Searching for the door

Six a.m. A new day.

The girl in the mirror was pretty, with angular features and effusive wheat-blond hair. She had to get that hair just right. First she attacked it with a blow-dryer. Then hot curlers. Then a curling iron for touch-up work.

She was, she’d later write, “a hair monster,” a girl who could phizzzzt her way through a can of hair spray in a week. On her best days, the adhesive fog raised her ’do 3 inches high. It shimmered. Strangers on the street were mesmerized.

Years later, Darcey Steinke would look back on those mornings of teen-age desperation with a sense of defeat. She’d sold out to peer pressure, to the hopes of an ex-beauty queen mom, to the dark gravity of suburban conformity.

Who would’ve guessed? The Roanoke County preacher’s daughter who’d grown up to be the hip tattoo-sporting New York City chick, the dark-and-aberrant literary novelist, the slick magazine journalist who’d hung out with Kurt Cobain and smoked pot with David Koresh’s rock ’n’ roll buddies . . . she’d had big hair in high school.

If she recalls those days in luxurious detail, that’s to be expected. There was always more to her than what was reflected in the mirror.

She concealed a writer’s sensibility that drove her to think about religion and misery and sex. She cataloged the grubby details of life along the Virginia 419 corridor that sliced through the middle of her world — the convenience-store perfume of spoiled relish . . . the exhausted-looking split-level homes . . . the shag carpets that reminded her of mangy dog hair.

And if she feels bad about her big hair days, it’s not that she wants to sneer at the cul-de-sacs and prom dresses of her youth, or at people who’ve made a religion out of the idea that beauty products illuminate the path to enlightenment.

She just had a different path in mind for herself.

***

A girl lies on a bare mattress. The strip of light spilling from under the door illuminates “her bound ankles, pale blood-starved feet, the toenails like lavender shells.”

Dust particles swirl around her, making her feel like a tiny figure trapped inside a snow globe. Her name is Sandy and somewhere, in the real world, people are tacking up “Missing” posters with her face on them.

Another girl from the same town breathes the air of teen-age freedom. But she can’t enjoy it. Ginger’s days seem tainted by an accumulation of tiny horrors.

She is the daughter of a well-meaning but ineffectual Lutheran minister. A furniture factory owner is scheming to replace Ginger’s father and hire a new pastor who’ll put on a “good show” for the people rather than preaching about sin and morality.

One night, the factory owner insists on giving Ginger a ride home in his luxury car. He tells Ginger she’s “probably taken the words of Jesus a little too seriously.”

“You know that if Jesus came down today he wouldn’t say the same sort of things he said back then,” the industrialist lectures. Jesus wouldn’t give away his possessions, and, “Heck, I think he’d enjoy a little TV. Let’s face it, life is usually a pretty raw deal and good entertainment is as close to heaven as most people are going to get here on earth.”

Darcey Steinke created these disturbing scenes a few years ago in a novel called “Jesus Saves.”

The interlocking stories of Sandy and Ginger unfold in a nameless suburb. But for people who grew up in the Roanoke Valley during the Carter and Reagan years, the scenery is familiar: the miniature Graceland, the “pie-shaped” Lutheran church beside the Allstate Insurance complex, the crimson Steak and Ale sign floating up on the hill “like an angry message from God.”

Steinke weaved bits and shards of her youth into the landscape of her imagination to create what The Village Voice called “the most ferocious and chilling portrait of suburbia in years.” The New York Times called it a “disturbingly beautiful piece of writing” and named it a Notable Book of the Year for 1997. Details magazine was moved to call her “one of America’s most interesting young female writers.”

Not everyone likes Steinke’s work. One reader found a copy of an earlier Steinke novel, “Suicide Blonde,” in a friend’s trunk. After finishing it, he wrote to Amazon.com: “I’ve spied better journals in the nightstands of girlfriends while they showered in the morning.” The New Yorker unleashed a scathing attack on “Suicide Blonde.”

It took Steinke a while to get over that New Yorker review. But she says she’d rather write something that people react to strongly — love it or hate it — than something that’s popular in a bland, unthreatening way.

Writing is a compulsion for her, she says, an impulse to sort out the big issues of life.

“It’s like you’re searching for the door,” she says. “It’s everybody’s project in this life. Everybody’s searching for the door.”

***

It’s a cold, rain-soaked morning in March. Darcey Steinke stands under an umbrella in the middle of Wyndale Avenue, a quiet, sloping street in Southwest Roanoke County. She’s gazing at a pale-red brick ranch house with forest green shutters. This is the home where she spent her teen-age years.

“This is freaky,” she says. “I’m a little weirded out.”

Her family has long since moved away. She is 38 years old, and she’s lived in San Francisco, Ireland, New York. But this house still has the power to conjure memories that put her on edge.

She was born in upstate New York. Religion was in her DNA. Her father and two of his brothers were Lutheran ministers. An ancestor, William Miller, was leader of the Millerites, an apocalyptic sect that was a forerunner of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

She was 12 when her family — mom, dad, two brothers, Darcey — left Philadelphia for the Roanoke Valley, drawn by her father’s new job at the valley’s mental health agency.

Darcey’s early years had been difficult. She had trouble reading because of dyslexia. She had to repeat third grade and get special tutoring.

She also had a stutter — one bad enough that she took to writing requests on paper rather than speaking. “The thing that freaks you out as a kid is the shame,” she says.

She turned inward. By age 8, she was making up poems and stories, hoping the written word might offer a better means of expression.

Soon after her family came to Roanoke County, she enrolled in the Hollins Communications Research Institute. She learned techniques that helped her master her stammer, testing them by calling ice cream parlors and making cautious, terrified inquiries: “What time do you close?”

As she became a writer, she learned to observe the world with quiet vigilance. She carried a notebook to church to write down things people said or did.

At home, her days were marked with trepidation. Money was tight, and her mother and father were divided by a growing incompatibility. She recalls her father sitting on the edge of a chair like “a nervous houseguest,” her mother “irritably writing out $10 checks.”

Her mother, who’d modeled as a teen-ager, encouraged Darcey to do the same. Darcey was torn: Was glamour a path to happiness? Or was it a trap? She gave up hot curlers and green eye shadow for a time, then backslid, guiltily, into her beauty routine.

In her mind, the things she saw inside the house on Wyndale were evidence of a family malaise — proof that suburbia’s gloss of affluence hid unpleasant realities. The living room was empty save for a beanbag chair and a ficus plant. The shower in her parent’s bathroom was so dark with mildew her brother swore the devil lived inside.

Despite the worries at home, she found happy moments as she made her way through Cave Spring High School. She was popular, more confident. She loved the freedom of feeling the wind in her hair as she and her friends cruised up and down 419. Teachers encouraged her bookish tendencies — which she hid from friends and classmates.

“Darcey was very misunderstood in high school,” recalls Bart Edmunds, a former boyfriend who’s now an investment adviser in Roanoke. “She was pretty and kind of glamorous. But very few people really knew her. Her sort of intelligence, it doesn’t get you anywhere in high school.”

For all her qualms about suburban life, she says, she never thought the suburbs were bad. Just less perfect than people were willing to admit.

One night, she bought a ticket to a midnight showing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the megaplex near her house. She loved the cheerful, quirky story of a cross-dressing mad scientist, not to mention the audience-participation ritual that included squirt guns and toilet paper.

Afterward, a friend said the movie made her feel dirty. Darcey had a different reaction — a feeling of liberation. “I feel great!” she said.

***

One day when she was still a teen-ager, Darcey dragged a blue gingham quilt into her closet and curled up on top of her tennis shoes. Her brother coined the term “poodle bed” to describe her nesting place.

Sadness stalked her throughout her teens and 20s. She would retreat to her poodle bed for hours, crying and staring at the wall until sleep came.

Amid the emotional ups and downs, her career as a writer blossomed. After she graduated from Cave Spring in 1981, she left Roanoke for the big city, enrolling at Goucher College in Baltimore.

Goucher was good for her. She met great teachers. She started a literary magazine. She tossed out her makeup.

She moved on to grad school at the University of Virginia. One day, the phone rang at her apartment in Charlottesville.

“This is Jackie Onassis,” the voice on the phone said. “We would like to publish your book.”

On the strength of a first draft, Doubleday gave Steinke a $10,000 advance to help her complete her novel about a mother and son sorting out their hearts on an Outer Banks resort island.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was an encouraging and perceptive editor, but working with her was disorienting. Onassis teased Steinke that she was excessively nervous, “like those lovely terriers at fox hunts.”

When she moved to San Francisco in 1987, Steinke took her poodle bed obsession with her. She used a coffee-stained comforter stuck inside a water-stained closet in her apartment on the outskirts of Chinatown. One day she spent 20 straight hours in her nest.

The final scenes in her parents’ divorce helped spin her melancholy into a crisis of identity. The “Bohemian chick life” didn’t work for her — “I couldn’t handle free love.” She tried a variety of drugs, but didn’t like the way she felt after the buzz wore off. Religion didn’t do much for her, and the values her mother subscribed to — marriage, a nice house, babies — held no appeal either.

She ended up at her brother’s apartment in San Francisco, crying through the night in a poodle bed. Her mother bought her a plane ticket back to Roanoke.

With advice from a psychiatrist and “my mother’s great silent support,” she began to eat and sleep and feel better about herself.

Steinke returned to her Outer Banks novel, reworking it with help from Onassis. After “Up Through the Water” was published in 1989, The New York Times praised its “seamless and almost instinctive prose.”

But literary success didn’t change her life much. Religion, love, sex, ambition — nothing seemed to offer satisfaction.

Her second novel, “Suicide Blonde,” came out in 1992. This story of sex and suffering in San Francisco sold nearly 100,000 copies.

She also entered the world of big-time magazine journalism. On assignment for Spin, she passed a night in the Seattle home of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, talking about the rock icons’ tempestuous marriage and listening to music from their record collection.

As federal agents laid siege to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound, Steinke journeyed to Waco, Texas, and interviewed rock musicians who’d jammed with the man she called “the first cult leader of my own generation.”

“This whole thing had to do with thwarted musical ambition,” a member of Waco’s music scene told Steinke. “He couldn’t be a rock star so he decided to be Jesus.”

She kept turning her eye back to religion, in its best and worst manifestations.

After “Jesus Saves” came out in 1997, she told an interviewer that the conflict between hedonism and spirituality was an important theme not just in her writing, but in her life.

“I think the struggle is always there: what you want, what God wants, what adults tell you God wants.” Too many people, she said, are “obsessed with fake moral laws” that have nothing to do with kindness and giving.

“The New Testament is a great book,” she said. “Jesus is a radical.”

***

On a Monday night in November, a dozen aspiring writers sit around a diamond-shaped table at the New School in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Steinke, their instructor, is teaching at four colleges during the fall term, reading and commenting on 250 manuscripts a week. Like many writers, she teaches because she has to earn a living between books.

On this evening, she gently leads her students through the uneasy process of in-class critiques.

One student has written a story, set in an aquarium, in which a woman apparently has sex with a dolphin.

Another has a story about brothers locked in a feud. One smashes the other’s window with a frozen kielbasa.

Steinke likes weirdness. She likes the kielbasa story. “It’s original and idiosyncratic,” she says.

This is her life. She teaches. She writes for magazines. Once a week she practices with an amateur rock band that she and three other writers have put together. She’s at her desk most mornings, trying to make progress on “Milk,” a novel about sex and religion that she hopes will see print next year.

She spends much of her time caring for her 5-year-old daughter, Abbie. Steinke and her ex-husband, novelist Michael Hornburg, share parenting duties.

Steinke’s apartment is at the top of a brownstone walk-up in Brooklyn. She’s constantly schlepping up and down four flights of stairs. Some afternoons she gets so weary she has to make herself a pre-dinner peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

People tell her she needs to take better care of herself. She tries to listen, but she has trouble taking it easy.

“I feel like I’m lazy,” she says. “I can’t ever do all the things I want to do.”

This fall, her busy calendar will include a pilgrimage to Roanoke for her 20th high school reunion.

As she gets older, she appreciates Roanoke more — the safety, the friendliness, the ease of living. But city life suits her. Her father and two brothers live near her in Brooklyn and her mother is upstate in Albany.

Steinke loves the energy of urban streets. She knows a Chinese department store where she can get fishnet stockings for a dollar. She likes the fact that she goes to two kinds of parties in New York: Those where people look at the tattoo of the Sacred Heart on her right shoulder and say, “That’s not real, is it?” — and those where people say, “Cool. Where’d you get it done?”

She’s still sad much of the time, she says, but the responsibility of raising Abbie and her daily writing routine bring some stability to her life.

Steinke has taken a difficult, wandering path. She’s worshipped glamour. She’s embraced the unconventional life of urban Bohemia. She’s searched for spiritual peace.

A few years ago, lonely and unchurched, she started going to lunchtime services at a Catholic church in Brooklyn. She fell in love with the old folks and blue-collar laborers who came every day, praying and lighting candles. After a time she came back to the church of her youth, joining a Lutheran congregation in Manhattan.

She believes in God, she says, but she still has doubts — an uncertainty, she says, that reflects her search for answers.

Just before Christmas, Steinke dropped off Abbie at her ex’s house, and headed out of the city to Poughkeepsie. She spent four days at a monastery run by Episcopal monks. She meditated. She prayed. Five times a day, she heard the monks reprise their timeless chants.

Two weeks later, she and a friend were in Memphis, Tenn., at a Full Gospel Tabernacle pastored by the Rev. Al Green, the R&B singer-turned-preacher. Green still sings, and that Sunday morning he sang beautifully, his voice entwining with a soulful organ.

Steinke thought about the monks and their exquisite chants. She thought about the Rev. Green and his joyful music. Different. Yet connected.

This has to mean something," she thought. "There must be a God."

Mike Hudson, 39, has been a staff writer at The Roanoke (Va.) Times since 1985. He has been a police reporter, courts reporter, feature writer and movie reviewer. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Rocky Mountain News and other publications. Hudson is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow and co-author of one book, "Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits from Poverty." Over the years, his journalism has won dozens of honors, including a John Hancock Award for business writing and accolades from the National Press Club, the American Bar Association and Project Censored.