Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  * * *

  When we got home twenty hours later, we went straight to bed. I woke up on a glorious Sunday morning, and the first thing I did was jump into my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I could once again enjoy that plush swiveling piece of gluteal glory, because it was finally out of quarantine.

  After fully indulging, I started to unpack our bags, piling our dirty clothes onto the other sofa. While I was doing that, Dave woke up and suggested that we go to the farmers’ market. We’d been eating gluttonous meals for the past eleven days and he thought we should get some fresh veggies.

  I left our clothes strewn in the middle of the room as we went out into a chilly but sunny New York morning. We walked together in the East Village along Avenue A, up toward St. Mark’s Place. We were talking about what we would make—some kind of soup? No. A roasted chicken? Maybe. Something with black beans? That sounded good.

  I remember happy dogs walking by with their owners. The clank of boots on the sidewalk cellar grates. Pulling my sunglasses down over my eyes. The burn at the back of my head. The stinging sensation that occurred each time I touched my scalp.

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The vendors—their piles of gourds and apples—were in sight.

  “You have to check my head one more time,” I said.

  “Right now?” Dave said.

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even care about standard pedestrian practices. I stayed put in the middle of the sidewalk, like an obstinate boulder dividing a rushing river, as people walked around me. I dropped my chin to my chest and waited until Dave appeased me.

  When I was in Japan, I could easily dismiss the sensations as if they were some kind of awkward travel bug—the customary stomach upset we expect when traveling to a new place—but now that I was back home, I could finally recognize that the shit I was feeling was not even close to normal.

  Something had to be wrong.

  By this point, playing lice check had lost all its former cachet. Dave was exasperated—he’d probably checked my head at least thirty times—but he did his duty and took his designated position behind me. My hair was in a bun, so I expected him to start rummaging around in there. Instead there was silence and the heat of direct sun.

  “Do you see anything?” I said.

  “Um,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  There was another long pause.

  “What?” I said.

  He came back around to face me. The corners of his mouth were drawn down. “It must be because there’s better light here,” he said.

  Crabs

  Pubic lice, or Pthirus pubis, are the couch potatoes of the lice kingdom. They are characterized by their sluggish and sedentary lifestyle. I can’t blame them; I’d be that way, too, if my house was a porn set. Each louse is a millimeter, which means it would take twenty-five of them, back to front, to add up to an inch. They have a roundish gray body with six legs. The two in back are capped off with crustacean-looking claws, which is how they got their nickname: crabs.

  They are not found in the crotch because they are fools for genitals, but because pubic hair is their method of transportation. Like a train needs tracks to move, crabs need pubes. That’s why they can also be found in other coarse hair like eyelashes, eyebrows, armpit hair, and beards. We originally caught pubic lice from gorillas three or four million years ago. That’s why pubic lice like pubes. Pubes are the closest thing we have to thick and tough gorilla hair. The fine hair found on our scalps does not give them enough purchase to move around.

  Crabs don’t do much besides suck our blood and lay eggs—about three a day—for the two to three weeks of their short lives. Like head lice, they can’t jump or fly but can only scuttle from hair to hair. That is why sex—pube to pube—is their best opportunity to colonize a new home. They can also, though extremely rarely, be caught through infested bedding. A myth looms large that crabs can be transmitted via a toilet seat, but if that’s how your boyfriend is telling you he got his, then it might be time to find a new boyfriend or to finally have that talk about opening up the relationship.

  One textbook, Medical Entomology for Students, explains quite insightfully that having lice makes one “feel lousy.” Crabs can cause itching and irritation, but they are also easily exterminated: Wax off your bush or use insecticides.

  Though crabs—blood-sucking wingless genital goblins—sound apocalyptical, we actually have them on the defensive. They are becoming endangered because of habitat destruction. In one study, “Did the ‘Brazilian’ Kill the Pubic Louse?” researchers found that the dwindling number of crab infections coincided with the wax-it-all-off trend, which began around 2000. It’s hard to get good data—people often don’t report embarrassing parasites that have staked out their perianal region—but a 2009 study from East Carolina University reported that less than 2 percent of the population harbors papillon d’amour (which is the sexy French name for crabs). “Their forests are disappearing,” Danish lice expert Kim Søholt Larsen told me. “They are endangered because they don’t have anywhere to live.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He told me that there were so many black sesame seeds moving around that he couldn’t even count. He said it looked like a horror film where bagel toppings came to life.

  My first reaction was to laugh. Gosh, isn’t that funny. I have a lice infestation. I went through an entire country spreading a parasite during my honeymoon. LOL!

  Uneasily, Dave joined in on the laughter, too.

  Then we pretended that whole episode didn’t just happen. We continued walking toward the farmers’ market as if we were different humans—ones who didn’t currently have minuscule animals eating away at their flesh. It was the most acute case of denial I’d experienced since I was twenty and still suspected that I might grow another ten inches.

  “So we’re going to get broccoli and what else?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see what else looks good.”

  We were half a block away from the vegetable stalls when we both paused and looked at each other.

  “Wait, we can’t go to the farmers’ market right now,” Dave said.

  I furrowed my brows as the realization finally dawned on me, too. “Holy shit,” I said, “I have lice!”

  * * *

  An hour later, I was sitting on a chair in our apartment hallway. Dave stood behind me, brushing through each segment of hair with a fine-tooth comb. We had bought just about every lice-murdering product at Duane Reade, and upon getting home, I had doused my hair with the toxic shampoo. There were nontoxic methods, but I wanted poison! I wanted complete decimation! The fumes—strong and searing—were making my eyes sting, and I relished the implications of this particular burn.

  Dave sounded bilious as he explained the scene he was confronted with: “It looks like a city was napalmed and the civilians are trying to escape.” Many lice ran down my back. I couldn’t count them all, but I’d guess there were at least a metric shit-ton. On a piece of paper towel, Dave showed me an abnormally large one. “Look familiar?” he said.

  It looked exactly like the bug that had fallen on his arm in the Kyoto ryokan.

  (To this day, that bug is still inexplicable. I looked it up and there is no such thing as a queen louse. I try not to wonder about that too much. Mostly, the lice were as billed: dark brown and the size of sesame seeds.)

  While I sat there, I thought back to all the neck pillows I’d tried on at the Narita airport. I wondered if lice inject you with psychotropic substances that make you think it would be a great idea to rub your head all over everything. (I’m sorry, people of Japan!)

  Dave, oddly enough, had only four lice in his hair. When we did some research, we found out that they were repelled by the acidic shampoo he uses for his psoriasis. It was nice for him to realize that there was at least one positive to having a skin disorder.

  Even though I didn’t tell him at the time—it was my duty to make him feel
guilty for being a subpar lice-checker—committing genocide on my lice population was one of the most romantic things that he’d ever done for me.

  * * *

  I didn’t speak about my parasite to many people, because having lice is stigmatizing and they scare people, as they damn well should: Those suckers hurt and they are immensely contagious from head-to-head contact. Those evil little bastards exploit our love of hugs. That’s how they’ve survived for like a billion years. Nits have been found on Egyptian mummies. Vikings even carried delicately crafted lice combs in their belts alongside their most essential item: their sword. They—muscular masculine marauders from Scandinavia—were so freaked out by the little bugs that they got buried with their combs in case they needed to battle lice in the afterlife.

  One of the few people I told was my dad. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You know the story about how me and your mom got lice, right?”

  He was referring to the time they both got crabs when they were twenty. Even though I’ve heard the story several times, I still don’t know it, because I’ve worked hard after each telling to block it out.

  “Dad, I didn’t get genital lice!” I said.

  He told me that was too bad because it meant that my lice story was a helluvalot less interesting than his.

  * * *

  When I got off the phone, I spent the next day wondering how lice knew which patches of hair they belonged to—did I have to worry that my head lice could suddenly, due to positioning, become pube lice? Luckily, I found the answer to that was no. Head lice can move around only on thinner head hair, while pubic lice evolved to navigate coarser hair.

  * * *

  Except for one particularly bad day when I contemplated lighting my head on fire, I brightened up over the next few weeks. I also stayed incredibly vigilant. If you leave one louse or nit behind, you can easily reinfect yourself. I knew it was overkill—many entomologists say you cannot catch lice from anywhere except head-to-head contact—but because I’d spread all my infested baggage all over our apartment as soon as I’d gotten home from Japan, most of our place was under quarantine. That, of course, included the increasingly superfluous aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I did find humor in the fact that something widely considered a childhood affliction was preventing me from using the piece of furniture that symbolized my burgeoning adulthood. It felt like someone, somewhere, was trying to sabotage my maturity.

  After two weeks without any evidence of lice or nits, one is considered in the clear. Until that time, I kept up a daily routine. Every morning, I’d wash my sheets, shampoo my hair, comb it out with a tiny-tined comb, and then investigate any detritus with a magnifying glass.

  During this process, I came to realize that if it weren’t for me, then all those tiny beings wouldn’t have had life. I gave them life. They gestated near my follicles, hatched from my strands, and “breast fed” from my scalp. They could not survive without the heat from my head. You give and you give. They take and they take. Throughout it all, you worry nonstop. Is this what it feels like to be a mom?

  3

  Face It

  A friend once told me that I look exactly like Matza Ball Breaker, a girl on the Chicago roller derby team. She called our resemblance “uncanny.” So I searched for Matza Ball Breaker on the internet. When I saw her, I was mystified. We both have hair on our heads and a chin below our mouths. We could also both claim a set of eyes. Most likely, she, like me, had a vagina as well. Other than that, I was left deeply confounded. My supposed doppelgänger looked nothing like me—or at least the concept of me that exists in my head.

  Even though I’ve seen my image—photos and reflections—for thirty-four years, I’m confused as to which—if any—portrays reality. How I appear to myself is not at all consistent; my image is like a moving piece of newsprint that I can never fully read.

  The me that I see in the mirror is often, though not always, more attractive than the me I see in photographs. When I see photos, it feels as though I must have been kidnapped as the shutter tripped and had Yoda placed in my stead.

  There is nothing worse (except for murder, of course, and finding a long wiry hair in your entrée) than hearing someone say, “That’s a great photo of you,” only to get a glimpse of it and see staring back at you a mustachioed gnome with water-balloon cheeks and a grimace that could stunt-double for an elephant’s anus. If that is a “great” photo, then what am I when I’m captured at my everyday?

  I’ve tried to get a handle on this discrepancy by pointing at various disagreeable photos of me and asking my friends, “Is that really what I look like?”

  Then it’s often discouraging when they say, “Yes.”

  In order to survive, I have to tell myself that everyone—all the people in the world—must be way overdue for cataract surgery.

  No matter how sure I am, my perceptions are inevitably challenged. Recently, I snapped a selfie that I liked—there I am, I thought after taking my twenty-fourth shot—so I asked Dave for validation.

  “How about this?” I said full of hope. “Is that what I look like?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I was elated until he quickly added, “Except for your face is much rounder and your cheeks are bigger.”

  Thus, the various manifestations of my appearance continue to confound me.

  I was always uncomfortable with the author photo on my first book, but not for the usual reasons. This photo actually promised a little too much—unlike most, it didn’t make me look entirely like an Ewok—but friends and family reassured me that it was a fair depiction.

  I spent many months going to events with a fear that I’d sense a palpable disappointment upon the audience’s realization that the real me didn’t live up to the poster outside. Everything was okay—if it was happening, people kept their snickering to themselves. I felt encouraged—perhaps I actually was attractive—until a loathsome evening in the middle of June at a small event space in Midtown Manhattan.

  Before the reading, a woman lingered in the back by the table of books. She had my book in her hand and was rifling through the pages. She nonchalantly asked me who I’d come to see.

  “I’m actually reading tonight,” I told her.

  “Which book?” she asked.

  I told her it was the one in her hands.

  She turned the book over and appraised the photo. “Oh, that’s you?” she asked. I sensed a bit of incredulity.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She laughed and gave me a knowing glance. “I have some glamour shots, too,” she said.

  After all the evidence—the misleading doppelgängers, the fickle photos, and the many unreliable reflections that chase me around the city in storefront windows—all I can say about my appearance with any certainty is that I have brown hair, a mouth, and a couple of ears. I’ve been wondering about it for years, so I finally wanted to know, why is it so difficult to get a real read on our own appearance? Is there a true version of the self, and if so, can we ever see it?

  * * *

  At first, I suspected that the inconsistency I experienced with my looks was solely an issue with the medium I used to view myself. There was something mysterious that happened—I became uglified—when my image hopped from a reflection to a photograph. Cameras, those bastard devices, had always misunderstood me.

  To fill me in on what might be happening, I spoke with Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center. She said what many of us might already know: The mirror is a small white lie. It flips our image. Unless our faces are perfectly symmetrical—which happens only in the rarest of supermodel cases—we will likely feel uneasy when we see a photograph of ourselves. The nose that usually leans to the right in a photo leans to the left.

  “It can look slightly off and therefore look funny to us,” Rutledge said. She explained that many of us prefer our mirror self simply because we see it more often. “We like what’s familiar,” she said.

  “We like what’s familiar”
sounded like an off-the-cuff generality, but it’s actually science. We tend to develop a preference for things—sounds, words, and paintings—for no other reason than that we are accustomed to them. This concept, called the Mere Exposure Effect, was proved in the 1960s by a Stanford University psychologist named Robert Zajonc. (Finally, there’s an answer to the shoulder-pad craze of the 1980s. Just by being repeatedly exposed to something—even if it’s heinous—you can come to think of it as a good-looking fashion statement.)

  Another issue with the mirror is that we all, unconsciously, shift into flattering positions—hide the double chin, suck in the stomach, pop the hip—but it takes only one candid photo to haunt all that hard work and make you second-guess everything. I thought my arms were svelte little hockey sticks until a camera came along at an angle I was unaccustomed to and captured them in a way that gave me a month of night sweats.

  Photographs, like mirrors, also don’t tell the whole truth. Depending on lighting, focus, and lens size, they can distort us in various subtle ways.

  “So which is more truthful?” I asked Rutledge of the two mediums.

  “‘Truth’ is such a subjective word,” she said. “A mirror is going to feel more comfortable to you, but a picture is how other people see you.”

  “Gross!” I said.

  * * *

  I thought about this for a while—what Rutledge had said—and decided that it was unacceptable to me. I did not look like my photos. It just wasn’t possible. I needed a second opinion.

  So next, I got in touch with Robert Langan, a psychologist who dabbles heavily in theory of the self. I went to his office on the Upper East Side and sat across from him on a sofa, the one where so many of his patients have probably cried about extramarital affairs and admitted to being bronies. I still wanted to figure out what I really looked like and if I could ever see that real me. I’d warned Langan that I was coming for that reason, but the situation got out of control immediately. We passed rational query right by and went deep into existential quandary.