The Tick and the Tailgate
When I was eleven, I thought my life was already over. I’d settled into the tedium of the well-defined role of ‘traditional woman.’ I was to be a helper. This world was for men, and my only job was to ensure that things came easily to their grasp. I was meager. I was meek. I was not the kind of girl to stir up trouble. The feisty part of my spirit had been drowned in dirty dish water when I was five, standing at the sink, scrubbing until little fingers bled. Playing was for boys– for men. Housework was for the women. Women weren’t meant to have adventures, not unless they were accompanying men, anyway. Yada yada. It’s what I was told.
It’s what I believed.
I was bored out of my mind with the role foisted upon me, but I accepted it nonetheless. And so I sat and pulled at tufts of grass, mind wandering down dark corridors, opening antique clocks, solving mysteries like Nancy Drew, while the boys rode motorcycles and shot BB guns. I journeyed in mind, while they left me for hours, sitting on the tailgate of a rusty pickup truck, alone, in the middle of nowhere. They’d come back around noon for sandwiches, disappointed if the food wasn’t already waiting. I hadn’t had anything else to do, after all.
It was one such Saturday that I found a spark of the indomitable spirit I’d been born with. I decided to leave the truck. I decided to go explore. I would not leave all of the adventure to the boys. First, I ventured only a short distance, to a tall pine at the center of the clearing. There, I found a loveliness of ladybugs, congregating at the base of the tree. I thrust my palm into them, relishing in their tiny legs tickling up my arm. They were soft and sweet and nearly as friendly as the pair of doves I’d spent the past weeks cooing at from the bed of the truck. I spent well over an hour getting lost in the ladybugs.
My enchantment was broken by a hot splash on my arm. Steaming liquid drowning my pretty red friends. My brother, urinating all over the little creatures… and me. I screamed in rage and shook the wetted bugs from my arm, fist balling, ready to strike. Booming laughter from the men standing near the open truck tailgate joined the cackle of my brother’s sick happiness. “Where’s lunch, Pearl?” they called between chuckles.
I shoved my brother over and mumbled, “get it yourself,” under my breath. I wasn’t brave enough– dumb enough– to say it where they could hear me. I stalked off, up the dirt road. I hadn’t made it half a mile when they zipped past on motorbikes, leaving me behind with nothing but dust in my mouth and the ringing of wicked laughter in my ears.
I plopped down on a grassy slope, disappointed that in all my walking, I’d just ended up where they were riding, on a hillside creatively named “the meadow.” I didn’t have it in me to keep walking. I watched my brothers jump. I watched my dad try ill-favored stunts from years gone by. I watched my uncle weave between trees, not to be outdone by his older brother.
I hated myself. I hated them. I hated the hot tears that threatened to fall out of my eyelids. I ripped at the grass, pulling hunks from the earth to match the holes in my heart. I lay back, hoping, secretly, that one of them would run me over. Maybe that would at least make them feel a little bit sorry. I watched the clouds breeze by and imagined I was a ladybug flying above the trees. I could almost feel little feet crawling on my skin as my eyes drifted shut and I fell fast asleep.
When I woke it was dusk, and my father was gruffly ordering that I hop on the back of his bike. We rode down to the truck, the wind whipping my hair, and I felt terribly, wonderfully alive. I never wanted it to end. I could have ridden on the back of that motorcycle for the rest of forever, but instead, we stopped. I cleaned up tuna cans from their hasty lunch, guilt eating at me for making them do it themselves, skin crawling. My skin wouldn’t stop crawling. Not during the hour-long drive home. Not while I helped unload and wash the bikes. Not while I put together dinner in the kitchen.
I begged off to go and take a shower before we ate and was allowed several luxurious minutes. I scrubbed, but the crawling wouldn’t subside. It centralized: a pinpoint of annoyance in my belly button. I finally got up the courage to look at the truth that I could feel crawling there. Little legs protruded from the folds of my belly button. I screamed and Dad came in to see what the hell all of the fuss was about. When I explained he laughed. He brought in a flashlight and looked at my belly button. “HAH!” he’d said, startling me, “yer right, Pearl. It is a bug. Looks like a tick.” I started panicking.
“Get it out. Please! Dad– get. It. out!”
“Enough–” he replied, raising a hand and silencing my pleas, “we will deal with this after dinner.”
I sat through dinner, gulping down food, nauseated, but attempting to fake it. Dad scowled and told me to toughen up. I flinched away from the crawling in my abdomen. Dad told me I was being ridiculous–dramatic. He didn’t ever try to help me remove the tick. I tried for a long time, to pull the thing out with tweezers, while I hid in the bathroom, pretending to pack to go back to my mom’s house. I had no luck.
Mercifully, my brothers and I were going home to mom that night, else I fear I would have been forced to sleep with the tick in my belly button. When we arrived at mom’s, she had me lie down on the dining room table and everyone took turns trying to pry the wriggly wee beast out of my astonishingly deep belly button. You see, leaving the head of a tick in one's skin can lead to terrible infection, so we needed to be careful not to break it. It was a delicate game I quite wanted to opt out of playing. At one point, my oldest brother (who lived with mom only) had the bright idea to try and scare the thing out with a match. Suffice it to say that I ended up with a burnt belly button and a stubborn tick still very much inside. Finally, mother stepped in, wrenched the tweezers out of my brother’s hand, and ordered them all from the room.
“Hon– I am going to pull the tick out. If I don’t get the head, we will go to the doctor in the morning. Okay?” she asked.
I gulped, “Okay.”
“Lay back,” mom commanded.
I complied, and she yanked the tick out, whole.
My mother could always be counted on to get the job done, no matter what.
I showered for what felt like hours, washing away the remnants of a day I would have liked to forget, but that lives stubbornly on in memory.
That is the day that I stopped liking bugs.
It’s the day I stopped laying in the grass.
It’s the day I stopped trying to go on adventures.
It’s the day I gave up: the day I decided it would be better to stay on the tailgate.