Sister Golden Hair: A Novel Read online

  MORE PRAISE FOR SISTER GOLDEN HAIR

  “Steinke’s narrator, Jesse, is both unforgettably unique and a quintessential adolescent girl. . . . Jesse’s naive admiration . . . and her chameleonlike reaction to whomever she attaches herself to create a painfully true account of a tough phase of life made more so by the disillusions of the time. But as Jesse observes these characters’ hopelessness, she herself becomes more defined—perhaps more the guitarist than the girl in the song.”

  —BOOKLIST

  PRAISE FOR STEINKE’S PREVIOUS WORK

  “I became riveted by Steinke’s tone, a steady, lovely, hallowed, patient, things-in-themselves hum . . . [Easter Everywhere is] a delicately wrought little volume . . . This is a beautiful book.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “If the novel had an essence (eau de roman), a pithy core, Darcey Steinke would be its genius.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES

  “Steinke writes some beautifully mystical descriptions of sexual encounters, and the conjunction of sex and the spirit, bodies and souls, is fascinating.”

  —WASHINGTON POST

  “Erotic . . . beautifully crafted prose.”

  —TIME

  “Steinke’s idiosyncratic, unsentimental fourth novel continues her examination of sexual and religious obsession . . . all the characters struggle to establish a relationship with God through contact with those around them, but Steinke’s prose repeatedly hints at the divine in tangible things.”

  —the NEW YORKER

  “Few authors understand America’s darkest fears and obsessions like Darcey Steinke.”

  —the VILLAGE VOICE

  “Easter Everywhere is an excellent account of a writer going head-to-head with the divine and finding some inner quiet—even in the darkest corners of her imagination.”

  —TIME OUT NEW YORK

  “Darcey Steinke certainly knows her way around characters and plot . . . it’s a joy to see her inner life finally exposed.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  “Steinke unflinchingly recounts years of disillusionment in her stumble back toward faith.”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “She drew this atheist reader deep into her devotional tale, seducing with prose that is rich and filling, with images that are startling and deep.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  Copyright © 2014 Darcey Steinke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700

  Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Steinke, Darcey.

  Sister golden hair / by Darcey Steinke.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-935639-95-4 (ebook)

  1.Teenage girls--Fiction. 2.Dysfunctional families--Fiction. 3.Roanoke (Va.)--Fiction. 4.Virginia--Social life and customs--20th century--Fiction. 5.Domestic fiction.I. Title.

  PS3569.T37924S74 2014

  813’.54--dc23

  2014011909

  “Hospital” by Jonathan Richman © 1971 Wixen Music

  Publishing / Modern Love Songs. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved.

  Interior design by Diane Chonette

  www.tinhouse.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: SANDY

  CHAPTER TWO: JILL

  CHAPTER THREE: JULIE

  CHAPTER FOUR: SHEILA

  CHAPTER FIVE: DWAYNE

  CHAPTER SIX: JESSE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Abbie

  I’ll seek out the things that must have been magic to your little girl mind.

  —THE MODERN LOVERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  SANDY

  The Vagabond Motor Lodge sat across the street from the Fiji Island restaurant, wedged between Johnny’s Auto Parts and a gas station with a flying horse on its neon sign. Our first few days staying there felt like a vacation. In the morning, after Dad left for his new job, we swam in the motel pool, doing cannonballs off the diving board as my mother lay out under a blue canvas umbrella with white fringe, watching cars go by on the highway. In 1972, I’d just turned twelve, and my family had moved for the third time in so many years. The August heat was ruthless on the bright cement, relenting only in bluish spots of shade. There was glamour in the way the heat slowed my body down and penetrated every moment with languor. In the late afternoon, when it was time for my little brother, Philip, to nap, we walked in our wet bathing suits across the parking lot, heat rising around us in visible waves. Our mother let us stop at the gumball machine outside the front office. Inside, the motel owner, a bald man who wore a Texas string tie, sat with his little dog, Mr. Buddy, on his lap, watching television.

  We were moving again and the reason was, as my father frankly told us, that there were not many jobs for defrocked ministers. The members of First Methodist hadn’t liked when my dad let his hair grow so long it brushed his coat collar, or that he traded his clerical collar for bell-bottoms and blue shirts with wide ties. They didn’t like it when he encouraged the youth choir to sing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” accompanied by guitars rather than the organ, and they really didn’t like it when he started a Gestalt workshop in the church basement and began preaching against Vietnam. When he held a commitment ceremony for Barry and Don, a parishioner complained. This led to a clergy trial, with a jury of nine Methodist ministers who decided that his actions were not compatible with Christian teaching. They read from the Book of Discipline, stripped him of his credentials, and—from what I heard—my dad, who refused to defend himself anyway, walked down the center aisle and into secular life.

  After getting fired, Dad stayed in bed and read from a pile of old New York Review of Books that we dragged from the rectory to each new rented house. He read books about history, science, and psychology. Once he was over the shock, he started to get enthusiastic: church doctrine was draconian; we’d figure out our own relationship to God. He gathered us together and explained that we were going to make a fresh start in Virginia.

  It would have been nice if my mother was the strong, long-suffering type, but this was not the case; with every move she got a bit more unhinged. When we were supposed to be asleep, she cried to my father about how unhappy she was. Explained the she felt like a zero, a nothing. Listening to her, I tried to judge her freak-out level. She was at a 5 pretty much all the time. Brow furrowed, vaguely unhappy. Often, say, around the dinner table, she got to a 4 or even a 3 if my dad was sullen or my little brother complained about the food. She’d been at a 2 the whole drive down, but now she was at a 3, a good 3, not a bad 3.

  When we got back to our room the owner’s wife had made up our beds, vacuumed, given us new towels. She was skinny as a skeleton as she pushed her cart, loaded with tiny bars of soap, glasses in white paper, and clean towels. Every day while she worked inside the rooms, jerking her bones around as she pushed the vacuum, I gazed at the cart until I got up enough courage to ask for more motel writing paper. She turned off the vacuum, gave me a sour look, and told me the stationery wasn’t kiddie stuff, but she guessed I could have a page or two. She didn’t know I was writing a long letter to Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, telling her about myself and also how sorry I was her father drank.

  By midw
eek we still hadn’t moved into our duplex in Bent Tree. We no longer walked down the highway, parking lot to parking lot, to Sambo’s for dinner, but instead ate American cheese sandwiches and chips from a big foil bag we bought at the convenience store.

  After dinner we took baths and got into our pajamas, and our mother let us out in front of our room to play in the parking lot. Across the street the Fiji Island was lit up so we could see the huge carved Easter Island statues on either side of the bamboo doors. The sign out front, bookended by plastic palm trees, read PINA COLADAS—TWO FOR THREE DOLLARS. For some reason nobody could explain, an old railroad car sat to one side of the parking lot. My mom knocked on the window from inside our room, pointed to the highway and shook her head vigorously. Then she leaned against the orange headboard and read a magazine, occasionally glancing to the television screen where Nixon’s head was huge and wiggly like the bobblehead dogs older people liked to put in the back windows of their cars.

  In the half-light we ran around the motel to the Dumpster. Across a mangy field was a farmhouse that had wandered out of an earlier time period, gotten lost, and was now unable to find its way back. Fireflies floated over the field and above the farmhouse. Tiered up the side of the mountain were brick ranch houses, lit in two colors: incandescent gold if the families inside were having dinner, or indigo blue if they were watching television.

  I wanted to crouch down in the field and pretend the Viet Cong were after us. But I could tell this game frightened Phillip. Whenever he was scared he pretended to look very carefully at some object on the ground, in this case chunks of parking lot gravel.

  As it got darker the fireflies rose up and we went back around to the front of the motel to spy on the owner. Mr. Buddy sat delicately on the bald man’s lap as if he were the dog of a French diplomat. The owner and his wife lived behind the office and we could see them through the doorway at the back; the wife rattled around the kitchen.

  The parking lot was packed with cars, license plates from Alabama, Mississippi, even Florida and Texas. The backseats were jammed with coolers, stacks of magazines, and clothes hung from hooks above the back doors. A fat man who held his pants together with an expanse of rope had dragged a chair from his room and was sitting out smoking.

  The fireflies multiplied; there were so many it was easy to reach out and catch one and hold it in the palm of your hand. Phillip got his Wiffle bat and swung at the bugs until he had a patch of glowing tails stuck to the plastic. He smeared the tails over his forehead so his skin glowed.

  After we caught as many as we could in the ice bucket, I opened the motel-room door and told my mother we had a surprise for her. “Now what?” she said, letting the magazine she’d been reading fall to the bedspread. She and my dad had yelled at each other earlier and now he was in the motel bar reading his book and drinking a beer.

  I turned off the overhead light, then lifted the top of the ice bucket so the fireflies rose into the room and began to blink over the bed and around the night table. One flickered so close to my mother’s face that I could see the white of her eyes.

  “How will we get them out of here?” she said.

  Though her voice sounded worried I could tell by the way her eyes followed the little lights around the room that she liked the fireflies. After a while she helped us trap the bugs again and let them go outside.

  I had trouble sleeping. To try to calm myself I thought about our life before we left the church. Dad used to say prayers before every meal; he sat on my bed and prayed with me at night. There were Sunday services, Sunday school, funerals, baptisms. When I slipped into the church in the late afternoons, the altar was dark and beautiful. The crimson carpet, the blues and greens from the stained glass like a doomed kingdom under the sea. We visited the lonely, we collected cans of food for hungry people, coats for people who were cold. We prayed for sick babies. We were at the center of what I thought of as THE HOLY, and our every move had weight and meaning. But out in the world away from church, we floated free. What if my dad did not come back? What if he met a lady in the bar he liked better than my mom, one who wasn’t always complaining about money? One who didn’t tell stories about giant worms in New Guinea that lived in your intestines or housewives who laid their bodies down over railroad tracks? He might go off when the bar closed and we’d never see him again. I sometimes imagined my father had another family. Rather than upsetting me, this gave me a certain respect for him. This second family would explain why he was always so preoccupied.

  Our room was not far from the motel lounge with its orange hanging lights with wrought-iron filigree. Cars came and went; as it got later people laughed loudly in the parking lot and used the cigarette machine just outside our door. I watched the few remaining fireflies bob in the air, blinking on and off. I tried to stay awake to see my father, but I must have fallen asleep. When I woke again he was lying beside my mother and there was just one bug left flying frantically by the doorway.

  The next day my mother forced my dad to go over to Bent Tree and give the manager an ultimatum: if we couldn’t move in by Friday, we were going to ask for our deposit back and look for another place to live. Usually when my parents talked seriously my father sat beside my mom, but on his return he paced the floor and his eyes kept opening wide as he went up on his toes. He talked as if the details of our life were an exciting movie, not anything that actually affected us.

  “Get this!” he said. “The woman who is in the unit we’re supposed to move into has barricaded herself inside. She told us through the door that while she was moving out Sunday morning, her ex-husband threatened her with a knife.”

  “Lovely,” my mom said.

  Her mouth turned down around the edges and her chin started to quiver like it always did when she was about to cry. Seeing my mother in such misery jolted my sleepy bloodstream like a candy bar. My mind started to click down my well-worn list of ways I could help her: (1) Write an anonymous letter about what a great person she was. (2) Spend my allowance on lottery tickets. If I won, which I figured I was bound to do if I really concentrated hard, I could buy her the house she was always talking about. (3) Run away from home so she wouldn’t have me to worry about anymore. I knew that last one would hurt her more than help her; a few items on my list were radical. Rather than make her feel better, they were meant to throw a glass of cold water in her face.

  My father continued to talk about the evil ex-husband. I pictured him sitting in his pickup truck looking at the duplexes through binoculars and playing with his Swiss army knife. He wore a red bandana on his head and mirrored sunglasses. I pretended to shift in my sleep, so I could see my mother in the dark hotel room. Her eyes were large and wet as she watched Johnny Carson. A 3 moving toward a 2. To my mom, the intrigue with the woman was just another example of how our life was in decline, one more detail added to the long list of others, chief among them the fact that we couldn’t afford to buy a house on my father’s tiny salary.

  Sometimes when my mother cried and said she wanted a house, Phillip, who was four, would rub her back and tell her not to worry, he was going to buy a big house when he grew up, and everybody could live there—not just us, but all our friends, grandmas and grandpas, birds, all the rabbits and mice. Even polar bears, if they promised to be nice and not eat anyone.

  I’d had the same fantasy for a while, that I’d grow up, get rich, and buy her a house that looked like the Taj Mahal; to me the pink marble and deep purple reflecting pools looked like heaven. But I was getting tired of her endless longing. Wherever we lived wasn’t good enough. We might call it a house, and think of it as “our house,” but to Mom no place we’d lived in was nice enough to be a house. It was as if the walls had fallen down, and we were just camping out, completely exposed to the elements.

  It rained all day Friday. We watched television as heavy drops pelted the big plate-glass window. We fought over whose turn it was to get ice from the machine at the end of the open corridor. The ice machine sat next to t
he candy machine, each bar of chocolate lit up like a tiny god.

  In the evening the rain cleared and we drove over to Bent Tree, passing Long John Silver’s, Hardee’s, and a 24-hour do-it-yourself car wash. There was a drive-in movie theater playing a film called Dallas Girls and a string of brick ranch houses with Christmas lights up around the porches and a sign by the road that read MASSAGE.

  Eventually the strip malls got farther apart, interspersed with black glass professional buildings and churches on both sides of the highway. Just before we turned off, there was a brick church with white columns, a steeple, and a sign that read SIN KNOCKS A HOLE IN YOUR BUCKET OF JOY. The parking lot was empty and glittering under the overhead light.

  Off the highway I counted thirteen NIXON FOR PRESIDENT signs stuck in front yards. My father hated Nixon, but I felt sorry for the president because he always looked so dazed and miserable. Warm air came through the window, damp from the rain and tinged with the scent of dirt and grape juice.

  I didn’t understand why we couldn’t rent a different duplex in one of the other developments—Lux Manor, Sans Souci, Evergreen Estates—spread like bread mold over the side of the mountains. My dad was acting like he did when he was a pastor, like everyone else’s life was more important than our own. He drove slumped back in the seat, his hand dangling over the wheel, the motel envelope holding the rental listings from the local paper on the dashboard. He intended to slip the envelope under the woman’s door and gently encourage her to think about moving out.

  When he told us his plan, my mother had been folding clothes she’d just brought back from the Laundromat, a pair of my little brother’s corduroys on her lap. She looked up at him.

  “That’s your plan?” she asked.

  In the last few days she’d rolled her eyes whenever my father talked about how much he liked his brand-new job at the VA hospital, or said something about the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Most of the car ride she’d been silent, her head pressed dramatically against the window frame, but as the car climbed the mountain and my father said we were close, she started to talk. Her features became unfocused, and when she opened her mouth I knew she was going to say something about rich people.