Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (31 page)

At school she sat with me at lunch and we talked about Laura and Scotty, who was cute but dim. Once she’d even come to my locker and said she liked the picture of Cher I’d taped to the inside.

We went over what our duties would be at the party: make and deliver mixed drinks, empty ashtrays, and carry around plates of stuffed mushroom caps and clams casino.

After we were dark enough, we got the jar of mayonnaise out of the fridge and smeared it over our hair. Then we mixed dirt with lemon juice and spread it over our cheeks and foreheads to make our pores smaller. We lay on the bed and Sheila read from her mother’s new paperback,
The Happy Hooker
, by Xaviera Hollander. I was surprised her mom would read a book about a prostitute. But Sheila explained that Walt had given her the book as a joke. Sheila read the parts that might help us understand our clients at the Playboy Club. She read that bankers were the best customers and that stockbrokers were a
horny bunch of brothel creepers. When the stocks go up, the cocks go up
became our favorite line. I wasn’t sure yet if I was headed toward being a good girl or a whore. I’d been hoping for a little bit of both, but
listening to Xaviera, I began to think there was no middle ground—you were either one or the other.

At five we took showers. I’d brought over my hot curlers and so we both, after blow-drying, wrapped our hair onto the hot white plastic. Sheila put on her makeup, while Sheila’s mom, who was also in hot curlers, took me into the bathroom.

“OK, Jesse,” she said, “you ready?”

I nodded, gazing over the thirty kinds of sparkly eye shadow and the ten shades of lip gloss and blush that she’d brought home from the store.

She shook a bottle of foundation and spread the paste over my face. She’d already done her own makeup and penciled in her eyebrows, which at some earlier point she must have plucked off completely. She’d used gray shadow, which made her eyes look large and supernatural. She was, I realized, as beautiful as my mother.

“You’re young to have such dark circles,” she said, pressing the concealer over the bags under my eyes, then blending in the foundation.

“I get anxious,” I said, “and it’s hard for me to sleep.”

“It’s the Devil,” she said. “He’s tormenting you.”

I knew she was talking about the local Satanists. According to the newspaper, they drank cats’ blood out of crystal goblets and had fires where they burnt Bibles along with red satin underwear. Black masses performed in basements included the sacrifice of both hamsters and mice. Mrs. Smith claimed the Satanists sent away for books of incantations to cast spells on
the elderly. My dad said all this was crazy. He said he’d never seen people so obsessed with the Devil as people in Roanoke. It wasn’t the nightly news without at least one report of some demonic activity.

At my school in the morning, the Christian Athletic Association prayed out by the flagpole and, at lunch, Crusaders for Christ prayed beside the smoking block, asking God to free the stoners from the Devil’s snare. I had even seen the principal, his eyes clenched shut, his face flushed, begging for protection.

“Do you ever pray to Jesus?” Sheila’s mom asked.

Here we go.

“No,” I said.

Actually I did pray. Sometimes I prayed to the memory of the altar at our old church. Not on Sunday mornings but in the evenings, remembering the times after dinner that I’d snuck over to run around on the dark altar, with its linen cloth muddled in gold light. On the altar I’d seen a lady in her coffin, the skin of her face slack and her features completely still, and also a bride so pregnant that the zipper on the back of her dress had to be safety-pinned. I believed that the altar was a soft spot, an opening between our world and the infinite one. Now, though, God was mundane, something old and pretty, but broken, like the bronze door handle, or the
odd crystal from a chandelier, things you might see in a box at a junk shop. At times I still felt the open God feeling, not so much in objects but in the space around them, like in the space around the couch or the area between the lamp and my bed: it was in that vacuum that something might happen, though it was impossible to know how to pray to nothingness and if it was crazy to do so.

“Well, you should pray,” Sheila’s mom said. I could see her lip liner and how she had expertly filled in the color by using both gloss and lipstick. “You need to accept Jesus as your personal savior.”

A few girls in school had been talking about getting saved, not just the usual pack of Christer kids but even the regular kids: a few of the cheerleaders, and a handful of girls on the drill team. After the assistant football coach got saved, most of the team followed. It was like the flu, my dad said, everybody was catching it.

“If you let Jesus in he will wash you clean. Close your eyes,” she said.

I felt the wand with the soft sponge moving over my eyelids. In the dark, I saw streaks of light moving from one side to the other over my eyeballs. Maybe this was the moment. After I had my face made up, I would finally transform. I’d become shining and whole in an instant.

“If you accept Him all your sins will be washed away and you’ll be like a little baby.”

I didn’t want to be like a baby lying in a crib. I wanted to go out into the world, I wanted to sin, I wanted to sin a lot.

At seven, after we’d painted our nails and spread lotion over our tan arms and legs, we pulled up the black tights and our black leotards, clipped on our cuffs, and hooked our bow ties. Our hair was huge. The bell rang and the first couple arrived: Walt’s college roommate from Virginia Tech and his girlfriend. The couples kept coming until finally Walt drove up and we all crouched in the dark living room. He came in, calling out, and we sprang up and Sheila flipped on the lights. Walt put a hand against his chest, took a step back, and his mouth fell open. Sheila’s mom threw herself on him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He hugged her back and smiled.

Sheila and I took our Bunny duties very seriously. I carried gin and tonics on my tray and delivered them with a perfect Bunny dip. Sheila passed a tray of mushroom caps from couple to couple. One man stared at her for so long his wife nudged him.

“You all look soooo cute,” the wife said.

I picked up empty glasses and dumped ashtrays into the trash. One man grabbed my ears off my head and stuck them onto his own bald one.

After lots of drinks, the couples played musical chairs. I’d played this game at birthday parties when I was little, but this version was different. The men sat on the chairs the whole time, while the women
scrambled whenever the music stopped to find a seat on the men’s laps. The women had to jump onto the men and the men hugged them and snuggled their faces in the women’s hair. The one lady without a lap was out and, while everyone laughed, I could feel she was humiliated. It finally got down to Sheila’s mom and another lady in a pink dress and white go-go boots. When the music stopped Sheila’s mom was farther away, but she threw herself through the air and landed on the birthday boy’s lap.

After musical chairs was over, Walt went into the bathroom with the lady in the pink dress and go-go boots. Sheila’s mom stared at the bathroom door from the living room. “Fly Me to the Moon” played on the stereo. Black eyeliner tears ran down either side of her nose. No one said anything to her. A couple of the men who weren’t too drunk looked at her as if they might go over and try to say something to comfort her, but they didn’t. The women looked away or looked down at their shoes. Sheila didn’t say anything either. She just looked at me and walked slowly up the stairs. I followed and we lay down on her bed, silently looking out the window at the streetlight. After a while Sheila got up, walked over to the closet, and opened the door.

Mr. Ramin, it was rumored, had taken off for Canada, where the cops could not arrest you for sleeping with a
minor. At least that’s what Dwayne told everybody on the bus. After they got caught in the AV room, Sheila got two weeks’ suspension. Her mother grounded her, and the only sign that she hadn’t killed Sheila was the globe of light shining through the shade of her bedroom window.

Sheila came back to school for the last few days of junior high. She wouldn’t speak to anybody. She sat alone on the bus and at the far end of the last table in the cafeteria near the garbage can at lunch. The cheerleaders pretended to bump into her every time they brought their trays back. Eventually, she fled to the smoking block. The kids out there with their hunched shoulders and dark circles under their eyes were vampires, and now Sheila was one of them. I watched her, in an angle of sunlight, doing the Bunny stance all by herself.

CHAPTER FIVE

DWAYNE

On the last day of ninth grade, on the bus back to Bent Tree, Dwayne and I fought about the Civil War. He said, as he always insisted, that the Confederate soldiers were just fighting for
what they knew
. I inferred the Confederacy was a lot like Nazi Germany. Dwayne lost his cool completely, yelling about how his great-grandfather had nailed horseshoes to the bottoms of his boots to make them last longer and that he’d had to wear the uniform of a dead man.

He stood behind my seat, even though the driver yelled at him to sit down. He no longer wore his Skynryd T-shirt and faded army jacket. Instead he’d dressed up for the last day of school in a blue oxford and khaki pants, with his hair slicked back with gel; he reeked of his dad’s Old Spice.

“You think the world would be perfect if you could just get rid of us rednecks!”

“Wouldn’t it?” I said.

At first I thought he was going to spit at me; his face collapsed in on itself and he made a noise in his throat and put his hand up to cover his eyes. He flung himself into the backseat and turned into the corner so no one could see him cry.