Nitty Nora the Bug Explorer

It’s one of my earliest school memories: the school nurse making the rounds to each classroom, methodically walking the rows and carefully parting the hair of each seated child. We would groan as word spread like wild fire that Nitty Nora was on the way. And then we would sit perfectly still at our school desks, staring in trepidation at the etched graffiti in the wooden lids – a worn scrawl of initials, hearts, insults, and pop stars’ names - desperately hoping we wouldn’t be deemed unclean. Naturally the teachers made much of the fact that nits, hair lice by any other name, favour clean hair. But that wasn’t any better than a Manhattan hotel reassuring guests all rooms had been fumigated after the bed bug epidemic. Contamination sticks, and stigma by association is a bitter pill to swallow.

Around the age of seven years old, it was finally my turn. Mine, and most of my little girlfriends thanks to our break time huddles over marbles or class-time Chinese Whispers. I cried and was sent home with instructions to get special lice shampoo and a thin steel comb from Listers the Chemist, our high street pharmacy. The shampoo had a very distinctive smell, one I clearly recall, and after shampooing my mother carefully dragged the thin tines of the comb through my long hair, over and over to hunt for any tell-tale eggs still attached to the hair shaft or, worse, any little lice running for their lives.

The problem with hair lice, (or bed lice, or any other bugs visibly feasting on us), is that they have such a medieval feel. Adapted, as we are, with sensitive noses and complicated, highly-scented washing regimens, we are appalled by any type of body odour or whiffy clothing, let alone the idea of body lice and fleas. We go to great lengths to soap and scent our bodies, hair, and linens, before we follow it up with efforts to remove the bulk of our hair from our feet to our chins. So this throw back to Biblical times is an affront to our effort to be spotlessly clean.

After my pre-tween exposure, I was so horrified by the idea of human lice I was profoundly affected by one Bible story at Sunday School. While the rest of the Bible tales were squirreled away with Hans Christian Anderson and Aesops’s Fables, I never forgot the visual of Jesus wandering around in a lice-infested hair shirt for forty days and forty nights while the devil tempted him. Nor could I fathom why he didn’t just take it off (the practice of mortification being lost on me). It follows that I may have made some pre-pubescent equation of lice with the devil (plus the whole OT business of god punishing people with pestilence and plague). So when I stole from my brother’s chocolate stash I truly thought I might be punished with some sort of infestation.

This week my pre-schooler returned to school armed with her backpack, lunchbox, wellie boots and bug spray. She had been there for precisely one day when a school notice popped up in my email inbox. Nits, it explained, had been “visualized” at school and the nurse would now be conducting examinations of all students’ heads. As nits are most at home on the noggins of the three to twelve year old set, and on girls typically over boys, my child should be a shoe-in for contracting them. The school helpfully included a link so that parents could better educate themselves in the reproductive lifecycle and feeding habits of nits. Regrettably, the kidshealth link included additional information on the head louse’s distant cousin, the pubic louse, which, I learned, causes irritation of the eyelid in toddlers and preschoolers. When my daughter came home from school scratching her head and blinking excessively I was fastidious in hair follicle examination.

In three weeks, friends will be coming from England to stay. Having never been to NYC it makes sense that they want to spend a few days in town before heading upstate to us in the capital. On a whim I promised to make a reservation for a mid-town hotel and to join them, but bed lice complicated the plan. Almost every travel-booking site has information on the worst affected hotels, and despite the nightmare gently dissipating from the newspaper headlines, feedback on any hotel booking site lingers. Tales of nighttime nibbling, little black spots on sheets, and luggage infestations unwittingly brought home left me practically apoplectic. Mind you, helpful travelers shared their tactics: put your suitcase in the bath, hang your clothes on the shower curtain, never use the wardrobe, throw back the covers of the bed, and absolutely never, ever, walk barefoot on the carpet.

Since I haven’t viewed hotel bedspreads in the same light since the ABC network’s 20/20 body fluid special, I now consider myself forever changed in hotel stay practices. After three days of school, Nitty Nora has done her job and we have had no nit sightings. And, in a stroke of luck, I’ve been offered a friend’s unoccupied Manhattan apartment to assuage my fears of bed bug Russian Roulette.