Darcey Steinke - Sister Golden Hair

I couldn’t stand just watching her. I pulled on my bathing suit, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and left the cool duplex for the blinding outdoor light. The only sunglasses I had were a pink pair from when I was little, but I figured they were better than nothing.

As I stood at the foot of her lounger, I saw how pale my skin was in comparison to hers. I asked if I could lie out beside her, and to my amazement she said yes. I hated my bathing suit with its pattern of strawberries and eyelet ruffles. Sandy said it was cute, but I knew it was babyish. She smelled like dirt and radiator heat and once I lay there I began to feel like a larva, pale and glassy beside her.

Sandy talked, pausing only occasionally to sip her beer. When she leaned up to spread oil over her legs, her bikini top gaped open and I saw her nipple and large areola. I listened to her voice with my eyes half closed, watching the skin around the crotch of her bikini; I saw a bevy of black nubs that made my eyes unfocus.

She told me Sonny was not really a good person; he sometimes told people they needed root canals when their teeth were fine. He called his teenage sons lazy and said they smelled bad. Sonny never listened, just waited for his turn to talk. She had thought she loved him, but now she realized she actually hated him.

“To be perfectly honest,” she said, “I’m still stuck on Eddie’s father. But I fucked that up by fooling around when he went off to Vietnam.” He had a new girlfriend now and she was the one who got to fly over to Hawaii to meet him when he got R and R.

She spoke about herself with a certain distance, as if she were talking about a character on General Hospital .

“When I think about it,” she said, “I can see what a terrible person I am.”

“I don’t think you’re a terrible person,” I said.

“But you would, Jesse, if you really knew me.”

After that she was quiet and I could hear the hot wind in the leaves.

“Sonny took me to the grocery store and let me buy whatever I wanted.”

She didn’t know what she would do if he didn’t help with the rent and the car payments. No way could she ask her family for money. Her parents had five teeth between them and the house she grew up in, if you could even call it a house, didn’t have indoor plumbing.

“I’d rather gnaw my own arm off than go back there.”

The sun beat down. Tree leaves singed around the edges, curled forward like burnt paper, and my skin was dry and stiff no matter how much baby oil I spread over myself. The weeds looked brown and miserable. Sandy’s radio said we were in the dog days of summer, then a buzzer rang over the airwaves and the DJ told us it was time to turn or burn. The sun made a slow lava lamp under my closed eyelids, and I felt my head getting swimmy and realized how thirsty I was. I asked if I could go inside her duplex and get myself a drink.

Inside Sandy’s unit it was dark and cool. All the furniture looked like it was underwater and covered with algae. It was true I was thirsty, and I drank down a jelly glass filled with water and then another, but I also wanted to be inside Sandy’s house. I thought about going upstairs into her bedroom and lying across her water bed, and while I liked the idea of my bare skin against her fuzzy bedspread, I knew I would leave grease stains. What if I just quickly held one of her bras against my bathing suit top? She kept several hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Once I thought of this, the urge to do it was magnetic. It would be like holding Wonder Woman’s bodice against my chest. Who knew what superpowers would spark from the material into me? I started toward the stairs, but then I saw Eddie and Phillip through the back window, making their way through the trees down the side of the mountain. All afternoon they’d been in the hooch, a tree fort made of particleboard with a skull drawn in Magic Marker on the door. The one time I’d been allowed inside, Eddie told a story about how his father had to unload a helicopter filled with body parts.

I walked out the back door and handed Sandy a beer; Phillip and Eddie ran down the raw edge of red dirt, toilet-paper rolls of ammunition taped to their T-shirts.

Their tennis shoes sent up a cloud of pink dust.

“Why are you running?” Sandy said.

“The gooks are after us!” Eddie yelled.

“You’re not supposed to call them that!” Sandy said, but by the time she finished talking they had disappeared back up into the trees.

That night, while we waited for my dad to get home from work, my mom browned hamburger in the Teflon skillet and I stood over the trash can and peeled potatoes. The wet strips curled off the blade and landed in the garbage in artistic configurations.

Mom was talking about rich people again, her voice growing lively and familiar. Mrs. Vanhoff was pencil thin and always wore her hair up, highlighting her long and elegant neck. The Vanhoffs had been in last night’s newspaper eating lobster thermidor at the Hotel Roanoke.

“Carolyn Vanhoff is head of the mayor’s art council, and I heard she takes tennis lessons with the pro at the club.”

She sprinkled the Hamburger Helper flavor packet over the ground beef.

“Every January she goes off to a spa in North Carolina to lose the few pounds she gains over Christmas.”

“You and Dad should go away,” I said. “I could watch Phillip.”

“Your father? Take me on a vacation? Like that’s ever going to happen.”

A peel flew off the blade and stuck to the wall. I wanted to defend my dad, but what could I really say? That he read a lot, that he had a great vocabulary, that he helped people. These would only get grunts and eye rolls from my mother. I decided to change the subject.

“Sandy is having trouble with her boyfriend,” I said.

I thought my mom might like this information, but I could tell by how she pressed down the spatula so grease oozed out of the hamburger that she did not.

“I hope you’re not looking up to that woman,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“You know Sonny is married.”

“Separated,” I said.

My mom swung around, holding the fry pan in front of her. It was rare; she’d gone from a solid 5 straight to a 2. The grainy hamburger and the greenish grease pooling in the tilted pan looked disgusting.

“Jesse, you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

At least they’re people I actually know , I wanted to say to her, not strangers I read about in the newspaper. My mom would rather pretend to have relationships with people than actually deal with our real-life neighbors. But I just grunted and ran out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and slammed the door to my room.

I held my View-Master to my eyes, pushed the lever down: Alice’s head poking out of a thatched roof, then the wide, menacing smile of the Cheshire Cat. The colors reminded me of the stained-glass windows in my dad’s old church, gemlike and glorious. But I couldn’t move myself into the tiny 3-D colors like usual, so I tried to read the book I’d gotten from the library on worldwide burial rituals. I was on the part where mummies, after being swathed in linens, are first placed into one coffin and then a second. Through the wall I could hear Mrs. Smith playing hymns on her piano. She had a long list of things that were bad luck. Some of them were obvious, like breaking a mirror, but others I’d never heard before, like sweeping after dark and cutting your fingernails on Sundays.

I had always felt it was good luck that my mom was prettier than all the other moms, and that even though she didn’t dress up anymore, she couldn’t help but look stylish in her paisley head scarf and big dark sunglasses. But now her face was the color of a mushroom and she had velvet bags under her eyes like a zombie in a monster movie. Incrementally, she had transformed from the mom I used to love into a creature, weepy and miserable, a dark thing to be afraid of in the middle of the night.