Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (18 page)

The mountain above us was big and black. I could just make out the tips of the tree branches where they seemed to melt into the sky. I wanted to go home; my parents would be worried. Now that we were here, what exactly was supposed to happen? This new Jill was different from the old Jill. Even though it was dark I could see her eyes had enlarged, and she was standing with her hands on her hips in a way I’d never seen before. She was like the girls on
Dark Shadows
, all smooth hair and cheerfulness at first, but pretty soon black circles would appear under their eyes and they’d lie around all day, dreaming of blood.

“Should we walk out to the middle?” she said, motioning to the dock with the diving board at the end. I was worried she was planning to do something dramatic, take off her clothes and jump into the water. I knew this would be more suicidal than dramatic, because the water was freezing and Jill couldn’t swim.

“What do you say, Julio?” Dwayne asked in that voice boys used exclusively to tease each other.

“Yeah, man,” Julio said, though I was pretty sure his name was not Julio. Dwayne walked beside Jill and Julio walked next to me. I kept my hands deep in my pockets as if they were attached to my hips. I did not want to chance random hand contact. When I looked at him sideways, I saw that his face was solemn, and I realized this was not easy for him either. Dwayne had probably promised that I was tall and beautiful. I was tall, that part was true, but I was not beautiful. I was sure when he first saw me a few moments ago, he was disappointed that instead of looking like Julie from
The Mod Squad
, I looked much more like Huck Finn.

My heart struggled like a trapped sparrow. Between the boards of the dock, I saw the water pitching. At the dock’s end we stood and looked up at the stars, pinpricks in black paper, their reflections smashed up in the moving water. I felt we had entered the firmament that my dad had told me about, that vast black nothingness before God made the earth and the sun and all the animals. He’d also said that in medieval times, people thought mice and rabbits were made out of the extra bits left over after God made the bigger animals like lions and bears.

I thought of saying this aloud—it might be interesting to the others—but the wind was loud in the branches and on the water. We turned back in silence and walked off the dock and toward the overhang with the picnic tables.

Once we were out of the wind, Dwayne pulled Jill away from me, and Jill raised her arms as if it were impossible for her to stop him. They went to the corner, where I couldn’t really see anything but the light reflected off the zipper of Jill’s ski jacket.

Julio sat on a picnic-table bench. He hooked his hand into my elbow and pulled me toward him. I would have pulled away, but I lost my balance and fell onto his lap. I sat there, panicky and teetering like a porcelain figure on the back of a whale. To be polite, I felt I had to sit there for at least a few minutes.

“So what’s your real name?”

“Guess!” Dwayne yelled from his corner. Boys always talked only to each other, no matter who else was around.

“Harold?” I guessed.

Dwayne snorted.

“Harold is a perfectly good name,” I said.

“If you’re a faggot,” Julio said.

Dwayne laughed.

I tried to pretend I was the unicorn girl talking to Mr. Brown Bear about the taste of violets and how we missed the porcupine who lived behind the gas station. But Julio’s lap was nothing like the bear’s and my fantasy did not hold; I started to panic.

“What are you all doing over there?” I yelled to Jill.

“You’re like a rabbit,” Julio said. “Just settle down.”

I was afraid if I leaned too close to his face, I would be blotted out completely.

“I have to go,” I said. I pulled away from him, jumped off the platform.

“Just relax,” Jill yelled to me. I didn’t look back. I was already on the path.

As I got near the road, two cones of light passed over me and I realized Mrs. Swenson was back early from Bible study.

I turned and saw that Jill was behind me. We ran faster than I thought two girls could run, branches smacking our bodies as we hurled ourselves through the woods and around the lake.

By the time we got back, the car lights were off and Mrs. Swenson was just a dark figure standing on the porch. I could tell she’d been inside already to look for Jill. She was now gazing at the dark water. I heard Jill trying to regulate her breath as we hid behind a stand of trees close to the porch.

“It’s me,” Jill said.

Mrs. Swenson turned toward Jill’s voice, trying to make out her shape in the darkness.

“Don’t you know me?” Jill said.

Mrs. Swenson stood there quietly before she went back into her house and closed the door.

Jill didn’t show up at school the next day. When I got home that afternoon, I called the Swensons. Mrs. Swenson answered and said Jill was gone. She’d run
away and nobody knew where she was. Her grandmother hadn’t heard from her and Dwayne claimed he hadn’t heard from her either, but by the way the corners of his mouth turned up I knew he might not be telling the truth. Rumors went around the school. Stories about how Jill had run away with a pot dealer, how she’d been kidnapped by a bunch of bikers and taken to Mexico. These, while horrible, bothered me less than Sheila’s story: she claimed that Jill had fallen into Tilden Lake and drowned.

CHAPTER THREE

JULIE

Mom glanced up now and then from her photo album to watch the new tenants moving into the Bamburg duplex. I still thought of it as Jill’s place even though I hadn’t seen her or the rest of her family for three years, since I was twelve. A single guy had lived in 11B since the Bamburgs moved out, a pale young man who worked at the Jiffy Lube on 419. Last week, without warning, he’d packed up his beer-can collection and left. My mom and I watched the new woman carrying boxes and her daughter coming in and out of the living room. The girl cradled something white and round in her arms that I assumed was a stuffed animal.

Mr. Ananais told us the woman, whose name was Julie, was a former Miss North Carolina and that
she owned a dance studio out in Salem. She wore a wraparound skirt over a white leotard. On her thin wrists hung big silver bracelets, and her long brown hair spurted out of a ponytail at the top of her head. I assumed my mom would say she was just like Sandy, who, since she’d broken up with Sonny, had a different guy sleep over every month. But my mom wasn’t ready yet to render her verdict; Julie’s possessions confused her. Chrome lamps, a crystal champagne bucket, a sheepskin rug—all too glittery for my mother’s taste, but she had to admit the stuff was expensive. After unpacking, Julie hung a mirror over her beige leather couch. It reflected the wires flowing out of the back of our television set and my mom sitting at the table in her bathrobe.

Nixon had resigned and I’d gotten my period, but not much else had changed besides my bra size. The world went on: Patty Hearst got kidnapped, Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon, and the Weathermen bombed the State Department. Though time had passed and I was now fifteen, I felt trapped like a bug in amber. I was stuck in place while my dad kept seeking. Over the years he’d had many phases. First he got interested in past-life regression, convinced that all his current problems were connected to unresolved problems in his past; in one life his
father had beaten him and in another his little sister had drowned. After that he’d joined a group that practiced rebirthing. Birth, he explained to me, was traumatic. The baby learned the world was hostile. But through rebirthing the participant felt a saturation of
divine love
. I sat in the car and did homework during one of those sessions. The screams that came from the Unitarian church basement scared me. When he came back, he seemed flushed and a little crazy, his eyes darting around the road. He told me the woman who’d been reborn had
really gotten into it
. She’d even, like a baby, peed her pants.

“Yuck!” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

I thought he’d be mad, but he just laughed. Currently he was going to a dream-therapy group and reading Alan Watts. The books lay piled up on the coffee table. When I walked by he’d look up and say, “
Get this!
You are an aperture through which the universe is exploring itself.” God, if he existed at all, was just as much in the Long John Silver’s as inside any church. He told me Christianity was a sort of playacting. He didn’t need scripted prayers or creeds to reach divinity; he, like everyone, needed to find his own route. When he looked back at our time in the rectory—a time that was to me as precious as it was remote—all he felt now was regret.

My dad had no interest in Julie, but I studied her, watched her sit on her plush couch, drinking white wine. I assumed she was too glamorous to be interested in us. But one night, after my dad went to his second job, my mom came down in her good dress, a burgundy linen number with a boatneck and high heels. She smelled slightly of mothballs and wore red lipstick. Julie was coming over for a drink!

I went back to my science notebook, filling in the names of the trees beside different-shaped leaves. When the bell rang she ran to the door. To my mom, every aspect of a woman’s appearance translated into particular information. Womanhood for her was a cult with hundreds of secret symbols. A turquoise ring meant one thing worn on the index finger, something completely different on the pinkie. When Mrs. Smith wore a red scarf tied sideways around her neck it was OK, but when Sandy wore a red scarf as a belt my mother called her a Gypsy. I was afraid my mother would not approve of the way Julie’s white enamel necklace hung around her neck or the way her toenails were painted orange, but she welcomed her and thanked her for bringing wine.