Itch

Itch

“and so the hunter cut open the wolf’s belly and there, still alive inside, were Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother. They filled the wolf’s belly with rocks and when he woke up and tried to run away; the stones held him down and he fell down dead.

The huntsman skinned the wolf and took the pelt home to his wife. Grandmother ate her cake and wine and Little Red Riding Hood never strayed off the path again.

And they all lived happily ever after.”


Always, I wake up with an itch. Not that my skin literally itches, but I feel an electric current of anxiety or restlessness. That itch has moved me to 32 states. I never finished college because of that itch and because of it I am a forty-year-old virgin.

I remember my Nana telling me when I was a little girl, “Sometimes the thing that makes us special is both a blessing and a curse.”

My family’s specialness had always been the ability to uproot and reinvent ourselves. Standing up and fighting was not one of our strong suits. Sure, when backed into a corner, it wasn’t like we soiled ourselves in fear. We could and would draw first blood if necessary. It was just we preferred to find an exit and run. Collectively my family had run from Eastern Europe to the New World, from the East to the South, from the South to the West and I myself had run from the West back to the North.

I remember complaining in grade school. “We can’t move again! What about my friends?”

My father looked at me sadly, but my mother answered, “Sarah, friends come and friends go, they are seasonal will-o-the-wisps who would turn on you in a moment. It’s your family, only your family, that you can count on.”

I never thought I would choose to run.

I went to college in Boulder, Colorado. As is their way, my family had moved there with me. My mother and my sisters that is, my father was dead before then. We lived in a two-story house that lived up to the Hollywood standards of my childhood. It had a cellar and a porch, an attic and a huge picture window in the living room. My sisters and I loved it and spent hours staring out at the street where we lived. My mother gruffly argued that it was impractical – too cold, too much glass. But the cellar was a necessity and, for once, our dreams and our reality waltzed in unison.

A part of me knew already that college was fantasy. I was majoring in History and minoring in English with an emphasis on Folklore, but that all important visualization – the ability to picture myself with a degree in my hand – just wasn’t there. After all, I had pictured myself living in the dorms, while my mother stayed 200 miles away. My mother was always the choke collar I wanted to slip.

I had a 9 pm curfew. Amazed? Some nights it was even earlier. I pushed those rules and limits as far as I could without them snapping and hitting me with the recoil.

My father had teased us girls with a saying – it wasn’t special or unique really, except that it was his. When he could see that we were headed for trouble with our mother, he would goof on us, “Sarah (or Katie or Marie,) you’re cruising for a bruising. You know that?”

One night in Boulder, my mother greeted me at the door – I think it was 10 pm – with the words, “Sarah, you realize you’re cruising?”

“Don’t ever say that! Don’t EVER use his words to me.” And I pushed past her into the house.

If I had only listened, but I thought it was only the itch. The mighty itch that my family worshipped and used to justify our transience. If my mother would just take a moment and consider, she would be proud of my independence.

So that one night, that one critical, turning-point night, I pushed it.

It was the first night of a full moon and I had a curfew of 5 pm, but I wanted to be with Kevin. I think I even imagined it would be my “first time.” We “parked” outside of town and swapped sweet nothings and tongues. By 5 pm, I knew that the only milestone that would happen that evening was that it would be the “first time” I pushed my mother that far. I began the girlish protestations I’d need to make to get myself home. By 5:30 Kevin, who had seemed the same frightened virgin that I was, apparently had gotten wind of my original intent and was determined to further the notion.

The air was beginning to fill with that pre-darkness twilight that signaled the end of day. I could easily envision my angry mother staring out the picture window and my protestations became more frantic and real.

I felt the first stomach cramps a little before 6.

I gasped aloud.

Kevin, whose right hand was fighting to get past my pants and into my underpants, first took it as a sign of excitement and thrust the bulge in his pants against my thigh.

“No!” I tried to concentrate. “Kevin, I’ve got to go home. I’ve got to go home right now!” My body underlined the point by having another cramp that bent me in two. “Ugh!” I clutched my stomach with my right hand. Soon my mother would be locking and bolting the front door. I’d never spent a whole night out; I couldn’t spend a whole night out like this.

“Sarah?” Kevin was frightened and alarmed now. “Sarah? Are you ok?”

“Home.” I gasped unevenly. “I’ve got to get home.”

I was beginning to realize the downside of my rebelliousness. What had I been thinking? But then I wasn't the first girl to think with her hormones instead of her head.

A block from my house, I threw the passenger door open and jumped from the car as Kevin slammed on the brakes. I ran towards my house for all I was worth, dimly hearing Kevin scream at me from behind.

The door was bolted. “Mother!” I screamed. “Mother, help me!”

I was running out of time; I could feel the coarse hair begin to pierce the skin of my arms. Backing up five feet, I threw myself at the picture window. I’ll never know what Kevin saw of the transformation, but I was more animal than human being when I reached the basement door.

That night, as my sisters lay in a pack formation snuggled up against my mother, I slept in a cobwebbed corner licking the shoulder where my mother had bit me and thought of Nana and curses.

"The huntsman skinned the wolf and took the pelt home to his wife. Grandmother ate her cake and wine and Little Red Riding Hood never strayed off the path again.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Or so they thought. But you see Sarah, the huntsman had been too late in rescuing the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood.

They were alive and would live many more years, but the wolf had left them a gift. Every month with the coming of the full moon, Red and her Grandmother transformed into wolves of the same sort that had eaten them.

Our family has always been very wise and they were able to hide themselves for a long time. Sadly, it was Red’s love affair with the huntsman that brought about the end. After an afternoon lovemaking, she overslept and was awakened by her transformation. Unable to comprehend what it was that he was seeing, he didn’t act to save himself.

But Nana, she couldn’t have hurt the man she loved, could she?

Never intentionally, pet, but she was not herself. Try to remember that you may not know yourself when the hair bursts the skin.

In the morning when she found blood on herself, Red knew and she knew that before evening came his wife would know of his death. She couldn’t imagine anyone tracking it to her, but she couldn’t risk it either. So they ran. What they didn’t know was that Red was pregnant with the Hunter’s baby. That baby was my great-grandmother. . . . that’d be a couple of more greats to get to you Sarah.

Ever since, love has been hard on this pack. We found we have to keep moving; it doesn’t pay to stand still.”

The next night my mother brought a rare treat to the basement den, fresh meat. I didn’t need to see it to know who it was; I could smell it. Again I kept to my corner, my head down and eyes closed. She couldn’t make me eat.

For the next month, we waged a wary truce. She watched me, sure that I would show signs of being with child. And I waited. Waited until the moon was but a sliver in the sky and then I ran.

I ended up in Yellowstone. Three nights a month, I run. The rest of the time I make souvenier wolf print paperweights for the tourists. They sell quite well; everyone says they look almost real.

It's a lonely, solitary life without a pack, but . . . I’m free.