Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (27 page)

“We’re making a movie!” he said.

“It’s a play, Richie,” my father said, “and you’re in it. You’re Stretcher Carrier Number Three.”

Richie nodded. He stood too close to me, and I could smell the scrambled eggs with hot sauce he’d had for breakfast.

“I’m having a problem,” Louie said to my dad. “I need to talk to you privately.”

The two of them went into the corner. My dad put his hand on Louie’s back. I watched a nurse walk down the hallway carrying a tray covered with paper cups.

My father came back.

“Louie is upset.”

I glanced over at him; he seemed to be wandering around in a small circle.

“He’ll act, but he doesn’t want to say the lines.”

The four men who were going to carry the stretcher all sat together on one couch. They all wore khakis and white T-shirts with red cross armbands.

“Where’s Tom?” my dad asked.

“He’s not coming,” the youngest of the stretcher carriers said. “He doesn’t like his part.”

“Was he a Nazi?” I asked.

“No,” my dad said, “he was going to play a wounded soldier.”

My dad glanced at the clock on the wall; in just ten minutes hospital staff and a few visitors would be arriving to watch the performance.

“Listen up, everybody,” my dad said. “It’s getting close to time. We need one more actor.”

Richie jumped up.

“Fuck all of you!” he said. “This is bullshit.”

My dad had told me some of the men were easily angered. I knew too that while the younger nurses loved my dad’s ideas, the older ones worried that his play might upset the patients.

“Will you do it?” my dad asked me.

“Sure.”

He got me a white lab coat and wrapped my head with an Ace bandage.

“All you have to do is lie on the floor and wait.”

Louie moved closer to me. He had a round face; his pupils were dilated and his forehead was shiny with sweat. My dad told me he had seen a lot of people die in the war, that he had terrible insomnia and
sometimes cried for hours at a time. He reached his hand out to me; he had only a pinkie and a thumb.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re going to patch you up.”

People gathered and my dad narrated the story of Louie running through the water on D-day up onto Omaha Beach, and scratching out a hole to lie down in to protect himself from bullets.

I lay on the cool linoleum staring up into the light and moaning.

“Aid man!” my dad yelled.

As he called out the numbers one through four each man took his place on the sides of the stretcher. Louie cupped my head and moved me onto the canvas. I was lifted up and carried through the audience and out into the hall.

It wasn’t until April, when all the fire hydrants in town were painted to look like tiny freakish minutemen, that I got the courage to actually speak to Sheila. I’d had a dream the night before that she and I were holding hands and singing John Denver songs. I would ask her if we were going to have our hygiene quiz in health today. I knew it wasn’t until Friday, but I thought this was the best way to make contact.

My plan was to stop and ask about the quiz as I walked to get rid of my trash in the cafeteria. My hair looked good, and I wore my beige corduroys and a
gauze blouse that had been Jill’s, along with a leather bracelet stamped with roses. The problem was that between me and Sheila was a wasteland of chubby band girls and a whole pack of sixth-grade boys with huge eyebrows and gigantic feet. Then there was Pam, the birthmark girl from my bus, who was reading a fat biography of Eleanor Roosevelt while spooning fried rice out of a Tupperware container into her mouth. The beige foundation she used to cover up her birthmark just made her look pathetic. None of the others were likely to say anything to me, but Pam often tried to start a conversation when I passed, telling me that Mrs. Roosevelt was so serious as a child, her mother had called her Granny. Sometimes I toyed with the idea of talking to Pam, but I was only holding on by a thread myself and I couldn’t risk any interaction.

I got up and kept my head down to dissuade Pam from speaking to me. All went well partly because I’d practiced in my room the night before. As I came near, Sheila turned her head and spoke into her friend Heather’s ear. My timing was off, so I passed by, threw my garbage in the trash can on top of a half-eaten hamburger and empty milk containers. On the way back I paused near where they sat, and Sheila looked up at me, but my vocal cords constricted and I just stood there until she shrugged at her friends and went back to telling them how her curling iron wasn’t heating up the way it was supposed to.

On the bus ride home, I decided to shoot for a less glamorous guru. Sheila sat a few seats in front of me; even after a long day at school, her hair fell perfectly on her shoulders and she smelled like powdered sugar. Her aura was so wide and thick I would have needed a chain saw to cut through. I decided to consider second-rung gurus, such as the drill team captain. She sat with a few drill team members at a middle table in the cafeteria, and as I got off the bus, I made a resolution. The next day I would sit, if not beside her, at least a few chairs down.

Sheila got off the bus first, as always, and was walking over Mr. Ananais’s lawn. I was already halfway up the hill when I heard Sheila say my name. I turned, waiting for her to call me a lezzbo, but instead she asked if I wanted to watch
General Hospital
. I knew she was asking because Heather, who had always ridden the bus home with her before, didn’t anymore, not since everyone found out that Sheila’s dad was gay. No matter the reason she’d asked me, I almost blacked out with joy. It was all I could do to act like it was no big deal. Too much enthusiasm left you open to ridicule. I’d seen what the other kids had done to Pam when she talked about Eleanor Roosevelt.

I followed Sheila to her unit along the main road. All the units in her stretch had trees in the yard, and the large boxwoods were well manicured thanks to
Mr. Ananais’s electric hedge clippers. He’d told me that when these units had been built, the owner had been flush and so each had a room-to-room intercom and a wet bar.

Inside Sheila’s unit, the couch and chairs were pale pink. The glass-top coffee table sat on a white area rug and on top, like a cherry on a sundae, sat a conch shell. Over the couch was a painting of a lighthouse. The ocean motif was carried out on pillows printed with starfish. The room was as dust-free and uncluttered as a model room in a furniture store. No photos of her dad or her family before her parents split up. No photographs at all, only a white vase filled with sea oats and a crystal candy dish shaped like a clamshell.

Our duplex smelled of tennis shoes and pipe smoke. There were always dishes in the sink, unfolded laundry on the couch. Whenever I walked past the living room, my dad, who could sit still for hours, would look up, his pupils like blots of ink, and read something trippy out of his book.
The game is not about being someone, it’s about being no one.

But at Sheila’s everything was perfect. Even the kitchen, which had our same avocado stove and refrigerator, had been softened by the creamy toadstool cookie jar and the pale-yellow dish towels. Sheila pulled out a real plate, not a paper one with a wicker holder like the ones we used, and shook crackers out of the box and squirted Cheez Whiz on
each one. She told me to get Tabs out of the refrigerator. We set the couch cushions against the coffee table, the plate between us, and got ready to watch
General Hospital
.

So far I hadn’t explained how, in ancient times, people thought birds migrated to the moon. I hadn’t farted, though at one point I smelled cinnamon and I wondered if Sheila had.

After commercials for Kool-Aid and Lux fabric softener, we watched Laura walk down the hallway of the hospital. Sheila had a face not unlike Laura’s: pug nose and round cheeks, with long, shiny blonde hair. On the surface Laura was like us. She was a teenager, a few years older than we were. She was sweet and pretty but underneath she was conniving and selfish. In every situation she always let her desire lead her, though she pretended to be innocent. The amazing thing was, nobody seemed to catch on. In fact, everyone loved Laura.

During the commercial, Sheila got the can of Cheez Whiz and we ate the stuff off our fingers. Sheila’s fingers were long, her tongue pale pink like a kitten’s. After
General Hospital
was over she led me upstairs. Over her bed, which was covered in a baby-blue corduroy spread, was a poster of Gregg Allman. She still liked him, she said, even though he’d gotten busted for drugs and ratted out his whole band.

Leaning against the wall was a poster board covered with cut-out Playboy Bunnies. One Bunny held a
gigantic key and another posed at the Playboy Club in front of backlit photographs of naked girls. Below the collage on her dresser was a lighter with the Playboy Bunny logo and a pair of satin ears.

“Walt brought these back from New York,” she said. “He’s my mom’s boyfriend and kind of like my stepdad.”

“Cool,” I said.

I had watched “Bunny of the Year” on television last year. It was impossible not to know about
Playboy
magazine and the Playboy Clubs in Chicago and New York. I’d seen pictures of Bunnies dancing on top of the piano. Everybody knew about Hugh Hefner and the orgies he had at his mansion.

“Walt says I’d make a great Bunny,” Sheila said.

I thought this was a strange thing to say, but I could tell how the comment had given her hope.

“You would,” I said.

I was worried she would take this the wrong way and accuse me of being a lezzbo, but she just started to tell me that at the clubs there were many varieties of Bunnies: Door Bunny, Hat-Check Bunny, Table Bunny. Each Bunny wore a satin bodysuit that matched her ears and high heels.

She told me that when they had open auditions, hundreds of girls showed up.

“Walt is a Number One Key Holder,” Sheila said. “That means he can ask the Bunnies out.”

“But he’s with your mom, right?”

“He doesn’t do it because he loves her.”

This was so romantic we just sat there a minute until Sheila opened a drawer and pulled out a big ball of white yarn.

“I’m making myself a tail,” she said.

Sheila passed it to me. I saw how she’d cut all the yarn into same-size pieces and tied them in the middle. But I wasn’t sure if I should say I liked the tail. Should I act indifferent? Sheila’s mouth was in a neutral position but I knew if I messed up, her lips could easily slide into a snide smile and she would say something to humiliate me. When I was embarrassed, the tips of my ears got as red as bell peppers.

Sheila turned on the radio that sat on her nightstand. “Black Betty” blasted into the room. I was trying to like the song but the lyrics reminded me of how the health teacher warned us when we menstruated we smelled. Sheila sat against the wall on the gold shag, her eyes open, but behind her eyes she was asleep.

“Ziggy Stardust” came on the radio next. I knew not everyone liked David Bowie, so I kept my expression neutral. You couldn’t like anything that was too weird because then that weirdness jumped onto you.

“I don’t like David Bowie,” Sheila said. “He can’t decide whether he’s a boy or a girl.”

I nodded without looking at her. If I looked at her face I knew she’d see I loved Bowie. Instead I concentrated on Sheila’s feet: her toes were long and thin, her nails a lovely pink lavender, and her baby toe was so perfectly formed it looked edible.