Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (20 page)

When I woke up the next morning my mother was already out of her bathrobe, and when I got home from school the shag had been vacuumed and the kitchen counter swept of crumbs. She’d put away her photo albums, set candlesticks on the table, and placed a tapestry—given to us by a Chinese missionary—over the back of the couch. She set out on the coffee
table
The Family of Man
, a book of photographs that showed, among other things, a just-born bloody baby, and
Surfacing
, a book my father told me was about a woman who went insane.

Phillip was running the vacuum.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Who knows?” he said. “But at least she seems happy.”

After my dad left for the psych center and my brother settled into my parents’ room to watch the portable television, my mom changed into a good dress, the polka-dot one with the full skirt, put on lipstick, and arranged cheese cubes on our nice serving plate. She put
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
on the stereo and turned on our lamp with the brass base and linen shade. She sat sideways on the couch, looking through
Town and Country
magazine. She tried to act cool, as if she set herself up with hors d’oeuvres and paged through magazines every night. But I could tell by the way she kept glancing over to Julie’s apartment, staring at a tiny version of herself in the mirror over Julie’s couch, that she was a little unhinged. A 4 moving to a 3.

I’d spread my notebook, graph paper, and pencils all over one corner of the living room in an effort to mark the territory as my own. But once Julie arrived and my mom opened a bottle of wine and they sat down on the couch, laughing and smiling widely into each other’s faces, I was banished to my usual spot at the top of the stairs. From this vantage I could see
down the stairwell, which was covered with the same gold shag, now matted flat. At the foot of the steps lay my brother’s sneakers and on the hook above hung a baseball cap and a black umbrella.

I could hear best if I leaned in between the bars of the wrought-iron railing.

Julie complained about her last class of the day, an exercise class for what she called “old fatties,” many of whom couldn’t even, God bless them, touch their goddamn toes. My mother laughed and complained about how boring it was to fold towels and make beds, how she hated the mangy shag. I got bored listening to them trade complaints back and forth. I crept back down the hall to my room and read for a while about the Zoupee people and how they buried their dead in blankets woven out of fern fronds.

By the time I came back to the steps, Julie was deep into her life story. Now this was more like it! After her reign as Miss North Carolina, she’d gone to New York City, where Eileen Ford herself told her she would never make it as a model and the girl she met in the waiting room at Wilhelmina had turned out to be a lesbian. A lesbian! I leaned farther between the black metal poles.

Phillip came out of my parents’ room and interrupted my eavesdropping. He pointed to a picture in the back of his comic book of a man flying through the air with a jet pack strapped to his back.

“I want this,” he said.

If he talked too much my mom would hear us.

“I’ll get it for you,” I whispered.

“Really?”

I nodded, and he ran back into my parents’ room.

After New York, Julie had come to Roanoke and worked as a bank teller, doing occasional local commercials for beverage distribution centers and car dealerships. In a moment of weakness and insanity she’d married her high school sweetheart, a beefy guy whose family owned the local supermarket. They moved into a split-level over in Windsor Terrace. This was the largest subdivision in Roanoke, with hundreds of houses, all on small lots, saplings tied to stakes in the yards and silver
TOT FINDER
stickers on the upper windows.

Her husband and his friends spent weekends in the basement drinking beer and eating mixed nuts. It didn’t take her long to realize she had made a mistake. She tried to tell him that the house depressed her. He said that in time they’d have a bigger one, in time they’d have everything they needed. She felt like she was drowning. When he was at work one day, she took the car and started driving. She was hours out of Roanoke when she realized she was going to drive all the way to LA.

Right away things were magic out there. She found a cute studio apartment and got an agent; small TV roles were offered to her within the week she arrived. Parts playing receptionists, nurses, waitresses—all
of them, she had to admit, were dumb blondes, but heck, she was in fucking Hollywood. She even played a tennis bunny in a film starring a famous comedian, a guy with one blue eye and one brown eye who was very into spiritualism. It was on the movie set, sitting in her trailer, that she realized how late her period was and that she was pregnant. When she called her husband to tell him, he was thrilled even though she had left him without writing a note. He told her to come on home.

My butt was sore and I could feel parts of my brain, in the back somewhere, turning in for the night. I peeked into my parents’ room where my brother was sleeping sprawled out on the bed, holding a plastic saber. I pulled the bedspread up to cover him and turned off the light. In my room, moonlight came through the blinds and I pulled down my corduroys, pulled my turtleneck over my head, and put on the oversize T-shirt I had taken to sleeping in. I kept my door open and listened. I wanted Julie to go back to her own duplex, to hear my mom wash the dishes, set them in the rack, then climb the stairs, go into her bedroom, undress, and get into bed.

But it was not until much later that I finally heard the front door close. I jumped out of bed and saw my mom walking Julie to her front door. As my mom walked back, Julie called out to her and blew a kiss. My mom pretended to catch the kiss in her fist and push it down into her pocket.

Every night my dad worked, Julie came over. She and my mom drank wine. When Julie was around my mom seemed like a different person, as if she had been kidnapped and replaced by a glamorous imposter. It was all just too much. Julie was coming over in the morning, too, after we left for school. When I’d get home in the afternoon, all the signs would be there: cigarette butts in the ashtray, mugs with coffee residue, and jelly glasses that smelled of wine in the sink.

On Saturdays, after Julie taught her morning classes, she and my mother went around to the open houses in the new subdivisions. They were gone into the evening, so that most Saturday nights we now ate toaster-oven pizzas. I took the English muffin from the bag, cut it in half, spread tomato sauce over the top, sprinkled it with garlic salt, and laid the American cheese on top. I stood by the counter watching the red coils to make sure the cheese softened but did not burn.

On the last Thursday of the month, after Dad got paid, he took us out to Pizza Hut. We all agreed that Pizza Hut pizza was terrible, a distant relative to pizza, as if pizza had been murdered and come back to life as a pizza zombie. But over the years the greasy ground sausage and sweet tomato sauce washed down with a huge pitcher of root beer had become, if not delicious,
then at least addictive. As we ate, Phillip told us how during the fire drill a kid named Dougy had peed himself and that a girl in his class had gotten caught with a lollipop in her cubby.

Our waitress, an older lady with an unusual shade of orange hair, asked how we were doing, and we all nodded fine. My mom had not yet mentioned Julie, though I could tell by a sudden change in the air that she was about to. I wanted to head her off. I’d made a mental list of conversation subjects: (1) What did she think of Jimmy Carter? (2) What did she think of the fire hydrants painted like minutemen for the bicentennial? (3) Would she reconsider our request for a CB radio?

But before I could ask my questions she started up about Julie, saying that Julie had told her the Pizza Hut owner was a sleazebag.

I looked over at the middle-aged man with the mustache who was taking checks at the cash register. He looked friendly enough, though his shirt was unbuttoned a few too many buttons so I could see his sprouting chest hair.

I took a long drink of my root beer and imagined the sweet liquid floating over the seaweedy tentacles of my taste buds.

“And how would she know?” Dad asked.

At first, Dad was glad Mom had a friend. He’d explained to me how impossible it had been for my mom to make friends as a minister’s wife. And besides,
he’d continued, using the same tone he used to speak about patients at the psych center, since they’d moved around so much in the last few years she’d had no time to befriend anybody.

Now, though, my mother’s constant talking about Julie was wearing him down. She wasn’t just telling you things about her, but also implying she was divine.

“Julie knows everybody in this town.”

She began reciting the details of Julie’s story, which were as familiar to me now as the stations of the cross: after she’d gotten her break in LA, the brilliant comedian had taken her aside on the movie set and told her he would help her make it in the big time. If only she hadn’t gotten pregnant, if only . . .

My father wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, took out his wallet, opened it, and pulled out two ten-dollar bills.

“I think I’ll walk home.”

“You’re going to walk home?”

“That’s what I said.”

He slipped out of the booth and moved toward the door.

“I want to go with him,” I said.

“I won’t have you walking down the side of the highway,” my mother said tightly.

“What about Daddy?” Phillip said.

“He’s a grown man. If he wants to act like an idiot that’s his business.”

“You’re going to just let him go?” I said.

I jumped up and ran after him.

“Jesse!” my mom yelled. “Come back here
now
!”

In the parking lot, the asphalt glittered and my dad was nearly to the foot of the Pizza Hut sign when I caught up with him.
COME ON IN!
was spelled out on the sign in removable black letters.

“Come back,” I said. “She doesn’t mean anything.”

He looked at me and then down at his shoes.

“It’s a beautiful night,” he said.

It was true. The air was deep purple, and all around the parking lot, petals flew off the trees like confetti, banking on windshields and in little piles on the asphalt. I could see the blue light inside the bank across the street. He would be fine. No matter what happened he would be fine. I was more worried that rather than walk home, he’d start walking backward, hitchhiking like Guy, and then we’d never see him again. To me, my dad was on loan to us, and sooner or later we’d have to return him like a library book. What would happen to us when we lost him? That was the real question.

“You won’t come back in?” I said.

He shook his head.

“I’ll see you at home.”

I turned back toward the Pizza Hut. A black dog slept on the backseat of a station wagon next to a stack of old newspapers. The dusk-to-dawn lights flicked on, and inside the restaurant I heard Cat Stevens singing “Peace Train.”

All the way home, my mom drove like a maniac, switching lanes without signaling and driving up on the shoulder. She’d had just about all she could take of our father. He was a man-child, and she was fed up with his selfishness and immaturity. She was at 3 moving fast toward 2. During 3 she ranted and it was, to be honest, sort of amusing, but at 2 she got quiet and a desperation set in that was unbearable.