Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (7 page)

“You’re getting good color on your front,” Sandy said as I spread my towel beside her on the grass, “but you need more on your back.”

It was late in the afternoon. Shadows fell over our toes, but the sun was still hot. We lay before the mountain like virgins about to be sacrificed. I pulled down the side of my bottom, to show her the line of lighter skin.

“Malibu Barbie!” she said, as she shook the baby oil and iodine and squirted a glossy puddle between her breasts.

“He still hasn’t called,” she said, motioning to the phone she’d pulled outside, which now sat on the welcome mat. Eddie sat beside it. He had on a pair of huge stereo headphones that had been accessorized with tinfoil sticking out at odd angles.

“He’s in the Head Crusher,” Sandy told me matter-of-factly.

“My eyes are going to squirt out of my head,” Eddie yelled cheerfully, as he turned the page of his comic book. He wore his father’s recon gloves, the tips of the fingers cut out, he’d told me earlier, so he could better grip his weapon.

“I’m sure there are good reasons he’s not calling,” she said, laying her head against her arm. “Emergency root canal, or that lazy son of his might have gotten busted.”

I watched sparrows rub themselves with dirt in the ditch beside the driveway and listened to Mr. Ananais mowing down by the road. Lulubell lifted her furry head and looked at me.

My dad came out of the duplex in his bell-bottoms, a striped shirt, and a wide tie. He was going to his second job at the psych center, but before he got in the car, he walked over to where Sandy and I lay.

I sat up and pulled my knees into my chest; he held his hand over his eyes, blocking the glare, so he could better see us. I was terrified he’d say something stupid, tell Sandy about my rashes or that as a baby I was always constipated.

“Not much sun left,” he said.

Sandy pulled off her sunglasses.

“There’s enough for me, pastor,” she said.

Before we left the rectory, everybody called him pastor—even people who didn’t go to church called him that. Now, though, the title embarrassed him; he blushed and looked up into the trees blowing around on the side of the mountain.

“Help your mother with dinner,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

He walked back to our car, got in, and started up the engine.

“Your father,” Sandy said, “is a good-looking man.”

“What?”

“He’s a looker.”

“If you say so,” I said, rolling over onto my stomach and pressing my cheek into the grass.

When Sandy let me in she was dressed for her night out with the girls: white short shorts and a puffy-sleeved blouse tied high up to show off her belly, and her hair teased up and sprayed. She looked like one of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. I had to admit she was disturbingly tan.

Eddie was already asleep, and when a horn honked, she jotted a number on a pad by the phone and said she’d be back no later than eleven. I got myself a jelly glass full of Pepsi and a handful of Fritos and watched a made-for-TV movie about a senator’s daughter who ran away to join a bunch of hippies who lived in an old school bus. The head hippie—a long-haired guy in an embroidered vest and dirty jeans—took the senator’s daughter to McDonald’s, where he searched through the garbage for food. He tried to get her to eat the food he’d retrieved, but the senator’s daughter couldn’t make herself taste the limp, leftover fries. Then there were scenes of hippies handing out daisies and swimming in rivers. I got bored and turned down the sound.

I’d brought my favorite book,
Half Magic
, with me, and I opened the pages to where the oldest boy presses the magic coin firmly into his palm and all the children are suddenly transported to the court of King Arthur. The idea that certain objects had magic powers, a concept I’d clung to for so long, was starting to seem ridiculous. I’d also lost the ability, which I’d once reveled in, to pretend I was an animal. I used to
spend whole afternoons thinking kitten thoughts or hiding in my closet like a shy baby deer. I’d imagine I was a mother badger living in a civilized badger hole, with a tiny stove and wooden breakfast table.

It was depressing, really, to be stuck always in my own skin. For a short while when I was small, between the time I realized I was myself and when I knew I had to stay a girl, I thought I could go back and forth between girl and boy. I used to imagine I could trade my body for a boy’s. It wasn’t until I said
I have a penis
, and watched my parents’ faces break apart in laughter, that I realized I’d have to stay a girl forever. I turned the sound back up on the television. On the screen I could see the head hippie and the now-hippified senator’s daughter. She was barefoot, in a patchwork dress with a braid of leather around her forehead. They had returned to the McDonald’s, and they were foraging food left on the tables just out front. The head hippie fed the half-eaten hamburger to the hippie girl, the camera lingering on the girl’s lips as she took the hamburger into her mouth. I could tell by the sad music that played over the closing credits that I was supposed to feel sorry for her. But why? Because she didn’t have money for a fresh, clean hamburger? Or was it because she looked different in her hippie dress from the straight-looking people sitting around her? I thought I knew the real reason. Any girl who didn’t do what her parents wanted had clearly been brainwashed. Now that she was eating garbage,
it wouldn’t be long before she’d be in some courtroom singing in Latin with an
X
carved into her forehead like the Manson girls.

Though I hadn’t realized it till now, whenever I thought of Miranda’s ex-husband, he always had the same wild eyes and long auburn hair as Charles Manson—Charlie, as the girls called him, who could handle rattlesnakes without being bitten and bring dead birds back to life. I walked up the stairs, pushed Eddie’s door open, and stood in the doorway watching his little chest rise and fall a few times, his hair so white it glowed in the dark like the tail of a comet. With one arm he clutched his Dapper Dan doll, the thumb of his other hand in his mouth. I went into Sandy’s bathroom. It was still damp from her shower, and the humid air was scented with musk.

I pulled the neck of my T-shirt over to look at my white strap marks, then lifted up my shirt and stared for a while at my stomach. It was a golden brown, the fine hairs white. Then I examined several darker hairs I’d found earlier that day under my left arm. One of the things I liked best about babysitting was that I had time to look at myself as much as I wanted. Each new hair meant I was moving closer to the Danger Zone. Once my body flooded with hormones, I’d become vulnerable to the whims of men. Men, it wasn’t hard to see, ran everything, and once a girl got breasts and all that went with that, men had wizard power over you, they could make you do anything they wanted.

Sandy had left her bathing suit hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and before I even realized it, I had pulled the bikini bottoms up over my jeans and fastened the top over my T-shirt. I decided to practice a move I’d seen Sandy do when she bent down to tie Eddie’s shoe. It was a small gesture, but I’d been fascinated by how she’d collapsed her skeleton to the ground with concern and focus. I broke the movement into parts. First there was the noticing of the thing that needed your attention. Your face showed a sudden focus as the knees began to bend. The next part was the hardest to do smoothly: you floated downward without any effort, gentle as a flower petal. With my fingers I simulated tying a shoelace before releasing back up into the regular stream of time. As I stood up I tried to look satisfied in a small-time way, but my face in the mirror looked
deeply
satisfied, as if I’d just prevented World War III or something.

Maybe if I put on a little eyeliner. I pulled the tiny brush out and moved it along the edge of my eyelids. The black made my eyes look separate from my body, as if they had a different destiny from my nose or my mouth. I tried a sort of chaotic walk that Sandy used as she moved over the lawn toward her lounge chair. I walked back and forth in front of the mirror, slopping my body around as if it were liquid in a bucket, but the bathroom was too narrow to get a real feel for the full sequence, how she opened the duplex door, moved across the grass, dropped her butt over the lounge
chair, and swung her legs up, centering her face into the sun.

I went down and got a beer from the refrigerator and Sandy’s sunglasses and looked at myself in the mirrored wall.

“I don’t know why I keep fucking him,” I said to myself in Sandy’s high voice. It was no use: no matter what adjustments I made, I never really looked like anything other than a boy dressed up in girls’ clothes.

I was getting sleepy but I knew I needed to stay awake so no harm would come to Eddie or me. At the window I saw that all the lights were off in my own family’s unit across the street—even my dad who usually stayed up late was asleep—and I started to wonder if I’d ever lived there. Maybe I was the one who had betrayed Eddie’s father and was now pining for a sleazy oral surgeon. Though I tried to push the story back, I thought about the babysitter who’d gotten The Phone Call, a man’s voice at the other end laughing. The man kept calling until the babysitter finally called the operator, who told her the man was calling from the phone upstairs! If that one wasn’t scary enough, there was the one about the babysitter who saw a man standing outside looking in the window, only to realize the man was actually standing behind her, and what she was seeing was his reflection in the glass. The scariest of all, though, was the babysitter who had called the parents to ask if she could throw a blanket over the creepy life-size clown
statue that stood in a dark corner of the living room. I saw the bloodshot eyes surrounded by white grease paint, the red painted smile and rainbow wig. After a long pause the father said, “We don’t have a life-size clown sculpture!”

I heard a tapping sound and got worried Miranda’s evil ex-husband had cut the phone line. My heart boomed in my ears. I couldn’t stay in the unit; I had to wake Eddie and we’d go out into the yard, just up in the tree line, and wait for Sandy to get back. But just as I was slipping on my tennis shoes, I heard a car come up the street blasting the Allman Brothers. It wasn’t the baby-blue Pinto Sandy’s girlfriend had picked her up in. It was a white Mustang. As the Mustang parked in front of the duplex, a trail of raspberry embers flew out the driver’s-side window and into the weeds. I waited for Sandy to get out of the car, but she didn’t. I saw shapes moving in the car’s back window like koi swimming sluggishly in murky green water.

When I finally got home my father was up and sitting in the dark, listening to his jazz records with oversize headphones. I watched his reflection in the sliding glass doors that led out to the deck. Roanoke, it was perfectly clear now, was not the Sun Belt. There were no landscaped parks. No fountains. Things at
my dad’s job had already gotten weird. It all started when he told the guy who thought he was Speed Racer
Good luck in the big race,
and then at group he suggested to the lady who was afraid of her washing machine that
form is no form
. As a pastor he’d reassured parishioners that they rested inside the heart of God. But he didn’t believe any of that anymore. Now Dad tried new ideas on the patients. Ideas he’d learned in his Trungpa book: that there was no such thing as a self separate from the rest of the universe and that all dualities were delusion. These ideas freaked out his patients: the washing machine lady had to be sedated, and Louie, the man who wore rain boots over his hospital slippers because he was afraid of floods, figuring his body was the same as the bricks, walked right into the wall. Dad was on probation now. At first he’d taken to bed as he always did when a job wasn’t going well; I brought him a crustless grilled cheese sandwich. My mom gave him a pep talk: he’d have to make his job at the VA hospital work, since we’d only just gotten here and we couldn’t afford to move.