Darcey Steinke - Sister Golden Hair

My dad slipped into the driver’s seat. I made funny faces at Phillip. We were screwing up our mouths and shaking our heads, but when Dad turned around we froze.

“Your mother’s upset,” he said.

“Understatement of the universe,” I said.

“I want Mommy,” Phillip whined.

My dad put on the hazards and drove up behind her. He kept so close that I could see the muscles flexing in the backs of her legs. She was pretending to enjoy her little walk along the highway, looking at the weeds in the ditch, glancing up at the hazy sky.

“Just tell her you’re sorry,” I said. “That’s all she wants to hear.”

Dad leaned his head out the car window.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “OK? Just please get back in the car.”

She turned, took off her sunglasses, and looked at us through the windshield. Her face was pink and wet and her eyelids were so swollen she looked like a sea creature. Behind her was a string of fast food restaurants, a McDonald’s followed by the Long John Silver’s and the Hardee’s. Every time a car sped by, her clothes sucked against her body. She stared at us for what seemed like a very long time — at least a million years.

This is it, I thought, this is when she decides to leave us and start her new life.

Maybe because Phillip was so much younger, moving didn’t seem to bother him in the least; he loved packing up his toys in his old suitcase, and once we got to Bent Tree he knew how to hang around out front in the mornings, running his remote-control tank up and down the sidewalk, until he attracted a kid his own age.

At Bent Tree, Eddie was the first kid to come around. Though he was only four, the same age as my brother, he looked like a tiny adult, his white hair cut in a mullet, short in the front and past his shoulders in back. He had a white plastic knife tucked under his belt and a bandolier made of toilet paper rolls attached with electrical tape to his T-shirt.

My mother was pleased Eddie had come over because she wanted Phillip to stop running in and out of the duplex. All week, while she tried to unpack, he’d been sliding down the banister and jumping off the couch. Mom agreed that Phillip and Eddie could play together in the woods if I walked with them. On the way, Eddie showed us the unit next to ours; it looked OK from the outside, but inside wires hung from all the ceilings. The wood frame next in line was overgrown with weeds. On the lot beyond, the builders had given up completely. There was only a large hole and a few bags of cement ruined by the rain and dried to hard chunks in the sun. Eddie told us that in the spring, rainwater collected at the bottom of the pit and he had caught tadpoles there in a Dixie cup.

The tree line was scattered with stuff people had dumped: a television with a smashed screen, a plastic bag of clothes, a broken-down playpen. Vines covered everything. I’d always thought of nature like the happy woodlands in my childhood storybooks. But now I was frightened by the large shiny leaves, the heart-shaped ones veined purple, and the ones small as doll hands covered with white hairs. The trees seemed angry; I felt if I turned my back, they might poke a sharp branch into my heart. I wanted the woods to be a place where I might make friends with a fawn or see a unicorn. I wanted to meet a squirrel wearing a little vest or a frog walking on his hind legs, leaning on a tiny carved cane.

Eddie felt none of my anxiety. Once we got a few yards into the forest he insisted that no girls were allowed in the hooch, that he and my brother would walk the rest of the way alone. I watched their thin legs moving over the packed dirt path. Where they made a sharp right, the trees thickened first to dark green and then to black.

When I got back, our nearest neighbor, Mrs. Smith, was standing in her doorway wearing a housedress with metal snaps down the front. She wore her hair teased up in a beehive and smoked a cigarette with a long dangling ash.

“Would you mind getting me my newspaper, honey?” she said. “That boy threw it onto your side.”

I pulled the paper out from under the ratty boxwood.

“You all moved in?”

“Still unpacking.”

“Where you all from?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Up there,” she said. “My Lord!”

I nodded and smiled.

“I hear your daddy’s a preacher.”

“He was one. But he’s not anymore.”

Mrs. Smith frowned. She was the sort of character I’d imagined lived down South. Someone who made fried chicken and loved okra, someone who watched the Grand Ole Opry on television.

“Was it him I heard up in the middle of the night?”

“Either him or me,” I said. “We both have trouble sleeping.”

“Y’all and me both,” she said. “I haven’t gotten more than a couple hours’ worth since my husband passed.”

“When was that?”

“Twenty years ago,” she said. “But it feels like twenty days.”

Her cheeks sucked in as she pulled on her cigarette and let the smoke out of her small nose, the stream thick and gray.

Eddie’s mother, Sandy, lay out on a lawn chair beside her unit in a leopard-print bikini, spreading oil mixed with iodine over her legs. When she turned over on her stomach, she undid her top so her back was bare. To me she was exotic as a lizard soaking up the sun. Listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd on her transistor radio and drinking a can of beer. I stared for a while at her brown back and perfectly shaped butt from my bedroom window — until she glanced in my direction and I went back to unpacking my few possessions, hanging my dress and arranging my shoes in the closet. I had three pairs of shoes: red Keds, sandals with tire-tread soles, and a pair of Mary Janes that my mother had made me pack but that I swore I would never ever wear again even if someone held a gun to my head.

I opened the box that held the old encyclopedias I’d gotten at the Philadelphia library sale. Wedged in between the volumes was my baby doll, Vicky, her ratty sleeper scrunched up under her arms and her blue glass eyes clearly frustrated. I could tell she was mad I’d left her in the U-Haul for so long, and so I let her lie on my chest and I stroked her bald head as I sang “American Pie,” the song that was now always on the radio.

After a while I got up and peeked out at Sandy. She had turned back around and was eating orange Cheez Doodles out of a big plastic bag. I went out to see if we had any mail and to get a look at her up close.

As soon as I came out our front door, she raised her sunglasses.

“Are you a teenager, honey?” she called to me. Her voice, like a little girl’s, made no sense coming out of her brown body.

“Almost,” I said, walking over to her chair.

“You babysit much?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to appear too anxious, but I was thrilled she might actually hire me. My heart fluttered. It was as if I were talking to a goddess from another galaxy.

“For who?”

“My brother mostly, but once I watched a new baby while its mother got her hair done.”

“Sounds good,” she said. I realized from the way she waved her hand that she was going to offer me the job no matter if I’d said I’d watched sea monkeys and babysat goldfish.

“Could you come over at seven? My boyfriend is taking me out to dinner.”

When I arrived that evening, Sandy’s boyfriend opened the door. Sonny was a tan, thin man with huge white teeth, his hair feathered back perfectly like birds’ wings. I’d heard from Eddie that he was an oral surgeon and that he was rich. He poured himself a drink from a decanter with a gold top. Sandy’s living room was filled with spider plants hanging in macramé holders. One wall was mirrored. There were ceramic lamps with large silk shades and a geometrical print suspended on the wall over the long, low, brown couch.