was better than being jerked around by her mood swings.

  My dad sat beside my mom, paging through a seed catalog Mr. Ananais had lent him. On a yellow pad he drew rows of tomatoes and corn and made a square patch for strawberries. In our new backyard, he’d already pulled up weeds and turned over the dirt with a shovel.

  Our neighbors had all come to say good-bye. Julie, who had quit drinking, took my mom out to lunch in the French Quarter. While they were gone I went over to Kira’s room and she let me hold Snowball on my lap. I fed him a carrot and let him lick the tip of my pinkie. When Eddie first heard we were moving, he and Phillip fought and he threw a lump of modeling clay at my head. But when Sandy brought over a tuna casserole, Eddie had come along and given me one of his Sargent Rock comic books as a going-away present. Now he and Phillip were downstairs watching television.

  Mrs. Smith, like Eddie, was mad when she first heard we were going. She told my dad he was the only person she could talk to and she grabbed his hands in both of her wrinkly ones.

  In the day I lived at my new house, unpacking my stuff, setting up my room, but once I was asleep I was back in Bent Tree. People carried out boxes, loaded their cars, and then drove off. New people parked, climbed out of their cars and carried boxes through the front doors. This all went on very fast, all night long, like a sped-up movie, so Bent Tree resembled a frenetic colony of ants. Sometimes I’d dream that there was a fire in 34K. I’d see the pink flames shooting out the windows and I’d wake up terrified until I realized that 34K was not a real duplex, but one, as Jill said, that was in the next world.

  Jill kept calling, asking me to come see her get baptized. The last person I’d seen baptized was a premature baby. My dad called all the children to come out of the pews and gather around the basin of holy water. The baby was tiny and hairless, more like a woodland creature than a child. She slept in her godmother’s arms until my father cupped water and poured it over her forehead. She didn’t scream like most babies, she just opened her eyes and looked up at my dad as if he were God.

  It was one thing for a baby who didn’t know anything to be baptized, but Jill was desperate. At first I said I had something else to do that day. She persisted, stopping me whenever we passed in the hallway and asking if I’d come see her get baptized. Even at night when I closed my eyes I’d see her in her long white dress, begging me.

  My dad thought I should go.

  “Why?” I said. “You don’t even like church.”

  “I’ll drive you,” he said.

  “I have not been inside a church since we left the rectory; why should I go now?”

  “Do you love your friend?”

  “No,” I said, “not anymore.”

  On the Friday before her baptism, Jill cut class and tracked me down in the cafeteria where I was sitting with Pam.

  “You have to come!”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You could,” she said, clutching the large Bible she carried with her everywhere. “You just won’t.”

  Because Jill was yelling, kids turned around and stared.

  “Look,” I said. “I just don’t want to see you get baptized.”

  “Why not?”

  “You used to make fun of those people.”

  “I know,” Jill said. “I feel bad about that.”

  I moaned and rolled my eyes at Pam.

  “Just come,” Jill said.

  “I don’t want to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

  Jill flinched like I’d hit her, put her hands over her eyes, and ran out the cafeteria doors. I felt bad, but at least that was the end of it. She’d be insane, I thought, to ask me again.

  After the final bell rang, Jill was waiting for me in front of my bus. She’d made a sign on a piece of notebook paper that read PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE COME! All she had on was her dress, so her arms goose-pimpled and her teeth chattered. She had lost her mind. She stood there, hair hanging around her face, begging me. Cold smoke moved out of her mouth as she asked me again to come.

  She called me several more times over the weekend. Once my dad answered the phone and Jill pleaded with him. My dad told her he would drive me over to the church in the morning. He used his Buddhist mumbo jumbo on me, saying everything was connected to everything else, that every fragment fit somehow into the whole. When he saw me rolling my eyes he said, “A real action is one only you can perform.”

  The next morning I felt a hand on my head and opened my eyes to see my father sitting on the edge of the bed. It was ironic. There was a time, not long ago, when I’d have been thrilled just to get his attention.

  “It’s time to get up, Jesse,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go!”

  “We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”

  I dressed in a sweatshirt, my worst pair of jeans, and ratty sneakers. I figured he’d see how inappropriate I looked and let me stay in the car.

  On the way I told him again I had no intention of going into the church and I quoted Emerson to prove it: “God enters by a private door into every individual.”

  He quoted a line back at me, one of Mr. Higgins’s favorites: “Always do what you are most afraid of.”

  “Doesn’t that go for you too?”

  “Me?” he said, shaking his head. “I’m beyond all that.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’m post-crucifixion.”

  “What?”

  “I wouldn’t recognize Jesus even if I saw him.”
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  He never talked about the services he’d been part of in the sixties anymore, where he’d worn a black turtleneck and read from Neruda and T. S. Eliot. All he said lately was that God, if he even existed, was too big a concept to fit into his head.

  “I am not going to go, unless you go with me.”

  My father was silent. As the car ran down the asphalt the winter trees, naked without their leaves, were a blur of gray. Mist hung over the road and floated like bits of cotton candy around the mountain. I tried to do silence, to sit in a space like an open doorway or a flower.

  “OK,” he finally said.

  We parked in the lot, got out of the car, and walked up the stairs. Snowflakes swirled around in the air and clung to my hair. Some perched on the shoulders of my sweatshirt.

  Bibleway Church was a one-story rectangular building covered with white aluminum siding. Inside, an usher showed us to a back pew. We’d come in late; the band—drums, electric guitar, and bass—were mid-song. Our church in Philadelphia was all dark wood pews, organ music, musty hymnals, and heavy bronze light fixtures. Our stained glass showed Bible scenes in deep syrupy colors and the altar was dark, lit only by candles. Jill’s church had painted cement-block walls and the altar, lit by a fluorescent panel, held only the baptismal font, a big plastic rectangle filled with water and a table covered with a wax cloth. One small, round stained glass window, a crown of thorns surrounding three bloody nails, was suspended over the back door. It felt unfinished, even ratty, or what my mother called tacky; I prayed nobody would start speaking in tongues.

  At the altar stood the minister, a short man with a full face. Instead of a robe he wore a white suit. He motioned for the baptismal candidates to come forward. There were three: a pear-shaped boy, his bangs clinging to his forehead; a middle-aged lady who wore her long hair parted down the middle like Cher; and Jill. She was smiling. Her dark roots showed above orangey strips of Sun-In. Even from the back of the church, I could see the constellation of pimples over her forehead. I thought of all the rituals Jill and I had made up, the bean pods, the Halloween turnip, setting fire to the Vogue. We’d chanted over our math textbook and recited poems as we sacrificed flowers to the garbage disposal. Now, she danced awkwardly to the music, elbows in the air, the melody catchy, like a song you’d hear on the radio.