Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (13 page)

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The door slammed shut behind me and I found myself out for a walk, alone. I set out down the path toward the creek where the girl had walked for over an hour and engaged with me in petty misdemeanors. I was unencumbered, free to power walk as fast or as slow as I pleased. It didn’t feel anywhere near as liberating as it used to.

I
bought my son an electric toothbrush because trying to brush his teeth manually had become a nightly exercise in forcible mouth sodomy. Kids don’t understand why they have to put toothpaste on a brush and scrub their teeth for twenty agonizing seconds, and even if you tell them why—
Your teeth will fall out! Girls will never kiss you!
—they still don’t get it.

I tried bribing my son. I tried reverse psychology by saying, “Whoa, hey, don’t go brushing those teeth! That would get you in big trouble, amigo.” I tried doing that thing they suggest in parenting books where you say to your kid, “Your teeth aren’t brushed!” This presents them with a problem to solve.
My teeth are not brushed; therefore, I must brush them.
The idea is that most children like solving problems rather than being told what to do. You can’t ask them to brush their teeth because that gives them a chance to say no. The phrasing must be precise, like the wording of a will.

But the boy was no sap. He knew that he was three years old and had NO problems of any sort. No life-form on earth has it easier than a three-year-old child. You don’t have to go to school, you don’t have to have a job, and you’re perfectly happy having a train for a best friend. What did he need to solve a problem for? Problems were for bigger, dumber people. He could have given a shit about his unbrushed teeth.

So every night, I had to grab his big head and jam the brush into his mouthhole and he cried and screamed and acted as if I were a Hanoi prison guard toying with his psyche. Fed up with this process, I bought an electric toothbrush and put all kinds of cool stickers on it, hoping he might come to enjoy brushing his teeth.

“Look, it’s got a motor!” I said. “It’s a toy! You can blast all the bad plaque goblins with it!” You have to make everything sound fun to a child. Brushing your teeth is
blasting plaque goblins
. Broccoli soup is
monster
soup. A trip to the drugstore is a trip to the
witch’s laboratory
. It gets tiring.

I put some toothpaste on the new toothbrush (we bought five different kinds of paste before finding one that suited his palate), turned it on, and handed it to him. He ran into my room with it, threw it on the ground so that the toothpaste could pick up random hairs and bits of lint, then pulled down his underwear and started grabbing his dick. I rinsed the brush off, put on more paste, and handed it back to him.

“Once you brush your teeth, Daddy will tell you a story.”

Slowly but surely, my son turned the brush on, raised the brush to his mouth, and placed it on one of his teeth. Massive success. I felt as if I’d just deadlifted five hundred pounds. Only fifteen some-odd teeth to go and my effort would be an official triumph. I figured that now the brush was in his mouth, we’d be cruising.

Instead, the boy took the brush out of his mouth and stared down at his dick. Then he looked up at me. I knew what was coming next. There are those moments when you know exactly what’s going to happen, only you’re powerless to stop it.

I screamed out, “NOT ON YOUR PENIS, NOOOOO!!!”

But he was too fast and I was too old and fat. The vibrating brush went right down onto his dick, which I’m sure felt terrific to him. And then, once the boy felt his dick was sufficiently brushed, he stuck it back in his mouth. Then he giggled.

My mom was visiting, because of course she was. Weird shit like this only happens when grandparents visit, as if the children wait for that exact moment to make you look bad. I went down and told her what happened, and I assumed she and I would have a good laugh over it.
He brushed his peener, HA HA! Kids brush the damnedest things!

Instead, she quickly inhaled through clenched teeth, the way you do when you watch someone tell a bad joke during a wedding toast.

“Oh, Drew.”

She looked truly concerned, as if I were raising a goddamn criminal. It wasn’t my fault, Mom. I didn’t tell him to brush his dick and then eat it. And don’t think you would have done any better.

Ever since that night, I have instituted the following rule in our house:
No one is allowed to brush his or her teeth without pants on
.
Ever.
It was one of those commonsense rules I never would have thought of ten years ago because I was single and alone and had yet to meet anyone who enjoyed brushing his own penis.

M
y daughter had just gotten home from school and my wife pulled me aside to speak to me in hushed tones.

“Did you hear about Marshall Reilly?” she asked me.

“Who is that? Is that a famous person?”

“It’s one of her classmates.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Yes, really. You’ve met his mother several times.”

“I have?”

“You know! She has brown hair. Her husband’s name is Mike. He’s a lawyer.”

“(blank stare)”

“Anyway, the point is that he’s in her class, and he got head lice this week. We got a note about it.”

“HEAD LICE?!”

“Shhhhh!”

“Oh man, that’s gross as shit,” I said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Do they not bathe him? Does the kid play in the toilet all day?”

“I don’t know, but we should keep an eye on her.”

“Pfft. She’s not gonna get head lice. She takes a bath every day. She’s a pretty little girl. Only fat boys who smell like old clams get head lice.”

“I’m sure she won’t, but I don’t like the idea of the head lice kid going to school with her every day.”

“She’ll be fine,” I said. “No way she gets head lice.”

Many Months Later

The girl got off the school bus on a Friday afternoon scratching her head and I thought nothing of it. She scratched it as she walked down the street. She scratched it while she was watching TV. She scratched it while she ate dinner, and while she colored in her coloring book, and while she begged me for an ice cream sandwich. At some point, after hours and hours of scratching, enough to tear off her own scalp, I finally connected the dots.

“Hey,” I said to my wife, “she sure is scratching her head a lot.”

My wife’s eyes widened. “I was just gonna say that!”

“Maybe she has dandruff. I have lots of dandruff. Look . . .” I scratched my head and thirty pounds of dead skin sloughed off. “Dandruff.”

“I’m worried she has lice.”

“No way.”

“Remember when Marshall Reilly got it?”

“Who?”

“One of her classmates. You’ve met his mother several times.”

“I have?”

“You know! She has brown hair. Her husband’s name is Mike. He’s a lawyer.”

“(blank stare)”

“Oh, for God’s sake. I’m gonna check her.”

“Don’t do that. She’s fine.”

I was trying to keep my wife away from the girl’s hair because little girls do not like it when you touch their hair. Every time I dared to approach my daughter with a hairbrush, she would scream as if she were being subjected to Civil War–era surgery. Then I would tell her to stop screaming and she would scream even
louder
, and then I would brush her hair anyway as punishment for all that screaming. This was not a healthy way of doing things. My daughter will probably grow up with an intense fear of hair. Wigs will scare her to death. She’ll marry a guy with alopecia and that will be that.

So I was averse to exploring the girl’s scalp, but my wife was more than happy to attack other people’s heads. At random hours, she would walk up to me and begin looking through my hair without even bothering to ask me if that was something I wanted. If I had an eye booger, she would jam a finger into my eye socket without so much as a warning. And she happily assaulted the girl with a hairbrush for minutes at a time every morning. She had no fear of reprisals. She’d be great at mugging people.

She walked up to our daughter, who was parked in front of the TV, and began rooting through her hair.

“What are you doing?” the girl yelled. “STOP!”

“I’m checking your hair,” my wife said.

“Go away!” she said, burying her head in one of the throw cushions on the couch.

“No, no, no! Don’t put your head there. If you have lice, they’ll get in the cushion.”

“STOP!”

“Drew, I see little things in here. Come look.”

I stared down into my daughter’s wriggling head and saw a bunch of little blond capsules, as wide as two hairs across. They were shiny, almost greasy in appearance.

“It’s probably dandruff,” I said.

“That’s not dandruff.”

Now the research began. My wife hopped onto the computer, Googled “head lice symptoms,” and opened up every single link.

“Look here,” she said. “It says, ‘Nits resemble tiny pussy willow buds. Nits can be mistaken for dandruff, but unlike dandruff, they can’t be easily brushed out of hair.’ That’s what she has.”

“You’re overreacting,” I said. At this point, I was like the clueless sheriff you see in movies, the last guy to acknowledge that aliens have invaded.

“Well, let’s look at the pictures and see,” she said. I tried to stop her from clicking “IMAGES” because when you search for an illness on Google Image Search, it gives you photos of the ugliest people imaginable exhibiting the worst symptoms imaginable. Also, you get a picture of a penis, for no reason at all.

But I was too late. She hit search and I was confronted with a mosaic of severely lice-ridden scalps. Nits, nits everywhere. Bleeding heads. Broken skin. Pus-filled abscesses. In the center of it all was a photo of an adult louse, swollen to ten times its size after feasting on a child’s blood. Oh God, it was so awful. I can still see it in my head even though I don’t want to.

“Close the browser! Close the browser!” I said.

“You see now? She has it.”

“It could still be dandruff.”

“Oh my God, Drew. What is wrong with you? Can you please accept reality here?”

I still clung to the now-infinitesimal chance of this all being an elaborate ruse. I didn’t want it to be head lice because I didn’t want to deal with what was certain to be a world of bullshit involved in ridding my daughter of it. I stood in the dining room and watched from afar as my wife went back and dug into my daughter’s head.

“STOP!!!!”

“Honey, hold still,” my wife told her. “You definitely have lice.”

“I do?”

I ran to my wife and tried to correct her. “Shhh! Don’t say she has lice in front of her! She’ll get embarrassed!”

“I really have lice?” my daughter asked.

“You
might
have lice,” I said. “It’s not definitive. No need to think of yourself as filthy or diseased just yet.”

“There are nits all over her hair,” my wife said. Then she struck gold. “Oh my God. There it is.” She reached into the girl’s hair and plucked off a tiny little black speck with legs, then held it up like it was a fugitive that she had been hunting down for years. “This is one of them,” she said triumphantly.

I stared at it. To the naked eye, a head louse doesn’t look all
that
bad. It’s just a little tiny thing. It’s when you hop on the Internet and look at one that’s been magnified fifty times over that the sheer horror of it hits you.

“What if it’s a flea?” I asked.

“You’re gonna have to go to CVS and pick up some shampoo.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I’m gonna call the doctor. We have to strip all the beds in the house. We have to wash all her clothes, and we have to vacuum everything. And we have to wash our hands after touching
anything
. Otherwise they come back and you have to do it all over again.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I don’t want lice in this house.” My wife is half-German, so obsessive cleanliness is her birthright. “Go to CVS and see if you can find a shampoo. And a comb. They make special lice combs.”

My daughter, meanwhile, was staring up at us with increasing alarm. “Do I have bugs in my hair?”

My wife knelt down. “Honey, we’re doing everything we can to make sure you don’t have bugs in your hair, and that they don’t get anywhere else in the house. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I hopped in the car and drove at light speed to the nearest drugstore. The lice shampoos were on the bottom shelf in the skin care section, tucked away from prying eyes. I tried to buy the most serious-looking one I could find. There was one called RID, with a logo shaped like a stop sign. That seemed very stern to me. Also, there was a comb included free with the shampoo, all for fifteen bucks. So I grabbed the kit along with a bag of chips. I never ran an errand without properly rewarding myself.

When I returned home, my wife was just getting off the phone with the doctor, one of superstar Dr. Ferris’s satellite pediatricians. She had taken copious notes during the call. It looked as if she had taken down enough information to launch a Mars probe.

I took out the lice removal kit and showed it to her, beaming with pride.

“The comb came free!” I said proudly.

“Oh, that shampoo’s no good.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s a pesticide. Look at the label.”

I looked at the label and checked the FAQ on the website. My wife was right. You had to ventilate the room before using the shampoo. You could not touch the shampoo. You could not eat the shampoo. There were enough warnings on the label to make you think you were handling a chemical weapon. I looked at the reviews for the shampoo on Amazon (which I should have done prior to jumping in my car, but I really wanted some chips), and the reviews averaged two stars. You could sell a baby snuff film on Amazon and still get their reviewers to throw you four stars, but this shampoo was not only poisonous but also ineffective. One review headline said “USELESS” and nothing else.

“Jesus, this stuff is horrible,” I said.

“The doctor has a shampoo we can use.”

“So what’s it called? I’ll go back.”

“No, she literally has it. She has it left over from when one of her kids got it. A comb too. She said you could go to her house and grab it, but you have to go now, before she goes to bed.”

I had never had a doctor extend such a courtesy. “She’s okay with me going to her home?”

“Yeah, isn’t that incredible?”

“I better go before she realizes that she just broke the fourth wall. The rest of doctordom will never forgive her.”

“When you get back,” my wife said, “we have to check you.”

“What do you mean, we have to check me?”

“The whole house is compromised. We have to check everyone, including you and me.”

“Pfft. I don’t have lice.”

“You don’t know that. You could have given it to her.”

“How dare you!” I said. “For all we know,
you
could have given it to
her
!”

“You don’t always shampoo at the gym.”

“Well, sometimes YOU shower at night. They could jump in your hair during the day and have hours to have hot lice sex with one another. Just because you’re a girl doesn’t mean you’re so immaculate.”

And then my head itched. I tried to avoid scratching it because I didn’t want my wife’s theory proven that instant. The itch grew and grew and grew until it felt as if there were a giant louse perched atop my head, rubbing his greasy exoskeleton all over me. I caved in and scratched my head.

“This is not a lice scratch,” I said. “Just one of my many normal, daily itches.”

My wife handed me a dishrag. “Cover the headrest in your car with this. Otherwise they can embed themselves in the headrest and lay eggs.”

“No, they can’t.”

“Yes, they can. We’re gonna have to vacuum the minivan too. You gotta run now. That doctor is waiting for you.”

I got back into the car and laid the dishrag over my headrest. I felt the itch on my scalp again but tried my best to ignore it. I even turned the radio up because I thought it would help distract me. But the itch was there. It was
alive
. It was screaming and yelling at me to address it, to give it the recognition it wanted.
I can’t have lice. I shower every day. It’s just dandruff. Jussssst dandruff. And if it’s just dandruff, why then I’d be a fool NOT to scratch it!
So I did. I scratched the shit out of my head for a solid mile.

I got to the doctor’s house and she greeted me at the door in her nightgown and I did my best to not look directly at her because I felt like I was intruding on sacred ground. She gave me the shampoo and the comb and I thanked her over and over again, as if she had just given me a check for a billion dollars.
Oh, thank you, thank you. I can’t believe how nice this was of you. You don’t know how much this means to our family. And I know you have a life and a house of your own and you didn’t even charge me a co-pay for it and that is arguably the greatest thing one person has ever done for another and I AM FOREVER IN YOUR DEBT.

I raced home with the precious lice-killing kit. The next morning, we stripped every sheet, washed every stitch of clothing, and vacuumed every square inch of the house. We even washed the covers of the couch cushions. My wife set our daughter up in a wooden chair with a little smock tied around her neck. She put on dishwasher gloves and applied the shampoo to the girl’s scalp, making sure every strand was lovingly coated in fancy
organic
poison. Then she took the comb, which looked like two dozen steel sewing needles bunched tightly together, and went through the hair handful by handful, pulling out COLONIES of lice and showing them to our daughter.

“Was that in my hair?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” my wife said.

“COOL!”

“No, not cool. Ew.”

“Ew.”

It was painstaking work, and the girl sat there, miraculously, for nearly two hours without complaint.

“You are being so good,” my wife told her. “After this, you can have anything you want.”

“Even a car?” she asked.

“Not a car, no.”

The whole time I watched my wife disinfect her, all I could think was
oh shit, I hope I don’t have it
.

“Did you check him?” my wife asked me, pointing to our son.

“Oh, right,” I said. I ran over to the boy and spent exactly half a second running my fingers through his hair. “Nope! Looks good.”

“Drew, you have to
look
.”

I looked again while the boy twisted and squirmed away from me.

“Deddy, no!” he shouted.

“Lemme just check you.” I parted his hair every which way, peeking through the blond curls and praying that I’d find nothing but white scalp. But there was a nit. And another nit. And then three. There weren’t anywhere near as many as there were in the girl’s hair, but they were there. The little egg capsules were unmistakable.