'The Life of a Breck Girl', by Mary Ann McGuigan
My brother Sean’s face tells me something I’m not sure I want to know yet. The hooded eyes, the hard straight line of his mouth, a choir boy’s face with a prizefighter’s stare. He’s sixteen, seven years older than me. He’s been at school, on class trips and Boy Scout outings, at friends’ houses. His suspicions have been confirmed. There’s something wrong here.
My sister Irene and I are still like shipmates who haven’t yet set foot on land. We can see the shoreline in the distance, but surely it’s just like home. She assumes, as I do, that everyone shares the last of their left-over spaghetti, sleeps in pajamas that smell of sheets that need washing, revives stale bread, wet in the oven. We’ve been out of school for weeks because of the lice in our hair. We play with our dolls, watch The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. We’ve gotten used to the snapping sound of a thumbnail squashing head lice on the back of a saucer.
Sean doesn’t fall for our parents’ lies, nor does he bother to contradict them. He knows the electric bill hasn’t been paid, the kitchen will never get painted, the claims about finding a new place to live are yarns. When we want the truth about something, we ask Sean. The trust he garners will help him succeed later on, keep clients from doubting him when there are delays in construction, and that stare will surely be useful when he dares to set up shop in an industry controlled by the mob. He’s a man of few words, all true, so people learn to listen closely.
He’s the one who confronts Mama about our hair. “You can get stuff in the drug store to fix it,” he says, not waiting for a response, just tossing the money on the table. Mama waves him off, because she already knows the cure. But she’s working long hours as a cashier at the Vogue Theatre now, can’t keep up, so I guess our hair is a problem she hasn’t gotten around to fixing.
My sister Kathleen, almost ten years older than me, tells us she had head lice when she was our age, promises us they can’t eat their way through our scalp. Danny swears that the vermin babies can eat up our brain cells and we’ll go blind and deaf. I’m just beginning to need glasses, and every time I squint, he insists the baby lice are ready with their forks on my scalp. Danny brings his own brand of chaos to every situation.
Kathleen has the same expression Sean does, as if she knows the truth for sure. That a home doesn’t have to be this way. Dishes left unwashed for days, condiments gone bad in the fridge. A father staggering home, ready to trash the place and the people in it. Lamps glued back together, blood stains left to fade on the couch. Kathleen is married now, has a baby girl. Her husband’s an Irish guy, so at first Mama tried to steer her away from making the same mistake she did. “They’re only good for a song and a smile,” she’d say. It didn’t work. Kathleen liked having a reason to go out—and she loved his car, a 1950 Chevy with a backseat as big as a couch. So she got married at sixteen, already pregnant, just like Nora, the oldest. But Kathleen insisted she loved him, so Mama pinned her hopes on that.
I learn from my cousin, years later, that Mama never got the chance to marry the man she loved. He was Irish but Protestant, and Grandma made her break it off. One of my uncles finally introduced her to my dad, an Irish-Catholic who fit the bill. Even then, he drank a bit, greeted Grandma with a tad too much cheer, but a whif of Jameson’s on a man’s breath in those days was nothing that would have set him apart. He’d give her Catholic grandchildren. And I guess that’s what mattered.
After the treatment—a painful procedure with metal combs and harsh shampoo—Mama cut our hair short, barely covering our ears. After that, I refuse to let my mother touch my hair. I become obsessive about letting it grow and making it shine. Thick, clean hair that can veil my face and cascade down my back becomes a trusty camouflage. With hair like that, how can I come from such an ugly place? How can I be desperate? I steal Breck shampoo from the drugstore, hide it in my bookbag between washings. A bunch of it spills out into my history book. When it’s time to return our textbooks at the end of the year, I pretend I’ve lost it, because it still smells, the scent of a promise that things can be fixed.
In less than two years, Sean joins the Navy, escaping from the madness like Nora and Kathleen. But by then I don’t need their help to see the truth. I know nothing will change. I find my own escape, my corner table in the library, where I stay as long as I can, until Irene expects me home to help wash dishes or peel potatoes or sweep the floor. I do what everyone tells me to do, until I can curl up on our bed with my long, yellow legal pads and write my stories filled with characters who aren’t afraid to speak, who know how to keep their word.
My hair grows thick and long. “You have your grandmother’s hair,” Mama says, as if there may come a day when I’ll have to explain where I got such a luxurious gift. I learn to be grateful for it. Total strangers—store clerks, nurses—will compliment my hair. The color. The cut. I’ll search their faces for signs of suspicion, because by then I’ll know what Sean knows, that attention here went to all the wrong things, the next drink, the next excuse. Eventually I’ll understand who we are—the children with a hand-me-down life, born to people who get invited only when there’s no other choice, but who know all the words to the songs, people who can’t come up with the fare anymore, who forgot the rules for raising a family, lost touch with the instinct to protect their young.
In families like ours, the books say, the cycle is rarely broken. We know better than that. The force of wanting more can bust through impossibility. The degree is earned. The job secured. The construction company started. The novel written. The memories get small. And then a child is born. Sean and Kathleen have families, so do Nora and Danny and Irene and I. We have eighteen children altogether, all with hair that’s healthy and strong, who can trust the scent of a promise.
Mary Ann McGuigan’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Citron Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The Sun, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and many other journals have published her fiction. Her collection Pieces includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net; her new story collection, That Very Place, was published in September 2025. The Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library rank Mary Ann’s novels as best books for teens; Where You Belong was a finalist for the National Book Award. She loves visitors: www.maryannmcguigan.com.