Sister Golden Hair: A Novel by Darcey Steinke Read Free Book Online Page A

held his hand over his eyes, blocking the glare, so he could better see us. I was terrified he’d say something stupid, tell Sandy about my rashes or that as a baby I was always constipated.
    “Not much sun left,” he said.
    Sandy pulled off her sunglasses.
    “There’s enough for me, pastor,” she said.
    Before we left the rectory, everybody called him pastor—even people who didn’t go to church called him that. Now, though, the title embarrassed him; he blushed and looked up into the trees blowing around on the side of the mountain.
    “Help your mother with dinner,” he said.
    “Yes sir.”
    He walked back to our car, got in, and started up the engine.
    “Your father,” Sandy said, “is a good-looking man.”
    “What?”
    “He’s a looker.”
    “If you say so,” I said, rolling over onto my stomach and pressing my cheek into the grass.

    When Sandy let me in she was dressed for her night out with the girls: white short shorts and a puffy-sleeved blouse tied high up to show off her belly, and her hair teased up and sprayed. She looked like one of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. I had to admit she was disturbingly tan.
    Eddie was already asleep, and when a horn honked, she jotted a number on a pad by the phone and said she’d be back no later than eleven. I got myself a jelly glass full of Pepsi and a handful of Fritos and watched a made-for-TV movie about a senator’s daughter who ran away to join a bunch of hippies who lived in an old school bus. The head hippie—a long-haired guy in an embroidered vest and dirty jeans—took the senator’s daughter to McDonald’s, where he searched through the garbage for food. He tried to get her to eat the food he’d retrieved, but the senator’s daughter couldn’t make herself taste the limp, leftover fries. Then there were scenes of hippies handing out daisies and swimming in rivers. I got bored and turned down the sound.
    I’d brought my favorite book, Half Magic , with me, and I opened the pages to where the oldest boy presses the magic coin firmly into his palm and all the children are suddenly transported to the court of King Arthur. The idea that certain objects had magic powers, a concept I’d clung to for so long, was starting to seem ridiculous. I’d also lost the ability, which I’d once reveled in, to pretend I was an animal. I used tospend whole afternoons thinking kitten thoughts or hiding in my closet like a shy baby deer. I’d imagine I was a mother badger living in a civilized badger hole, with a tiny stove and wooden breakfast table.
    It was depressing, really, to be stuck always in my own skin. For a short while when I was small, between the time I realized I was myself and when I knew I had to stay a girl, I thought I could go back and forth between girl and boy. I used to imagine I could trade my body for a boy’s. It wasn’t until I said I have a penis , and watched my parents’ faces break apart in laughter, that I realized I’d have to stay a girl forever. I turned the sound back up on the television. On the screen I could see the head hippie and the now-hippified senator’s daughter. She was barefoot, in a patchwork dress with a braid of leather around her forehead. They had returned to the McDonald’s, and they were foraging food left on the tables just out front. The head hippie fed the half-eaten hamburger to the hippie girl, the camera lingering on the girl’s lips as she took the hamburger into her mouth. I could tell by the sad music that played over the closing credits that I was supposed to feel sorry for her. But why? Because she didn’t have money for a fresh, clean hamburger? Or was it because she looked different in her hippie dress from the straight-looking people sitting around her? I thought I knew the real reason. Any girl who didn’t do what her parents wanted had clearly been brainwashed. Now that she was eating garbage,it wouldn’t be long before she’d be in some courtroom singing in Latin with an X