Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (9 page)

It rained the next day, and I stayed in my bedroom arranging my school supplies into different configurations, putting pencils into my new puppy pencil case and sniffing my new erasers. After practicing it many times in different script styles, I wrote my name very slowly on the cover of all my new notebooks. To me the blank white sheets were like photographs of the Milky Way. They gave me a weird feeling of reverence.
Every little while I went to the window and looked out. Sandy’s blinds were closed and whenever I went to her duplex, which I did every few hours, Eddie came to the door in his pajamas and told me she was still asleep.

The next morning, just after Sandy had left for work and Eddie and my brother had gone off to their hooch in the woods, a van pulled up and parked in her driveway. It was still raining. Two men, one short with a fringe of hair around the side of his head and the other a surly-looking high school kid, used a key to open the door of her duplex. At first I thought Sonny, in an effort to make up, had sent guys over to paint her place. In a few minutes, though, the men carried her couch out to their truck.

I ran down in the rain to get Mr. Ananais.

I told him what was happening at Sandy’s and he followed me up the hill. I stood by the doorway while he talked to the older man, who showed him a pink slip of paper.

“Are they breaking in?” I asked when he came out.

He shook his head.

“They have Sonny’s keys,” he said. “The lease is in his name.”

“What about the furniture?”

We watched them carry the geometrical print down the driveway and slide it into the truck.

“It’s all Sonny’s,” he said. “What kind of a man would take away a woman’s furniture?”

The younger man carried the afghan that Sandy kept on the back of the couch and the wicker fan that had hung over the television. I knew for a fact that one of the residents in the nursing home had crocheted the blanket for her.

“That’s Sandy’s,” I said.

He stopped and turned his head.

“It’s on the list,” he said flatly.

“Well it’s not Sonny’s,” I said, grabbing it out of his hands.

“Hey,” he said, “give that back.”

“It’s OK,” the older guy said, coming up behind us carrying a lamp in each hand. “Let her keep it.”

Mr. Ananais pulled me away.

“You have to calm down,
koukla
,” he said. “The ladies in Bent Tree are sometimes a little crazy. I had a girl come out of her unit naked and go around door to door asking for a cheese sandwich. These ladies will have arguments about anything, how to cook a chicken, or if rain is rain or if it’s drizzle.”

We watched the movers pull the metal door of the truck shut. I copied the number off the license plate and Mr. Ananais went down to his duplex to call Sandy at work. He promised me he wouldn’t evict her, that he’d give Sandy a chance to pay her rent herself. After the movers drove off, I sat on the curb in front of her duplex under my black umbrella with the blanket over my lap. The light faded like a lamp being dimmed by slow degrees. The sky was green,
then white, the air smoky with raindrops and the trees on the mountains darkening. When the rain stopped, steam came up off the asphalt and the cicadas started to pulse.

My dad came out to talk to me. I could tell my mom had sent him. His beard had grown in and he’d lost weight; his hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Before we got kicked out of the rectory my dad would have told me not to worry, Sandy was a child of God. He’d insist that all people and animals, even snakes and crocodiles, were connected at the root, a solid blob of life. At the end too, when we died, we’d be connected once again. It was only in life that we
seemed
like separate beings.

But now he wasn’t sure what to say.

“I guess you’re not hungry?”

“No.”

I thought he might point to the trees swaying in the soft wind and expect me to get all goose-pimply, because the Holy Spirit was moving in the world. He used to do it all the time, and while now it was rare, he sometimes still held his hand up, out of habit, to show that the spirits’ enchantments were not completely dead.

Instead he pulled a cookie wrapped in a napkin out of his pocket.

“Just in case,” he said, setting it beside me on the curb.

I watched him walk back into the duplex. I was mad at him. Without God to protect us, I had to watch over
Sandy and help her the best I could. I saw my mother doing the dishes at the sink through the kitchen window and I knew Phillip and Eddie were inside watching television. It got darker. The streetlight came on and moths beat against the glass. Clouds blew sideways and a few stars came out. I was afraid that when Sandy came back, she’d see her empty apartment and swallow a whole jar of aspirin. If I didn’t wait up for her, she might not make it through the night.

CHAPTER TWO

JILL

On my first day of seventh grade, I waited for the junior high bus by the row of mailboxes down on the main road. I had chosen my outfit only after setting all my options out on my bed and trying on each one. I went through various movements in front of the bathroom mirror before settling on the wide-wale corduroys and the green blouse with the large pointy collar.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest and angled my head. From practicing, I knew the pose I wanted to present when I stepped on the bus. My chin had to have a delicate look and my lips had to be relaxed and slightly parted. I wanted to look mysterious like a Victorian heroine, with pale cheeks and sunken, glittering eyes. In Philadelphia I’d blown the first day of sixth grade by acting friendly and wearing a shirt I’d
tried to sew myself out of calico fabric. I swore I would never let that happen again. I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags. When people asked me where I was from I was going to say Northampton or Old Lyme, as if my life were resplendent with rope swings and sleeping porches. But now that I was out on the bus stop I realized nobody really cared.

Sheila was the only one I wanted to meet. I’d watched her from our deck, lying out with her girlfriends on towels in her small backyard. She was fully developed, as grown-ups liked to say, and dressed like Julie from
The Mod Squad
. She wore a choker around her neck, a floral blouse with lace at the wide cuffs, and rose-colored corduroys.

I was convinced there was a direct connection between breast development and the way girls lost interest in playing jacks and singing along to John Denver songs. In the sixth grade, my friend Kelley had been happy to jump rope with me until her chest began to swell and the creases around her nose got greasy. After that she drifted to the back fence where the boys hung out. I had noticed that once a girl went over she was impossible to get back unless you yourself went over too. Then you could be friends again and talk about pop idols and blue mascara.

Besides Sheila and Dwayne—a sullen older boy in tight bell-bottoms and a Skynyrd T-shirt—the only
other kid at the bus stop was Jill Bamburg. She lived in the duplex next to ours. She looked exhausted, with gray pouches under her eyes. During her mom’s parties, I’d watched Jill and her little sister, Beth, in white nightgowns, and her older brother, Ronnie, use homemade wands to make bubbles the size of small dogs. After the liquid soap ran out, they dropped objects from their second-story window and timed how long it took them to fall.

I moved closer to Sheila. She smelled like musk oil and Eve shampoo. She jumped away as if she might catch geekiness from me, so I sunk back to where Jill stood. I spoke to her, hoping, idiotically, that it might make Sheila jealous.

“What a drag school’s starting,” I said.

Jill looked at me with her flat brown eyes.

“I guess so,” she said, looking past me up the road to see if the bus was coming.

Finally the bus pulled up and the double doors swung out with a loud metal click. I got on last and saw Sheila sitting next to a red-haired girl wearing a Tweety Bird T-shirt. Dwayne sat with the boys in the back who were singing a Doobie Brothers’ song. Junior high went from sixth to ninth grade, but Dwayne looked much older; he must have flunked and been held back. Jill sat with a friend in the middle of the bus. Only one girl was alone. She sat by the window, her white-blonde hair long in the front to hide a port-wine birthmark that stained her cheek. She looked up
at me hopefully but I decided that sitting beside her was too big a risk.

I took an empty seat near the front instead. I knew that proximity to the driver offered a certain amount of protection. This period of grace lasted only for the first few days, though. After that, being close to the driver became a liability.

In school Sheila moved among a flock of shiny-haired girls in colored corduroys, cheesecloth shirts, and Earth shoes. They were like jewels dropped in the muddy hallway waters, with their bright fingernails, glittering eye shadow, and peacock-feather earrings. At lunch they sat together and talked about lip gloss flavors and whether patchouli oil smelled better then musk. They looked so alike it was hard to tell one from another.

I knew, with my short haircut and knobby knees, that I would never join their group. If I were a boy I would have escaped into a football obsession, comic books, or
Star Trek
reruns by now, but girls, girls had no such escape hatches.

I hadn’t always been like this. Before we moved from the rectory I rode my bike everywhere and all the neighborhood kids loved me, because I was the best at making up games. We often enacted scenes from the Bible. My favorite was the raising of Lazarus, where
I’d make my brother rub dirt on his face and lie down on the grass. I’d stare at him with my glowing eyes as I commanded
Rise!

But that period was over. In Roanoke nobody cared if you had a good imagination, if you knew everything about mummification rites or had acted out every detail of the burial rituals of the natives in Timbuktu. The teachers at Low Valley Junior High were mostly female, with thick Southern accents, heavy makeup, and carefully teased-up hair. At lunch I saw my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Remsly, eating deviled eggs out of a Tupperware container. The only men were the grim-faced janitor, the young AV guy wearing bell-bottoms as he rolled his overhead projector down the hallway, and the principal, whom so far I knew only as a deep baritone coming over the intercom, leading the Pledge of Allegiance and asking us not to throw food in the cafeteria. I darted from class to class like a small stunned fish. Nobody was particularly unfriendly, but nobody was nice to me either.

I needed a guide to help me negotiate the local customs, and that guide had to be Sheila. She had the power. At lunch, I saw the birthmark girl, whose name was Pam, sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room. Pam had a Holly Hobbie lunch box and thermos and she ate while she read, not caring if she had milk on her upper lip or a smear of mustard on her chin. She invited me to sit with her, but I pretended I didn’t hear. Instead I sat alone and stole glances
at Sheila, who sat with a bunch of girls, laughing and nibbling her sandwich.

After lunch I watched how expertly Sheila rolled her combination, swung open her locker, glanced at herself in the little mirror she’d taped inside, then pulled out her math textbook. When I walked behind her I wanted to place my finger on her delicate collarbone. I wanted to ingest her like one of my father’s communion wafers and let her instruct me, like Jesus, from the inside.