I’d been married for a while, so I wasn’t sure if things had changed, but I thought protocol was to call, not text, if you’d possibly transmitted a disease.
I read the text again. I tried not to overreact, but this was happening to me on my birthday!
I thought back to how I’d been so reluctant to let the kids sit on my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I wasn’t an asshole. My sixth sense had intuited that they were contaminated.
I needed immediate mental health support. I got Maggie’s attention by yelling above the roaring dryer. She is an inherently positive person. She could see someone lose a leg in a car crash and still probably find something uplifting to say about the disaster. “At least her leg is still intact!” She’d say it like dismembered extremities have been known to go on to get postgraduate degrees and lead productive lives.
She sat on a bench while I paced back and forth, recounting all the possible points of physical contact I’d had with the kids the night before. I mentioned the dark restaurant, the ice cream shop, and how we’d skipped back to my apartment. At the time, it had seemed like such a sweet and quaint Sound of Music moment, but now I wondered if it was all a ruse—the lice made them do it in order to get close to my head. And to think, after that night, I’d almost been convinced that I wanted kids.
“You won’t get lice, Mar,” Maggie said.
By this time, we were already outside, waiting to cross at a light that apparently didn’t realize that it was my birthday.
“How do you know?”
She reminded me that I’d hardly touched the kids. I had to be in closer contact. Lice don’t fly. “Did you rub heads?” she asked for the fourth time.
“No.”
“Then see,” she said, “you’re fine.”
By the time I met up with Dave for my birthday dinner, I was ready to commiserate with someone, but he wouldn’t cooperate.
He’s usually the one concerned with external dangers—murderers, burglars, and tiny fanged creatures—while I worry more about internal dangers like cancer and the possibility that my heart may explode. But as I shoved birthday enchiladas into my mouth, there was a serious role reversal at play.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“But. There. Were. Lice. In. Our. Apartment,” I said for the eighth time.
I imagined the little insects were exactly like criminals, but instead of wanting to hurt or steal from us, they wanted to eat our heads.
“We’ll be okay,” Dave said.
That night, I felt tingling on my scalp. The sensations seemed real, yet then again maybe they weren’t. I nudged Dave awake and asked him to investigate. He rolled his eyes, but humored me nonetheless, because we took vows, dammit.
As Dave positioned me under a lightbulb and parted my hair, I was reminded of lice-check days in elementary school. The first time was in kindergarten. The nurse came in with latex gloves and told us all to sit cross-legged on the carpet. She directed us to lower our chins to our chest and wait patiently until she got around to each and every one of us. I was terrified about what she was going to do until she stood behind me and laid those virtuosic hands onto my head. My eyes rolled back and my arms got gooseflesh as she parted my hair into tiny chunks and looked through each nook and cranny of my scalp. Lice check, I thought, should last forever. Parasite detection felt so good.
From that day forward, I got excited whenever a nurse appeared with latex gloves (an impulse that would eventually fail me).
In the meantime, my friends and I began to play “lice check” during slumber parties. We would take turns being the nurse and the potential parasitic host. I cannot quite imagine what my parents must have thought if they overheard our conversations. “But now it’s my turn—you have to check me for lice!” They probably thought I wanted to become a nurse when in actuality I wanted to grow up and get massages.
As I got older, I experienced a new kind of hair caress—the kind attempted by boyfriends. I always wanted to tell them that they weren’t doing it quite right. Hair caressing should have direction, a point of view. Their method, I realized, lacked purpose. I wished I wasn’t so shy and could have just told them exactly how I wanted it: “Do it to me like you’re checking for blood-sucking insects!”
What I’m saying is, I totally understand how childhood can influence the development of sexual fetishes.
“I don’t see anything,” Dave said, turning off the light.
I spent the next two weeks under orange alert. I didn’t necessarily think I was going to get lice, but I wasn’t going to be stupid and ignore the fact that lice-infested children had been in my home. I took precautions. The aqua-colored velvet chair was under quarantine as a potential hot zone. I didn’t care that science says that it’s highly unlikely to contract lice in any other way than direct head-to-head contact.
I started out learning novice stuff—a louse can lay six eggs a day, it can survive underwater for several hours, and infestations occur most often at schools in September (and September it was) because children come back after a long summer break and immediately mingle their head fauna—but I eventually got into mating practices. I dug way too deep. This info wouldn’t help me, but I couldn’t stop. It was ghastly stuff. If a louse dies while copulating, then the pair can’t separate. The one that survives has to carry around the other’s dead body, connected via the genitals, for the rest of its life. I didn’t know whether to think it was tragic or beautiful—surely dying in each other’s orifices was more romantic than in each other’s arms, but still.
I kept going down the information black hole. When a louse needs to eat, your head becomes a real-life nightmare. A small tube with teeth on the end protrudes from its mouth and pierces the scalp. As if that weren’t obscene enough, the tiny menace then spits on the wound. The spit is what makes some people itch, but it’s also magical and keeps the cut from clotting, so the louse can endlessly consume the blood through the two pumps in its head as if it were standing under a never-ending soda fountain. Lice take four to five meals a day, during which they consume the equivalent—if they were our size—of ten gallons of blood, and even with all that liquid, they don’t pee. Their urine evaporates through their respiratory system while their excrement, tiny dry pellets, goes through the more traditional anal route.
I later spoke to Kim Søholt Larsen, an entomologist from Denmark with a PhD in fleas and a specialization in lice and ticks, about this behavior. “If they urinated, your hair would stick together and you would immediately figure out that you have lice,” said Larsen. “This is how they hide themselves.”
They’ve had a lot of time to hone their terror techniques, because they’ve been hunting our plasma for millennia. The only good thing I found out about head lice was that they aren’t body lice: Body lice carry disease.
In the meantime, I still had Dave check me at the slightest provocation. If I felt anything, I’d turn on the bright overhead lights, flip my head over, and have him gander at my scalp. We were searching for insects that looked like black sesame seeds; irritated red skin near the ears and neck; and tiny white dots—lice eggs or nits—that informational lice blogs described as looking like “dandruff that won’t move” near the base of my hair.
I did not moan from pleasure during these encounters. It wasn’t that Dave was bad at lice checking, but I found that the practice didn’t feel as hedonistic when it wasn’t recreational—nothing like a real fire to take all the fun out of a fire drill. Dave would toss a couple of strands here and there and tell me that everything was going to be okay.
“There’s a very low possibility that