Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (37 page)

“The big news is my mom came back,” she said.

“Where was she?”

“She won’t say,” Jill said. “The only clue we have is a tattoo on her ankle of a rattlesnake.”

“Weird!”

“She just came in the front door, got a beer out of the fridge, and threw herself down on the couch.”

“Why didn’t you ever call me?”

“I kept meaning to, but the more time went by, the more I got afraid to dial your number.”

Her accent was thicker than I remembered. She was still skinny and hunched, and her face was pale and beautiful like a girl in an old painting. She asked if I wanted to ride the bus home with her one day after school.

Jill was in standard while Pam and I were in accelerated, so we had different lunch periods. I ate my tuna fish sandwich. There was something really sad about the tuna fish sandwich, especially because the bread was soggy and mayo was smeared onto the plastic bag. We were finally buying a house and moving. I knew this was supposed to make me feel good. But instead of making me feel more substantial, somehow I felt less so, like a ghost girl roaming the hallways with my feet floating above the floor. Between me and everything there was a space, like an enormous canyon I could never hope to bridge or cross. It was like I was dead. A ghost girl didn’t need to worry about being popular, and it didn’t matter if she was sitting beside the freakiest girl in the whole school. Pam tried to cheer
me
up, which was pretty ironic. She reminded me that
Mr. Higgins had told us the Transcendentalists felt unseen things were eternal and that the life inside us was like a river. She told me that when Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to swear, she said
Oh Spinach!

After lunch I gave my report in health on how shampoo buildup dulled hair and how important it was to rinse your hair now and then with cider vinegar to cut soap scum. I had a picture of soap scum on a bathroom tile to illustrate my point. The girl after me explained how by using an ice cube you could numb your eyebrows before plucking, and the girl after that showed us how to clean our pierced ears with a peroxide-soaked cotton swab.

Pam walked up to the front of the room swinging a tote bag. She was supposed to talk about highlighting your hair with lemon juice. She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote
nevus flammeus
on the board. After she set the chalk down, she looked out over us, gazing into each of our eyes before taking a damp washcloth from her bag and running it over her face. The makeup came off beige and greasy and her birthmark revealed itself as purple-red with a lattice of tiny black capillaries just under the skin. It was as if she were showing us that while she could pass for human, she was actually a space alien and that, on her planet, people’s hearts were located not in their chests but inside their cheeks.

I wanted to shout
Stop! Go back! Have you lost your mind?
But it was too late; a space had opened, one
rawer and realer than the classroom we’d originally entered. All eyes fixed on Pam. She didn’t seem shy or embarrassed. All her movements were matter-of-fact. I was reminded of how, on the rare occasions she spoke up in class, she always said something so wise that the teacher had a hard time believing she was not reciting a quote from a book.

She told us her birthmark was often called a port-wine stain or other nicknames, such as salmon patch, stork’s bite, or angel kiss. The medical term was the word on the board.
Nevus flammeus
. For a long time, she explained, people had thought birthmarks were caused by things your mom had done while she was pregnant. You’d get a red patch if a jealous person touched your mother’s stomach; you’d get a red patch if someone slapped her face, or if she’d been frightened by an animal. Saints sometimes had red marks that were reported to give them divine power. A woman with a mark on her forehead might say she could cure babies of colic. All of these were false.
Nevus flammeus
was just a bunch of blood vessels all in one place, too close to the skin’s surface.

“I’ve been called Kool-Aid face, throw-up face, fire face, monster,” Pam said. “Also sambo, retard, cootie queen. I’ve been called ugly in so many ways—ugly monkey, Ugly Mcfugly—I’ve lost count. You’d think by now we’d be too old for name-calling but the first day of school someone called me cutworm. It was worse in the fifth grade. A boy said I was possessed by the
Devil. On the playground he’d sneak up on me and make devil horns over my head. Pretty soon all the kids were doing it.”

Pam held up a jar of white cream.

“It was after that that I started to use this. And I’m going to show you how I do it.” She stuck her fingers into the stuff, spreading it over the mark that stretched from her forehead almost down to her chin. When it was covered she looked like she had sunscreen over half her face. Then she squeezed the thick beige foundation onto her fingers and spread it out in a circular motion. As she did this her real face disappeared and the one we all recognized came back into focus.

Sans Souci consisted of two rows of three-story apartment buildings surrounded by gravel parking lots. Jill and I walked from the bus stop with a fat girl named Bitsy, past the reeking Dumpster full of diapers, pizza boxes, and a busted lamp shade. The Bamburgs’ apartment was on the second floor. The living room had a low ceiling and walls painted industrial gray. An electric cord hung down from the overhead light and connected to the back of the television.

In the kitchen I could hear the upstairs neighbors laughing and, through the wall, “Free Bird.” There was an uncovered pot of beef stew on the stove and, in the fridge, a twelve-pack of beer and a jar of mayonnaise.

Jill started to tell me how she went to both Sunday and Wednesday church services. At her church sometimes people looked up at the ceiling as if they were seeing right through the roof and spoke in tongues. Others were slain in the spirit and fainted. Now she felt closer to Jesus than her own family. He was always nearby, sitting on her bed or walking beside her through the halls at school.

She read her Bible every morning, during lunch, and at night.

“So you found God?”

I tried to sound bored.

“He found me,” Jill said. “I was too lost to find anybody.”

“Lost how?”

“First I started drinking. Then huffing. When I was huffing I would go with anybody.”

Jill looked down at her hands. She’d bitten her nails down to nubs but her fingers were still long and elegant.

“What does Jesus tell you?”

“It’s personal,” she said. “He doesn’t want me to say.”

I remembered when we’d smoked the bean pod in the bathroom at the mall and Jill had seen the black catfish that looked like her dad.

“Jesus will talk to you, too, if you ask him,” she said.

There was a mildew smell coming from the wall adjacent to the bathroom. I did not want to do a Bible study. Jill was talking about Jesus like he was her boyfriend. I just wanted to leave. But the clock said my father wasn’t supposed to pick me up for another
half hour, so I’d have to sit in her room and listen to her testimonial.

Jill’s bed was made up with the same afghan she’d had at Bent Tree, though now it was in tatters. She didn’t have a dresser. Her clothes were carefully folded and stacked against the wall. I watched her move around the room. The skin on her face was grayish with lavender pouches under each eye. She had on that long prairie dress, the white one with the lace collar. Everything she did irritated me. I had loved her once but now I didn’t even want to look at her.

She put “Stairway to Heaven” on the portable record player she’d found in the Dumpster. According to the newspaper this was a song the satanic kids loved, but Jill claimed it was about Jesus.

“Buying a stairway to heaven means the lady is tithing,” she said. “And with a
word
she can get what she came for. The word is the Word of God!”

“If you say so,” I said.

She could tell I was unmoved, unyielding to her lover boy Jesus.

Jill reached up to the top of her closet and got down her Ouija board.

“Did you know there were unicorns in the Bible?”

“Unicorns?”

“Numbers 23:22. God brings them out of Egypt and is for them like the horn of the unicorn.”

The Ouija board’s box was cracked at the sides from heavy use. In Philadelphia, I’d been to a birthday party
where girls got out the Ouija board and asked if the boys they liked liked them back and how many kids they’d have. But I’d heard darker stories too, about the girl who’d started talking in the voice of Jack the Ripper and how during one session a toaster had flown off the counter and smashed on the floor. I watched Jill unfold the board on her bed. On each side was a different occult symbol: a sickle, a moon, a crown, a raven. The wooden planchette was shaped like a triangle.

“Are you sure your minister would approve?”

“I’m careful,” she said, turning down the music, squeezing her eyes shut, and interlocking her fingers.

“Saint Michael, archangel, our protector against the wickedness and snares of the devil, thrust into Hell all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of our souls. Amen.”

She opened her eyes and asked: “Do you want to ask the first questions or should I?”

“You go first,” I said, as we put our fingers on the planchette.

“I’ll start with the basics,” Jill said. “Lord Jesus, are you here?”

The planchette moved to the
Y
. Then the
E
. Then the
S. Y-E-S
.

“You go now,” she said to me.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Just ask anything.”

I had a lot of questions for the Son of God but none I really felt like asking through a Ouija board.

“What is your favorite color?”

The planchette moved.
R-E-D
.

“I could have guessed that one,” I said.

Jill knew I wasn’t taking this seriously, just like the bean pods in the mall bathroom. But now she was less angry than determined to convince me that Christ was real.

“I have one,” she said.

She closed her eyes.

“Is my dad in heaven?”

The planchette hesitated then jerked hard to the right and spelled out
M-I-S-T
.

“That’s weird,” Jill said. “My dad is a part of the weather? I don’t know if I like that.”

“It’s a nice word, though,” I said. “Maybe he’s lost inside the letters.”

I heard a car horn outside and I looked out the window to see my dad looking skeptically up through the windshield at the apartment building.

I jumped up and said I had to go.

Jill grabbed my hands.

“You think I’m pathetic, don’t you?” she said.

“I don’t,” I said, pulling away.

“I can see it on your face. You think I’ve gone crazy.”

Dad beeped again, longer this time. I picked up my book bag and Jill followed me to the front door.

She hugged me so hard I felt her breasts pressing against me. She turned her head, her breath warm in my ear.

“How was it?” my dad asked when I got into the car.

“Weird,” I said, looking out my window. “Jill got saved.”

My dad nodded.

“She thinks Jesus is talking to her.”

“Maybe he is.”

I went from a 5 to a 3. My heart valves thumped, silver threads shimmered at the edge of my vision.