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  • Three Sandhills for Ray Charles, and: Hippie Jew Hair
  • Kate Sontag (bio)

Three Sandhills for Ray Charles

Because it’s June and Ray Charles is dead All afternoon we take him canoeing I can’t stop loving you moan three cranes overhead Scores of miniature white lilies blooming

All afternoon we take him canoeing You unhook undersized smallmouth bass Scores of miniature white lilies blooming On the Honey Honey surface of the lake like jazz [End Page 69]

You unhook undersized smallmouth bass I paddle you toward soulful shallows On the Honey Honey surface of the lake like jazz Dragonflies mate, reeds brush willows

I paddle you toward soulful shallows Big fish flash What’d I say then hide Dragonflies mate, reeds brush willows Swamp iris pass our gospel glide

Big fish flash What’d I say then hide You cast and recast your breezy line Swamp iris pass our gospel glide Over logs, sinkholes, mud-shine

You cast and recast your breezy line Farther from shore as piano notes drift Over logs, sinkholes, mud-shine Bubbling springs of drowned tears shift

Farther from shore as piano notes drift Through these bluesy summer channels Bubbling springs of drowned tears shift Goin down slow quicksand tunnels

Through these bluesy summer channels God rock ’n’ rolls his grace on you and me Goin down slow quicksand tunnels America, America the Raylettes wail tenderly

God rock ’n’ rolls his grace on you and me Because it’s June and Ray Charles is dead. America, America the Raylettes wail tenderly I can’t stop loving you moan three cranes overhead [End Page 70]

Hippie Jew Hair

My stepmother once told me I was known on her block as the girl with the hippie Jew hair. At least that’s what the lady across the street called me. “Oh, is that your daughter . . . ?” It was L.A. The late 60s. Nixon signs still decorated the lawns. I was visiting for the holidays. “I’m not your daughter, I’m your stepdaughter,” I corrected her when she repeated the neighbor’s slur as naturally as an exhale off a Kent. I knew she spread lies, told people I used to be hers, the cabinet filled with half-empty bottles of Tame from when I was a kid, but what could she do now that I was a teenager and living three thousand miles away? It didn’t help that my real mother had taken me to a beauty parlor every six months to get my hair thinned with scissors spastic as two combs mating, straightened with a solution noxious as tear gas, shampooed three times then deep-conditioned with mayonnaise until my whole head smelled like coleslaw, cream-rinsed, toweled, sectioned, and rolled onto curlers fat as Campbell’s Soup cans, netted, dried under a helmet fit for battle in the Trojan War, brushed back and ponytailed high as a pinecone, then lacquered to a glossy finish, even glittered. And when wrapping hit the scene, whose standing-before-the-mirror-each-night-turbaned-daughter was I? And when ironing was all the craze, whose crouched-under-the-ironing-board-again-daughter was I? Another frizzled sister from a generation of singed ends. But the wig my stepmother gave me for Christmas, while my stepbrothers got transistor radios and terrycloth robes and my father opened carton after carton of Pall Malls, turned me against her for years. [End Page 71]

Even though we were Jewish we celebrated Christmas like the rest of the neighborhood: chose our favorite tree out of hundreds on the lot, sprayed the green branches with fake snow, strung popcorn & cranberries and lights, attached a five-pointed gold star at the pinnacle, arranged presents underneath, then plugged in the whole blinking thing in front of the living room window. I unwrapped the box and found the chestnut-brown fall inside— straight and sleek and shiny as movie star hair; Breck commercial hair meant to bounce me through the rest of high school, four years of college, marriage (did she have an Orthodox one in mind so I’d shave my head?), motherhood, and a career; step-hair I buried in my suitcase like a...

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