Dirty Secret (19 page)

Dear God. “What kind of sign?”

“Just asking them to please wash their hands before they touch me. You don't know what kind of infections you can get in hospitals.”

“Yeah, but now the nurses are going to think you're annoying. It's rude, Mom. I'm sure they wash their hands constantly.”

“It's just a little sign. I leave it on the table next to the bed.”

I want to point out the ludicrousness of worrying so much about germs, given the state of her house, but I bite my tongue. Besides, who knows? Maybe she's right.

We talk for a while more, and then as we're about to get off the phone, I remember the mysterious rash. “Hey, Mom, you don't have any weird bumps or bug bites, do you? I've got this patch of
something
on my ankle and I can't figure out what it is.”

After a few long seconds she says, “Oh, no. You're not going to like this.”

“What?”

“I think I know what it might be.” She pauses. “And you're
really
not going to like it.”

“What is it? Tell me.”

“I think it's . . . body lice.”

I wait for her to laugh, but she doesn't. “You are kidding, right?”

“I wish I was.”

Immediately the itching spreads from my ankles up through my legs and into my torso, my arms, all the way to my fingertips—invisible lice are crawling over my entire body.

“What makes you think that's what this is?”

“I bought a pillow at Savers and I think it had lice on it. Or, wait a minute, maybe it wasn't at Savers. No. That's right, this was from a consignment shop in St. Paul.”

“But why would you use it if you thought it was infested with lice?”

“Well, I didn't know it had lice at the time,” she says as if I've just asked the most absurd question she's ever heard.

“Why would you buy a used pillow? That's like buying a used bra or used underwear.”

“It's one of those pillows that I like—you know, with the arms attached? And it was such soft corduroy. I couldn't resist.”

I know which one she's talking about. The so-called “husband pillow” was on her bed.

“After I slept with it a few times, I noticed my feet itching in the morning—”

“Your feet? Wouldn't it be your head that was itching?”

“No, it wouldn't. I was sleeping with it down by my feet. But I used the RID cream and I thought it was cleared up.”

“You knew about the lice and you still didn't throw it out?”

“Well, it's one of those ones I like . . . and I washed it after I figured out the lice. I thought it was gone.”

Her voice is high-pitched and whiny. I feel like yelling at her, but I don't. It's not her fault that she acts like an idiot sometimes. It's the hoarding that compels her. Once again I wish I still smoked. Instead, I walk to the refrigerator, grab a bottle of white wine, pour myself a glass, and take a sip.

“Jessie? Are you still there?” my mom asks.

“How am I supposed to get rid of this?”

“I thought you hung up on me.” She laughs. “Is there a drugstore open near you?”

“This is New York City. Of course there's a drugstore open,” I snap and take another sip of wine. “Sorry for being a bitch, Mom, but I can't believe I have . . . body lice.” I can barely say the words.

And what really upsets me is that her hoarding is now affecting my life all the way across the country. Mentally, yes, she affects me wherever I am, but I always thought I was safe from the physical aspects of her disorder once I stepped on a plane. I was wrong. Not even the 1,200 miles I've put between us can protect me.

“You just have to go to the drugstore and get some RID. It's for both head and body lice. Get the spray and the shampoo. You'll need to put the shampoo over your entire body and sleep with it on. And use the spray on your bed and your couch.”

“I'm not sure about spraying that stuff in my bed or on the couch—what about Abraham Lincoln? He weighs ten pounds. His system can't take those chemicals.”

“Please, I'm telling you, you have to spray! And get Dave to use the shampoo, too. If you don't both do it, you'll just keep reinfecting each other. Oh, and you have to wash everything
you've touched since you've been back, and in the hottest water possible.”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “The problem is that we don't have a washer or dryer in the building and the nearest Laundromat is two blocks away.” I look around the apartment, quickly assessing everything I've used since I've been back: the clothes I've worn, the sheets on the bed, the blankets, the pillows, the couch cover, the bath mat, the bathroom towels, the kitchen towels, my jacket. “God, this sucks,” I say. “It's going to take a whole day to wash everything.”

“I'm so sorry . . . and please tell Dave I'm sorry, too!”

“It's not your fault, Mom,” I say, though in reality I think it is her fault. No one held a gun to her head and forced her to buy a used pillow. My poor husband is teaching tonight and won't be home until after 10:30. He'll come home tired and hungry, and instead of relaxing and eating he'll get to smear lice shampoo over his entire body.

“Jesus Christ,” my mom mumbles. “Maybe I still have it. Now I'm going to have to tell those nurses to treat me for lice.”

“Hey, at least you can take down that sign you made—they'll definitely want to wash their hands now, at least
after
they touch you.”

But my lame attempt at a joke isn't met with my mother's usual free-flowing laughter.

“I really am sorry about this,” she says.

“I know you are, Mom. Look, it's okay. It'll be okay. Just take care of yourself in the hospital. You're the one with cancer.”

And I do forgive her, but it's so humiliating and frustrating that I'm running to Rite Aid at ten o'clock at night to buy RID. I want to have everything ready for when David gets home. He's going to have to slather the stuff on as soon as he walks in the door. And Abraham Lincoln: I have no idea how to treat him.

It turns out there are three shelves dedicated to lice-killing measures and insect repellants. I stand there under the fluorescent lights comparing the prices of RID versus the generic brand, looking at the lengthy list of chemicals I've never heard of, and whenever I sense anyone approaching I turn around and pretend to be looking at the aspirin across the aisle.

I can picture the exact moment I was infested. Her bedroom was packed like all the other rooms, filled nearly wall-to-wall with folding card tables and TV trays, every surface layered with stuff: crumpled McDonald's bags, empty Pringles cans, raggedy books of crossword puzzles and acrostics, half-f two-liter bottles of Pepsi and Orange Crush. A tall white bookcase sat empty against one wall (a smaller bedroom, next to hers, was packed floor to ceiling with paperbacks). While taking it all in and trying to decide where to start, I spotted a pyramid of empty liquor bottles on a table in one corner of the room. But supposedly my mother hadn't touched alcohol in thirty years.

“What are these doing here?” I asked my mother, who was standing in the doorway.

“I don't know,” she said, coming closer to inspect them. “Wait a minute, I bet they were left over from when I had that asshole guy living here! That guy . . . you know, the guy who was going to work on the house in exchange for a place to stay. I can't even remember his name now.”

“The superstar handyman?”

“Yes. That guy.”

He was an acquaintance of one of her neighbors and my mom had met him only once before she hatched the plan. All she knew about him was that he was seventy-five and supposedly fantastic at fixing things. I didn't love the idea of him moving
in—at least not until she got to know him—and advised my mother against it, but she struck a deal with him anyway. The arrangement lasted only a few months, just until she figured out that he wasn't planning on doing any actual work. He'd been gone for at least a year, though.

“This was that guy's room?” I picked up one of the liquor bottles and put it into a bag for recycling. “Did you
share
this room with him?”

“No, no,” she started laughing. “This room was his and then I moved into it after he left.”

“And you didn't bother to throw out these bottles?”

She shrugged. “I guess I forgot they were here.”

Okay.

What else did she forget? Did she even change the sheets? I looked over at the bed, a tiny twin bed from when I was a kid and lived here. The question of whether or not she changed the sheets was irrelevant. There were no sheets on the bed at all.

“Oh, Mom.” Suddenly I was completely depressed. “How can you live like this? It's so . . . sad. How can you stand it?”

“Frank! Oh, Jessie! That was his name. Frank.”

I want my mother to have a normal life. I want her to have a clean house, clean sheets on a comfortable bed. I want her to
want
that. But as I swept under her bed, I found a garbage bag's worth of Häagen Dazs bar wrappers, clumps of dust and hair, combs and Q-tips and soda cans and bottle tops and paper coffee cups and more crossword puzzles. I felt like crying and almost did as I put sheets and blankets on the bed and organized the pillows.

Including
that
pillow.

I dusted the windowsills and swept the floor. I tried to get my mom to give up some of the back massagers and foot soaking
tubs and those contraptions you put into a bathtub to make an instant Jacuzzi, all unopened in their boxes, but she wouldn't part with them. And I understood why: They're all devices meant to give comfort. Without Roger, she has no one to give her comfort. Who ever hugs my mother, besides me when I visit twice a year? Who ever touches her?

And now that I have body lice, who will touch me?

Finally I toss three bottles of RID shampoo and one can of RID spray into my red basket and go stand in line to pay for them—though the store is almost empty, there's still a line; there's always a line—and as I scratch at a new welt that's forming on my arm, the first one outside my ankle area, a hazy memory of another infestation in my mother's house begins to take shape. Rodents. It happened right after my parents separated, when my brother and I lived with my mom during the week. The rodents weren't mice and they weren't rats—they looked like three- or four-inch long fetal kangaroos. None of us had any idea what they were. It was as if some alien spacecraft deposited them in the house at night, and in the mornings we'd find them. Once I found one in a shoe—discovering it as I slipped my foot inside. No one will confirm the existence of these otherworldly creatures, but I remember them, and they're what I'm thinking of as I purchase my poisons from the night clerk at Rite Aid and make my way home.

MY MOM DOESN'T
call me the next day, and when I try to call her the afternoon of her surgery, I can't get through. The phone in her room is busy. I'm pretty sure she's taken it off the hook. She always makes herself unavailable when I most need to reach her. Every Mother's Day, Christmas, birthday, her phone is off the hook. She clearly doesn't want to be disappointed if no one
calls, but by making herself unavailable for disappointment, she also negates any chance of being pleasantly surprised. I've told her this a million times but it makes no difference. I always end up waiting for her to call me.

And she finally does, the day after her surgery.

“I feel fine,” she says when I ask. “Totally fine. Now I just have to wait for the doctors to tell me the results from the tissue samples. That's when I'll find out about the chemo.”

“So you're not in any pain at all?”

“No, none.”

It's one of my mother's many paradoxes: She can talk for hours about the emotional traumas she's suffered at the hands of her father, her siblings, bosses, ex-friends, even bank tellers, but her threshold for physical pain is off-the-charts high. My dad told me that after she broke her back in the car accident she never once complained about the pain. And she had to have an emergency appendectomy not long ago—
emergency
because she waited so long to go to the hospital, thinking the odd feeling in her lower back would pass.

I'm the opposite. I'm constantly gauging how I feel, touching the glands on my neck to see if they're swollen, looking at my tongue as I've seen acupuncturists do (though I have no idea what I'm looking for), asking my husband if he'll feel my forehead and tell me if I seem feverish. My dad is the same way and I think I got it from him.

My mom starts talking about how one of the nurses there has a dog the same size as Abraham Lincoln and my mother plans to knit it a sweater.

“Mom?” I say, interrupting her. “I need to ask you about these . . . lice.”

“Oh, no. I didn't mention it because I was hoping they were gone.”

“They're not.”

“The nurse is here,” she says abruptly, and then I hear her speaking in the high voice she usually reserves for children and pets, “I'll take more of that pudding, please. The butterscotch—it was just delicious!” Then she's back to me, her voice low and muffled, as if she's covering her mouth and the phone's receiver. “Jessie, what's going on with the lice?”

“It seems to be getting worse. The rash that started on my ankle has moved to my arms.”

“I told you to get that RID!”

“I did. In fact I did it two nights in a row just to be safe. And I've washed everything.”

“You didn't get Dave to do the RID, and now he's reinfecting you.”

“No, he's done it twice, too. And he doesn't have any of the bites that I have anyway. The thing is, from what I've read, this doesn't seem like body lice. You're supposed to be able to see them crawling around in the seams of your clothes and I can't see anything. And I've washed every item of clothing I've worn since I was in Minneapolis, not to mention all the sheets and blankets and towels, plus I've scrubbed the entire apartment from top to bottom.”