Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (14 page)

“Does he have it?” my wife asked me.

“Uh, well, he kinda does. Not all the way like her. Just a few here and there. Maybe that’s okay.”

“I gotta treat his hair too.”

“Crap.”

I sat idly by and watched my wife painstakingly remove the nits from our son’s scalp while he brayed and screamed like a captive animal. When the day of tireless lice eradication was at last all over, the kids went to sleep and it was time for the final examination.

“Who examines who first?” I asked.

“Do me first,” my wife said. “Then I’ll do you.”

“This is
sooooooo
sexy.”

“Let’s just get it over with.”

She turned around and I teased out small bunches of hair at a time, making a sincere effort to look for the lice, applying a jeweler’s eye to the tens of thousands of roots and follicles. I found nothing. But I didn’t want my wife to think that I was half-assing the search, so I checked her scalp three, four times over.

“I don’t think there’s anything here,” I said. “And I’m not saying that because I’m lazy. I really don’t think you have it.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. I could tell she wanted to believe it.

“There’s nothing here. I think you’re good.”

Now it was my turn. I presented myself for inspection, shutting my eyes and silently hoping that I wouldn’t end up sitting in the Lice Chair for two hours.

“I can’t find anything,” she said, and I heaved a sigh of relief. But neither of us was 100 percent convinced. Before bed, we both shampooed our hair thrice over. When we lay down to sleep after all of the driving and combing and vacuuming, the specter of the lice still lingered.

“Who do you think gave it to her?” my wife asked.

“I don’t know. Someone gave it to her. She didn’t get it herself. She’s a very clean little girl. Someone rotten and filthy transmitted it.”

“Do you think it was one of the neighborhood kids?”

I began ranking all the kids at her bus stop in order of cleanliness.

“We took her to a playground,” I said. “Maybe she got it there. Maybe we shouldn’t go back.”

“Maybe we should warn other people.”

“Maybe that playground is one giant biohazard. Remember the pudding shorts?”

“I actually read online tonight that lice prefer clean girls’ hair because it’s long.”

“Really? So, in a way, having lice is actually a sign of
good
hygiene.”

“Definitely.”

“Totally.”

I had now shifted from being a cruel judge of the lice-ridden to one of their more passionate advocates.
How dare anyone think my child is dirty simply because she has lice? No one better tease her.
I realized that obsessing over the source of the lice had turned me into a paranoid lunatic. The truth is that getting lice has virtually nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with bad luck, and the lengths to which you must go to eliminate lice serve as proof of just how durable the little fuckers are.

The itch on my scalp came back.
Oh God. What if I really do have it? What if the lice were dormant until now and are beginning to lay their eggs inside my pillow? What if I open my mouth when I’m sleeping and they shit into my throat? What if they crawl down to my dick? CRABS. I’ll have crabs. I’ll have crabs and I wouldn’t even have gotten the pleasure of making love to a stripper in order to contract them.

The itching spread. I scratched my neck. I scratched my ear. I scratched my elbow. Soon my wife began scratching everything as well: her face, her legs, her underarms. Imaginary lice had washed over us, skittering around our bodies and infiltrating every nook of the house. Nowhere was safe. We would never rid ourselves of them. The entire house would have to be burned down and rebuilt from scratch. Our minivan would have to be traded in, and we’d have to face the ethical dilemma of whether to tell the dealer that our car was a receptacle for indestructible vermin. Our lives would never, ever be the same.

Morning broke and I found that, despite my growing paranoia, I had managed to fall asleep. My wife arose and sprinted to our kids’ room to check the sheets in the bunk beds. She plucked a single living louse from the pillowcase on the top bunk and held it up.

“Another one!” she cried out.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means we clean everything again.”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO . . .”

My daughter went to lie down on the carpet and my wife quickly reprimanded her.

“Don’t put your head on anything.”

“I can’t put my head on the floor?” she asked.

“No, you can’t touch anything with your head all day.”

We washed the sheets and vacuumed the mattresses and went through the shampoo-and-combing process a second, awful time. By the time my wife had finished the job, there wasn’t a trace of lice to be found anywhere in the house. No bugs. No nits. I took the lice that my wife had combed out and carefully shook them into a plastic bag, then disposed of them outside, where they could never menace us again. Gradually, a feeling of normalcy returned to the house.

“I think you got them all,” I told my wife.

“I think I did too.”

“You could do this for a living. You could be the Lice Fixer.”

“They have a lady like that here. She’s called the Lice Lady. You pay her three hundred dollars and she gets rid of the lice in your kid’s hair for you.”

“Ewwww! There must be lice all over her house.”

“Yeah. Disgusting.”

As the days went on, the lice threat slowly faded from view. The couch and the rug and the children’s hair remained spotless. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, I get a little itch. I think about the possibility of a single nit that we missed somewhere, hiding inside a shoe, or in a curtain, or tucked in the folds of a bathroom towel. It’s lying dormant, waiting for the right time to hatch, the right time to bust out and find a scalp to nest in, to start a new family of bloodthirsty little fuckers that will stop at nothing until my house and my family have been ruined. It’s waiting for me. I know it. Then again, maybe it left here and is out in the world, ready to find a new host. Maybe it’s found
you
.

T
here was a list and I never deviated from the list. It had eggs, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, cereal, vegetables, and fruit. Too much fruit, too many vegetables: bananas, three different kinds of berries, apples, oranges, lettuce, carrots, peppers, parsley, and more. I was in the minivan, scouting the list, and I knew right away that it demanded way too much time in the produce section. It was always my mission to get in and out of the grocery store as quickly as possible. One time, I made it to the store and back home in just thirty-eight minutes with both kids in tow. I was determined to beat that record, but the more time I spent in the produce section picking and weighing shit while two hundred old people milled about groping for Fuji apples, the more likely it was that I would fail.

I had two coupons in my back pocket that my wife said I should use at the register to save money. But I considered those coupons an optional luxury. Using coupons meant that I would have to rely on a clerk to scan them, and that one of the coupons would inevitably scan wrong, and that the manager would be called in, and that I would be stuck in that store for nine years. It wasn’t worth saving thirty cents on a box of orzo if I couldn’t beat the record.

There were four options for handling the children at the store. I could get one of those mammoth carts that were shaped like fire trucks and strap both kids into the cab up front. But those things were vile. They took up too much space in the aisle, and grocery store managers always made sure to litter every aisle with four hundred stand-alone displays for Cajun seasoning that were just wide enough to destroy traffic flow. It should be legal to take your cart and blast straight through these displays, as if they were fruit carts in a movie car chase. Also, the fire truck carts never had enough room for actual food. And my children always wanted to get out of them halfway through.

Another option was to put my son in a regular cart and let my daughter roam free. This never worked because my son would see my daughter waltzing around freely and realize that he was getting a raw deal. I could also let both kids roam free, but that usually ended with them having a slap fight in the freezer aisle. Instead, my strategy was to let them push around the little green kiddie carts provided by our store while I went about the business of actual shopping. My kids went running for the kiddie cart section as I grabbed a self-scanner. All the kiddie carts were taken.

“There are no carts!” my daughter said.

“You guys can hang on the side of my cart,” I said. Now, this was a horrible thing to suggest. There are diagrams all over every shopping cart that tell you to not do this. The girl had a penchant for hanging off the front of the cart and then jumping off as it was rolling forward, allowing the cart to break both her ankles quickly and efficiently. But time was of the essence, so I grasped for the quickest and easiest possible solution. No way I was gonna get a fire truck cart.

Then, by the grace of God, a store worker came by with two green kiddie carts for my kids.

“Thank you so much,” I said to him. I turned to my kids. “What do you guys say to the nice man for giving us these great carts?”

My son looked up at him and shouted out, “WHAT’S UP, FUCKFACE?!”

He had just watched a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD where someone says something that sounds like “WHAT’S UP, FUCKFACE?!” but is
not
“WHAT’S UP, FUCKFACE?!” But when my son repeated it, it sounded very much like “WHAT’S UP, FUCKFACE?!” I bent down and looked my son in the eye.

“No, no, no. We don’t say that. I know you’re not trying to say anything bad, but it sounds like something bad.”

“WHAT’S UP, FUCKFAY?!”

The nice store worker walked away, unfazed. He was clearly used to children shouting random crap inside the store.

“Seriously, what is it that you’re saying?” I asked my son. “‘What’s up, Front Case?’”

“WUZZOUT, FUCKFACE?!”

Other shoppers began to stare.

“You know what? Let’s just move along.”

The children began fighting over who got to use the first green cart.

“I want it!” the girl screamed.

“Me too!” said the boy.

“They’re the same cart!” I said. “Do you not see this? There is literally no difference between these carts. They are the SAME.”

“I want it!” she said.

“WHAT’S UP, FUCKFACE?!”

“I’m leaving to go shopping,” I said. “You two can jolly well sort this out yourselves.” This is what you have to do as a parent. You have to let the kids fight it out or else they’ll constantly look to you to solve their disputes and then bitch about the way you solved them.

Eventually, the two kids sorted it out and came trailing behind me. I got a text from my wife asking me to also get half-and-half for her coffee. I texted her back that I would and then instantly forgot that I had to get it. If it wasn’t written on the list, it was doomed.

I went to the deli first because the deli takes forever and my kids wanted ham. I tried using the digital ordering kiosk but it was broken because of course it was fucking broken. God forbid the most convenient amenity of the entire market be operational. Both my kids came running up with their carts and took thirty numbers each from the electronic deli number dispenser. We were next in line behind an old woman who was buying an eighth of a pound of everything in the case. I redirected my children to the produce section, got everything on the list, went back to the deli, and by this time my children were so starved for lunch meat that I was prepared to cut off a shank of my own thigh, cure it in brine, and feed it to them.

Finally, the deli guy called one of our sixty numbers. He gave us our pound of ham and I quickly handed slices to my kids, who then promptly dropped their slices, picked them up off the floor, and ate them. While they were eating filthy, germ-ridden floor ham, I double-checked the list to make sure I had no reason to go back to the produce section, because the produce section was worse than South Sudan. We were good. I still had twenty-seven minutes to work with.

“We’ve got all our fruits and veggies. LET’S GO, DUDES,” I said.

We got away from the deli and the produce section. The next thing on the list was a box of organic alphabet cookies. I had no idea where they were. They could have been anywhere. They could have been in the cookie aisle. They could have been in the natural foods aisle. They could have been located merely in my wife’s imagination. I scoured the aisles, searching for the box while trying to keep an eye on both children, who were now openly racing their little green carts up and down the aisles. I came by a box of organic alphabet cookies, but they were CINNAMON and not VANILLA. Would that matter? Would my children, who were pickier about food than a dying Steve Jobs was, notice the difference and cry? Or was it better to get credit for securing everything on the list?
Fuck it.
In they went.

I ticked off the other items: the sugar and flour and cereal and chicken. Seventeen minutes left to break the record. So close I could taste it. My daughter asked for a bag of potato chips and I relented.

“Can we open them now?” she asked.

“I have to buy them. Then we can open them.”

“But you took that Coke and opened it and drank it.”

“That’s different because I’m a grown-up.”

I had three more items left: cheese sticks, yogurt, and milk. I checked the list again just to make sure I wasn’t wrong. We were nearly done and nothing traumatic had happened. We hauled ass to the dairy aisle and I looked at the yogurt. There were fifty-seven different varieties: tubs and tubes and little four-packs of Greek yogurt, Dannon yogurt, whipped yogurt, plain yogurt, and Danimals, which are not actually yogurt but rather yogurt-like drinks forged from buffalo drippings. I was baffled. All the list said was “yogurt,” which was bullshit. It may as well have said, “GUESS THE YOGURT ASSHOLE HAHAHAHA.”

I grabbed the first tub of vanilla yogurt I saw, then the cheese sticks and the milk, and we were done. Twelve more minutes to go. We could still break the record.

I got to the SCAN IT! line and there was one person in front of me who was clearly using his little scanner for the first time and was in need of assistance. But he didn’t go looking for help. He just stood there, waiting for the magic grocery store fairies to appear to solve the mysteries of the self-checkout for him. He had enough groceries to survive a bioterrorist attack.

My kids began to mentally break down while waiting in line. They had yet to understand the concept of lines.
Why do we have to wait? Who are these other people? Can’t they just die? This isn’t fair.
They began pushing their carts into each other and crying. I told them to stop. Then my son rammed me with his cart.

“Please don’t hit Daddy with the cart. You guys are doing such a great job right now and I’m so proud of you, but now Daddy’s shins are bruised and he’s losing valuable time. Can you help me out here? Can you wait patiently?”

“Oat-kay.”

My daughter pointed at the candy display and gave me her best “I’m smiling because I want something” smile.

“Can I have some gum?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t want to fight. You could have offered to sever my finger to speed up the process and I would have agreed. It’s like an innocent man breaking down and confessing after eight hours of relentless interrogation. I wish I could have just settled down and enjoyed the time I had with my kids no matter where we were, to not treat excursions like this as one more goddamn obstacle in the way of getting the day over with. But I couldn’t. The people around me were less people than they were faceless enemy combatants. Giving myself some arbitrary time record to break was my only way of turning it into a sport instead of a grueling ordeal to be endured. When you’re single, you don’t think twice about going to the store. It’s nothing. But for someone with kids in tow, it’s an
expedition
. It requires planning and equipment and detailed strategies. It’s as daunting as a paralyzed man attempting to dress himself.

My daughter pointed at a small bag of sour cream and onion chips.

“Can we have those chips too?”

In they went.

“And can we have some M&M’s?”

In they went.

“And can we have some Golden Oreos?”

In they went. Ten minutes left. Every minute you wait in line at a grocery store takes four hours in perceived time. It’s like being high.

Finally, the amateur in front of us was finished and I whipped out my scanner to show the rest of the store how checking out was done. Everyone was gonna be in awe of my speed at the register. Managers would salute me. The deli guy would hand me bonus ham.

But my scanner thingy didn’t work. The cashier needed the key. Why she couldn’t have had the register key on her at all times was beyond me. Eight minutes left. Hope was fading. I double-checked the list one final time and saw the word “STAMPS” in block letters surrounded by a tasteful double border. Stamps were easy to forget because they came at the end of the grocery run, after the main items on the list were already obtained. I was not in the mood for stamps.
Fuck those stamps.

We finally had everything paid for and bagged and I got the kids back across the Parking Lot of Death and into the car. The girl demanded her gum and I tore through the packaging with my teeth to get her a stick of Trident as quickly as possible.

“You guys were amazing,” I told them. “We CRUSHED that trip. We SLAYED it. We CRUSHSLAYED it. Now hold on to your butts because I’m driving fast all the way home.”

I spied the clock and had a scant six minutes to go. The idea of getting across town that quickly was foolhardy. But screw that. I would get home under the wire and have my record and the whole world would bow at my feet. We were going to do it. The record was
mine
.

Then I pulled out of my spot and a ninety-year-old woman in a Crown Victoria blocked the way for ten minutes.

“Guhhhhhhhh.”

“Dad, that woman is blocking the way,” said my daughter. “And that’s not fair!”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Can I have more gum?”

“No.”

We broke free and when I finally got home, I began to unload the bags and bring them into the kitchen, dejected but proud of the children for helping with the effort.
We’ll get them next time, by God.
Once the last bag was inside, it was all over. No more store. Not for a few days, at least. My wife began sorting through everything.

“This isn’t the right yogurt,” she said. “And where’s the half-and-half? And the stamps? Did you use the coupons? Why did you buy Golden Oreos?”

“Because I earned them.”

“WHAT’S UP, FUCKFACE?!”