Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [62]
The doctor says, “I’m afraid we can’t continue with the examination until we treat you for that critter you brought in.” He looks alarmed.
“I was cleaning out the henhouse,” Georgeann explains. “I figured it was a chicken mite.”
“What you have is a body louse. I don’t know how you got it, but we’ll have to treat it completely before we can look at you further.”
“Do they carry diseases?”
“This is a disease,” the doctor says. “What I want you to do is take off that paper gown and wad it up very tightly into a ball and put it in the wastebasket. Whatever you do, don’t shake it! When you get dressed, I’ll tell you what to do next.”
Later, after prescribing a treatment, the doctor lets her look at the louse through the microscope. It looks like a bloated tick from a dog; it is lying on its back and its legs are flung around crazily.
“I just brought it in for fun,” Georgeann says. “I had no idea.”
At the library, she looks up lice in a medical book. There are three kinds, and to her relief she has the kind that won’t get in the hair. The book says that body lice are common only in alcoholics and indigent elderly persons who rarely change their clothes. Georgeann cannot imagine how she got lice. When she goes to the drugstore to get her prescription filled, a woman brushes close to her, and Georgeann sends out a silent message: I have lice. She is enjoying this.
“I’ve got lice,” she announces when Shelby gets home. “I have to take a fifteen-minute hot shower and put this cream on all over, and then I have to wash all the clothes and curtains and everything—and what’s more, the same goes for you and Tamara and Jason. You’re incubating them, the doctor said. They’re in the bed covers and the mattresses and the rugs. Everywhere.” Georgeann makes creepy crawling motions with her fingers.
The pain on Shelby’s face registers with her after a moment. “What about the retreat?” he asks.
“I don’t know if I’ll have time to get all this done first.”
“This sounds fishy to me. Where would you get lice?”
Georgeann shrugs. “He asked me if I’d been to a motel room lately. I probably got them from one of those shut-ins. Old Mrs. Speed maybe. That filthy old horsehair chair of hers.”
Shelby looks really depressed, but Georgeann continues brightly, “I thought sure it was chicken mites because I’d been cleaning out the henhouse? But he let me look at it in the microscope and he said it was a body louse.”
“Those doctors don’t know everything,” Shelby says. “Why don’t you call a vet? I bet that doctor you went to wouldn’t know a chicken mite if it crawled up his leg.”
“He said it was lice.”
“I’ve been itching ever since you brought this up.”
“Don’t worry. Why don’t we just get you ready for the retreat—clean clothes and hot shower—and then I’ll stay here and get the rest of us fumigated?”
“You don’t really want to go to the retreat, do you?”
Georgeann doesn’t answer. She gets busy in the kitchen. She makes a pork roast for supper, with fried apples and mashed potatoes. For dessert, she makes jello and peaches with Dream Whip. She is really hungry. While she peels potatoes, she sings a song to herself. She doesn’t know the name of it, but it has a haunting melody. It is either a song her mother used to sing to her or a jingle from a TV ad.
They decide not to tell Tamara and Jason that the family has lice. Tamara was inspected for head lice once at school, but there is no reason to make a show of this, Shelby tells Georgeann. He gets the children to take long baths by telling them it’s a ritual cleansing, something like baptism. That night in bed, after long showers, Georgeann and Shelby don’t touch each other. Shelby lies flat with his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling. He talks about the value of spiritual renewal. He wants Georgeann