Now it was my turn. I presented myself for inspection, shutting my eyes and silently hoping that I wouldn’t end up sitting in the Lice Chair for two hours.
“I can’t find anything,” she said, and I heaved a sigh of relief. But neither of us was 100 percent convinced. Before bed, we both shampooed our hair thrice over. When we lay down to sleep after all of the driving and combing and vacuuming, the specter of the lice still lingered.
“Who do you think gave it to her?” my wife asked.
“I don’t know. Someone gave it to her. She didn’t get it herself. She’s a very clean little girl. Someone rotten and filthy transmitted it.”
“Do you think it was one of the neighborhood kids?”
I began ranking all the kids at her bus stop in order of cleanliness.
“We took her to a playground,” I said. “Maybe she got it there. Maybe we shouldn’t go back.”
“Maybe we should warn other people.”
“Maybe that playground is one giant biohazard. Remember the pudding shorts?”
“I actually read online tonight that lice prefer clean girls’ hair because it’s long.”
“Really? So, in a way, having lice is actually a sign of good hygiene.”
“Definitely.”
“Totally.”
I had now shifted from being a cruel judge of the lice-ridden to one of their more passionate advocates. How dare anyone think my child is dirty simply because she has lice? No one better tease her. I realized that obsessing over the source of the lice had turned me into a paranoid lunatic. The truth is that getting lice has virtually nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with bad luck, and the lengths to which you must go to eliminate lice serve as proof of just how durable the little fuckers are.
The itch on my scalp came back. Oh God. What if I really do have it? What if the lice were dormant until now and are beginning to lay their eggs inside my pillow? What if I open my mouth when I’m sleeping and they shit into my throat? What if they crawl down to my dick? CRABS. I’ll have crabs. I’ll have crabs and I wouldn’t even have gotten the pleasure of making love to a stripper in order to contract them.
The itching spread. I scratched my neck. I scratched my ear. I scratched my elbow. Soon my wife began scratching everything as well: her face, her legs, her underarms. Imaginary lice had washed over us, skittering around our bodies and infiltrating every nook of the house. Nowhere was safe. We would never rid ourselves of them. The entire house would have to be burned down and rebuilt from scratch. Our minivan would have to be traded in, and we’d have to face the ethical dilemma of whether to tell the dealer that our car was a receptacle for indestructible vermin. Our lives would never, ever be the same.
Morning broke and I found that, despite my growing paranoia, I had managed to fall asleep. My wife arose and sprinted to our kids’ room to check the sheets in the bunk beds. She plucked a single living louse from the pillowcase on the top bunk and held it up.
“Another one!” she cried out.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means we clean everything again.”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO . . .”
My daughter went to lie down on the carpet and my wife quickly reprimanded her.
“Don’t put your head on anything.”
“I can’t put my head on the floor?” she asked.
“No, you can’t touch anything with your head all day.”
We washed the sheets and vacuumed the mattresses and went through the shampoo-and-combing process a second, awful time. By the time my wife had finished the job, there wasn’t a trace of lice to be found anywhere in the house. No bugs. No nits. I took the lice that my wife had combed out and carefully shook them into a plastic bag, then disposed of them outside, where they could never menace us again. Gradually, a feeling of normalcy returned to the house.
“I think you got them all,” I told my wife.
“I think I did too.”
“You could do this for a living. You could be the Lice Fixer.”
“They have a lady like that here. She’s called the Lice Lady. You pay her three hundred dollars and she gets rid of the lice in your kid’s hair for you.”
“Ewwww! There must be lice all over her house.”
“Yeah. Disgusting.”
As the days went on, the lice threat slowly faded from view. The couch and the rug and the children’s hair remained spotless. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I get a little itch. I think about the possibility of a single nit that we missed somewhere, hiding inside a shoe, or in a curtain, or tucked in the folds of a bathroom towel. It’s lying dormant, waiting for the right time to hatch, the right time to bust out and find a scalp to nest in, to start a new family of bloodthirsty little fuckers that will stop at nothing until my house and my family have been ruined. It’s waiting for me. I know it. Then again, maybe it left here and is out in the world, ready to find a new host. Maybe it’s found you.
THE LIST