Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (36 page)

The next morning Glen’s car was gone, but people started to show up as usual and Dwayne, who assumed he was out scouting locations with Mrs. Smith, got everybody in orderly lines. After a while Mrs. Smith came out and said she hadn’t heard from Glen since yesterday but that the police had called and asked a few questions. She looked small and worried, telling everybody that he must have had an emergency meeting out of town. People moaned when Dwayne announced auditions for the day were canceled.

It took a few days for it to sink in that no movie was going to be made. No grand battle scene with thousands of extras, no ballroom scene with a full orchestra. James Taylor would not be playing Jubal Early.

Dwayne got his Hancock’s job back. I’d see him through the window lying on his couch after work with his oxford unbuttoned, doing bong hits. He claimed he’d known all along that Glen was a fake, that he’d promised him a cut of whatever money they made off of dopes who wanted to be movie stars. It didn’t make sense. Had he really wanted me to show McCabe my womanhood for the ten-dollar application fee?

On Saturday night I could have hung around outside the pizza place down in the strip mall by the highway or lain on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. If I were a boy I’d have shot hoops or worked on my karate moves, but for a girl there was only one kind of adventure. I walked down the hill to Dwayne’s duplex. As he opened the door, I threw my skeleton against his skeleton. It was like we’d lived our whole lives, died, lain down in the dirt, and were now meeting as elements. He put his arms around me. Over his shoulder I saw the little altar on top of the television, one of his mother’s dangly earrings, a postcard of Little Sorrel, Jackson’s horse, and a star-base bullet that Dwayne claimed had killed his great-great-grandfather in the Civil War.

CHAPTER SIX

JESSE

The morning I got up for my first day of tenth grade, my parents were sitting on the couch. My mother’s face was white, but she was smiling. Dad, on the other hand, was gray, exhausted. My mother said after school we were going to have an important family meeting.

What would the meeting be about? I asked diplomatically. The night before they’d had a terrible fight, yelling, slamming doors. My mother screamed
you want us to eat air
and my dad said that actually there was a sect of monks who trained themselves to survive only on oxygen. My mother went from a 3 to a 1, and my dad fled, left the house, and drove off in the car. I couldn’t tell if they’d made up or if they’d decided to end everything. My parents responded together that we’d have to wait and see.

I was feeling queasy by the time I climbed on the bus fifteen minutes later and caught a whiff of vomit and cleaning fluid. One of the little kids from the earlier elementary-school run must have thrown up. The wheels rolled into a pothole and I was tossed in the air and had to hold on to my seat. Dwayne had dropped out of school to work and Sheila was going to the Christian High School in Salem. The only person I recognized was Pam, who sat in her usual place a few seats behind the driver, her long bangs over her birthmark, her nose, as usual, inside a fat book. Halfway to school, she turned and looked at me.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Why?”

“You look sick.”

“I think my parents are going to split up.”

“Join the club,” she said.

“Your parents are divorced?”

“Mine never even got married!” she said.

I waited for her to explain further but her eyes drifted back to the pages of her book. She was famous for sneaking a library book onto her lap and being so mesmerized by it that she wouldn’t even hear the teacher call her name. The door clunked open and a kid got on carrying his black tuba case. The driver yelled at the boys in the back who were chewing tobacco and spitting brown juice out the window. As we turned off 419, into the high school lot, Pam told me how Eleanor Roosevelt often read straight through
bath time and, sometimes, while sitting up in a tree. Eleanor was terrible at making conversation and so she’d go through the alphabet to come up with things to say.
A–apples. Do you like apples, Mr. Smith?

I glanced around to see if anybody was laughing, but nobody seemed to care what we were doing one way or the other.

At Cave Spring High, which went from tenth to twelfth grade, the halls were not as noisy as they were at Low Valley. Boys didn’t jump on each other’s backs pretending to ride each other like horses. Girls didn’t scream when they heard a surprising bit of gossip. I’d expected to be threatened with a knife while watching kids copulate. I’d expected to be offered Thai stick and to watch girls snort coke in the bathroom off their geometry textbooks. But while there was a strong undercurrent of sex and misery, the students moved subdued through the hallways.

My homeroom teacher, a middle-aged woman with a small, shriveled face, looked over us female sophomores with contempt poorly disguised as cheerfulness. In health class, the eager young student teacher told us our first unit was to be on grooming. We’d each have to do an oral report on some aspect of our morning routine. Hands shot up to volunteer to talk about hot rollers and curling irons.

The only teacher who appeared nervous was Mr. Higgins, who taught sophomore english. He paced the front of the classroom in black dress pants and a blue button-down, his face pink. He spoke in an unhinged way about infinity. On the board he’d written out a quote by Emerson:

A sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies.

He had a lunatic’s enthusiasm for the Transcendentalists. He told a mesmerizing, if tangential, story about taking a bee out of his little sister’s white ankle sock. How tiny her foot was and how hard she’d tried not to cry. Pam, who sat beside me, was clearly as thrilled as I was by Mr. Higgins’s energy. He was like the preachers on television, but instead of God’s law, he was talking about the possibility of becoming
pure love
. My classmates rolled their eyes at each other while he spoke, but I felt that, like Cher and Bowie, he had a message intended especially for me.

In the hallway, Pam made the boys uneasy; when she passed they looked down at their tennis shoes. In the locker room a girl whispered something to Pam. She put her hands over her face but she wouldn’t tell me what the girl had said, and she didn’t want me to tell the teacher. High school, she’d hoped, might be different than junior high, but clearly that wasn’t true.
I felt bad for her, with her slumped shoulders and marked face. I reached a hand out to her, but she just shrugged me off and quoted Muhammad:
When people throw garbage on you, remember that it’s their garbage.

When I got home my parents were sitting on the couch again. My dad had on his suit and my mom wore her good dress. My brother was called down from his room and we all walked outside and got into the car. I sat next to my brother just as I had on the drive down to Roanoke from Philadelphia. He started to cry. My mom turned and told him softly that there was no need. I knew we were headed to Sans Souci to see where my dad was going to live. I figured he was the one who had decided he was not rooted in our life together. We’d visit him on weekends, he’d make us eat his terrible cooking. I’d used to long to hang out with my dad in his bachelor pad, where we could sit reading, him with his Alan Watts book and me with my
Big Book of Burial Rights
, no one moving from a 3 to a 2. But now that it was happening all I felt was carsick.

My dad did not drive the car toward the airport and Sans Souci; he turned into a subdivision not far down 419. The place was called Nottingham Hill, and we passed a split-level with a speedboat parked in the driveway and one with a deer figurine beside a boxwood bush.

“Are you getting divorced?” I finally shouted.

My mother turned around as we pulled into the driveway of a red-brick ranch with yellow shutters.

“No, silly,” she said. “Your father and I bought a house!”

As I got off the bus the next day I saw Jill holding hands with a dozen kids out by the flagpole. She wore a long prairie dress with a white collar. A boy with a receding hairline asked God for protection from the Devil. He asked Jesus to walk alongside each of them through the hallways and into every classroom. Jill’s eyes were clenched shut, but when she opened them and saw me, she ran over and threw her arms around me.

I’d been hoping to see her, but now that she was in front of me I felt angry. After she hugged me she started to talk fast, telling me that after the Swensons’ she’d been placed in another foster home. It wasn’t a bad place, just weird, with odd smells and hot-pink towels. Her grandmother had finally gotten custody of them last Christmas and they’d moved into her trailer in Bedford. Now they lived in Sans Souci.