Household Gods

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.”