At the airport, we had a little extra time, so I went into a corner shop. I browsed books and then I began trying on neck pillows. My mom always told me not to try on stuff like that in stores because you never know the hygiene of other people who have tried them on before you, but I’ve never been concerned. The pillows were so soft and came in so many colors.
As I tried them on, I became a little obsessive—it happens periodically—and suddenly felt like as long as I tried on every different color, then somehow that would mean that the plane wouldn’t crash.
Dave was getting antsy, but I managed to finish my mission before he dragged me off to our gate.
When we got home twenty hours later, we went straight to bed. I woke up on a glorious Sunday morning, and the first thing I did was jump into my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I could once again enjoy that plush swiveling piece of gluteal glory, because it was finally out of quarantine.
After fully indulging, I started to unpack our bags, piling our dirty clothes onto the other sofa. While I was doing that, Dave woke up and suggested that we go to the farmers’ market. We’d been eating gluttonous meals for the past eleven days and he thought we should get some fresh veggies.
I left our clothes strewn in the middle of the room as we went out into a chilly but sunny New York morning. We walked together in the East Village along Avenue A, up toward St. Mark’s Place. We were talking about what we would make—some kind of soup? No. A roasted chicken? Maybe. Something with black beans? That sounded good.
I remember happy dogs walking by with their owners. The clank of boots on the sidewalk cellar grates. Pulling my sunglasses down over my eyes. The burn at the back of my head. The stinging sensation that occurred each time I touched my scalp.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The vendors—their piles of gourds and apples—were in sight.
“You have to check my head one more time,” I said.
“Right now?” Dave said.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even care about standard pedestrian practices. I stayed put in the middle of the sidewalk, like an obstinate boulder dividing a rushing river, as people walked around me. I dropped my chin to my chest and waited until Dave appeased me.
When I was in Japan, I could easily dismiss the sensations as if they were some kind of awkward travel bug—the customary stomach upset we expect when traveling to a new place—but now that I was back home, I could finally recognize that the shit I was feeling was not even close to normal.
Something had to be wrong.
By this point, playing lice check had lost all its former cachet. Dave was exasperated—he’d probably checked my head at least thirty times—but he did his duty and took his designated position behind me. My hair was in a bun, so I expected him to start rummaging around in there. Instead there was silence and the heat of direct sun.
“Do you see anything?” I said.
“Um,” he said.
“What?” I said.
There was another long pause.
“What?” I said.
He came back around to face me. The corners of his mouth were drawn down. “It must be because there’s better light here,” he said.
Crabs Pubic lice, or Pthirus pubis, are the couch potatoes of the lice kingdom. They are characterized by their sluggish and sedentary lifestyle. I can’t blame them; I’d be that way, too, if my house was a porn set. Each louse is a millimeter, which means it would take twenty-five of them, back to front, to add up to an inch. They have a roundish gray body with six legs. The two in back are capped off with crustacean-looking claws, which is how they got their nickname: crabs.
They are not found in the crotch because they are fools for genitals, but because pubic hair is their method of transportation. Like a train needs tracks to move, crabs need pubes. That’s why they can also be found in other coarse hair like eyelashes, eyebrows, armpit hair, and beards. We originally caught pubic lice from gorillas three or four million years ago. That’s why pubic lice like pubes. Pubes are the closest thing we have to thick and tough gorilla hair. The fine hair found on our scalps does not give them enough purchase to move around.
Crabs don’t do much besides suck our blood and lay eggs—about three a day—for the two to three weeks of their short lives. Like head lice, they can’t jump or fly but can only scuttle from hair to hair. That is why sex—pube to pube—is their best opportunity to colonize a new home. They can also, though extremely rarely, be caught through infested bedding. A myth looms large that crabs can be transmitted via a toilet seat, but if that’s how your boyfriend is telling you he got his, then it might be time to find a new boyfriend or to finally have that talk about opening up the relationship.
One textbook, Medical Entomology for Students, explains quite insightfully that having lice makes one “feel lousy.” Crabs can cause itching and irritation, but they are also easily exterminated: Wax off your bush or use insecticides.
Though crabs—blood-sucking wingless genital goblins—sound apocalyptical, we actually have them on the defensive. They are becoming endangered because of habitat destruction. In one study, “Did the ‘Brazilian’ Kill the Pubic Louse?” researchers found that the dwindling number of crab infections coincided with the wax-it-all-off trend, which began around 2000. It’s hard to get good data—people often don’t report embarrassing parasites that have staked out their perianal region—but a 2009 study from East Carolina University reported that less than 2 percent of the population harbors papillon d’amour (which is the sexy French name for crabs). “Their forests are disappearing,” Danish lice expert Kim Søholt Larsen told me. “They are endangered because they don’t have anywhere to live.”
“What do you mean?”
He told me that there were so many black sesame seeds moving around that he couldn’t even count. He said it looked like a horror film where bagel toppings came to life.
My first reaction was to laugh. Gosh, isn’t that funny. I have a lice infestation. I went through an entire country spreading a parasite during my honeymoon. LOL!
Uneasily, Dave joined in on the laughter, too.
Then we pretended that whole episode didn’t just happen. We continued walking toward the farmers’ market as if we were different humans—ones who didn’t currently have minuscule animals eating away at their flesh. It was the most acute case of denial I’d experienced since I was twenty and still suspected that I might grow another ten inches.
“So we’re going to get broccoli and what else?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see what else looks good.”
We were half a block away from the vegetable stalls when we both paused and looked at each other.
“Wait, we can’t go to the farmers’ market right now,” Dave said.
I furrowed my brows as the realization finally dawned on me, too. “Holy shit,” I said, “I have lice!”
An hour later, I was sitting on a chair in our apartment hallway. Dave stood behind me, brushing through each segment of hair with a fine-tooth comb. We had bought just about every lice-murdering product at Duane Reade, and upon getting home, I had doused my hair with the toxic shampoo. There were nontoxic methods, but I wanted poison! I wanted complete decimation! The fumes—strong and searing—were making my eyes sting, and I relished the implications of this particular burn.
Dave sounded bilious as he explained the scene he was confronted with: “It looks like a city was napalmed and the civilians