Darcey Steinke - Sister Golden Hair

Maybe if I put on a little eyeliner. I pulled the tiny brush out and moved it along the edge of my eyelids. The black made my eyes look separate from my body, as if they had a different destiny from my nose or my mouth. I tried a sort of chaotic walk that Sandy used as she moved over the lawn toward her lounge chair. I walked back and forth in front of the mirror, slopping my body around as if it were liquid in a bucket, but the bathroom was too narrow to get a real feel for the full sequence, how she opened the duplex door, moved across the grass, dropped her butt over the lounge chair, and swung her legs up, centering her face into the sun.

I went down and got a beer from the refrigerator and Sandy’s sunglasses and looked at myself in the mirrored wall.

“I don’t know why I keep fucking him,” I said to myself in Sandy’s high voice. It was no use: no matter what adjustments I made, I never really looked like anything other than a boy dressed up in girls’ clothes.

I was getting sleepy but I knew I needed to stay awake so no harm would come to Eddie or me. At the window I saw that all the lights were off in my own family’s unit across the street — even my dad who usually stayed up late was asleep — and I started to wonder if I’d ever lived there. Maybe I was the one who had betrayed Eddie’s father and was now pining for a sleazy oral surgeon. Though I tried to push the story back, I thought about the babysitter who’d gotten The Phone Call, a man’s voice at the other end laughing. The man kept calling until the babysitter finally called the operator, who told her the man was calling from the phone upstairs! If that one wasn’t scary enough, there was the one about the babysitter who saw a man standing outside looking in the window, only to realize the man was actually standing behind her, and what she was seeing was his reflection in the glass. The scariest of all, though, was the babysitter who had called the parents to ask if she could throw a blanket over the creepy life-size clown statue that stood in a dark corner of the living room. I saw the bloodshot eyes surrounded by white grease paint, the red painted smile and rainbow wig. After a long pause the father said, “We don’t have a life-size clown sculpture!”

I heard a tapping sound and got worried Miranda’s evil ex-husband had cut the phone line. My heart boomed in my ears. I couldn’t stay in the unit; I had to wake Eddie and we’d go out into the yard, just up in the tree line, and wait for Sandy to get back. But just as I was slipping on my tennis shoes, I heard a car come up the street blasting the Allman Brothers. It wasn’t the baby-blue Pinto Sandy’s girlfriend had picked her up in. It was a white Mustang. As the Mustang parked in front of the duplex, a trail of raspberry embers flew out the driver’s-side window and into the weeds. I waited for Sandy to get out of the car, but she didn’t. I saw shapes moving in the car’s back window like koi swimming sluggishly in murky green water.

When I finally got home my father was up and sitting in the dark, listening to his jazz records with oversize headphones. I watched his reflection in the sliding glass doors that led out to the deck. Roanoke, it was perfectly clear now, was not the Sun Belt. There were no landscaped parks. No fountains. Things at my dad’s job had already gotten weird. It all started when he told the guy who thought he was Speed Racer Good luck in the big race, and then at group he suggested to the lady who was afraid of her washing machine that form is no form . As a pastor he’d reassured parishioners that they rested inside the heart of God. But he didn’t believe any of that anymore. Now Dad tried new ideas on the patients. Ideas he’d learned in his Trungpa book: that there was no such thing as a self separate from the rest of the universe and that all dualities were delusion. These ideas freaked out his patients: the washing machine lady had to be sedated, and Louie, the man who wore rain boots over his hospital slippers because he was afraid of floods, figuring his body was the same as the bricks, walked right into the wall. Dad was on probation now. At first he’d taken to bed as he always did when a job wasn’t going well; I brought him a crustless grilled cheese sandwich. My mom gave him a pep talk: he’d have to make his job at the VA hospital work, since we’d only just gotten here and we couldn’t afford to move.

The thermostat by the side of the house read 103 degrees. I could feel the heat through the soles of my tennis shoes. The duplexes shimmered and swayed in the silver light, made of fish scales rather than brick. One trick of the light and all of Bent Tree would flicker and then disappear. I went inside to the refrigerator, got an egg, and walked out to the sidewalk. I cracked the egg and let it drip out onto the cement. There was a half-hearted sizzle and the bottom turned white, but the top was still gelatinous and runny.

Eddie opened his window and yelled out.

“You got to do it on a car hood.”

I nodded but decided to retreat into the air conditioning instead and read about mummification. I was interested in how the Egyptians pulled the brains of dead people out through their noses with a hook and then held them in jars shaped like cats. I wanted to tell somebody about the cat jars, which were shiny black obsidian, with whiskers cut into the stone and emeralds for eyes, but I knew my mother would just shake her head and say I was morbid. I used to be able to tell her anything, that at times I felt I was a snowy owl, or that I wanted to be a cash register. Not anymore. My dad might be interested, but he was working. I held my View-Master up to my eyes and turned toward the light of the window. Chief Red Feather greeted visitors at the entrance of Knott’s Berry Farm. Click. A stagecoach parked in front of the Old Saloon. I set the View-Master beside me and lay watching the light move over my perfume bottle collection. I liked how it glittered the edges of the glass, how it moved incrementally toward the wall, illuminating the grains in the paint and the strands of the carpet below. I closed my eyes and started to say the days of the week, waiting for the sun to make the inside of my eyelids red.

At some point I heard a car stop on the street. At the window I saw Sonny get out of a taxi and walk over to Sandy’s car. Her front door flew open and she ran over the grass barefoot in her mini-kimono. I ran down the stairs and swung open the door, the heat hitting me as if from an open oven.

“It’s my car. You gave it to me!”

She was up on her toes, the tendons in her neck defined.

“Well,” Sonny said, not even bothering to turn, “I’m taking it back.” He wore a pale blue golf shirt and white pants. Though it was hot, the material hadn’t wilted. The clothes hung on his thin frame as if on a hanger.

Sandy wobbled down the driveway, her bare feet unsteady on the gravel. He swung around and put his hands on his hips; she moved her fists up and I was sure she was going to beat against his chest, but instead she clasped them to her own heart, her knees swung sideways, and she fell onto the gravel.

Eddie ran down from the duplex in just his white underpants and tennis shoes.

“You killed her!” he said.

“She’s just being dramatic,” Sonny said as he stood staring down at her. I walked over to where she lay, her long eyelashes closed, her perfect breasts pointed to the sky. Eddie put his cheek down next to his mother’s and her eyes flew open like a doll’s in a horror movie.

“You fucker!” she said. “That car is mine!”