Authors: Liz Murray
“Guess who’s here,” she sang. I heard two sparks from a lighter and thought she was lighting a cigarette. Then I heard a fluttering noise, like a small swarm of bees.
“Ma!”
“Look what I brought you, pumpkin. Go get your sister.”
Ma stared at a sparkler that she held like a magic wand. The brightest light in the living room, it shot glowing, silvery threads all over her pinched fingers, around her bare arm. Flecks of light danced in her eyes.
“Ta-da!” she sang, raising the sparkler. Just then, I noticed the large plastic bag filled with fireworks hanging from her other arm.
We never made it downtown by the water that night, but we did sit on the stoop out front, surrounded by people from our building. We set off every last firework Ma had brought home. With the neighborhood kids, we made Jumping Jacks dance and spin. Firecrackers popped, ringing in our ears. Daddy was the safety supervisor for Lisa and me. With a glass bottle from the trash, which he cleaned off with newspaper, Daddy taught me how to send a bottle rocket soaring into space without hurting my fingers. Ma sat on the stoop and talked to Louisa from apartment 1A, whose daughters played with their own fireworks beside us.
“Here, Lizzy,” Daddy said to me, his deep voice reassuring. “You’ve got to prop the stick into the bottle first. You don’t want to get burned.”
I crouched into a ball down by the cement to help Daddy light the fuse. Daddy wrapped himself over me, engulfing my small body, protecting me. I smelled his scent, the musk and sweat mixed with our freshly struck matches. His hands were enormous, cupping mine as he showed me how to position the small explosive. Together we backed off to watch it fly, screaming through the air, flashing radiant pink beams in the black night sky. With Lisa and I taking turns shooting bottle rockets, we finished the whole bag in under a half hour. I sent each one flashing into the dark with a round of applause, looking over my shoulder at Ma, who hooked her arm through Daddy’s and was leaning on his shoulder, smiling.
That was the summer of 1985, just before school, and the last time I can remember the four of us being close, and happy. Before then, whatever went on in our household, I simply had nothing to compare to. I had no idea how different we could be from other people. All I knew was Ma was a real mother then, and my parents, together, tended to our needs. Or whatever they didn’t tend to didn’t matter because I had no clue that I needed anything more.
The fade of that summer withdrew not just its own warmth, but with it, the only family unity I’d ever known, and as a result my very last clear memory of stability, too. I guess you could say we’d lived in some kind of bubble before that, a little world made up of just the four of us. But in my eyes, we were just one of the many families living and struggling to make it on University Avenue. Things were sometimes tough, but we had each other, and in having that, we had it all.
That August, I made a habit of standing on one of the kitchen chairs to count the passing days off the free Met Food supermarket calendar tacked high up next to the fridge—something I’d learned watching my big sister. For two Augusts, I’d seen Lisa repeatedly squint at the dates framed neatly beside coupons for bargain poultry and ninety-nine-cent frozen burritos while she muttered complaints and groaned extravagantly over the start of school. Tomorrow would be my first day to join her.
“You’re in for it now,” she said, digging through her extra school supplies to split with me. “No more bumming around here, that’s for sure. You’re going to have to work now, just like the rest of us.”
I thought of all the times Lisa returned home and headed straight for her room to labor over homework, emerging hours later, droopy-eyed and exhausted, only to find that I’d been sitting on Ma’s lap, watching TV most of the evening. Routinely, she’d strike up some petty fight with me shortly thereafter, demanding control over the TV or the couch, since she’d been working hard and I’d just been sitting around on my butt. Her helping me prepare for school felt, to me, like some form of revenge.
Lisa peeled open a pack of very old lined paper that she’d dug up from her closet and divided it in half.
“You’ll need this,” she said, passing one stack to me. “Don’t put it in upside down or people will make fun of you. Kids tease about a lot of things, you’ll see.” My small hands worked to hook the whole stack at once into my three-ring binder, just the way I had seen Lisa do many times before. Ma circled the room frantically.
“Tomorrow, Lizzy. I can’t believe it. It wasn’t too long ago that you were in diapers. In diapers!” Ma’s voice was panicked. I couldn’t tell whether she realized that she was shouting.
Ma had just spent time in the kitchen with Daddy, getting high. Now, with her jaw tight, her lips pursed, and her eyes wild, I knew she would go on like this for a while, circling and ranting. I’d been pressing Ma the whole week to get me ready for school, but she wouldn’t get out of bed. Luckily, check day had just come. And now that she’d shot up, Ma absolutely came to life. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled with her attention.
“Now look at you, starting school. I can’t believe it, pumpkin.” She lit a cigarette and sucked so hard that the tip glowed bright.
“You’re going to love it, Lizzy. You’ll do so well.”
Her excitement became my excitement. I
would
love it.
“Wait, do you have a notebook?” she asked with sudden, manic concern.
It was eleven thirty at night. I’d found the used binder under Lisa’s bed a few hours before. The paper she’d provided, which we’d rescued from the trash room downstairs last spring, was yellow with age.
“Yeah, Ma. It’s right here.” With great effort I held the thick notebook high for her to see, but she didn’t look.
“Good, but did I give you a haircut?”
“A haircut? No. Do I need one?”
“Yes, pumpkin, the day before school everyone gets new things, they get their hair cut, they brush their teeth. Go sit on the floor by the coffee table, I’ll get some scissors and take care of you right now. You probably don’t need your whole head, just your bangs. That’s all people really look at anyway.”
She went to search the junk drawer. Her movements were impatient, unfinished, like her sentences, which usually stopped before any point was made.
“Lizzy, you just . . . It’ll be good. Wait until you see . . .” Her energy felt frantic.
I could hear the contents of the junk drawer clanking from the kitchen as she stirred through them. Lisa had gone to bed, saying she needed sleep to get up early and warning that if I knew what was good for me, I would do the same.
Something about the way Ma moved made me nervous. Did she even know how to cut hair? And what about her eyesight? I didn’t want my hair to look anything like hers, which was long and wavy, but also kinky and unkempt. The thought filled me with worry.
“Here we go!” she yelled, holding up a pair of rusted scissors. Daddy was still in the kitchen; I could hear him fidgeting and making small mumbling noises. There was nothing to do but go with it, so I did.
I had to stay perfectly still, with my chin held in place by Ma’s fingertips while she made each cut, or I would interfere with her concentration. Ma made me close my eyes to avoid getting any hair in them. I held a piece of loose-leaf paper below my chin to catch what fell. I’d never had bangs before, but Ma didn’t seem to realize this. She just took clumps of my longer hair and made the necessary cuts. The real panic didn’t set in until I could feel the cool metal of the scissors slide along my forehead, over an inch above my eyebrows.
“Ma, are you sure that’s not too short?” I asked.
“Pumpkin, it’s okay, I just need to make it even. I almost had it before; I just need to try again. We’re almost there. Just . . . sit . . . still.”
On the ground beside me, my hair had fallen in scattered chunks. Ma tapped her foot impatiently. Every so often she’d hiss a curse.
“Shit!”
My heart raced and I tried not to ruin her concentration by flinching.
In small bits, Ma chopped away my bangs, until they were so short, only a cropped border remained, so stubbly that pieces of it stuck straight out from my head. When she rested the scissors on the coffee table, I touched my forehead, rubbing it frantically in search of hair, pinching the short stubble in disbelief. Tears welled up in my eyes.
“Ma-aaa,” I whimpered. “You made it really short, Ma. Isn’t this too short?”
She was already putting on her shoes to head out to the bar. From the way her face had dropped, I could tell her high had worn off. The alcohol was what she needed now, to calm her. She was out of my reach again.
“I know honey, it’ll grow back. I just had to make it even. Those damn scissors are no good for cutting hair. I had to keep going back to fix it.”
Lisa said that kids teased about a lot of things. Imagining what the kids in school would think when they saw me, I began to cry softly. Ma took me by the hand and walked me down the hall to the bathroom, which was just beside the front door. She stood behind me, both of us facing the mirror together. Her jacket was already on. Suddenly, her chin was down on my shoulder, her fingers stroked my forehead.
“It’s just hair, pumpkin, it’ll grow back. When I was little, my sister, Lori, cut my favorite doll’s hair off. I was so angry. She told me it would grow back and I
believed
her. Can you imagine?”
I wiped tears from my cheeks and studied us together in the mirror. Ma’s eyes couldn’t stay in one place, and her hands on my shoulders had blood spots on them. Tiny pieces of hair were stuck to her fingers.
“At least yours grows back, Lizzy. It’s really fine. School will be so much fun, you’ll see.”
With that, I watched her reflection plant a single kiss on my head, and she slipped out the front door. I could hear her stomping quickly down the battered marble steps. Then she was gone.
“THEY DON’T LIKE RED. I’M TELLING YOU, IF YOU PUT RED IN YOUR
hair, they’ll leave. I swear, Lizzy, it’s how I got rid of mine.”
“Yeah right. . . .
Liar!
”
For apparently nothing more than to relieve her own boredom, Lisa would torment me in our parents’ absence. When Ma and Daddy disappeared for a full day or when they’d stream in and out of the house, preoccupied with copping drugs, leaving us to ourselves for whole nights, she would dream up new and terrible things to do to me.
“Look, first, I’m going to have to braid your hair, Liz. But, not just any braids—stiff ones that point out in all directions.”
“But why! I
know
you’re lying. Why would it matter if my hair was braided?” While I believed almost everything Lisa told me, I had, by the time I reached the first grade, been fooled by more than one of her practical jokes, so my instincts were slowly growing sharper. This claim seemed too outrageous, I thought; surely she was up to something.
“All right, Lizzy,” she said, turning to walk away from me. “I’m only trying to help you out here. Isn’t that what you wanted? Well, I know what it takes, but if you don’t want to get rid of your lice, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it.”
But I did want to get rid of my lice. They’d been crawling on my head for weeks. Chasing them with my fingernails, I’d dug burning furrows into my scalp, painful and sensitive to the touch. At night, I could feel them moving around, weaving their way through my hair, biting until I scratched deep to disperse the sensation. I awoke frequently to dreams of angry bugs eating at my scalp, laying eggs in my skin.
At first, it wasn’t this bad. I’d barely noticed them at all. It took the building superintendent’s daughter, Debbie, to come knocking on our door, telling Ma to look out for lice in our hair, before I connected the persistent itching on my scalp with anything specific.
“All those creeps my father has down there,” Debbie said. “I swear, half of them come right out of the gutter, Jeanie. Check your kids out; they’ve spent enough time hanging out in the basement with you to have caught ’em. I know. I just spent the whole damn afternoon scraping those nasty things off of my own scalp.”
A memory of the super’s place from the past weekend flashed back to me. I’d waited in the doorway that divided his apartment from his cellar, watching Ma pass Bob money in exchange for a small, foil package. It was midday; my vanilla ice cream was melting over my hand. People were asleep or just waking up all around me, spread out across the basement floor, over two dirty mattresses. Debbie was there; she’d gotten up to hug me and Ma, and stunk of beer. The place was littered with people, some snoring, some not fully dressed. Fly tape hung from the ceiling, covered with black, lifeless bugs: bare bulbs provided the only light.
Just before Ma took me out of there, a shirtless man had sat up and begun to rub sleep from his eyes. Without noticing me, he shook another sleeping person, a girl, and woke her. I stood there, shifting my weight from foot to foot, uncomfortably, while they kissed, empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays at their feet.
When Debbie left, Ma stepped into our living room to ask, lightly, if either of us had caught lice. I didn’t know for sure, so I just said, “My head’s itchy.” Lisa said the same. We were promised a shampoo called Quell, and that was that. It had been roughly a month since then, with no Quell in sight. So this is why I reluctantly gave in to Lisa and allowed her to twist my hair in all directions while my face curled in pain.
“Now, pass me the barrettes.” Each time another braid was finished, Lisa spun me around to note her progress, her face glowing, as if she took some private delight in the sight of me. I grew particularly suspicious when she flat-out laughed.
“Sorry! Sorry, Liz. It just looks funny. I can’t help it. You would have laughed when I did this to my hair, too, believe me. You should have been there, it was such a mess. Don’t worry, it’s all part of the cure.”
I believed Lisa just enough to let her go on, but her giggles made it difficult for me to contain my growing anger. Once I even pulled away when she looked too amused, only to have Lisa make me beg her to finish. After all, she seemed to be my only hope for a remedy. She agreed to continue grudgingly, and warned that I shouldn’t be so doubtful of people’s good intentions. I told myself to concentrate less on her and more on how good it would feel once this was all over.
She grabbed my hair into rigorous twists, sending the tiny bugs into a frenzy. I cringed and watched the clock drag its hands along. Earlier, Ma and Daddy had promised groceries, but they had stayed away for hours. Embarrassed over what they might say if they walked in and this turned out to be another one of Lisa’s pranks, I hoped she would finish quickly.
After what felt like three hours, when my legs had grown sore from kneeling on the thin carpet and I’d fidgeted in every direction in search of comfort, Lisa finally lifted her hands away from my head.
“Okay . . . Done! Now, listen carefully to me, Lizzy. Next we need to find anything red that we can stick in your hair. They’re terrified of red. Let’s get something, and then you’ll see how this works. But you have to move fast, or they’ll catch on.”
“Anything red?”
Lisa slid one of Daddy’s garbage treasure-hunt finds, a red Barbie dress, over my largest braid at the very front of my head. The empty sleeves pointed outward, and the open collar presented a barrette-pinched puff of hair.
“Is that it? Is it working?”
“More! We need more. Hurry, they’re all going to run to one side. That makes it harder. Go!”
With nothing useful in sight, I raced across the apartment and threw open my drawers, tossing trinkets and all kinds of junk around my room. I searched feverishly, but it seemed there was nothing red to be found—until I remembered Ma’s dresser. With one wide sweep of my arm, I grabbed Ma’s bouquet of red plastic roses from her green vase and crashed onto the bed, Lisa cheering me on at my side.
“Hurry, Lizzy! Put them anywhere there’s room, fast!”
One by one, I ripped the heads from the stems’ sockets and began working them into my hair, around the base of each braid. I tried my hardest to cover every last available spot. In the tight zigzags of my braids, they clung nicely. When I was done, my head sported a helmet of bright, red roses and a small red dress emerging from the front, like a unicorn’s horn. I looked at Lisa for confirmation.
She explained that it would take at least twenty minutes for there to be any noticeable difference. The most important part now was to remain as still as possible. So I shut the bathroom door behind me and took a seat in the bathtub. I figured it might be good to send every last horrible bug streaming down the drain as soon as they began to retreat from this red they feared so much.
I decided to remove all of my clothing in case they tried to survive in some fold along my shirt or in one of my pockets. I stripped completely, crouched in the tub, and waited.
Time passed and nothing happened. Lisa knocked and asked to see how things were coming along, but I sent her away. The empty tub became icy under my feet. I began to shiver. Then, without warning, a bug dropped.
A small thrill ran through my body. I shook my head, and another dropped. Time passed, but that was all. The bugs wriggled, dwarfed in the white basin, just the way they did when they had recently caused me trouble in school.
As far back as last year, I’d felt different. The kindergarten teacher assigned us to walk with a buddy then, but I always cried when it was time to pair up because I didn’t want anyone to be close enough to get a good look at my spiky bangs. I knew the kids couldn’t help but stare. Soon I became the crybaby with the weird haircut. With all the name-calling, I’d kept to myself, and that had made me something of an outcast. Now, in the first grade, when I had told and retold myself I would be a perfectly “normal” kid, the lice had ruined everything all over again.
It happened during Mrs. McAdams’s spelling test, when I was seated across from a boy named David at table three. Mrs. Reynolds, the teaching assistant, a heavy, turkey-necked woman with gray tufts of worn-out Velcro for hair, walked around the classroom to make sure we behaved during Mrs. McAdams’s reading aloud of the week’s spelling words.
Pencils scratching paper and Mrs. Reynolds’s penny loafers dragging along the tiles were the only sounds. I spread my sloppy handwriting across the handout page, struggling to spell
Sunday
.
From her desk, Mrs. McAdams called out the next word,
time
. Just as I leaned in to give it a try, I caught a deep itch on my scalp. When I scratched, a tiny gray bug landed with a light click in the center of my worksheet. My heart raced with a sharp pang of fear that shook off my drowsiness. I quickly swatted the insect off my desk. My eyes darted in all directions in search of a witness, but no one had seen.
I would have been in the clear had the itch not persisted. Another scratch, and two more bugs came clicking down. I swatted again. One landed on the ground; the other shot across my desk and landed on David’s side of the table that we shared. Mrs. McAdams called out another word, but I missed it. I was too busy pretending not to notice the bug struggling for firm footing right under David’s nose as he looked up to Mrs. McAdams for further instruction.
My itch persisted and grew, demanding attention. It took all of my will not to scratch again. Suddenly, David raised his hand, bringing the test and the entire class to a dead halt.
“Mrs. Reynolds? There’s a weird bug on my desk.” The creature had stopped for a rest at the top of David’s page, right where he’d spelled out
time
in neat little letters.
A girl beside him cried out, “Ewwww, that’s disgusting! David, you’re disgusting!”
“I didn’t—it wasn’t me. I don’t know where it came from.” The class broke into whispers. David turned bright red and folded his arms across his chest, holding in tears.
Mrs. Reynolds hurried over to investigate, mistakenly searching for food in all the desks. She was in the middle of delivering a quivery-pitched speech about how sneaking food into the classroom brought roaches, when I had to scratch my head and another bug fell,
click
, against my page. There was no hiding from the girl seated to the right of me the fact that that creature had fallen from my hair onto my nearly blank, white test sheet.
“Oh my God. They’re coming from her
hair
,” Tamieka called out.
Shrieks and noises of disgust exploded throughout the room.
Mrs. Reynolds’s cold, bony hand took me by the wrist, through the whooping and hollering, out of the room, and down the hallway. As the secretary watched, she ordered me to sit in an office chair that had been dragged to the center of the room, away from everything else. She ripped two thick Popsicle sticks from a thin package, parted my hair with the tips, and immediately found the lice. But instead of backing away, she dug around and remarked on how my head was “infested,” moving over to allow the secretary a look as she used the popsicle sticks to shake loose a few more lice, which dropped onto the green tiles, both women watching.
Mrs. Reynolds dragged me back into the classroom and ordered me to remain in the doorway. She went to the teacher’s cabinet and rummaged around in search of something.
Looking over at me, Tamieka whispered into another girl’s ear. They giggled, pointed, and stared. Mrs. McAdams slammed her palm down hard on her desk and shouted for them to “be nice,” inadvertently calling the rest of the class’s attention to me. Just then, Mrs. Reynolds lifted a bottle of vinegar into the air and called through the silence, “I’ve got it. Let’s go. Walk ahead of me—those suckers jump.” The children roared behind us. But as much as I was humiliated, I was more worried about what the vinegar was for.
She took me to the front of the school building, where two teachers stood, sharing a cigarette. The street was busy; cars whizzed by and a train rumbled overhead. For a moment, I considered escape.
But hope for freedom vanished with Mrs. Reynolds’s grip on my shoulder. She pushed me into a bent-over position, with my hands pressed against the rough brick wall. She rolled up her sleeves, readying herself.
“Now, this is a home remedy passed down in my family. Don’t fret, it won’t hurt you one bit. All you need to do is close your eyes. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Cold liquid splashed over my head, stinging the spots where I’d scratched. Mrs. Reynolds rubbed my scalp in harsh circles that tangled my hair. I inhaled deep whiffs of vinegar until I felt sick and woozy.
From where I stood, only the splashing of vinegar against cement and our four feet—my sneakers and Mrs. Reynolds’s penny loafers—remained visible. Soon, a small crowd of new feet gathered nearby—the teachers on break.
There was no way I’d ever enter that classroom again. How could I look into their faces, much less reclaim my seat between David and Tamieka? I wished I would die from the fumes, and that Mrs. Reynolds would be blamed for killing me.
When Mrs. Reynolds finally allowed me to stand, she commented, “That’s enough. You don’t want anyone to mistake you for a salad, do ya, kid?” She let out a quick snort of laughter. Then, just as quickly as her smile had come, it was gone. “Let’s go, you. Back to class.”
Crouching in the tub back at home, I watched the bugs float away, helpless in the stream of water I released from the faucet. My scalp throbbed in the grip of the tight braids. I thought of how Mrs. Reynolds’s “home remedy” had done nothing, the way Lisa’s “cure” seemed to be doing the same.
I stood to get a look at myself in the mirror. The image that stared back was startling. When my effort to evenly arrange the roses had failed, Lisa volunteered to help fix it. A perfect headdress of roses was spread all around my hair—a symmetrical sort of bouquet.
A single bug crawled on the hem of Barbie’s dress, walking leisurely along the red cloth. Had Lisa lied? Or was there something she’d forgotten? I slipped my clothing back on, exited the bathroom, and called out for my sister.