Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (15 page)

We took the bus down Williamson Road, past the Vagabond Motor Lodge to the Lee Theater. The movie titles,
Girls That Do
and
The Divorcee
, were spelled out in red and black letters with big red triple X’s beside them. Next door was a place with blackened windows and a sign that read
TODAY’S ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
. Music rattled the front door. We stood across the street by the guardrail in our ski jackets. It was so cold that the tips of Jill’s ears were red and my nose ran.

Petticoat Junction was a brick ranch house with purple shutters and a large American flag flying from the pole out front. The windows of Miss Renee’s Health Club had been cemented over. Jill took my hand and squeezed it hard, then tried to straighten her back. She had lost weight; the bones in her face pressed out, making her features shine. When there was a gap in the traffic we ran across the highway and walked down the driveway to the side door. We stepped over a puddle of muddy water. I tapped my foot in a tight triangular pattern as Jill pushed the buzzer and we waited.

There was noise behind the door and as it opened a man appeared in a waft of warm air scented with sandalwood incense. He wore a bright-red shirt and had dark curly hair. Around one wrist was a leather
band and drawn on the knuckles of the other hand were blue tattoos.

“I need a job,” Jill said.

“You got the wrong place,” he said.

We watched his Adam’s apple go up and down.

“I can use a feather better than anybody,” Jill said. She reached into her Mexican bag and pulled out a turkey feather she’d found in the woods.

“See,” she said, “I even have my own!”

“Little girls,” he said, waving his hand. “Go away.”

Jill threw her body against the door.

“If I could just talk to you inside!”

“No!” he said.

“Just let me in!”

“Crazy bitches,” he said, slamming the door and throwing the lock.

Between the massage parlors was a Citgo and we walked over and stood by the gas pumps under a string of red, white, and blue flags. Jill was wearing her mother’s macramé skirt with a safety pin clenching the waist and suede boots with paper stuck up into the toes. She unzipped her ski vest with the rainbow on the back, took a pair of balled-up tube socks from her bag, and stuffed a sock into each of the cups of her bra, tying up her blouse so her belly button showed.

“What are you doing that for?” I asked.

“You know why,” she said.

“Let’s go back.”

She looked at me with a sudden softness in her face.

“I can’t go back,” she said.

“Why?”

“You know why,” she said again and walked away from me toward Petticoat Junction.

I ran after her on the wet asphalt. She knocked on the door and a tall woman in a blonde wig answered. Behind her sat three women, their eyes all outlined in black. Each one wore a different neon-colored baby-doll nightgown with feathers at the hem. One used a mirror to put on lipstick while the other two read magazines.

“Your mother is not here,” the woman said. “I already told you on the phone.”

“You’ve got me confused with someone else. I’m not looking for my mother,” Jill said, then paused. “Well, I guess I am looking for my mother, but not here.”

The woman’s brows had been plucked and drawn back in so they formed a semicircle high above each eye.

“I’m a good dancer,” Jill said, thrusting out her hips. “If you let me in I could show you.”

“Your mother is not here,” the woman said, as if she were deaf and hadn’t heard anything Jill said.

Jill pulled her feather out of the bag again.

“I have a feather,” she said, throwing herself toward the woman, “and I’m not afraid to use it!”

The woman’s mouth dropped open and she slammed the door.

“Let me in!” Jill shouted. “You didn’t even give me a chance to show you my splits.”

When I got home my mother was sitting in her bathrobe watching television. I couldn’t be certain, but by the way she was sitting I guessed my parents had had a fight and my father had taken the car out for a drive again. She was at 3 but in danger of slipping to 2. She didn’t turn her head when I came into the room, and I saw she was watching her favorite show,
Mary Tyler Moore
.

While my mom usually talked continuously about how important it was for women to stay home and make the domestic sphere beautiful, to be loving wives and attentive mothers, how my grandmother had wanted her to be the valued helpmate of a rich and considerate man, there she was sitting on the edge of the couch in complete thrall to Mary Richards, a working girl. I could tell by the way she didn’t acknowledge my presence that a silent treatment was in effect. I knew I should just go to my bedroom and read one of my library books about teenagers dying of leukemia, but instead I tried to figure out what had triggered it. If she’d found out I’d been to Williamson Road she’d be furious, but there was no way for her to know about that. I remembered I had laughed at dinner when my father told the story of the patient who thought he was a telephone pole and I’d yelled at Phillip for stealing Tater Tots off my plate. I didn’t think either of those would have set her off. The most likely reason for the
silent treatment was that I’d been home so little lately. I thought of telling her I planned to stay home more. I wanted to say how her hair looked pretty pulled back with the pink scarf and that she was the most beautiful mother in all of Virginia.

But I knew neither of these things would work. I always pretended that I was unaffected by my mother’s silent treatments, but actually they made me feel like the ground underneath me had lost its solidity and I was swaying inside the terrible dark.

The silent treatment lasted days, even though I jumped up after dinner to load the dishwasher and complimented my mom on everything from the way she sat sideways on the couch to how she organized the spice rack. Still she walked right past me as if I were invisible. Even when I got desperate and pretended to have a temperature, she put her hand on my forehead, shook her head, and let her fingers drift off, all without making eye contact.

Finally, after school one day, she spoke to me. She’d seen Beth rooting in the garbage cans beside our house, gnawing at a stale honey bun, then using a stick to shovel applesauce into her mouth.

“Beth is a little weird,” I said. “Did you know she was a math genius? She can do problems even God couldn’t figure out.”

My mother looked at me with an expression I was familiar with—she’d had the same expression when I tried to tell her that tomatoes were giant berries or that the reason I’d gotten a D on a test was that I’d had amnesia. She knew something was off, that what I said was only part of what I actually meant.

“No,” she said slowly, “I wasn’t aware of that.”

“It’s very weird,” I said.

“I haven’t seen Mrs. Bamburg lately,” my mom said. She sat on the couch and set her laundry basket beside her. “Her car is always sitting in the driveway.”

Now that she was talking to me again, I wanted to confess everything to her. I’d tell her the Bamburg kids were hungry, how they had no money for toothpaste or laundry soap, how Beth had a cough she could not get rid of and Jill was so worried about the rent she was lucky if she slept a few hours a night. But I couldn’t betray my friend.

“That’s because Mrs. Bamburg got a job as a guard at a warehouse,” I said. “She works all night and sleeps all day.”

“Those poor kids,” my mother said, shaking her head.

I knew she was satisfied for now, but that it was only a matter of time before she found out that Jill’s mom was missing.

I ran over to Jill’s to warn her that my mother was suspicious. I found her upstairs sprawled over her bed. I expected that after I told her, she would ask me to help her run up into the woods and live off the
land. Living off the land was an interest we shared. Jill wanted to build a hut with a moss-covered floor and a hole in the roof so the smoke from our fire could escape up into the night. She wanted to steal the goats from the petting zoo up at Mill Mountain. They looked so miserable chained to the mesh fence. We would let them eat wildflowers, then milk them and make goat cheese. My notebook was full of the furniture I planned to build by weaving together branches with kudzu vines, and I had the ingenious idea of stuffing pillowcases with leaves for our mattress.

But Jill didn’t even change positions on the bed. Her head was tipped backward; the ends of her hair brushed the shag. Tented beside her was her mother’s copy of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
.

She was sick, she told me, of using pages of the telephone book for toilet paper and eating stale hot dog buns.

She didn’t seem to care that my mom might find out her secret. “Whatever happens,” she said, “I’m going to try and be philosophical about it.”

I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed that I hadn’t tried harder to cover up about her mom being gone or if she was just exhausted. I watched her eat one-third of the Little Debbie cake I’d snuck over, carefully leaving some for Beth and Ronnie. I tried to get her interested in a game of Scrabble or Frustration. She just lay there with her eyes half-closed.

Finally, I picked up a safety pin sitting in a bowl next to her bed.

“Let’s become blood sisters,” I said.

She sat up.

“Let me go first,” she said.

She stuck the pin into the pad of her thumb and when she pulled it out a small bead of blood appeared.

I stuck the needle into my thumb, a prick that was cold and then warm as a dot of blood rose up. We pressed our thumbs together and our blood mixed.

I never found out who called social services. My mom denied it. Anybody could have seen Beth eating out of the garbage. Jill warned her to stop, but she was relentless, going from duplex to duplex, picking out pizza crusts and half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches. Whoever called, the result was that early on Saturday morning, the Bamburg children filed out, youngest to oldest, followed by a chubby lady carrying Jill’s back brace. Jill had on several layers of clothing, her two favorite sweaters, and both her mom’s suede coat with the fur collar and her ski vest with the rainbow on the back. I ran outside in my nightgown, and when Jill saw me her face flooded with a huge and ludicrous smile.

After they drove away, I went back into the house. Phillip was on the couch, watching cartoons, eating Cap’n Crunch one by one out of the box. My parents were still asleep. I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom and tried to stare at my face so long it
would no longer seem like mine. Then I hunched my back, opened my eyes wide, and ran the water, pretending to do the dishes the way Jill did, with quick mechanical movements of my hands. I pretended to lay the dishes out beside the sink to dry. I did this until my dad knocked on the door, asking about the endless running water. When I opened the door, his hair was hanging around his face and he wore his seminary T-shirt over his pajama bottoms. I slipped past him.