Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (10 page)

One afternoon when I got off the bus, I walked behind Sheila. It was still hot. A warm breeze blew through my hair and in front of 3B I saw the leaves of the ratty sunflowers dropping, the dirt around them dry and red. I’d been rehearsing what to say to her. Saying I liked the braids in her hair sounded too intimate, but complimenting her clogs didn’t seem personal enough. All day I’d weighed which part of her perfect body to concentrate on. Finally I decided to tell her I liked the birds stamped into her leather belt. It showed my eye for detail without being creepy. But before I could say anything, Sheila swung around.

“Are you following me?”

“No!”

“Why are you walking so close to me then?”

“I’m not,” I insisted.

“And why did you touch my hair in health class?”

It was true. During the menstruation movie, while the soap opera music blared and the egg made its way down the fallopian tube toward the uterus, the projector light had been so silver on Sheila’s head that she had not looked real. That’s when I reached out beyond the edge of my desk and set the pad of my index finger gently against the back of her head.

“I was brushing away a spider.” It sounded lame even to me.

Sheila looked at me. She had her hands on her hips and her head tilted sideways.

“Yeah. Right,” she said. “You should just admit that you’re a lezzbo.”

Jill ran up behind us.

“Leave her alone,” she said. “She’s just trying to be nice.”

Sheila looked from me to Jill.

“Freaks,” she said. “Go off to freakland and do your freakazoid things!” She hurried down toward her duplex, her clogs sounding on the asphalt.

“Don’t mind her,” Jill said. “She’s a double-dutch bitch.”

I felt as if my brain had been scooped out with an iced-tea spoon. As Jill talked about Sheila her words moved around the empty space inside my head. True, I was walking up the incline, but I had no sense of my legs moving, just a floating feeling, like a dust mote careening around in an angle of light. I watched Jill’s mouth move.

She had a painfully long, pale face and hair that fell limply around her cheekbones. At her mother’s parties, men with mustaches drank beers. Along with watching Jill and her sister make bubbles, I’d also watched them play badminton, hitting the birdie back and forth. As the night wore on, their games got more surreal. I’d seen them volley both an ice cube and a banana.

While her mother didn’t allow after-school visitors, Jill said if I agreed to hide in her bedroom I could sneak inside 11B. But we’d have to be quiet. We slipped through the screen door into the living room and I was confronted by a number of smells: sandalwood, beer, and some third thing I’d never smelled before. The couch sagged and the coffee table was covered with puddles of dried wax. An Indian-print bedspread hung behind the TV and there was ivy dangling from a macramé holder in front of the window. It was identical to the hippie crash pads I’d seen on TV and in movies, but different because instead of grown-ups in tie-dye shirts and macramé belts, it was filled with children. Beth, Jill’s third-grade sister, sat on the floor surrounded by math books. Ronnie, her older brother, was slumped on the couch watching
General Hospital
.

Neither of them looked in our direction. Upstairs, Jill had the same room as mine, though hers was decorated more sparsely, with a mattress on the floor and a cardboard dresser. She’d taped pictures from magazines up on the wall, mostly baby animals and
photographs of sunsets. In one corner, a giant stuffed panda, whose name was Barnabas, slumped over as if he’d been shot in the back.

“I didn’t talk to you at first,” Jill whispered, “because I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”

“Why are you whispering?” I said.

Jill pointed to the wall.

“My mom is sleeping.”

She told me how in sixth grade Sheila had pretended to be her friend but once Sheila got her braces off she’d told everyone at school that Jill was a dirtbag.

“She announced that I had leg spasms, which was true, but it only happened once. And she said my farts smelled like dog food.”

“Whose farts smell good?”

“Hers,” Jill said. “They smell like cinnamon.”

She shook her head.

“She’s just the worst sort of person,” Jill went on, “two-faced and a bitch.”

Jill cast her eyes down to her blanket, a nubby afghan of triangular blue and pink strips.

“Were you planned?” she asked.

This was a common question. If you were planned it meant your family wanted you, you’d come into a friendly spot, you were loved. But if you weren’t planned, that was a whole other story.

“I was,” I said. “But my little brother wasn’t.”

My parents had never actually admitted this, but my mother had implied it a few times.

“None of us were planned,” Jill said. “Not a single one.”

It was hard for me to figure out how this could be true. But before I could ask Jill more about it, her face got very serious. She was suddenly
deadly
serious.

“Before we can be friends,” she said, “you need to know that the Bamburgs are a tragic family.”

“In what way?”

“In just about every way you can imagine,” she said. “You name it, we’re tragic.”

She pulled out a drawer.

“For instance—”

She took out a black comb with dandruff lodged in the teeth and a key chain with a Harley Davidson medallion. She laid both on the bed.

“That’s it, that’s all I have left of my daddy.”

“What happened?”

“Motorcycle wreck. He’s buried in that graveyard on 419 next to the Taco Bell.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. I never knew what to say when people told me sad stuff. Jill took the comb into her open palm and looked at it as if the thing had the power to transport her back to the sixties when her dad was still alive. I wanted to change the subject.

“Did you know the lady who lived in our unit?”

“Miranda? She had a Dolls of the World collection.”

“What about her ex?”

“He’s a freaky hippie guy. He threw her clothes off the deck once. But for around here, that’s nothing. Did you know a lunatic roams the woods at night?”

I shook my head.

“I heard from a kid in 4A that he loves the taste of children’s pinkies. Eats them like chicken wings.”

We heard her mom get out of bed. Jill put her finger to her lips as she left the room. It was her job to get her mom a bowl of cereal and bring her the black pants, white blouse, and apron she had to wear to waitress at the Western Sizzler. While I waited, I poked around Jill’s room. In her closet a dress hung sideways off the hanger and a metal back brace lay on the floor over her shoes. On the shelf above, there was a line of dirty stuffed animals. The pink kitten had a lazy eye.

After her mother left the house and I heard her car head down the road toward the highway, Jill called up the stairs that the coast was clear. By the time I got down, she had thrown the couch cushions on the floor and Ronnie had pulled the bedspread off the wall and tied it around his neck. He was repeating the lines of Barnabas Collins from a recent episode of
Dark Shadows
. Inside the mausoleum, Maggie was questioning Barnabas about a sheep that had been killed. The creature had been found drained of blood. I watched until the scene changed to Parallel Time and Jill dragged me up to the bathroom, made me get into the tub, close my eyes, and grub through the bathroom shower curtain. I had to close my eyes tight and push through the plastic until I’d moved into another dimension. Once I was there she informed me in a
solemn voice that Ronnie and I were now married and she was dying of a brain tumor.

At five o’clock I told them I had to go home for dinner. Jill seemed to take this as an insult. She cast her eyes down and I thought she would now confide a grisly detail from her father’s death, that his arm had been ripped off in the crash or that his eyes had popped out of their sockets. Instead she asked if I’d follow her into the basement.

In the dark laundry room she pulled the string that turned on the overhead bulb and reached into the space between the washer and the dryer. She brought out a towel, unfolded it, and lifted up an elongated string bean. I recognized the long green pod as one of the ones that grew on a tree beside the empty foundation up the mountain. It was a big tree with huge ragged leaves and long beans growing down like sci-fi fringe.

“When they dry out,” she said, “we can smoke them in the French Quarter.”

Tanglewood Mall, off the highway and about ten miles from Bent Tree, had a special section in one corner called the French Quarter. I’d seen the ads in the paper for the Tennis Villa, where rich ladies bought little white tennis dresses, and Mrs. Smith told me that the port-wine cheese at the Gourmet Shoppe
was the most divine thing she’d ever tasted. There was a rumor that when Little Feat came to the Civic Center, the lead singer got a trim at The UpperCut, the French Quarter’s unisex salon.

Twice my mom had taken us to the mall, but both times she’d only wanted to shop for bargains at J. C. Penney, and I had had to run after Phillip, who had a terrible habit of wandering off in department stores.

At the end of the first week of school, Jill persuaded her mom to drop us off at the mall. I told my mom that Mrs. Bamburg would be shopping with us, even though I knew she planned to go off to the Ground Round across the road and drink beer with her friend.

The bean pods, wrapped in tinfoil and stuck in Jill’s Mexican shoulder bag, made a muted rattling sound against her hip as we moved through the mall.

“They have samples in the cheese shop,” Jill said, “the sweetest cheese you’ve ever tasted.”

“What kind is it?”

“How should I know? What I’m trying to tell you is that it tastes good.”

We walked through Penney’s and into the mall. So far Tanglewood was the only Sun Belt part of Roanoke. Under a cathedral ceiling, a fountain bubbled beside soaring palm trees. I actually felt like I’d been transported to one of the planets I was always reading
about in science fiction novels. We passed Chess King, Jeans West, Merry-Go-Round, where a whole carousel of suede fringe vests were on sale. I was still confused as to why we couldn’t just smoke the pods up in the woods in back of Bent Tree.

Jill was on a mission, leading me toward the French Quarter, the mall’s soft, sweet center. Under a brick archway lay a darkened expanse of small shops with thatched roofs and gold windows. We roamed the dim corridors past the window of the Tennis Villa, where a white dress shimmered, smelled fresh-ground coffee wafting out the door of Lock, Stock, and Barrel, and passed the Seven Dwarfs, whose window featured imports from Europe—Hummel figurines, music boxes, crystal ashtrays. The mannequin in the bridal shop had blue glass eyes and long eyelashes. She stared across the corridor to the mannequin in the Hancock’s men’s shop window, in a sports coat and leather driving gloves.

Jill swung open the door of the restroom in Le Brasserie, the French Quarter sidewalk café.

I’d hoped for gold-leaf walls and French-looking light fixtures but was disappointed. The room was painted an institutional green and the sink was stainless steel, though once Jill turned off the lights, knelt, and lit the candle, the walls turned sepia. She unwrapped the tinfoil and placed one pod after another on a paper towel. Then she passed me the white peasant blouse with red embroidery around the neck that she insisted I wear for the ceremony.