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Everyone was going blond, and thus so was my sister. Every day during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, she was in our backyard, wearing barely anything at all, making her skin dark like a Brazilian and her hair light. To expedite the process, she kept beside her a spray bottle of lemon water, and her hair crept over the months from near black to red to orange to finally a crude blond.
I was working at Burger King that summer. My sister would join me the next. And so too would many of our friends. My cousin Shanna was living with us, and she was one of the managers. It was through her that we all managed to get jobs. In between, I was writing a novel--or trying to write one, or pretending. Mostly, I was putting it off, watching television and thinking about what I was going to write, eventually, one day (and would indeed do the next summer). The summer before, I'd worked on the school yearbook, which was several months behind schedule (in the end, that edition would come out two years late), writing cutlines and feeling very productive and smart. This summer, by contrast, I accomplished little at all, except that I made some money, but not even much of that, though in my high school world, a thousand dollars still seemed like a lot, accumulating interest in my savings account month by month.
That summer, my last before high school graduation, holds few memories for me outside of work. In the years before, I could recount softball playing at night; janitorial work at my very first job; parties; lost keys; dirtied offices; a ride to an outdoor adventure store with one of my many friends named Mike, this one heading into his own senior year, into another life, and out of mine. This summer, my memories are of being told repeatedly that I had a small butt by one of my coworkers; of being told off by customers for washing down the sidewalks amid a drought (I was just following directions, and once I opted to try to stick mostly to sweeping, the regional manager complained of my work); of my first extended experiences with peoples outside of our church; of curse words laced in vocabulary every third word; of amazement at the superexperienced people in the drive thru (which would be me months later); of pushing grease around on the cement behind the store in an attempt to clean up a spill that had occurred the night before and of accomplishing little except getting oily and smelly myself; and of Maria, a Hispanic girl who wore short miniskirts and too much makeup and who I never dared to talk with except to say I needed more French fries or a Whopper. I lusted after her, while I dreamed of a desk job.
I pushed through my senior year, working about ten hours a week at Burger King, mostly on weekends but also for a couple of hours on one or two nights. The next summer, my hopes were high. I joined the job search, had an interview regarding selling perfume, went to see a Michael Keaton movie with my friend Brian a few days after the ceremony and talked highly of our futures, and then settled down eventually to working at Burger King with no end in sight. Friends joined me, and friends left, off to other ventures. Minimum wage went up from $3.35 to $4.25, and my wage, which I'd worked so hard to get up from $3.45 to $3.80 went up also--to the new minimum.
That second summer, two girls had crushes on me. One didn't speak English, and I learned of it only through one of my coworkers. She thought I had pretty eyes, and for the first time I realized that, yes, I did have pretty eyes--they were something amid the nothing else that I felt that I had. The girl was quite attractive herself, but I kept to my job. And there was another gal, a woman in her thirties, mentally challenged, who had been hired to take care of cleaning the dining room. She liked me too and wrote me letters stating such and came and sat in the break room with me during lunch and tried to sit on my lap, which I tried, tactfully, to refuse.
And there was my sister, still blond. But something had changed. Our church was getting stricter again. Women were not to wear makeup, were not to look like whores, which is what the Bible apparently intimated women who wore makeup apparently were. This had come down in the early eighties; now it was being extended. No dying of one's hair. And this included no bleaching, even with natural products. No fakeness. Be happy with who you are naturally, with the colors and the skin God has given you.
And so it was that my sister's hair had to be changed. Light was unnatural, even if she was out in the sun every minute of every day that she wasn't working at Burger King. The hair was dyed back, dyed back to near black. It was not okay to bleach your hair with lemon juice, but it was okay to use synthetic material to dye it to your natural color. The contradiction did not escape me.
My sister stayed home from work for the first couple of days after the dying. It had not gone well. Supermarket-purchased, the dye had made her hair come out in several shades of dark brown, depending on how well that segment of hair had undergone the treatment. She was embarrassed. She feigned sickness. Shanna told our boss about it at work, and together they laughed.
Several years later, after I had moved out of state and was back for a visit, I would spend the requisite night with my sister. We hardly ever speak on the phone, and she doesn't have e-mail, so we are lucky if we communicate once in a year. Both quiet people, we rarely have much to say to one another. That night, I would go to the Rialto Theater with her to see The English Patient. Afterward, we would go somewhere close for coffee or drinks--I don't remember where. She was living with her boyfriend Kevin at the time, and she was white, not tanned. I asked her about this, and she told me that she had realized how bad the sun was for you, that she didn't want to be old and leathery.
A year or two after that, I would receive from her an invitation to her wedding. The man in the photograph was not Kevin, the boyfriend of nearly a decade, but some other man, Adam. In the photo, he looked rather old (in real life, I discovered, he was indeed quite young, my sister's age). In his arms was my sister. And she was light skinned, and her hair was long and curled. But what struck me most was how dark that hair was, dark like it had been that day after she had had to dye it. At the time, I'd thought the dye too dark, so dark that it did not look natural on her. In the photograph, though, with the tropically colored clothes she was wearing, the shy smile, the dark hair, she looked to me as Brazilian as ever, even with the light skin.
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