“I do?”
I ran to my wife and tried to correct her. “Shhh! Don’t say she has lice in front of her! She’ll get embarrassed!”
“I really have lice?” my daughter asked.
“You might have lice,” I said. “It’s not definitive. No need to think of yourself as filthy or diseased just yet.”
“There are nits all over her hair,” my wife said. Then she struck gold. “Oh my God. There it is.” She reached into the girl’s hair and plucked off a tiny little black speck with legs, then held it up like it was a fugitive that she had been hunting down for years. “This is one of them,” she said triumphantly.
I stared at it. To the naked eye, a head louse doesn’t look all that bad. It’s just a little tiny thing. It’s when you hop on the Internet and look at one that’s been magnified fifty times over that the sheer horror of it hits you.
“What if it’s a flea?” I asked.
“You’re gonna have to go to CVS and pick up some shampoo.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. I’m gonna call the doctor. We have to strip all the beds in the house. We have to wash all her clothes, and we have to vacuum everything. And we have to wash our hands after touching anything. Otherwise they come back and you have to do it all over again.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t want lice in this house.” My wife is half-German, so obsessive cleanliness is her birthright. “Go to CVS and see if you can find a shampoo. And a comb. They make special lice combs.”
My daughter, meanwhile, was staring up at us with increasing alarm. “Do I have bugs in my hair?”
My wife knelt down. “Honey, we’re doing everything we can to make sure you don’t have bugs in your hair, and that they don’t get anywhere else in the house. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I hopped in the car and drove at light speed to the nearest drugstore. The lice shampoos were on the bottom shelf in the skin care section, tucked away from prying eyes. I tried to buy the most serious-looking one I could find. There was one called RID, with a logo shaped like a stop sign. That seemed very stern to me. Also, there was a comb included free with the shampoo, all for fifteen bucks. So I grabbed the kit along with a bag of chips. I never ran an errand without properly rewarding myself.
When I returned home, my wife was just getting off the phone with the doctor, one of superstar Dr. Ferris’s satellite pediatricians. She had taken copious notes during the call. It looked as if she had taken down enough information to launch a Mars probe.
I took out the lice removal kit and showed it to her, beaming with pride.
“The comb came free!” I said proudly.
“Oh, that shampoo’s no good.”
“It isn’t?”
“It’s a pesticide. Look at the label.”
I looked at the label and checked the FAQ on the website. My wife was right. You had to ventilate the room before using the shampoo. You could not touch the shampoo. You could not eat the shampoo. There were enough warnings on the label to make you think you were handling a chemical weapon. I looked at the reviews for the shampoo on Amazon (which I should have done prior to jumping in my car, but I really wanted some chips), and the reviews averaged two stars. You could sell a baby snuff film on Amazon and still get their reviewers to throw you four stars, but this shampoo was not only poisonous but also ineffective. One review headline said “USELESS” and nothing else.
“Jesus, this stuff is horrible,” I said.
“The doctor has a shampoo we can use.”
“So what’s it called? I’ll go back.”
“No, she literally has it. She has it left over from when one of her kids got it. A comb too. She said you could go to her house and grab it, but you have to go now, before she goes to bed.”
I had never had a doctor extend such a courtesy. “She’s okay with me going to her home?”
“Yeah, isn’t that incredible?”
“I better go before she realizes that she just broke the fourth wall. The rest of doctordom will never forgive her.”
“When you get back,” my wife said, “we have to check you.”
“What do you mean, we have to check me?”
“The whole house is compromised. We have to check everyone, including you and me.”
“Pfft. I don’t have lice.”
“You don’t know that. You could have given it to her.”
“How dare you!” I said. “For all we know, you could have given it to her!”
“You don’t always shampoo at the gym.”
“Well, sometimes YOU shower at night. They could jump in your hair during the day and have hours to have hot lice sex with one another. Just because you’re a girl doesn’t mean you’re so immaculate.”