Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (38 page)

“Man suffers,” my dad quoted, “only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

“Pull over,” I said. “I want to get out.”

“What’s wrong?” my dad said, his voice shaken.

He was surprised I was angry, that this question, to me, was a real one. I was sick of his bullshit. Either God existed or He didn’t. If He did, my friend Jill was not crazy; we were.

That night, I lay on my bed. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the radio. It wasn’t as sad as “Cat’s in the Cradle,” but I still found my eyes getting warm and water leaking out of them. It was almost better when Jill had disappeared.

On Monday she ran up to me while I was getting books out of my locker. She pushed a mound of tinfoil at me.

“They’re brownies,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I knew she wanted me to invite her over to Bent Tree. I knew, too, that seeing her should have made me feel better, but I had an empty place in my chest. Though I had found Jill, it was like I had lost her. And every time I saw her, praying in her long dress out by the flagpole, reading her Bible in the cafeteria, that spot got bigger and started to hurt, until I had to run into the bathroom and lock myself into a stall to get ahold of myself.

On the day before we moved into our new house, my dad and Sandy’s fiancé, Steve, loaded all our furniture except the beds and the dining room table into the U-Haul. I heard Mr. Ananais’s brush moving back and forth against the hallway wall. Already he’d painted over the doorway where Dad had marked our heights, and filled in the holes where Phillip had shot the wall with his BB gun. The kitchen smelled of ammonia instead of hamburger, and the windows, without curtains, flooded the duplex with light.

I’d packed my clothes, wrapped my perfume bottles in newspaper, my busts of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, taken down my Egyptians—even my Venus flytrap was going over to the new house. Last were books. The one Pam had lent me, on Eleanor Roosevelt, went on top. Pam talked to me about Eleanor’s ideas, how she’d done very specific
things to help people poorer than herself. Pam knew a lot about the congressional bills the first lady had gotten passed and she could talk about them for a long time, in a passionate way. She kept a notebook filled with quotes by famous women. Her favorite:
As a woman I have no country. As a woman the whole world is my country.
She and her mom were Quakers. A Quaker, she told me, sat in silence. Every summer she spent two weeks in New York City with her dad and his friend Henry. They ate dumplings in Chinatown and went to see French films at the revival movie theater in the West Village. Besides her dad, Pam had correspondences going with three pen pals, one in Ohio, one in California, and one in Brazil! She told me sometimes a good idea got stuck in her head behind a mediocre one. And she thought cute things—babies, kittens, puppies—were actually dense patches of God.

My dad was going to drop me off at Pam’s house so I could spend the night, and then pick me up in the morning and take me directly to the new house. I set my horse notebook, my nightclothes, and my toothbrush inside my little black suitcase. We planned on finishing the story we were writing about Mr. Higgins’s college days, how he’d read philosophy while lying on his bed and taken long walks in gardens. We were both completely obsessed with our English teacher. On Friday, he’d told us how Thoreau’s friends had spread wildflowers over his dead body at his funeral
and on the black board, he’d written a dream from Emerson’s journal.

I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, “This must thou eat.” And I ate the world.

Pam and I had looked at each other.
We wanted to eat the world too!
Pam had read some of my unicorn girl story and she liked it so much she wanted to make a Super 8 movie. Already she had gathered props: a stuffed squirrel, an old saddle, and a bunch of dried lavender. I was going to write the screenplay and Pam was going to direct.

Downstairs my mother sat at the table. Instead of old photographs she looked through paint-color samples, putting them against squares of carpet. “What do you think?” she asked me, holding up a patch of orange against a brown carpet.

“I like it,” I said.

I knew now never to say what I really thought. It was better just to tell her what she wanted to hear. With this strategy I was even able to feel for her; it was more pity than love, but that was better than being jerked around by her mood swings.

My dad sat beside my mom, paging through a seed catalog Mr. Ananais had lent him. On a yellow pad he
drew rows of tomatoes and corn and made a square patch for strawberries. In our new backyard, he’d already pulled up weeds and turned over the dirt with a shovel.

Our neighbors had all come to say good-bye. Julie, who had quit drinking, took my mom out to lunch in the French Quarter. While they were gone I went over to Kira’s room and she let me hold Snowball on my lap. I fed him a carrot and let him lick the tip of my pinkie. When Eddie first heard we were moving, he and Phillip fought and he threw a lump of modeling clay at my head. But when Sandy brought over a tuna casserole, Eddie had come along and given me one of his Sargent Rock comic books as a going-away present. Now he and Phillip were downstairs watching television.

Mrs. Smith, like Eddie, was mad when she first heard we were going. She told my dad he was the only person she could talk to and she grabbed his hands in both of her wrinkly ones.

In the day I lived at my new house, unpacking my stuff, setting up my room, but once I was asleep I was back in Bent Tree. People carried out boxes, loaded their cars, and then drove off. New people parked, climbed out of their cars and carried boxes through the front doors. This all went on very fast, all night long, like a sped-up movie, so Bent Tree resembled
a frenetic colony of ants. Sometimes I’d dream that there was a fire in 34K. I’d see the pink flames shooting out the windows and I’d wake up terrified until I realized that 34K was not a real duplex, but one, as Jill said, that was in the next world.

Jill kept calling, asking me to come see her get baptized. The last person I’d seen baptized was a premature baby. My dad called all the children to come out of the pews and gather around the basin of holy water. The baby was tiny and hairless, more like a woodland creature than a child. She slept in her godmother’s arms until my father cupped water and poured it over her forehead. She didn’t scream like most babies, she just opened her eyes and looked up at my dad as if he were God.

It was one thing for a baby who didn’t know anything to be baptized, but Jill was desperate. At first I said I had something else to do that day. She persisted, stopping me whenever we passed in the hallway and asking if I’d come see her get baptized. Even at night when I closed my eyes I’d see her in her long white dress, begging me.

My dad thought I should go.

“Why?” I said. “You don’t even like church.”

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

“I have not been inside a church since we left the rectory; why should I go now?”

“Do you love your friend?”

“No,” I said, “not anymore.”

On the Friday before her baptism, Jill cut class and tracked me down in the cafeteria where I was sitting with Pam.

“You have to come!”

“I can’t,” I said.

“You could,” she said, clutching the large Bible she carried with her everywhere. “You just won’t.”

Because Jill was yelling, kids turned around and stared.

“Look,” I said. “I just don’t want to see you get baptized.”

“Why not?”

“You used to make fun of those people.”

“I know,” Jill said. “I feel bad about that.”

I moaned and rolled my eyes at Pam.

“Just come,” Jill said.

“I don’t want to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

Jill flinched like I’d hit her, put her hands over her eyes, and ran out the cafeteria doors. I felt bad, but at least that was the end of it. She’d be insane, I thought, to ask me again.

After the final bell rang, Jill was waiting for me in front of my bus. She’d made a sign on a piece of notebook paper that read
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
COME!
All she had on was her dress, so her arms goose-pimpled and her teeth chattered. She had lost her mind. She stood there, hair hanging around her face, begging me. Cold smoke moved out of her mouth as she asked me again to come.

She called me several more times over the weekend. Once my dad answered the phone and Jill pleaded with him. My dad told her he would drive me over to the church in the morning. He used his Buddhist mumbo jumbo on me, saying everything was connected to everything else, that every fragment fit somehow into the whole. When he saw me rolling my eyes he said, “A real action is one only you can perform.”