Lice
Sheila tugged one rubber glove tighter to break the air bubble at her fingertip. As she parted Malika’s thin red hair, she looked up and saw Wendall drive away in his truck. What on earth? God, all the things she’d said. She shouldn’t have been so heavy handed. She jerked her leg, a sort of repressed stomping. She remembered the way he’d responded to her touch and the way he’d touched her back, especially her breasts, which he’d lingered over and praised. She was forty years old with a plain face and a decent figure and though she’d never been married, she knew what to do and say when it came to sex. One-night stands were not her thing. She believed that it took two or three times for a man to feel the connection and so she’d been frustrated by her inability to seduce him again. Sheila had had her eye on Wendall ever since she’d learned about his divorce. The tackle-style seduction had been a strategy. Inside the truck, they’d taken turns—half dressed—and then inside her house, when she’d tried for more, it hadn’t worked. She kept touching his shoulder or his knee, punctuating when she spoke, to test the voltage. Low. And now, Wendall hadn’t spoken more than a few words to her for two weeks.
Last week she’d blamed it on the weather. He couldn’t have pushed Carolyn on the swing in the rain. This week she blamed it on the lice, the closing of the school. The parents had called secret meetings to complain to one another about the way she was handling the crisis. She called Wendall to ask him what they’d been saying behind her back and all she’d gotten from him was that the meetings had been secret from him too. It was the most stressful thing she’d ever gone through. Several parents wanted their tuition money back—a ploy to force her to reopen the school. So, okay. She’d bought a buzzer. Any parent who agreed to have his child’s head shaved was in. All other students would be checked for lice at the door. The parents agreed and Sheila reopened the school. Now, here she was—the Gestapo. She wished she’d thought to take the muscle relaxers she always downed two days before her period. It was a terrible time for her; she could have used Wendall’s support.
“Just this one time,” he’d warned. Her last boyfriend had said something similarly unpromising (“I’m a loner”) and then stuck around for years, but watching Wendall drive off just now, when he had every reason to come speak to her, she knew she’d lost him.
Elizabeth Denton is the author of the short story collection, Kneeling on Rice (University of Missouri Press). Stories from her second collection, Mick Jagger’s Green Eyed Daughter and Other Stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbird and The Yale Review, where her story “Mick Jagger’s Green-Eyed Daughter” won The Yale Review Prize. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has won several grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and taught briefly at Yale University and City College. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Batesville, Virginia with her husband, writer Mark Edmundson.