Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (25 page)

My mom was at a 4 moving toward a 3 as she spread foundation over my cheeks and put glitter on my eyelids. She’d insisted on doing my makeup. Eyeliner too, even false eyelashes that made my eyes look like they’d gotten lost and just ended up by chance on my face. She took out the small curlers and tried to comb the short strands into a ponytail. She told me Julie had dumped out every bottle of liquor into the sink. I wanted to say
big deal, big fucking deal
, but I just nodded. Why was I looking up to her, anyway? I remembered one night a few weeks earlier, I’d come down to find my mom and Julie playing Mystery Date, Julie teasing my mom for getting the Dud while she got the Dreamboat.

I wondered if I should tell her what I’d heard about Julie. I knew, no matter what I said, my mom would just get mad. I had not planned to tell her. I wasn’t sure I wanted any of her hope on me. I knew my mom felt close to me when we did girl things together, like shopping or putting on makeup. But weren’t these the exact things that got you started down the road to becoming a sex slave?

“Look at you,” my mom said.

I turned to face the mirror and for a minute I did not recognize my features.

“You look beautiful.”

Now she thought I was beautiful. She should make up her mind.

“I think you look pretty,” Phillip said. He took my hand in his own and kissed the back of it.

At the high school auditorium the mothers were flushed and the little girls overwrought and heavily made up. All the outfits were red, white, and blue. The kindergarten tap class wore tiny sailor costumes, with white caps and big red ribbons on their tap shoes.

Kira sat backstage against the wall on a crate, reading a Nancy Drew mystery. I walked over to her. Snowball had been sick all week.

“How is he?”

“Not good,” she said. “All day I had to feed him water with a dropper.”

A Revolutionary War drumroll started up over the PA and a boy marched onstage in a tiny minuteman costume. He beat on the drum a few times before the red velvet curtain opened to show a giant American flag. Julie came out in a long white dress and welcomed the audience to the Bicentennial Revue. The tiny sailors shuffled to “You’re a Grand Old Flag” while Julie stood by the side of the stage directing. As the girls got older, the outfits, while still patriotic, got skimpier. The advanced jazz class wore denim short shorts and red tube tops. The girls on pointe wore red,
white, and blue tutus and pirouetted to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

As we took our spots on the dark stage my heart roared in my ears. This was it; fairy dust would rain down and I’d change in an instant from the mess that I was into a Real Girl. Over the PA system the first few words of the Elton John song sounded distorted. I kept my eyes on the girl in front of me but got behind a step and then two and before long I heard my name hissed from the side of the stage. I looked into the curtain to Julie, her pale face floating in the dark like the wicked stepmother in
Snow White
. I’m not really sure what happened after that. I must have run for the stage door because the next thing I remember, I was walking in the cold drizzle down the highway, caught in a string of headlights. The expressions on the drivers’ faces were mostly amused. I could feel the gravel beneath my ballet shoes. One car honked at me. A high school boy leaned out the window and yelled, “I’ve seen better heads on a glass of beer,” then threw a wax cup at me. The lid flew off and ice hit my cheek. I wiped my lipstick off with the back of my hand and pulled off the red and blue feathers my mom had attached to the back of my head with hair spray and threw them into the ditch by the side of the road.

I assumed my family would be home when I got back to Bent Tree, but the car wasn’t parked out front and the duplex was black. Julie’s door was unlocked and I went right up the stairs to Kira’s room. The tape player hissed and the Christmas lights hung around the cage. Inside Snowball slumped sideways against the mesh. I opened the door and reached in. His fur was warm, and when I got him on my lap I saw that his eyes had cleared. I got the dropper and squeezed water into his mouth, his small pink tongue sucking on the nib before he settled deep into my lap, and I ran my hand through his fur again and again.

CHAPTER FOUR

SHEILA

I was not a 5 but a 6 moving toward a 5, and I decided before I dropped any lower I had to do something. Ninth grade was almost over. Before I finished junior high I had to get myself together. I did not want to end up stuck, anxious, miserable. I had to take myself in hand, not wait around, like my mother, for someone else to save me. I walked down to my personal cultural mecca, Loving Expressions Hallmark Cards, by the highway in a strip mall between the bathing-suit outlet and the Christian bookstore. In the back of the long rows of birthday and sympathy cards was a rack of magazines. That’s where I found my three textbooks:
Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar
, and
Vogue
.

I studied the pages until my legs were numb. I finally bought a
Vogue
and brought it home, ripped out
the pictures that captivated me—the way hair floated around a girl’s face, the way the cloth clung to breast and waist. It was a phantom lightness, a haunting delicateness. From scrutinizing the pages, I narrowed down the types of women I was interested in emulating:

Natural: This species wore very little makeup and dressed casually, in peasant blouses, often with embroidery. They wore jeans and sandals from India and seemed to have a lot of picnics. While they never played instruments themselves, they often sat on the grass beside a man playing a guitar. In their spare time they filled terrariums with tiny plants and layers of colored sand.

Hippie: This type was related in genus to the Natural but was more extreme. They wore jeans with rainbows embroidered on the pockets, see-through eyelet blouses and halter tops, and leather platform sandals. While the Natural might not be having sex, the Hippie girl both had sex and smoked pot. She sometimes wore leather vests with fringe. I’d seen a few contenders at Jill’s mom’s parties.

Disco: These girls were smooth, with long shiny hair, and wore sleek nylon dresses with ruched sleeves in Prussian blue or dusty rose. They drank and sometimes snorted cocaine in the bathroom. They could be spotted only at night. On 419, the Quonset Hut
disco was filled on the weekend with wannabe Disco Girls, but to see the genuine article you had to go to Maxim’s or Studio 54.

Preppy: This was the only species I had seen up close. Once, in Tanglewood Mall, I’d observed a Preppy in her tennis outfit running into the Tennis Villa in the French Quarter to pick up her restrung racket. Outside of tennis whites, the Preppies wore cotton dresses in madras or bright green or pink. Preppy girls were closest to Good Girls. Good Girls did not have sex until they were married, and even then sex was a sacred event. Having sex was very meaningful to men who were having sex with Good Girls, almost like a church service. Sex with a Good Girl, unlike with a Disco Girl or a Hippie Girl, was never what I heard a boy in school describe as a “fuck fest.”

Of course, even among these types there were endless variations and mutations. Older women had categories as well. Mrs. Smith with her cowboy scarf and bouffant hairdo was in a completely different category from the poor lady in 10B, who was shaped like a barrel, had only a couple of teeth, and wore her gray hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. At any age or within any variety, a woman could, as my mother said, “go to seed” and end up as a slut. Sluts, as far as I could tell, had only one category. That was why they were sluts—only one thing defined them.

I was not in danger of “going to seed” because I did not have any flowers. And it wasn’t that I really aspired to be a Preppy or a Hippie, I just wanted that quality, ephemeral as it was, that I sometimes saw in photographs. Some called it femininity, others beauty, some said sexiness, but to me it was a form of magic.

Like a crazed scientist in search of the rarest butterfly, I might go mad in my search. I’d seen older women this had happened to. Roanoke was filled with them, in wigs or dyed blonde or red hair, eyebrows drawn in, lips lined. Bone-thin and taking awkward steps on wobbly high heels, they were like devotees of a religion that no longer existed. And while they were experts in the procedures and rituals of womanhood, the magic I speak of was no more likely to inhabit them than was a bolt of lightning.

I tried in a variety of ways to emulate the types I’d distinguished. I spent a few weeks wearing the peasant blouse Jill had given me and sitting out at lunch on the grass near the smoking block. Then for a period I wore a denim shirt my grandmother had embroidered for me, but instead of peace signs and rainbows, she’d sewn kittens on the collar and a baby in a bonnet on the back. In my glam-rock period, I ran into the bathroom right after I got off the bus and circled my eyes with black liner until I looked, as I heard a boy say in the hall, like a zombie. When I finally got the rust-colored nylon dress with the ruched sleeves off layaway at J. C. Penney, I was excited. The night
before I wore the dress to school, I could hardly sleep, and as I walked down the hall, while there wasn’t much of a reaction, I felt a little more real. I considered the look a hit until lunch, when a boy flipped up the hem while I was carrying my tray and exposed my big white panties. Preppy lasted the longest: a white Lacoste shirt and a pair of khakis.

I realized none of these measures moved me any closer to the other humans in my grade. I saw that my experiments had served only to make me seem odd and pathetic. I was at sea. My childhood was over. I’d pushed off from the Isle of Kidville and I was now in deep water, without any sign of Adultville in sight.

I decided I needed a role model, and I didn’t mean my dad, who was on a health kick, drinking ten glasses of water a day and eating only stewed onions. I needed a girl to study and emulate. At Low Valley there were no Discos or Hippies, only girls in baseball shirts, clogs, and multicolored toe socks. I needed information not on the types in the greater world but on the types in my own world. I had always considered Cher my guru. My black-haired goddess. She instructed me sometimes through
ESP
, but now I needed somebody I could worship in the flesh.

Sheila was the obvious choice, as I could examine her on the bus to and from school; in my health class, where she sat a few rows over from me; and at lunch, where we sat at different ends of the same long table. For years she had been in a golden, untouchable
realm that made making contact impossible. But just recently Dwayne had spotted Sheila’s dad coming out of the gay bar on Williamson Road. This was not as unusual as it sounded. Nearly every month some father came out of the closet. The tiny girl on the gymnastic team had a gay dad. So did the chubby boy who’d worn lederhosen on Halloween. When your dad came out of the closet, your status didn’t suffer outright. It was subtle. Sheila sat at the edge of the girls in her group in the lunchroom instead of in the middle. And while they had roamed Tanglewood Mall together every Saturday, now she walked alone.