Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (21 page)

When we got home my mom went directly to Julie’s duplex. I ran Phillip’s tub and told him to wash the pizza sauce off his chin. When he got out, he begged to sleep in my bed and because both my parents were gone and the duplex felt, even to me, a little spooky, I let him. I got the extra blanket from the hall closet, the plaid one with the silky edge, and the bedspread with the ink stains that had been my dad’s in seminary, and made myself a bed on the floor. He told me how he and Eddie had had a fight over Spiderman’s superpowers. Eddie said Spiderman had the web spray and could climb up walls but that was it, while Phillip believed Spiderman could also think like a spider. The fight had ended badly, with Eddie throwing dirt clods.

After that he fell asleep. Phillip was famous for sleeping, having once leaned over the arm of a sofa and fallen asleep in an upside down U-shape with his butt in the air. But his allergies made him snore and the
floor was hard. Dad was probably gone for good, run away with a lady from his dream group. What kind of job could my mother get with just a high school education? I wasn’t stupid. I knew why so many duplex complexes were going up along the highway. Families were breaking up like crazy and they had to have split houses for the half families to live in.

My heart throbbed and I felt sweaty under my T-shirt. I tried to settle myself down by going through burial rites: the laying of coins on the dead’s closed eyes, the filling of their mouths with instant rice. You might think this would be creepy, but at times like this, the only thing that calmed me was thinking of a Dylo woman carefully washing down the body of a dead person with a sea sponge soaked in goat’s milk.

The High Style Dance Academy was behind the Citgo gas station over the town line in Salem. My mother drove me around the gas pumps and a pile of tires to the aluminum building. On the drive over she talked about what a great opportunity it was that Julie was letting me take lessons for free. I was sick to my stomach and had the beginnings of one of my headaches. While I worshipped dancers, my relationship to dance was complicated. At the elementary school talent show every year, no matter which school I was in, mothers brought in glittering costumes covered in
dry cleaner plastic and certain girls got to perform on the stage in the gym. A girl named Amber had danced so passionately to “Rockin’ Robin” in an aquamarine leotard and black fishnet tights that she got overheated and threw up. For months though, vomit or not, she ruled the playground, teaching us the routine. In Philadelphia, the music teacher had asked me and another girl to do an interpretative dance while the guitar choir played “Morning Has Broken.” This had more to do with how terrible I was on the guitar than any talents I had for dancing. I think the teacher figured that there was no way I could be a worse dancer than I was a guitar player.

The other girl was a doctor’s daughter with long blonde hair, a ballerina who often got out of school early to perform at nursing homes. A week before our performance, I went to her house to choreograph and practice our act. In her living room she put the Cat Stevens record on the stereo and explained to me what she had in mind. She wanted us to
slowly
lift our left legs, then
slowly
lift our arms, then
slowly
turn our heads up to the gymnasium ceiling.
Pretend your arm is full of cotton. Concentrate only on your leg, your leg is the only leg in the entire universe!
I tried to move my arm as slowly as possible. After it became clear I was hopelessly clumsy, she got sullen. At the dress rehearsal, with both of us in white leotards with white scarves tied around our foreheads, I messed up so badly on the leaps, crashing into a music stand,
that afterward she wouldn’t even speak to me. The next morning I wrapped my foot in an Ace bandage and told the music teacher that I couldn’t go on because I’d sprained my ankle.

That should have cured me of my fascination with dance. But I was like a member of a spaceship cult: when the spaceship does not come, a few members quit, but the core group is more sure than ever that the mother ship will come.

“I guess this is it?” my mother said, pulling into the dance-school parking lot.

She was teary-eyed, a 4 moving into a 3 because I was finally going to gain the grace I needed to enter the World of Rich People. My mother was ambitious for me, but she saw my future only in terms of whom I would marry. Her parents—a housemaid and a chauffeur—had spent their careers in service to the rich and, while she had not fulfilled their hopes, there was still the chance that I would marry money.

She parked the station wagon in front of the dance studio and squeezed my arm. She thought she was looking at me deeply, but I knew her eyes had flipped and she was gazing inside her own head to some old memory. Before she could speak I told her I would meet her outside afterward.

Inside, girls chattered to one another as they hung their coats on hooks and slipped off painters’ pants and corduroys and traded clogs for ballet slippers. This was a jazz class, rather than ballet, so the
leotards were in every color. One girl wore multicolored leg warmers and a few had on headbands. I recognized several faces from my junior high, but most of the girls were from the high school.

I followed the other girls into a cavernous room floored with gray linoleum. The walls were covered with white wood paneling and posters, one of a tiny girl in a tutu that read
DREAM
at the bottom and another of giant toe shoes. On the wall that surrounded the window into Julie’s office were photographs of recitals from earlier years: groups of girls in sequined outfits with wide, intense smiles.

Julie was at the rail by the mirror, her leg up on the barre, her pale arms bent forward so I could see the back of her long, elegant neck. She didn’t look up or smile at the girls, who all seemed to know to sit on the floor with their legs spread wide and stretch. Everyone was limber enough to lay their bodies down against their legs. I could lean forward only slightly. There was still a good ten inches between my chin and the floor. I hoped nobody would notice.

The girls moved sideways, a few did splits. One girl, limber as a wet noodle, leaned into a back bridge. The phone rang in the office, and Julie walked over and picked up the receiver. She glanced at me, so I knew it was my mother calling, already checking up on me. She laughed, hung up, and walked over to where I sat on the floor, squatting down beside me. Soon I felt the pressure of her fingers against the bones of my spine,
and I straightened my back and strained to move closer to the ground. I thought of Jill’s shoulders. I knew nobody wanted a girl with a hunchback.

Every time Julie came to visit my mom, I was sent over to play with Kira. She did not take dance lessons at her mom’s school, she told me, because she didn’t like to sweat. At first, I’d tried to get Kira to do the things I’d done with Jill. She could be Barnabas Collins and I could be Victoria Winters. Or I said I’d teach her the bump or the hustle. But no matter what activity I suggested, Kira got grumpy and red-faced before we even started, and said she wanted to quit. Then she retreated to her spot under the canopy of her bed with her rabbit on her lap like a girl in a sad storybook.

One night in January, when the air had warmed enough for me to wear just a sweater, Kira let me in and I followed her into the living room where she was watching
Starsky and Hutch
. Beside her on the couch was a saucer with a nibbled carrot and a limp lettuce leaf. I could tell by her sour look she was planning on turning down any game I suggested. She stroked the whole length of Snowball’s furry body. But tonight I had an idea that she would not refuse.

“I’ll be Patty,” I said, “and you can be the girl with the short black hair.”

Patty Hearst’s trial had just started and footage of her robbing the Hibernia Bank was playing again on the television.

“I want to be Patty,” Kira said.

Kira, Patty? Impossible! I had all Patty’s moves down. I’d locked myself in the bathroom to practice, putting on my dad’s long trench coat and holding Phillip’s BB gun, shuffling jerkily and moving my head around, then stretching out my arm and glancing at my wristwatch. The watch glance was a motion I wanted to get just right, so I’d repeated the sequence at least a hundred times, pushing out my arm, then bringing it closer and tipping my head.

“I want to be Patty,” Kira said again.

“I see you more as a character actor,” I said. “What about the security guard?”

“Patty or nothing.”

I really wanted to be Patty and act out the bank robbery. It’s a hard feeling to explain—wanting to act something out. I used to have it all the time. I wanted to play mommy and baby dolls, I wanted to be the cat who marries the chihuahua. But that was a long time ago. Lately, I felt the urge only occasionally, but when it came, like now, it was powerful. I watched Kira stroke Snowball. She wore a candy-cane-striped nightgown with eyelet at the cuffs. I’d known other unplanned kids, like Jill, for instance. But Kira was the most extreme case I’d ever seen. Not only had she been conceived by accident, but her
mother seemed to feel she was an accident still. I decided to do the
Christian thing
, as Mrs. Smith was always saying. But I had to get a little something out of it.

“I’ll let you be Patty if I can hold Snowball?”

Kira looked at me with interest. Until that moment she had not realized I was a ruthless negotiator. I knew she did not want me to hold Snowball. Whenever I asked, she always gave some excuse: Snowball had a cold. Snowball was suffering from a bout of nerves and had twitched all night with flashback nightmares of the German shepherd and the snake. Snowball was her binky, her blanket, and her nightlight all mixed up together. I sat slowly on the edge of the couch to show how gentle I could be.

“OK,” she finally said, “but don’t squeeze him.”

I picked up Snowball, surprised at how loose he was, as if he were filled not with bones and organs but with water. He sniffed my hand and I started to pet him, moving my hand dreamily through his fur.

Kira clomped upstairs. I heard her overhead in her mom’s room opening drawers. After a few minutes she ran down the stairs and burst through the doorway wearing a black beret and a long coat, and carrying a bent clothes hanger. I was impressed with her getup.

“Stick ’em up!” she yelled.

Snowball twitched and struggled. I clamped down with my hand on his back and he swung around and bit my thumb. I was so surprised I let him loose and
he took a flying leap off the couch and ran under the stereo console.

“Now look what you’ve done!” Kira wailed.

There was no blood, just tiny teeth marks on the pad of my finger.

Kira knelt beside the console and tried to reach him, but her arms were too short. She sat back up and got his favorite storybook, about a bunny mother and her little bunny baby. She lay flat on her stomach, reading to him and showing him the pictures. Snowball was unresponsive. We played him records, Elton John and Kris Kristofferson, but it wasn’t until the B side of the Marvin Gaye album that the rabbit hopped out from under the console and hesitantly sniffed Kira’s
SLA
coat.