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

carved into her forehead like the Manson girls.
    Though I hadn’t realized it till now, whenever I thought of Miranda’s ex-husband, he always had the same wild eyes and long auburn hair as Charles Manson—Charlie, as the girls called him, who could handle rattlesnakes without being bitten and bring dead birds back to life. I walked up the stairs, pushed Eddie’s door open, and stood in the doorway watching his little chest rise and fall a few times, his hair so white it glowed in the dark like the tail of a comet. With one arm he clutched his Dapper Dan doll, the thumb of his other hand in his mouth. I went into Sandy’s bathroom. It was still damp from her shower, and the humid air was scented with musk.
    I pulled the neck of my T-shirt over to look at my white strap marks, then lifted up my shirt and stared for a while at my stomach. It was a golden brown, the fine hairs white. Then I examined several darker hairs I’d found earlier that day under my left arm. One of the things I liked best about babysitting was that I had time to look at myself as much as I wanted. Each new hair meant I was moving closer to the Danger Zone. Once my body flooded with hormones, I’d become vulnerable to the whims of men. Men, it wasn’t hard to see, ran everything, and once a girl got breasts and all that went with that, men had wizard power over you, they could make you do anything they wanted.
    Sandy had left her bathing suit hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, and before I even realized it, I had pulled the bikini bottoms up over my jeans and fastened the top over my T-shirt. I decided to practice a move I’d seen Sandy do when she bent down to tie Eddie’s shoe. It was a small gesture, but I’d been fascinated by how she’d collapsed her skeleton to the ground with concern and focus. I broke the movement into parts. First there was the noticing of the thing that needed your attention. Your face showed a sudden focus as the knees began to bend. The next part was the hardest to do smoothly: you floated downward without any effort, gentle as a flower petal. With my fingers I simulated tying a shoelace before releasing back up into the regular stream of time. As I stood up I tried to look satisfied in a small-time way, but my face in the mirror looked deeply satisfied, as if I’d just prevented World War III or something.
    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 loungechair, 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