Who's Afraid of Head Lice?
from
Diana Lively is Falling Down:
Diana Lively is naked under her shiny
bright yellow raincoat Mack. Her glossy black hair is swept
up in an untidy knot and covered with a clear plastic cap,
which, along with the raincoat, will be removed only after
she has finished Eleanor’s hair and rinsed her plastic
shield for good measure..
It is a little known fact, outside England’s majestic
borders, that its school children come home each day, their
little heads full of more than imperial history and knightly
valor. An invisible and infinitely replenishing army
of tiny grey-brown creatures moves from the hair of one pupil
to the next with a completely un-British disregard for social
class or economic well-being.
While most parents will wait until October, when hats and
jumpers provide the bridge by which the scourge of headlice
takes on critical mass, Diana cannot rest. She
has an uncommon aversion to insects of any kind.
Sheila Curran explains:
This is the original beginning of my novel, which I killed
before submitting it to my agent. My reasoning?
A friend with strong literary sensibilities and PhD in English
said that the subject of head lice was, in her considered
opinion, “ickky.” Since a big New York agent
had told her no one in publishing reads past a first paragraph
before deciding to reject, my buddy nixed the whole scene. While
I trusted her instinct on the ick factor, my protagonist’s
fear of insects was important to the larger story. I compromised
by keeping the raincoat-in-the-shower scene but changing the
offending bugs to a species less likely to strike a chord
of horror in the hearts of grade school mums the whole world
round. This decision felt right, despite the Brechtian argument
that could be made for yanking readers right out of their
bourgeois complacence. (I suspect Brecht never had to comb
his children’s hair for headlice; indeed--if he had
even had children—I’ve got a wild hunch that his
wife might have been the one to confront the brutal everyday
reality of nits.)
On the other hand, my
dear friend also didn’t like my first sentence, originally
written as “Diana Lively is naked under her shiny yellow
Mack.” I loved that line. Still do. Thus, I kept it
in for the agent and editor submissions, and still mourn its
premature death in the final page proofs, when my editor suggested
that 99% of American readers wouldn’t recognize the
British slang for a raincoat. After not a little angst, I
changed the opening to “Diana Lively is naked under
her bright yellow raincoat.” It still pains me to read
it now, and when I do any sort of reading, I cannot help but
revert to my original. Similarly, on my website, where the
first chapter is excerpted, my original first sentence remains
the same.
Diana Lively is Falling Down now begins:
Diana Lively is naked under her bright yellow raincoat. Water streams down the plastic Mackintosh, carrying clouds of lather from her daughter’s hair. Eleanor, age four, wails to the shampoo gods, but it’s not the soap in her eyes that’s making her cry. It’s the indignity of having been caught with her brother’s new packet of Walking Stick Insect Eggs before she’s had time for a proper look. Worse, five of six eggs have gone missing and Mummy’s put Bunny in the washing machine.
The raincoat is ludicrous. This
Diana knows. Still, better this silly shield than the
possibilities that suggest themselves in venomous twigs hatching
in unexpected places, for despite her intellectual powers,
Diana has an uncommon aversion to insects of any kind.
The thought of one, even the childishly drawn Walking Stick
Insect on the front of William’s packet—much less
the two hundred offspring promised—is enough to cause
her feet to move of their own accord. And so it is,
that here she stands, in this shower, on a late summer afternoon,
wearing her raincoat. Diana’s heels rise slightly
off the ground; her beautiful mouth twitches with each movement
of her daughter’s head. To put it kindly, she is
alert. Highly alert.
