What Lives in Our Head

In ghettos and in camps, was lice something that reminded them that they were alive?

“Mom’s positive.” I am sitting in a lice clinic in Waukesha, Wisconsin. One wall is covered in children’s drawings of happy and oversized lice. All the lice are smiling.  The rest of the place is a sterile white. The attendant working my hair – her own hidden beneath an intricate cloth – has just discovered that there is, in fact, lice in my hair. An infestation, she calls it, though she says my case is mild. My daughter, beside me, is also afflicted. We are infested.

In her hair covering, the woman whose fingers dance along my scalp reminds me of a shtetl grandmother. All of a sudden I know where the word “nitpick” comes from. I find it hard to believe I didn’t understand sooner.

When I was a child, you couldn’t pay anyone to do the dirty work for you. These lice clinics didn’t exist back then, when the parasites roamed my head like pilgrims on a new planet. Is this a good place to live? Is this viable ground? The lice suck at our blood, our life juice. Anxiety does the same, but its thorax invisible. Both have legs with grasping hooks.

We are in Wisconsin visiting my in-laws for winter break. And it turns out, we also have lice. This is something I’ve been anxious about since my daughter began kindergarten. I spray her hair daily with a concoction of rosemary and peppermint that is meant to detangle hair and keep lice away.

It didn’t work.

As a child I lived in a home of abuse and neglect. Lice doesn’t have a preference, we are told, between clean or dirty hair. And yet, it seems they prosper amidst the filth. When I was seven, my grandmother was braiding my hair, her hands still smooth, nimble. I remember her gasp, the moment she pulled her hands from my body. In that instant, she didn’t want to touch me. I was disgusting, dirty, undesirable. Head over a metal kitchen sink, toxic shampoo gingerly massaged into my hair, yanking at knots, my neck aching – these things I remember. My nickname in school was Knotty Hair, something I remind my daughter of often as I disentangle her knots, sometimes bringing her to tears. Don’t be me, is what I’m saying.

Today, thirty plus years later, it’s a scourge, an infestation. Words often used in tandem with other antisemitic epithets. I feel nothing like these semi-translucent creatures desiring only to suck blood. Jews were considered vermin, insects, rats. We infested; we were dirty, not wanted.

In the car as we leave the lice clinic, as soon as I hear the words “Brooklyn” and “Orthodox” and “machete,” I swipe quickly at the radio dial so my daughter does not hear of the gruesome attack, so the state of the world will not infect us. At least, in that moment. You can’t outrun it, you have to get it at the root. And that’s nearly impossible.

After we return from the lice clinic and after the ritual-like washing of every soft material and surface, I stare in front of a mirror in the brown, brown bathroom of my mother-in-law’s house. Frost collects in the corners of the window; the children – cousins who rarely see each other– are running around downstairs, laughing and singing. I reach for a pair of beauty scissors and chop off seven inches. Is this what they mean by beauty? I hold the hank in my hand and it looks like a rodent. The baggage under my eyes is deep, substantial, dark. I carry it around with me all the time. I flush the hair, leaving no trace.

I know it isn’t going to help; lice like the scalp. But I had to do something. Severing a piece of me feels like the only solution. I pile the remainder of my hair atop my head in a high bun and go downstairs to play with the kids, to eat the homemade challah, to light the Hanukkah candles.

A week later, in Seattle, I have no control when I send my daughter to Hebrew School. I have tied her hair up tight into a ballerina bun. The lice clinic has assured me their system is 99% effective and still I worry. Hair up and off the shoulders, they recommended.

As I usher my daughter into the synagogue, I thank Sean and Justin who are keeping guard. The synagogue pays them to protect the Jews inside. Their job is to smile at us, keep their eyes out for potential danger, and protect us against our enemies. Their existence outside the doors are meant to put us at ease. Are they enough?

Lice can’t live off the scalp for more than about twenty-four hours. So my generationally-traumatized-self wonders about when they killed us in camps and ghettos and our bodies were lying in heaps, piles, with no more interference from bitten and yellowed nails, how long were the lice able to feast before they too succumbed to death.

I can’t sleep, the paranoia is deep, burrowed into my skin. I lie awake until my eyes burn and then I close them and am still awake. Every tinge a worry, the potential of an insect traipsing through my hair. The potential to bring me all the way back, thirty years to when I had lice almost constantly. (To go further back, well, that fear is always there too.) Thirty years back the isolation at the behest of my classmates was acute. To them, I was Knotty Hair. To them, I wasn’t invisible. To them, I was a scourge. Happening concurrently to this nighttime stress, every dire glimpse of the news sends my body crawling. I don’t sleep.

The lice clinics, they didn’t have them back then. They relied on parents and their patience to go through strand by strand of hair to pull out every louse, hatchling, nit. Grueling work. I’m glad I didn’t have to do it.

I tell my daughter that it’s probably not a good idea to talk about the lice when she returns to school. That first week back, instead of some quippy remark about dirty hair, she tells me that a girl in her class – her kindergarten class –said that she hated Jews. My heart clenches. I ask five year old how she feels about it. She says she’s confused, because how can this girl hate Jews and be her friend? I see the solemnity in my her eyes. I knew this would happen; I just didn’t realize it would start so soon. Had I been worried about the wrong thing?

We go to a lice clinic franchise closer to home for a follow-up two weeks later. Isn’t that what life is? A series of follow-ups? Are you better? How about now? And now? And will we ever be better? Just tell me, is it possible? A young college man studying something to do with ministry and youth groups combs through my now shorter locks. He declares us all free of lice. My body collapses internally in relief.

But at night, I don’t believe him, so deep is my wound. I can’t sleep and a proliferation of ghost lice carry on with their vampiric work, taking a little bit of me each bite, their mandibles working like garden tools. Soon all that is left will be the ghost of me too. I scratch at phantoms – don’t we all?

The rabbi at our synagogue hosts a talk, “How to Talk to Your Kids about Antisemitism,” the day after my daughter tells me of her classmate who said they hated Jews. The room is full. While there, my head doesn’t itch at all.

I wrote a story once called Hineni. In it a granddaughter says this about her Shoah-survivor grandmother: “When she plucked lice from my head at ten, she said the parasites had been the only thing in the camp that let her know she was alive.”

Hineni, I am here. The lice tell me so. And in an ergonomically correct chair in Wisconsin in December, a contraption built of four mouths that blew hot air at my head, I felt it acutely. I am here. In that moment, I was there. In the other seat is my daughter, just far away that my fingers couldn’t reach. She was subject to the same treatment, the parasites being eradicated while she watched a cartoon on a tablet. Occasionally she let out a laugh and it was stunning in its innocence and beauty and strength. I am here. We are here.

This will not be a traumatizing experience for her. She has no idea that woven through her hair isn’t only her. It is me. It is her ancestors. We are not the past, though the pieces of it have wound itself atop our heads, the strands of our DNA still present and will be, even after we are gone.

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Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, Hobart, PANK, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She is the 2018/2019 Pen Parentis Fellow and a 2019 recipient of a Grant for Artist Project award from Artist’s Trust. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.