Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (22 page)

By the end of January, I had learned the full routine to Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom.” In class on Saturday mornings, Julie never corrected me in front of the others. She just moved near, using her hands to reposition my knee or elbow. She kept me after class every week and broke down the flick kick and the jazz drag, the snake and the layout. After she helped me, she turned off the lights and locked the door and I walked with her across the parking lot to her car.

Julie moved with her back straight, her skirt floating around her knees. Inside she let me pick an
eight-track from her case; I always chose Cher. So far on the drive home we’d talked about LA, Mexican food, Peggy Fleming skating to “Ave Maria” in blue light, the pros and cons of mascara. She sipped from a thermos filled with white wine and when a song came on that she liked, she sang along loud.

In the dashboard light Julie’s face was greenish and I could see how she filled in her eyebrows and dusted glitter on her cheekbones. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window. Like my mom, Julie drove fast, sometimes even blowing through red lights. The strip-mall windows reflected the car, as if we were racing a ghost.

Maybe I was crazy, but when I locked the bathroom door and practiced the pivot step and catwalk over the tile floor, sometimes throwing in a few Patty wristwatch glances, I thought I looked good. I was, as they said, developed now. Everything was more or less where it was supposed to be. Sometimes I’d talk to my reflection, saying
Hey, foxy lady
or
Hey, hot mama.

Mostly, though, I’d move in the mirror like I was Julie’s daughter. Whereas Kira was a hopeless case, Julie could be proud of my grace and composure. We’d go to the Brasserie in the French Quarter, get our hair trimmed at the UpperCut, then shop for lace underwear.

In mid-February, Julie dragged the cardboard box out of her office and passed out our costumes. I held the bag on my lap as we drove home after class. Julie didn’t want to chat; she was preoccupied. During class she’d gotten one of the older girls to lead while she retreated into her office to talk on the phone and sip wine from her thermos.

“Tell your mother I can’t make it tonight,” Julie said as she dropped me off. As I walked up the sidewalk to our front door, Julie turned the car around in a wide, jerky U-turn and headed back out of Bent Tree.

Inside, my mom was all set up as usual with her cheese plate,
The Music Man
on the stereo, wearing her best fifties shirtwaist dress. When I told her, her eyes filled up with water. She was a 4 going down into a 3. Maybe I should make an excuse for Julie to comfort my mom, but I was sick of her misery being at the center of every moment. I was well on my way now to making my own glittery and glamorous life.

I ran upstairs into the bathroom, locked the door, and tore the plastic off my costume. The color was neon red with one long sleeve sewn with navy sequins. The other side was sleeveless, a daring design but one I considered fantastic. I pulled down the leotard I’d worn to class. I had hairs now down there but I was still so skinny my ribs stuck out. I pulled on my costume, and I have to admit I was starstruck. I’d had Halloween costumes, the bumblebee hand-me-down from a girl at church and a princess one my mom had made for
me. But this was my first for the stage. My exposed arm looked pale against the red, but I hoped that, like a space suit, the Lycra would propel me into another dimension.

I looked at my reflection carefully. Did this girl have that special something? Was this girl ready to begin her slow climb to stardom? I adored the way the girl in the mirror did the snake, jerked forward into a lunge, checked her watch a few times, and then froze, grinning into her reflection like her life depended on it.

Usually Julie had left for her studio by the time I got home from school, but one day I came in the door to see her and my mom on the couch together, two bottles of wine on the coffee table between them, both flushed and serious. Julie’s eyes were red and she held a clump of tissues in her hand.

“Is jazz canceled?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me, just put her hands over her face and gave a loud, dramatic sob.

Phillip stood in the kitchen with the fridge door wide open. My mom had promised to go to the store while we were at school and get chips and Little Debbie cakes.

“Is there anything to eat?” he asked, slamming the door and opening the cupboards.

“How should I know?” my mother said.

We glanced at each other. It was like he’d asked for food from a stranger who happened to be visiting our house.

Phillip rolled his eyes, grabbed a can of Coke, and went up to his bedroom. I got out the cocktail crackers. There were a few at the bottom; I decided to eat them with margarine, preparing them slowly as if I were the queen and the crackers my subjects.

“My life is shit,” Julie said, struggling to get the words over her tongue and out of her mouth.

“That’s not true,” my mother said, grabbing her hand.

“I lost my house!” Julie said. “And look at my daughter!”

Julie picked up the bottle of wine and poured what was left into her own mug. I opened a kitchen drawer and they both looked up at me with the same distant, loony expression.

“Don’t you have homework?” my mom said.

I nodded and started up the stairs, the crackers on a Pyrex plate and a jelly glass of cold milk in my hand. I set the plate and the milk on the top step and walked down the hall to my parents’ room where Phillip was lying on the bed watching the small black-and-white TV that sat on the dresser. I opened my bedroom door and slammed it hard so they would think I was inside.

I sat in my usual eavesdropping spot at the top of the stairs. All I heard was Julie crying softly over the
noise of the needle hitting the end of the record. Julie told my mom how the school had called to say that Kira had fallen while carrying her tray in the cafeteria. When Julie picked her up Kira was fine but had food all over her dress, even in her hair. I put a cracker in my mouth, let the margarine melt against my tongue.

“How will she ever make it?” Julie said. “Every girl needs a certain amount of grace.”

“She’s just in an awkward phase,” my mom said.

“You really think so?”

“With your genes she’s bound to snap right out of it.”

“I guess you’re right,” Julie said. “It’s not like your daughter has much to work with either.”

I set the milk down on the carpet and looked very hard at the strands moving this way and that around the base of the jelly glass.

My mom laughed.
She laughed
. And said if they ran out right that minute they could get to the Hunting Hills open house and see both the one with the cathedral ceilings and the one with the veranda off the master bedroom. I walked into my room, threw myself down on the bed, and lay there with my face pushed into the quilt.

I’d never claimed to be beautiful. I wasn’t stupid enough not to see that my arms and neck were much too long for my body. My head seemed to hang over my shoulders like a wobbly marionette. My eyes were gray-blue. Unremarkable. Dirty-blonde hair. There
was nothing about me you could really call attractive. I had always known this in a vague way. But now I knew for sure.

That night I slept in my clothes, and in the morning I didn’t change or shower. I just got on the bus wearing the same outfit. This was a sort of small-time suicide. “Didn’t you wear that same thing yesterday?” Sheila asked me in homeroom. Rather than answer I grabbed her wrist and twisted her skin into an Indian handshake. Sheila’s face got red and she called me a
stupid bitch
. My English teacher’s reading of an Emily Dickinson poem made me sick. The way she overarticulated each word felt like a knife stabbing me in the eye. I called the Belle of Amherst a morbid bitch under my breath and got sent to the principal. Lucky for me he wasn’t there; he was probably off at the smorgasbord restaurant in Salem eating a huge plate of potato salad.

I just sat in a chair, waiting and watching the secretaries move around the office like fish in an aquarium. The dark-haired one answered the phone and told parents about teacher conferences. The red-haired one told the others about a burger, fries, and soda special at McDonald’s, and the oldest lady, with the bouffant, said, “I don’t know how you girls keep your figures.” The principal called to say he was held up.
The gray-haired secretary told me it was my lucky day, I was free to go.

I didn’t go back to class. I wandered out to the smoking block. Dwayne leaned against the building with the heel of his Dingo boot propped up against the brick wall. He was talking to one of the dirtbag girls.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in!” he said.

Through the oblong window I saw a teacher with a terrible haircut standing in front of his class. I saw the backs of kids’ heads. Round my feet were cigarette butts and in the sky a warmthless sun. I watched a small beetle crawl over the asphalt and when it got near me I reached my leg out and killed it with my tennis shoe.

That night my mom set out the cheese and crackers and was dressed as usual. I went right to my room. Now I was giving
her
the silent treatment. She didn’t notice. She just ran to the door whenever she heard a car on the street.

It wasn’t until late in the night that Julie finally came back. I watched her from my bedroom window, falling out of her car and wobbling down the stairs of her duplex on her high heels. When she got to her front door she rooted around in her pocketbook for keys. I heard our door slam and saw my mom run over to Julie.

Julie looked at my mom like she did not know her, then her face twisted up and she must have said something mean, because my mom spun around, ran across the dirt, and came back to our house.