TEENAGER HERO GIRL STEPS UP TO THE VACUUM
I Saved My Family From a Horde of Hatched Maggots
At 17, I was a girl who took matters into her own hands
A pheasant flew down our chimney. There it remained, lodged in the tight brick chamber. How do these things happen?
Birds have wings, fly around, and make mistakes. This pheasant was stuck like a child gets stuck in one of those Chinese finger traps with holes at both ends.
I hope it died a fast death. I don’t remember hearing the flap of wings as we watched The Brady Bunch or Love American Style. It was 1977.
Soon I would be put to a test.
At 17, I was driving my own car, a powder blue Ford Falcon. I think it was a ’64. In the backseat was a Queen T-shirt, an old white bra, and a pair of jeans with a broken zipper. Best to be prepared.
In the glove box was a zippo lighter with DEBBIE engraved on it, and an old pack of Marlboro 100s. An empty pack of birth control pills sat on the passenger seat. My brown leather purse with pink, blue and yellow flowers sat on the seat too.
I pulled in the driveway at home. My brother wasn’t there. Dad had recently bought him a red Corvair convertible. I dreamed about it last night, smiling.
Was I jealous he was driving a red convertible while I was cruising around in what I considered a POS car? Yes! Yes! Oh, fuck yes!
My blond sister and I, usually at each other’s throats, were in total agreement on that score.
A year older than I was, she and I both stared at our parents with the righteous indignation only pissed off teenage girls can muster.
Then, we probably went somewhere in her car, a red Mazda RX 4, and pouted. Or more likely, we loaded into my brother’s car and took a drive!
We didn’t stay mad long, especially when there was a red convertible to ride in.
Anyway, you get the point. No one was home but me. Siblings gone, parents at work. I arrived home at 3:10 p.m. after a boring day at high school.
Senior year, and I was nearly free! No more boring work, no more getting up early and suffering. Boy, was I in for a surprise, I think now.
Back then, I couldn’t wait to get home and eat a bowl of fruit loops with milk.
My parents come from different social classes. Sort of. My paternal grandparents were the glitterati of San Francisco, and dressed beautifully. They had a house now worth a few million dollars and when they moved to Oregon, lived in a house on the river my dad swears was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
I don’t know how this could be true, but I’ve seen some photographs of the home, now called The Gordon House. It’s been moved to the Oregon Gardens. The Gordons lived in that house.
Who knows? Family lore is funny like that.
My dad and his sisters went to Lake Oswego high school, then called Oswego. As a family from San Francisco, they had some street credentials, but my dad hated the Oswego teenagers.
They were, as he said, stuck up and hoity toity. Dad had one more card up his sleeve.
He was stunningly attractive. The girls at the high school loved him. He was foxy! My dad, imagine that.
But my mom was good looking too, a blond with green eyes.
Mom was the product of a German dad who worked the fields, and her own mother, who was thrown aside by her first husband after having two little girls.
The German worker and the beautiful girl of Scottish ancestry got together in Wapato, Washington.
My maternal grandparents carried on her family’s tradition of floristry. Baby’s breath and mums grew from the dirt, peonies and tomatoes. My grandmother was a businesswoman par excellence — but like her parents before her, the acumen of business started first in the dirt.
So, Dad was San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. Mom was Wapato, Washington and a handful of garlic pulled from the earth.
I was 17 in tight jeans and a blue hoodie, hungry for Fruit Loops. A blend of both worlds.
Sophisticated enough to know Bach from Brahms, but often thrown into a muddy field to do some godawful chore. Humble but sophisticated, except for the bra in the back of my car.
And don’t forget to take your birth control pill, I reminded myself! Sex and booze on the weekend coming up.
Crazy on You blared on my Falcon’s radio as I pulled in our driveway. My favorite band, “Heart.”
It was no huge surprise to come home to the flying hordes and swarms of bumbling fat, black flies.
Flies born of maggots. Maggots born of death, death of a pheasant in our fireplace.
I walked into our tiny farmhouse, where five of us shared one bathroom, and jumped out, slamming the door. The entire house, a the little two-story dwelling with moss-green paint and a red brick chimney, was filled with the humming creatures.
Our outside laundry room was just out the door. Dad had installed a second shower out there, and we had a vacuum with a detachable sucker hose. I put on Dad’s green coveralls and grabbed the vacuum. I threw on a baseball hat and protective plastic glasses, and reentered the home.
Bastard flies weren’t keeping me from my rightful after-school snack. Oh, no.
First, I called Mom. I needed her to know I was the family’s savior.
“Mom, we have a real problem on our hands. I’ll take care of it before you get home from work.”
I wasn’t letting my single-handed efforts go unnoticed or unrewarded.
The bumbling, disgusting creatures were newly hatched, and still stupid. Flies born of maggots are fat, large creatures. They hatch as larvae, feed on the offal, and then sprout wings.
Whee! we can fly! Let’s maraud the family home!
I clicked on the vacuum and it was like playing video games. I stood and let them come to me. I went to the trenches, the window frames.
I stormed the beach of the bathroom. Straight to the source, the fireplace, the black minions continued their assault straight from the jaws of the source.
I covered the maw of the fireplace with a piece of plywood. Whatever was happening in the chimney wasn’t part of the deal. I wasn’t going in, and I wasn’t coming down Santa-style. Way out of my pay grade. Dad would be spiderman. Not me.
By the time Mom got home, I’d cleaned up the mess. A few errant buzzers hummed from the direction of the chimney.
I had showered and scrubbed up. And yes, I had the bowl of the red and yellow and green Fruit Loops cereal. Life was normal again.
That night, we went out for pizza and I was celebrated as a hero. And no, I didn’t get a new car, nor did I get a hundred-dollar bill. But we laughed, and we had fun, and my family hugged me.
I will never forget ridding my beloved family home from the scourge of a million flies. I was the hero.
I stood on the pedestal, eating a third piece of pepperoni pizza and sipping from the chalice of coke.