Household Gods

“I’ve been trying to catch the miserable thing all day. And look, I finally did.”

“Oh…” Nicole bit her tongue before she burst out in a flood of English swearwords. Latin still felt strange to her, like a made-up language; something she’d learned in school and recited by rote. She couldn’t cut loose in it. If she started screaming in English, people would think she’d gone round the bend. Did they burn witches here? No English, then. Latin wasn’t enough. She clamped down hard on the most satisfying option of all: a plain old wordless shriek.

Once, about a year before, Kimberley and Justin had come home from Josefina’s with head lice. That had been a nightmare: washing the kids’ hair with Nix, using the Step 2 rinse to help loosen the nits — the eggs — from the hair shafts, and washing everyone’s bedding and spraying the mattresses and the furniture with Rid to kill any nits the children might have shed.

She’d used enough chemicals to exterminate a couple of endangered species. That had been bad enough, but it hadn’t been the worst part: not even close. The worst part was going through Justin’s hair, and especially Kimberley’s, which was both longer and thicker, one strand at a time, looking for the nits the fine-toothed comb that came with the Nix hadn’t been able to free.

The only difference between her and a mother chimpanzee was that chimps had to worry about hair all over the bodies of their offspring, and she didn’t. From then on, she’d understood how and why searching for tiny details got to be known as nitpicking.

“Come over to the window here,” she told Lucius. He rolled his eyes but obeyed. She shifted him around till his head was in the light, and started going through his hair. He didn’t ask what she was doing, which meant he knew. “Oh…” Nicole muttered again, in lieu of anything stronger. Umma might have done this for him before, but she hadn’t done much of a job. His hair was full of telltale white specks. They were so small, they disappeared if you looked at them from the wrong side of the hair shafts, but they were there, all right. They were all too evidently there.

He yelped more than once as she yanked and tugged, pinching nits one by one, sliding her fingers along each laden hair till she could crush them. She wasn’t gentle. Her revulsion was too strong. Each time she crushed a nit, she wanted frantically to wash her hands.

She didn’t do that. What good would it do? She had no soap. Nothing but water.

Every time she thought she’d found the last of them, a dozen more turned up. And there — oh, God, there was a live one, pale and slow and small, like a piece of dandruff with legs. It scuttled away from her questing fingers. Lucius wiggled as she pursued it. “Hold still!” she snapped. Her tone froze him in place. She barely noticed, except that he’d stopped moving. “Got it!” she said, and squashed the thing with a horrid mixture of delight and revulsion. It expired with a faint, crisp pop.

Just as she was about to go on playing mommy ape, a pair of customers wandered in. Her grip on Lucius slackened as she turned to take care of the man and woman. He escaped before she could tighten her hold again, scampering gleefully past the customers into the freedom of the street.

She could hardly go after him, not with both customers settling noisily at a table and calling out their orders. She fed them wine from the middle-range jar, and bread that Julia must have made while she was out, and honey and nuts. They scratched at themselves as they ate and drank, casually and without shame, as if it were something everybody did all the time. Had people been doing that to excess the day before? Had they been doing it in the market square? There’d been so many things to see, so much to absorb, that she hadn’t noticed.

She’d notice now. Oh, Lord, wouldn’t she just?

Her fingers clawed at her own scalp. Something… squished under one of them. She wanted to scream again. She wanted to throw up. She had to stand there while the customers finished and paid her and left, her head throbbing with Excedrin Headache Number Six Hundred and Sixty-six, and one thought beating over and over. Lousy. Lousy. Lousy…

No Nix here. No Step 2. No Rid. She couldn’t have cared less now about what was in them. She just wished she had them. Oh, God, she wished she had them.

Back before Nix and the rest, people had killed lice and nits with kerosene. Some people still did, because it was cheap or because it was what they’d used before they came to the United States. Once a year or so, there’d be a news story about an immigrant child whose head caught fire while her mother was delousing her.

Kerosene seemed like ancient history to Nicole. Unfortunately for her here and now, it wasn’t ancient enough. The Latin vocabulary she’d acquired from wherever she’d acquired it didn’t even have a word for the stuff.

“Julia,” she said, “what do I do about these horrible lice?”

Even in her misery, she’d framed the question with a lawyer’s precision. As she’d hoped, Julia took her to be complaining about the ones she’d just found on Lucius and on herself — oh, Christ, and on herself — rather than about lice in general.

“They are annoying, aren’t they, Mistress?” the slave said with a sigh. Annoying was not the word — was not a tenth the word — Nicole would have used. Julia went on, “I don’t know what you can do except what you did: pick nits, comb hair, and wash it, too, I suppose, though nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em.”

Nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em. Nicole hated bugs of any sort. She could deal with them, but she hated them. The idea that she had bugs living on her would make her scalp crawl if it hadn’t been crawling already. She’d felt dirty before. Now she felt unclean. She’d never known what that meant before, or how much worse it was than merely being filthy.

“Lice carry disease,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t get her anywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Sure enough, Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again, and said what she’d expected, as predictable as a sitcom script: “I never heard that before. Bad air or evil spirits or getting your humors out of line some way, yes, but lice? Beg pardon for saying so, but you sure have been coming up with some funny ideas lately, Mistress.”

“Ha, “ Nicole said in a hollow voice. “Ha, ha.” Convincing Julia she was right wasn’t the most important thing in the world — and that was lucky, too, because she could tell at a glance she wasn’t going to convince Julia, any more than she’d convinced her lead was poisonous. Julia had that every-body-knows look on her face again, the one impenetrable to everything this side of a baseball bat.

And there it was again, the script according to Julia: “How could lice carry disease? Like I said, almost everybody has ‘em. If they carried disease, people would be sick all the time, wouldn’t they? And they aren’t. So lice can’t carry disease.” The slave hugged herself with glee. “Listen to me, Mistress! I’m reasoning like a philosopher.”

Nicole sighed and went back to grinding flour. Julia’s logic was as good as she thought it was — if all lice carried disease all the time. If some lice carried it some of the time, no. But how could Nicole show that? She couldn’t, not by mere assertion, which was all she had going for her here.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Lice weren’t bad only because they carried disease. They were bad because they were disgusting. They were bad because they were lice. And she had them in her hair. In her hair. Every time she itched, she scratched frantically. Sometimes she drew blood. Every once in a while, she squashed something. She wiped her hands on her tunic, again and again.

When she found half a moment, she yelled for Aurelia. The little girl fidgeted more under her hands than Lucius had. She was just as lousy as her brother. As she had with Lucius, Nicole plucked nit after nit from her hair, and killed a couple of live ones for good measure.

But she didn’t have time to do anything even close to a proper job, not with baking and cooking and dealing with customers. It wouldn’t have mattered even if she had had time, because the children’s bedding was sure to be full of nits — and probably full of lice, too. Julia’s, too. And her own. Dear God in heaven, her own too.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Squish — a chitinous yielding under her fingernail. Got one. Five minutes later… Scratch, scratch, scratch.

No matter how she scratched, no matter how she picked through the kids’ hair, she couldn’t keep up. Long before sunset, she understood why Umma hadn’t been able to keep the kids’ heads even halfway clean. She went on anyhow, with the kids getting more and more fractious every time, till she had to light a lamp to see the nits; then even the lamp wasn’t enough. The kids went up to bed in visible relief — there, they probably figured, they’d be safe from her pinching, prodding fingers.

She followed them not long after, tired to the bone. She thought seriously of stripping the bed — but there