By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
Last month, I drove north from Manassas and flew out of BWI Airport, embarking on a transatlantic flight with my husband and our 1-year-old son. In preparation for what we knew would be a long and difficult journey, we packed snacks and downloaded soothing, baby-game applications to our phones. By the time our plane touched down in Germany, my teeth were stained Gusher blue and I was really, really good at Learning Letters Puppy. I had only cried once, for like, 15 minutes.
But a lot of people are frightened of flying. Probably somebody you know is, even if they haven’t told you they are—not everybody likes to broadcast their fears.
I do. I like to talk about what scares me, a lot. I do it to let other people know what I’m scared of, announcing my fears while making it clear that they should protect me from them. I have a low threshold for fear. It’s not cute, and to get people to like me I have to work hard to offset it. So I make a really good baked Brie and serve it with bagel chips at parties.
Last Halloween, we took my son through a haunted house that the operators had stripped of all its scary elements—the flickering lights, anything jumping out—before formally opening so the really little kids could walk through. My son loved the haunted house because in one room they had balloons and he would deliberately swallow tacks for a balloon. Otherwise, it was brightly lit and they’d thrown sheets over most of the gory displays, though there was one red-streaked shower curtain you still had to walk through. This was no problem for our 1-year-old, who tried to lick it, but I’m going to be honest and say I was a little freaked out.
Obviously, scary movies are out of the question. This was awful in middle school, when the big thing to do was spend the night at each other’s houses and watch scary movies. So I made a deal on the sly with one girl who’d already seen most of them. She’d signal me when it was about to get bad, then come get me from the bathroom when it was safe. I’ve grown out of it exactly zero percent: Last year, I couldn’t find a ride home from a friend’s party when they decided to put on “The Ring,” and if you’d like to know anything about that house’s second guest-bedroom’s wallpaper, it’s tattooed in my memory from having studied it for the better part of two hours.
As a girl, sleepovers were the least of my problems. Kids are scientifically good at scaring themselves. All manner of horrible things lived under my bed. A strong cast of nightmares was on steady rotation. In school, we would turn off the lights in the bathroom to summon Bloody Mary; to this day, I don’t make eye contact passing a mirror in the night. Sleep-away camp was a fearmonger’s petri dish: Dark 50 percent of the time, any one of them worth its salt is set in the woods.
There are some things I should be afraid of, legitimate fears—house fires, natural disasters, common strains of disease—that the irrational ones—the witches I know flew outside my window as a girl, Stay Puft Marshmallow Man coming to life—have eclipsed. A few months ago, we had a break-in at our house. The police came. My husband was spooked. He was astonished I wasn’t, but all the intruders had taken was some petty cash and his wedding ring. They were almost definitely never going to eat us. Witches, though. Give them half a chance. They’ll eat you right up, every time.
Some of my fears have swelled to tamp down the others. A day came when that same husband stopped killing spiders for me, which rendered me speechless: A principle reason to get married is to have someone to kill all your spiders, and if I could go back in time I would put it in our vows. But he doesn’t like doing it, so I was stuck with the choice to either let the spiders roam free over the rooms where I sleep and store food, or invest in an excellent vacuum. It took a couple weeks, but I finally trained my son to start war whooping when he sees me bring out the extension wand.
To balance things out, I’m extra tough with the things that I’m not scared of, and that other people may be. I speed. I love candy, and would take it from virtually any stranger who offered it to me. When I was 9 years old I rode my first rollercoaster, turning me cruelly unsympathetic to people who won’t ride them. It’s textbook overcompensation: You cannot prove to me those witches weren’t there.
My biggest fear is snakes. Meanwhile, the house I grew up in stands next to a creek, making an otherwise nice place to live a little dicey in the snake department. I would sometimes see one in our yard, though for years we got by fleeing each other when we accidentally crossed paths. My sister was smarter about it, and wouldn’t go into the yard. She’s scared of snakes because when she was young she saw my father kill one, and from the incident deduced that snakes are a Very Bad Thing. Hers is a justifiable fear, fixed with legitimate psychological underpinnings. I just think they’re icky. If I see one, I talk about how icky it was for weeks afterwards, with a Regina George sneer. I saw a snake on my way to a wedding one time and wouldn’t shut up about it to the bride. Most people were praising her dress, or the food. I full-body pantomimed the snake’s wriggle to her so she could agree with me on how weird and gross it was.
I don’t know for how long a time the litter of rat snakes that hatched in my parents’ house lived there. It’s one of those things that could have been two weeks, or a year—now and again I forget it ever happened at all, because sometimes your memory folds and warps around things that can’t seem to have been real. Other times, it starts to believe the lie by omission your family’s been telling the last two decades in the interest of seeing your sister at Christmas. But it was real. Here are the facts, as we know them:
A mother rat snake slithered her way into our house, probably somewhere in the basement because basements are dank and disgusting and there couldn’t be a more suitable place for a snake;
She pushed eggs out of her body that were more snakes, only latent and soon to think of this place as home; The eggs hatched; We found baby rat snakes everywhere—falling from curtain rods, inside toilets, curled up under the piano—for a time period ranging from two weeks to a year, although it felt like a lifetime; and, we caught all of them.
Except that last part isn’t necessarily factual. There’s no way of knowing how many eggs the snake laid, is there, so we can’t know for sure that we caught all of them. And according to a group of sickos at Northwestern University who devote their time to figuring out this sort of thing, the North American black rat snake can live up to 30 years.
That’s 10 still to go, but afterwards, we can confess everything.
Nothing to fear.
@CitySprawlNVMag is fearless on Twitter.