When I was younger, maybe 8 or 9 years old, there lived a family down the street. They still live there, but I don’t really know them anymore. A rambling family full of boys and girls of various ages, not unlike my own, but not like anything I could understand. Even now they spread throughout the neighborhood, with children and grandchildren streaming from open doors like ants. Dogs bark, tires litter the ironically neatly trimmed yard. I was friends with the middle daughter, Amanda – she was a year older than me and even then she was beautiful, with that type of lower middle class suburban sexuality that attracted much older boys. The kind of girl that skips the Regents exam and does Vocational school, hair school. She introduced me to hair spray, and Sebastian Potion 9. I used to be a tomboy. She shared an attic bedroom with her two older sisters. They had an enormous Iron Maiden poster on one wall, plainly and monstrously depicting the torture device the band is named after. I openly stared at that poster every time I went up there, the hot attic steam mingling with the scent of Aqua Net and girlsweat; I had never even heard of death metal, let alone seen anything like it. It reappeared behind my eyelids when I lingered in between wake and sleep nightly, its charcoal steel hugeness shooting into the sky, its sharp spikes waiting to pierce those unwillingly shoved inside its belly.
One hot afternoon, the whole summer looming before us threateningly, they teased and sprayed my bangs so they stood up like a waterfall. Those were endless summers. Our knees bled with bug bites. The girls put on their swimsuits and sent their little brother running after the ice cream truck for Choco-Tacos. Their breasts bobbed like grapefruits in bikini tops while mine were still struggling, still reaching for the stars. I eyed them out of the corner of my eye, praying with every ounce of my tiny heart for boobs like theirs, the kind that floated in pool water. They eventually reached their goal (and then some), but I cringed in shame then. The oldest sister (her name escapes me now) was greasing herself with baby oil and telling a story about spiders.
“I was laying out with her and I told her she had a bug problem. She says what the hell are you talking about? I said you got bugs in your house. She was like, how do you know? I said I could see them! They were crawling right out of her bottom!”
At this the girls dissolved into hyena squeals. I was truly confused but didn’t dare pipe up. Then Amanda cracked her gum and said, “Yeah right, you should even be talking.”
“Fuck you, Manda.” The oldest girl was probably about seventeen. She lit a Winston and inhaled. When she spoke again her voice was smoke-tinged and mean. She reached out with a smooth, tan arm and in one fluid motion pulled down Amanda’s bikini bottoms. She never missed a drag on her cig. Amanda’s dark pubic hair, curly and abundant, was plainly visible. She screamed and pulled them back up, hollering obscenities the likes of which I had never been exposed to.
“You goddamn BITCH.” Flushed fuchsia with rage, teenage indignation and embarrassment, she slammed the rest of her ice cream into her sister’s hair and stalked back inside, trailing a middle finger behind her.
“Ugh. Fucking disgusting.” The oldest one’s forehead drooled melted ice cream. She scowled and laid back down, muttering to herself. “Whatever, I’ll just use her fancy ass shampoo.” The other sisters laughed. I sat silently, finally understanding. I had seen the spiders. They were crawling all over Amanda’s crotch, scurrying and escaping from the sides. They were black and endless, there were millions of them. I shuddered. I knew what was going to replace the Iron Maiden in my nightmares.
AND NOW I THINK OF SPIDERS EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD “PUBIC.”
(I almost threw up while google image searching for the photo above.)
