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Let's rehearse the phobias of my childhood. There was Bigfoot, the giant ape-man creature that no one had been able to get definitive tracking on in Northern California. This didn't stop television stations from rehearsing the myth and adding to it, and this didn't stop me--never mind that our family lived in Southern California--from believing it possible, even probable, that one day Bigfoot would show up in my closet or outside our windows, ready to carry me away to wherever he lived. This showed up in a dream involving what in the dream were called Bogymen, a whole race of them, carrying torches in a marchlike procession down our residential street. I hid under the house, watching as my family was carried away on their shoulders. The dream ended with a bogyman's face poking into the screen through which I was staring. It was over for me, and accordingly, I woke up.
There were in my fears literal skeletons in my closet, and there were hands that would emerge from beneath the bed to keep me there until someone could come to rescue me. In the middle of the night, inevitably, I would wake to darkness, and after enduring fear for as long as I could, I would scamper down the hall to my parents' bedroom.
And then there was this fear: bugs. Bugs could bite you and give you diseases. Blood-sucking leaches, so I heard, were common in the lakes of Minnesota and were a big reason I had no desire to attend our church's summer camp up there (that and practical jokes and severe discipline, which I had also heard were common at camp). A news program shared the story of a sleeping bug, which, if it bit you, would give you narcolepsy. At school, we learned of lice--the nits they'd build on your hair, the scurrying they'd do into your pillows and bed sheets, the blood they'd suck from your scalp. If you got them, it was weeks of special shampoo. It was maybe having to have your head shaved. It was horror.
In 1983 we headed back to Eugene, Oregon, for the Feast of Tabernacles. Eugene was a common place for the family to travel. It was relatively close to Portland, where my mom's family was from, so it offered the opportunity to visit the relatives and old friends. Eugene was not a favorite spot of mine. First, there was little to do there: Some community museum, a few parks, the motel swimming pool (usually unheated and close to freezing, except the Jacuzzi, which would be crazy boiling). Second, bad things happened in Eugene. It had bad Mexican food that made you sick--or at least that had made me sick on the previous trip. It had weird men who asked you take off your clothes for them.
This year, our motel room featured fleas, biting bugs. It was a "pet friendly" room apparently, which we needed, I guess, because we had hamsters to care for. At night, my sister complained of little nips at her leg. A few of us discovered little red marks on our legs in the morning. (As I recall, the bugs did not seem to care much for me.)
A week after our return to school, my sister is pulled out of class. Lice. She has lice. She is sent home. I am made to go to the office, endure plastic-glove-encased hands searching along the top of my head. I pray that the lice have not infected me. I do not want to be bald. I do not want to get a crew cut. I like my hair. I do not want to wash my hair three times a day in poisonous gas.
Somehow, some way, the lice have not infected me. I am not sent home. I am allowed to continue attending school. My sister, meanwhile, whose hair comes to the bottom of her back, for the first time becomes a shoulder-length-hair girl. For two weeks or so, she endures hair treatments; my mom washes and rewashes laundry. My friends look at me askance at school, as if it were me who had these critters living on my skin. But I am guilty by association. Our whole family is. We are dirty people. We have bugs in our hair. But I had it easy.
I think of my sister's move from waist-length hair to shoulder length as her move from childhood to adolescence, from being just a kid to being a teenager. Sure, she was just twelve at the time, a year away from officially being a teen. But the waist length of her hair was in many ways my mother's decision, her preference for it created by the fact that such a length was "cute" on little girls, just as shorts were "cute" on little boys and so my only choice of pants until I started school. Without the long hair, my sister was no longer a little girl, no longer one whose hair was fashioned by her mom. Instead, my sister, in taking on an unwanted suitor, had crossed into a territory now to be entirely of her own making. In future years, she would curl it, cut it in various configurations, and--against my parents' will--bleach it, according to her own desire.
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