Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (2 page)

In the half-light we ran around the motel to the Dumpster. Across a mangy field was a farmhouse that had wandered out of an earlier time period, gotten lost, and was now unable to find its way back. Fireflies floated over the field and above the farmhouse. Tiered up the side of the mountain were brick ranch houses, lit in two colors: incandescent gold if the families
inside were having dinner, or indigo blue if they were watching television.

I wanted to crouch down in the field and pretend the Viet Cong were after us. But I could tell this game frightened Phillip. Whenever he was scared he pretended to look very carefully at some object on the ground, in this case chunks of parking lot gravel.

As it got darker the fireflies rose up and we went back around to the front of the motel to spy on the owner. Mr. Buddy sat delicately on the bald man’s lap as if he were the dog of a French diplomat. The owner and his wife lived behind the office and we could see them through the doorway at the back; the wife rattled around the kitchen.

The parking lot was packed with cars, license plates from Alabama, Mississippi, even Florida and Texas. The backseats were jammed with coolers, stacks of magazines, and clothes hung from hooks above the back doors. A fat man who held his pants together with an expanse of rope had dragged a chair from his room and was sitting out smoking.

The fireflies multiplied; there were so many it was easy to reach out and catch one and hold it in the palm of your hand. Phillip got his Wiffle bat and swung at the bugs until he had a patch of glowing tails stuck to the plastic. He smeared the tails over his forehead so his skin glowed.

After we caught as many as we could in the ice bucket, I opened the motel-room door and told my
mother we had a surprise for her. “Now what?” she said, letting the magazine she’d been reading fall to the bedspread. She and my dad had yelled at each other earlier and now he was in the motel bar reading his book and drinking a beer.

I turned off the overhead light, then lifted the top of the ice bucket so the fireflies rose into the room and began to blink over the bed and around the night table. One flickered so close to my mother’s face that I could see the white of her eyes.

“How will we get them out of here?” she said.

Though her voice sounded worried I could tell by the way her eyes followed the little lights around the room that she liked the fireflies. After a while she helped us trap the bugs again and let them go outside.

I had trouble sleeping. To try to calm myself I thought about our life before we left the church. Dad used to say prayers before every meal; he sat on my bed and prayed with me at night. There were Sunday services, Sunday school, funerals, baptisms. When I slipped into the church in the late afternoons, the altar was dark and beautiful. The crimson carpet, the blues and greens from the stained glass like a doomed kingdom under the sea. We visited the lonely, we collected cans of food for hungry people, coats for people who were cold. We prayed for sick babies. We were at the center of what I thought of as
THE HOLY
, and our every move had weight and meaning. But out in the world away from church, we floated free. What if my dad did not
come back? What if he met a lady in the bar he liked better than my mom, one who wasn’t always complaining about money? One who didn’t tell stories about giant worms in New Guinea that lived in your intestines or housewives who laid their bodies down over railroad tracks? He might go off when the bar closed and we’d never see him again. I sometimes imagined my father had another family. Rather than upsetting me, this gave me a certain respect for him. This second family would explain why he was always so preoccupied.

Our room was not far from the motel lounge with its orange hanging lights with wrought-iron filigree. Cars came and went; as it got later people laughed loudly in the parking lot and used the cigarette machine just outside our door. I watched the few remaining fireflies bob in the air, blinking on and off. I tried to stay awake to see my father, but I must have fallen asleep. When I woke again he was lying beside my mother and there was just one bug left flying frantically by the doorway.

The next day my mother forced my dad to go over to Bent Tree and give the manager an ultimatum: if we couldn’t move in by Friday, we were going to ask for our deposit back and look for another place to live. Usually when my parents talked seriously my father sat beside my mom, but on his return he paced the floor and his eyes kept opening wide as he went up on
his toes. He talked as if the details of our life were an exciting movie, not anything that actually affected us.

“Get this!” he said. “The woman who is in the unit we’re supposed to move into has barricaded herself inside. She told us through the door that while she was moving out Sunday morning, her ex-husband threatened her with a knife.”

“Lovely,” my mom said.

Her mouth turned down around the edges and her chin started to quiver like it always did when she was about to cry. Seeing my mother in such misery jolted my sleepy bloodstream like a candy bar. My mind started to click down my well-worn list of ways I could help her: (1) Write an anonymous letter about what a great person she was. (2) Spend my allowance on lottery tickets. If I won, which I figured I was bound to do if I really concentrated hard, I could buy her the house she was always talking about. (3) Run away from home so she wouldn’t have me to worry about anymore. I knew that last one would hurt her more than help her; a few items on my list were radical. Rather than make her feel better, they were meant to throw a glass of cold water in her face.

My father continued to talk about the evil ex-husband. I pictured him sitting in his pickup truck looking at the duplexes through binoculars and playing with his Swiss army knife. He wore a red bandana on his head and mirrored sunglasses. I pretended to shift in my sleep, so I could see my mother in the
dark hotel room. Her eyes were large and wet as she watched Johnny Carson. A 3 moving toward a 2. To my mom, the intrigue with the woman was just another example of how our life was in decline, one more detail added to the long list of others, chief among them the fact that we couldn’t afford to buy a house on my father’s tiny salary.

Sometimes when my mother cried and said she wanted a house, Phillip, who was four, would rub her back and tell her not to worry, he was going to buy a big house when he grew up, and everybody could live there—not just us, but all our friends, grandmas and grandpas, birds, all the rabbits and mice. Even polar bears, if they promised to be nice and not eat anyone.

I’d had the same fantasy for a while, that I’d grow up, get rich, and buy her a house that looked like the Taj Mahal; to me the pink marble and deep purple reflecting pools looked like heaven. But I was getting tired of her endless longing. Wherever we lived wasn’t good enough. We might call it a house, and think of it as “our house,” but to Mom no place we’d lived in was nice enough to be a house. It was as if the walls had fallen down, and we were just camping out, completely exposed to the elements.

It rained all day Friday. We watched television as heavy drops pelted the big plate-glass window. We fought over whose turn it was to get ice from the machine at the end of the open corridor. The ice machine sat next to the candy machine, each bar of chocolate lit up like a tiny god.

In the evening the rain cleared and we drove over to Bent Tree, passing Long John Silver’s, Hardee’s, and a 24-hour do-it-yourself car wash. There was a drive-in movie theater playing a film called
Dallas Girls
and a string of brick ranch houses with Christmas lights up around the porches and a sign by the road that read
MASSAGE
.

Eventually the strip malls got farther apart, interspersed with black glass professional buildings and churches on both sides of the highway. Just before we turned off, there was a brick church with white columns, a steeple, and a sign that read
SIN KNOCKS A HOLE IN YOUR BUCKET OF JOY
. The parking lot was empty and glittering under the overhead light.

Off the highway I counted thirteen
NIXON FOR PRESIDENT
signs stuck in front yards. My father hated Nixon, but I felt sorry for the president because he always looked so dazed and miserable. Warm air came through the window, damp from the rain and tinged with the scent of dirt and grape juice.

I didn’t understand why we couldn’t rent a different duplex in one of the other developments—Lux Manor, Sans Souci, Evergreen Estates—spread like
bread mold over the side of the mountains. My dad was acting like he did when he was a pastor, like everyone else’s life was more important than our own. He drove slumped back in the seat, his hand dangling over the wheel, the motel envelope holding the rental listings from the local paper on the dashboard. He intended to slip the envelope under the woman’s door and gently encourage her to think about moving out.

When he told us his plan, my mother had been folding clothes she’d just brought back from the Laundromat, a pair of my little brother’s corduroys on her lap. She looked up at him.

“That’s your plan?” she asked.

In the last few days she’d rolled her eyes whenever my father talked about how much he liked his brand-new job at the VA hospital, or said something about the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Most of the car ride she’d been silent, her head pressed dramatically against the window frame, but as the car climbed the mountain and my father said we were close, she started to talk. Her features became unfocused, and when she opened her mouth I knew she was going to say something about rich people.

“Did you know in Hyannis Port the Kennedys keep a pony for the children to ride?”

“I wish we had a pony,” Phillip said.

Between places, while we were in transit, she always went back to the Kennedys. Once settled in a
town she picked a nearby rich family. In Philadelphia it had been the Westerfields. She knew the girls went to Emma Willard for boarding school and that they summered in Lions Head, Maine. She knew that their house had six bedrooms and that each bathroom was fitted with delft tile.

I was sick of the Westerfields as well as the Kennedys. I had to hear about Caroline, how she had christened the
USS
John F. Kennedy
with her mother, Jackie, how she once received a puppy from Khrushchev and was moving schools from Sacred Heart to Brearley. My mother went on reviewing. John-John had spent the summer on a dude ranch. The Onassis yacht had a hot tub and a steam room. Then, as my dad tapped the brakes and took a left turn onto a road lined with freshly planted pine trees, she turned to new information she’d gotten out of the
Roanoke World-News
. She’d learned that the Vanhoffs were Roanoke’s first family. Mr. Vanhoff was president of Shenandoah Life Insurance Company. His great-grandfather had been governor. The paper said Mr. Vanhoff had hosted the fund-raising golf tournament at the Roanoke Country Club while Mrs. Vanhoff had taken her children to the family’s vacation compound on a private lake in Michigan. There they raised rabbits and took French lessons. While my mother spoke, I bent my fingers up and back so slowly I was able to slow time down, so the syllables of what she said were so far apart the words were unrecognizable. I imagined that I was one
of the astronauts on
Apollo 15
landing the
Falcon
on the Apennine mountain range, taking the lunar rover for a spin on the silent surface of the moon. After trying to catch our eyes in the rearview mirror she realized neither Phillip nor I were going to respond.