“Hi, honey,” I said, as I picked up my end.
“You’re not going to fucking believe this,” Ryan said. Usually when he began our conversations this way, he was gearing up to tell me about one of his clients.
“What now?” I asked.
“The kids are being sent home because their heads are infested with lice,” he said. Rather, he screamed, he barked, he yelled.
“No,” I said. “Oh, God.”
Although my worst maternal fears were of death, disappearance, and drugs, on the level of everyday family operations, head lice was a childrearing reality I had long dreaded. How would I eradicate them? Was the protocol as onerous and horrifying as all those urban legends about the annihilation of super lice suggested? Mothers at the YMCA showed up to swim lessons with their boys’ heads shaved bald, regaling me with horror stories of mondo-monstrous lice that refused to die. I knew cockroaches were difficult to kill, and I imagined Fern’s and Leo’s heads ravaged by bugs in coats of armor.
I headed to Walgreens, where I quickly discovered that RID is expensive. I spent $120 on Complete Lice Elimination Kits, which included the shampoo, gel, and nit combs, all the while wondering how the families who qualified for free and reduced lunch at our elementary school would afford treatment, if, in fact, this was the epidemic Ryan described. A long line of contagious children greeted Ryan as he and other parents arrived, early from work, swearing under their breath. Some of the children had nits, but according to our crusty (and trusty) old school secretary, “Leo had some live ones.”
“They’ll have to fumigate the entire school,” one of the teachers said, and a cluster of them laughed in the hallway, joking about how itchy they felt, down to their feet. None of the children would be allowed to return until cleared by the school nurse.
At home under the bright kitchen light, I sat Leo on a kitchen stool and parted his curls. I was startled to see adult lice scurrying against his scalp. They scuttled fast between the hair follicles like little bugs in a video game. I gasped, Leo started to cry, and Ryan glared. At nine years old, Leo was attached to his hair. It attracted him attention wherever we went. Other mothers and grandmothers often stopped to comment on his curls. “Look at that beautiful hair,” they’d say. “Boys have all the luck, now don’t they?”
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I said. “I just got scared for a second. It’s going to be OK.”
Leo was the first I treated with the chemical shampoo, working RID into his scalp. Our eyes burned as we stood in the steamy bathroom, Leo hiding behind the curtain. Afterward, he sat on his bedroom floor, towel around his waist, as I drenched his hair with gel and combed in every direction—front to back and vice versa; left to right and vice versa—raking the terrain of his skull. I managed to extract whole bugs with identifiable body parts. Some were still moving, their nervous systems giving in to paralysis as I watched.
I then began to wipe each foaming comb full of gunk against a dry paper towel, amassing hundreds of brown unintelligible specks. They looked like sesame seeds. I wasn’t sure if these were the eggs or little dead lice; they were nearly microscopic. The next evening, I used an even stickier conditioner to repeat the nit-combing process. I’d confidently killed the bugs but was warding off new babies with regular combings. Nestled into the warmth of his head, the eggs might still hatch.
No matter how many times I combed, I’d preen dozens of eggs with careful and meticulous swipes of the metal teeth. My job was not yet complete. At midnight, I became a phrenologist examining the bumps of my son’s skull. We rarely shared intimate space anymore. Leo was aloof and casual about our mother-son love, but for several nights in a row, he rested his face on a pillow in my lap, and I remembered him crowning inside me years earlier.
The lice on Fern’s head were not nearly as active, but we killed them anyway. Her problem was the abundance of eggs clinging to the shafts of her long hair. On the third day, when I believed I’d eradicated them all, our neighbor, Betty, took one look at Fern’s head and said, “Oh, poor baby. You’ve still got hundreds of nits.” I honestly thought the nits and casings were flecks of light or dust. Betty came over to our house, where we removed the shade from our reading lamp, and she taught me how to pull nits with my fingernails. Together, we nit-picked until Fern fell asleep. Betty’s was the truest sign of love, in place of disgust, that anybody ever showed us.
At school, Fern and Leo felt stigmatized. Two sisters returned with shaved heads after nearly a week, and they both blamed their new dos on the Ulrich kids. What could we do but remind them how insidious and shrewd a louse could be?
In Francis’s hair, I found the biggest louse of all, and when I showed it to him in the bathtub, he just shrugged his shoulders and kept playing with his army guys—classic fourth-child nonchalance. We treated him and Gus, and their short hair made constant monitoring easy. Ryan was convinced he never had any lice at all.
Irie and I both found nits in our long, thick hair. We treated ourselves and combed our scalps relentlessly, convinced any tingle was a bug. We washed all our bedding in hot water. We bagged up the stuffed
