Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (12 page)

At four, with his hair gelled back, the boa around his neck, and lipstick blood flowing from both sides of his mouth, Ronnie went to wake Mrs. Bamburg for work.

“Bad news,” he said, speaking with a sexy-evil Transylvanian accent. “She does not answer.”

“I’ll get her up,” Jill said.

Jill had a trick to lure her mother out of bed. She put on the Allman Brothers, went to the kitchen, and got out a can of beer.

“It’s near the anniversary of Duane’s death,” Ronnie said. “Hearing that might make her worse.”

“Oh, you’re right!” Jill said, running back to the stereo, lifting the needle, and putting on the new Thin Lizzy single her mother had brought home from Woolworth’s.

I followed her up the stairs. Even though I’d spent as much time as I could with Jill, I’d seen her mother only a few times. She had a frizzy perm and wore wire-rim glasses above her chubby cheeks. She looked more like an older sister than a mother and, like an older sister, she was usually too tired to do anything around the house. Jill did the laundry, made the beds, cleaned the bathroom. Mrs. Bamburg brought home groceries, once a week, but she just left the food on the counter for Jill to unpack.

“Mom,” Jill called through the door. I stood in the hallway. I remembered trying to lure Miranda out of
her bedroom. Maybe we should sing a song. Jill and I knew the lyrics to several John Denver songs and to “I Got You Babe.” She was always Sonny so I could be Cher. I tried to stand very still, so still I could feel my heart pump and my brain hum.

There was no answer. Jill turned to me and motioned that I should stay in the hall. As she opened the door, I saw that with the curtains closed, the room was dark. Her mother had the comforter pulled over her head so her body in the bed resembled a mountain range. Warm air tinged with cigarette smoke spilled over me and into the hallway.

Jill went to the blinds and raised them a few inches, then sat on the side of the bed.

“Please, Mom,” she said.

From under the covers her mother gave a grainy moan. Jill tried to pull back the comforter but her mother held it tight over her face.

“I’m sick,” she said. “I need you to call in for me.”

“But I did that yesterday!”

“I don’t feel good,” she said. “I can’t go in.”

“You got to,” Jill said, yanking the comforter.

The soles of her mother’s feet were chalky. Her toes looked delicate and sad, the baby toe curling into the bigger one beside it as if it were lonely.

“Give me back my blanket!” she said, sitting up and reaching toward Jill.

Jill didn’t say anything, just stepped away from the bed so her mom couldn’t reach her.

Downstairs Jill picked up the receiver and dialed the restaurant. She asked to speak to the manager.

“This is Jill Bamburg.”

She listened, nodding her head vigorously.

“Yes. But. No sir. OK.”

She hung up the phone.

“If she doesn’t go in today, she’s fired.”

This news, delivered by Jill through her mother’s bedroom door, elicited only a grunt. Her mother slept on as we filled the buckets and dropped apples into the water, rolling and shiny. Jill taped the picture of a pumpkin Beth drew on the front door and we made a list of the children we knew who lived in Bent Tree. There were eleven all together, plus two babies and, of course, Sheila and Dwayne, the older kid from the bus stop. He was what the kids in school called a dirtbag, but all I really knew was how he tortured us on the bus, dared us to lick the seats, and called all the younger boys faggots.

When she finally did come down in her bathrobe, Mrs. Bamburg was holding the beer Jill had brought up earlier.

“What is all this?” she said, blinking at the streamers, the scarves thrown over the two lamps, the chairs set up for games.

“The party,” Jill said. “Remember?”

Mrs. Bamburg nodded without enthusiasm and turned into the kitchen, where she picked up the phone and called her friends one after another, telling
them that the
little shit
manager had finally fired her. She told the story so many times, with the exact same words, that I felt like the earth might have gotten stuck and stopped rotating.

By seven o’clock, though it was fully dark, not one trick-or-treater had rung the bell. Ronnie had gone down to his room and Beth was doing math problems from his high school textbook. We’d even seen my brother and Eddie, in green fatigues and bleeding ketchup from their heads, walk right by our duplex with my dad. They were headed for the subdivision down the road, where it was rumored they were giving away full-size candy bars.

“It’s evil spirits,” Jill said, her eyes wide. “They are keeping people away from our party.”

“That’s crazy,” Beth said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. It was funny to see her doing math problems because everyone knew the real Pippi Longstocking would never do homework.

Jill walked into the kitchen, got out the turnip, and motioned for me to follow her around the side of the duplex. We walked next to where the siding met the cement foundation. We circled clockwise three times. I couldn’t keep up with Jill. She was upset not only that we’d worked so hard on the party and nobody was showing up, but also that kids right now could be biting into Mars bars filled with razor blades and M&M’s sprinkled with angel dust. Abruptly she stopped and swung around. I followed her three times
counterclockwise around the duplex, all in an effort to ward off evil spirits.

We sat on the stairs in front of the house, the turnip beside us, the stars splattered above us. I took hold of her hand. Even though it was cold outside, her palm was warm and moist. Holding it was like holding a small, soft animal.

Jill decided that the problem was that we hadn’t advertised our party enough. We should go down by the main road and let everyone know. At the edge of Bent Tree, right by the mailboxes, we saw the girls from 4B. The older one was a cowgirl in a red felt hat and matching vest, and the younger one, who threw around a furry tail and meowed loudly, was a kitty cat.

“We’re having a party in 11B,” Jill said to the mother, a short-haired woman in a yellow trench coat. “We’ve got all kinds of safe, fun activities.”

The woman looked at the handmade poster with a drawing of Dracula in his coffin and then up at us. Unless she was deaf, she’d heard music blasting from Jill’s duplex and sometimes men having fistfights on the front lawn; this mother thought we were the sort of people that Jill wanted to have the party to protect the kids against.

“Thanks honey,” she said. “But I got to get these kids to bed.”

“Please come up.” Jill grabbed the woman’s arm.

“Maybe another time.” The woman moved away and hurried down the path toward her front door.

“Meow,” the little girl said, but then grimaced like a mean cat and hissed at us.

We walked across the road into the subdivision with the brick ranch houses. There was a girl in a Cinderella mask with tiny eyeholes jumping on a trampoline. A jeep drove past with a dead deer tied to the top. I thought it was a Halloween prank, but Jill said hunting season had just started and I had to get used to seeing deer sprawled out on the roofs of cars. Most of the ranches were decorated for Halloween with dried cornstalks tied to their mailboxes and jack-o’-lanterns that lit up their front doors. Jill passed fliers to a group of teenagers in hooded sweatshirts wearing zombie masks and carrying pillowcases full of candy and a father taking around his toddler dressed like a lion in brown pj’s, black whiskers drawn over the kid’s chubby pink cheeks.

When we walked back up and sat on the steps again, I could tell Jill was disappointed; nothing had turned out the way she’d planned.

“Kids might still come,” I said. “It’s not too late.”

I could see now, though, that there were Pintos and Mustangs lining the street in front of Jill’s duplex, and I could hear Lynyrd Skynyrd blasting out the windows. No children would be coming to our party. We went back inside, where her mother was slow-dancing with a guy in an Indian kurta. We could see his red chest hairs poking out the top of his shirt. Her mother, who’d been drinking ever since she got
up, pressed into the man like a soft stick of butter, her mouth attached to his, and I could see by the way her cheek shifted that his tongue was fully in her mouth.

“That’s so gross!” Jill said, pulling me up the stairs. Two women and a man sat on her bed smoking. She told them to get out, that she needed to do her homework, but they ignored her and kept talking, the man explaining how to make dandelion wine.

We wandered back downstairs.

A few people wore costumes. Sandy, dressed like a bunny, in rabbit ears and an aerobics leotard, was talking to a man wearing purple-tinted glasses and love beads. She’d taken on more shifts at the nursing home so she could pay her own rent. Most of the other outfits were half-committed—a guy in a funny hat and a girl wearing rhinestone sunglasses. I saw that my father was in the corner. I’d told him earlier about the kids’ party and though it hadn’t worked out how we wanted, I was still glad he had come. He wore his wire-rim reading glasses and a surplice from when he’d been a minister. At first I thought he had come as a priest but then I saw that he carried a gold-trimmed book and realized he was supposed to be Prospero from
The Tempest
. I waved to him from across the room and he waved back. He was talking to a man with a mustache.

I didn’t like the look of the man. Any guy who looked like Charles Manson even a little gave me the creeps, and I could tell by the way the man kept holding his
hands up to replicate a rifle that he was telling my dad about hunting trips. Before we left the rectory, my dad might have come to a party like this to actually minister to lost souls, to tell them they were not alone, that there was a halo of presence around each of us and while you might feel separate from God, this was only an illusion. Now he was more like an anthropologist doing fieldwork. By the way he laughed and shook his head I could tell he was interested and amused by the man’s story.

Jill and I pushed through the crowd and went back outside. It was dark and the tops of the trees blew left and then right; nearly all the leaves were off now and the evergreens sat smoky in the darkness. The mountain was above us, wild and unknowable. I was cold in my white leotard and painter pants. I had made myself a unicorn horn out of tinfoil and attached it to my forehead with masking tape, but it had bent sideways and looked less now like a magical horn and more like someone had stuck a knife into the side of my head.

Jill was Victoria Winters from
Dark Shadows
in a black dress with a lace collar.

“This is the dress my mama wore to the funeral.”

“Doesn’t it give you the creeps to wear it?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “But aren’t you supposed to have the creeps on Halloween?”

“I guess,” I said. I sounded noncommittal, but what she said hit me hard. She wanted to honor the dead even if it made her uncomfortable.

We watched people moving in the windows like fish in an aquarium.

“Do the speech,” I said.

“I don’t feel like it,” she said.

“Oh come on,” I said. “It will make us feel better.”

“You think so?”

“Do it!”

“My name is Victoria Winters,” Jill began. “My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me, and link my past with my future, a journey that will bring me to a strange and dark place, a world I’ve never known.”

Later, back in my own bed, trying to fall asleep, I heard a voice. This time I knew it wasn’t a spirit. Jill stood outside my window in her nightgown. I went down and opened the door. It had warmed up a bit, so the ground sent up a fine bluish mist.

“My mother split to get beer,” she said, “but she’s still not home.”

“Was that before the fight or after?”

As the party was breaking up, two guys had gone at it in the street under the dusk-to-dawn lights.

“After,” Jill said.

“Maybe she decided to spend the night someplace else?”

“Maybe,” Jill said.

“Do you want to come in?” I said. “I’ll sleep on the floor and you can sleep on my bed.”

She shook her head.

“Beth might wake up.”