It looked exactly like the bug that had fallen on his arm in the Kyoto ryokan.
(To this day, that bug is still inexplicable. I looked it up and there is no such thing as a queen louse. I try not to wonder about that too much. Mostly, the lice were as billed: dark brown and the size of sesame seeds.)
While I sat there, I thought back to all the neck pillows I’d tried on at the Narita airport. I wondered if lice inject you with psychotropic substances that make you think it would be a great idea to rub your head all over everything. (I’m sorry, people of Japan!)
Dave, oddly enough, had only four lice in his hair. When we did some research, we found out that they were repelled by the acidic shampoo he uses for his psoriasis. It was nice for him to realize that there was at least one positive to having a skin disorder.
Even though I didn’t tell him at the time—it was my duty to make him feel guilty for being a subpar lice-checker—committing genocide on my lice population was one of the most romantic things that he’d ever done for me.
I didn’t speak about my parasite to many people, because having lice is stigmatizing and they scare people, as they damn well should: Those suckers hurt and they are immensely contagious from head-to-head contact. Those evil little bastards exploit our love of hugs. That’s how they’ve survived for like a billion years. Nits have been found on Egyptian mummies. Vikings even carried delicately crafted lice combs in their belts alongside their most essential item: their sword. They—muscular masculine marauders from Scandinavia—were so freaked out by the little bugs that they got buried with their combs in case they needed to battle lice in the afterlife.
One of the few people I told was my dad. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You know the story about how me and your mom got lice, right?”
He was referring to the time they both got crabs when they were twenty. Even though I’ve heard the story several times, I still don’t know it, because I’ve worked hard after each telling to block it out.
“Dad, I didn’t get genital lice!” I said.
He told me that was too bad because it meant that my lice story was a helluvalot less interesting than his.
When I got off the phone, I spent the next day wondering how lice knew which patches of hair they belonged to—did I have to worry that my head lice could suddenly, due to positioning, become pube lice? Luckily, I found the answer to that was no. Head lice can move around only on thinner head hair, while pubic lice evolved to navigate coarser hair.
Except for one particularly bad day when I contemplated lighting my head on fire, I brightened up over the next few weeks. I also stayed incredibly vigilant. If you leave one louse or nit behind, you can easily reinfect yourself. I knew it was overkill—many entomologists say you cannot catch lice from anywhere except head-to-head contact—but because I’d spread all my infested baggage all over our apartment as soon as I’d gotten home from Japan, most of our place was under quarantine. That, of course, included the increasingly superfluous aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I did find humor in the fact that something widely considered a childhood affliction was preventing me from using the piece of furniture that symbolized my burgeoning adulthood. It felt like someone, somewhere, was trying to sabotage my maturity.
After two weeks without any evidence of lice or nits, one is considered in the clear. Until that time, I kept up a daily routine. Every morning, I’d wash my sheets, shampoo my hair, comb it out with a tiny-tined comb, and then investigate any detritus with a magnifying glass.
During this process, I came to realize that if it weren’t for me, then all those tiny beings wouldn’t have had life. I gave them life. They gestated near my follicles, hatched from my strands, and “breast fed” from my scalp. They could not survive without the heat from my head. You give and you give. They take and they take. Throughout it all, you worry nonstop. Is this what it feels like to be a mom?
A friend once told me that I look exactly like Matza Ball Breaker, a girl on the Chicago roller derby team. She called our resemblance “uncanny.” So I searched for Matza Ball Breaker on the internet. When I saw her, I was mystified. We both have hair on our heads and a chin below our mouths. We could also both claim a set of eyes. Most likely, she, like me, had a vagina as well. Other than that, I was left deeply confounded. My supposed doppelgänger looked nothing like me—or at least the concept of me that exists in my head.
Even though I’ve seen my image—photos and reflections—for thirty-four years, I’m confused as to which—if any—portrays reality. How I appear to myself is not at all consistent; my image is like a moving piece of newsprint that I can never fully read.
The me that I see in the mirror is often, though not always, more attractive than the me I see in photographs. When I see photos, it feels as though I must have been kidnapped as the shutter tripped and had Yoda placed in my stead.
There is nothing worse (except for murder, of course, and finding a long wiry hair in your entrée) than hearing someone say, “That’s a great photo of you,” only to get a glimpse of it and see staring back at you a mustachioed gnome with water-balloon cheeks and a grimace that could stunt-double for an elephant’s anus. If that is a “great” photo, then what am I when I’m captured at my everyday?
I’ve tried to get a handle on this discrepancy by pointing at various disagreeable photos of me and asking my friends, “Is that really what I look like?”
Then it’s often discouraging when they say, “Yes.”
In order to survive, I have to tell myself that everyone—all the people in the world—must be way overdue for cataract surgery.
No matter how sure I am, my perceptions are inevitably challenged. Recently, I snapped a selfie that I liked—there I am, I thought after taking my twenty-fourth shot—so I asked Dave for validation.
“How about this?” I said full of hope. “Is that what I look like?”
“Yes,” he said.
I was elated until he quickly added, “Except for your face is much rounder and your cheeks are bigger.”
Thus, the various manifestations of my appearance continue to confound me.
I was always uncomfortable with the author photo on my first book, but not for the usual reasons. This photo actually promised a little too much—unlike most, it didn’t make me look entirely like an Ewok—but friends and family reassured me that it was a fair depiction.
I spent many months going to events with a fear that I’d sense a palpable disappointment upon the audience’s realization that the real me didn’t live up to the poster outside. Everything was okay—if it was happening, people kept their snickering to themselves. I felt encouraged—perhaps I actually was attractive—until a loathsome evening in the middle of June at a small event space in Midtown Manhattan.
Before the reading, a woman lingered in the back by the table of books. She had my book in her hand and was rifling through the pages. She nonchalantly asked me who I’d come to see.
“I’m actually reading tonight,” I told her.
“Which book?” she asked.
I told her it was the one in her hands.
She turned the book over and appraised the photo. “Oh, that’s you?” she asked. I sensed a bit of incredulity.
“Yes,” I said.
She laughed and gave me a knowing glance. “I have some glamour shots, too,” she said.
After all the evidence—the misleading doppelgängers, the fickle photos, and the many