by Jason Starr
“CRABS!” KAREN screamed so loud her ears stung. “You have crabs?! Fucking crabs!”
She jerked onto the steering wheel, veering into the oncoming lane, and then veering back when she realized she was speeding toward oncoming headlights.
“Well, actually pubic lice,” Steven said. “I mean that sounds better… I guess.”
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Karen said, touching herself over her jeans; suddenly she was itching like crazy.
“I’m sorry,” Steven said. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
“Sorry?” Karen said, thinking, Oh, my God, I have crabs. Crabs, insects, are living on me. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“It’s unlikely you have it,” Steven said. “I mean, my doctor said it’s not a definite thing that you’d get it too and that you definitely shouldn’t panic.”
“You’re joking.” Karen was lightheaded, felt outside herself. She heard herself say, “This is a sick joke. Please tell me this is a sick joke. When women break up with you, you tell them you have crabs as some kind of payback, right?”
“I wish,” Steven said. “I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am.”
Her rage overflowing, she screamed, “Fuck you, you stupid fucking prick! How could you do this to me? I have children. I’m a schoolteacher, not a hooker.”
She felt like she was losing control, not making sense.
“I didn’t know I had it,” Steven said. “I mean that. Honest. I had no idea. When I was peeing last night I saw one of them. I mean it, like, crawled onto my hand.”
Totally disgusted, Karen said, “I have to go to a doctor.” Then, thinking out loud, she said, “It’s Saturday, how am I going to find a doctor?”
“You can go to an STD clinic, they’re open twenty-four hours a day,” Steven said.
“How do you know their hours?!” Karen screamed at the dashboard, hating that it was displaying: STEVEN; it might as well have been displaying: CRABS. “How are you a fucking STD expert? Have you gotten STD’s before?” She swerved again, narrowly missing a collision with a speeding, honking car. “What’s that?!” She hadn’t heard the last thing Steven had said because of the honking.
“I said I know you’re upset, but there’s no reason to get hysterical,” he said.
“Don’t you dare tell me how to act,” she said, imagining big, black, disgusting crabs with their pointy claws and snapping mouths infesting her vagina. “I can’t believe this is happening. This is a fucking nightmare.”
“Look, this is difficult for me too,” Steven said. “You think I want to have this? You think I’m enjoying telling you this? I don’t know how I got this, it just happened, and I’m just trying to do the right thing, notifying all my recent sex partners.”
“All?” Karen had to get a breath; she was starting to hyperventilate. Then she said, “All? Exactly how many women were you fucking?”
“I just meant the women I’ve been with the past couple of months.”
Karen couldn’t believe this. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Relax,” he said. “I don’t deserve this.”
“You don’t deserve this?”
“We never had a conversation about exclusivity.”
“Oh my God,” Karen said. “Oh my God.”
She didn’t remember how the call had ended—she’d probably hung up on him—or much else of the car ride home. She didn’t even remember entering her house—she just seemed to wind up sitting on the toilet seat, her jeans and panties down, legs spread, holding a compact mirror over her vagina. She didn’t see anything unusual there, but would she see, actually see, them? What if they were microscopic? What if there were thousands, no millions, of little bugs down there, sucking her blood, eating her alive? She didn’t have much hair down there, just a landing strip. She’d thought about going bald. Fuck, why hadn’t she gone bald?
Though she couldn’t see any bugs, she could feel them. The itching was getting worse and worse; it was almost unbearable. She tried reminding herself that at least some of this was in her head because she hadn’t been itching at all before Steven had called, but she was so frantic that logic was useless right now.
She went upstairs, stripping along the way, letting her clothes fall wherever, and went right into the shower and put the shower head between her legs. She sometimes did this to masturbate—she swore to friends it worked better than any vibrator she’d ever used—but now it didn’t give her any pleasure and, worse, she knew it wasn’t killing any bugs. She needed medicine, a crab picker, something. God, she hadn’t even used condoms with Steven; what if she’d caught something else? What had he told her? Oh yeah, Don’t worry, I’m clean.
“Clean,” she said out loud, turning the shower head to its strongest, most pulsating setting. “Yeah, you’re really fucking clean!” Her voice was so loud and piercing, echoing off the walls of the shower, that it actually hurt her ears. “Die, you motherfuckers, die!” she screamed at her pussy and then she calculated that she and Steven had had sex at least ten times, and spent overnights at each other’s places. They’d spent nights cuddling and spooning and the whole time the asshole had had crabs? And she didn’t believe that I-didn’t-know-I-had-it bullshit. How could you not know you have crabs? Crabs. Jesus, it sounded so disgusting, so filthy; it was something that hookers got, not average people. Wait, maybe Steven went to hookers. Didn’t he mention he went to some strip club in Vegas one time? If he went to a strip club, why couldn’t he have gone to a hooker? After all, he was a fucking liar. And if he’d gone to a hooker, hookers, he might have other diseases—syphilis, gonorrhea, fucking AIDS.
In full-blown panic, Karen rushed out of the shower, not even bothering to towel off, and sat on her bed, and Googled for STD clinics in the area. There was one in Bridgeport, one in New Rochelle. She was going to call to see if one was open or had weekend hours but then she stopped herself, thinking, Do I really want to sit in the waiting room of an STD clinic with a bunch of teenagers? She was a schoolteacher, after all—if someone saw her there and the news spread, it would be a disaster for her career. She knew she was probably just being paranoid but, fuck it, she had reason to be paranoid—she had insects in her vagina!
She’d be better off going to her gynecologist during the week, keeping it discreet. In the meantime she had to do something, so she searched for remedies online. It seemed like the treatment was pretty much the same for head lice, which both her kids had had more than once, which made her feel a little better. She’d used peppermint oil on the kids, but fuck all that holistic bullshit, she needed medicine, chemicals, so she made a beeline for Walgreens and came back with a container of Rid. Back in the shower, as she treated herself, she started sobbing. It wasn’t just because of the crabs, it was because of the plight of her life, from her fairytale wedding day at the Boat House in Central Park to being keeled over in the shower, scrubbing her pussy with lice-killer. How had her life come to this? She knew, intellectually, that it was a compilation of decisions she’d made and external events that had nothing to do with her, but it still seemed absurd how everything had gone so horribly wrong.
She treated her hair and put in a laundry of all her dirty and recently used linens and towels. It was a good thing the kids didn’t use her bathroom, but she hoped they didn’t catch anything. How awful and humiliating would it be to pass along crabs to your child? Horrified, she imagined having to let Matthew’s teachers know that Matthew may have spread crabs into his classroom.
Later, in yoga pants and a T shirt, sitting on the bed on clean sheets, Karen felt a little more relaxed—if the bugs weren’t dead at least they were dying—but she didn’t feel any better about herself. She logged onto Match on her iPad and deleted her account. She also deleted her accounts on OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, and HowAboutWe. She needed a break from dating and, if the way she felt at this moment stuck with her, she might remain celibate for the rest of her life. There were women who did that—focused on their kids and gave up on sex
and romance; she could become one of those women. She could pleasure herself with the shower head and read erotic novels about sexy werewolves with washboard stomachs to make up for the deficit.
She checked her phone, a text from Mark: Can I call you to say goodnight???
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said, tossing the phone away onto the love seat.
She had no patience for Mark anymore—zero, none. Did he really think she was going to get on the phone and chat with him, as if nothing had happened last night and today? Yeah, he probably did think that. It was clear to her now that something was seriously wrong with Mark, he needed help, but she didn’t want to try to analyze him or the situation anymore. She’d wasted too much time on this ridiculousness already and, besides, compared to crabs, she couldn’t care less about Mark’s drama and acting out. What had happened to Mark? How did he get like this? It was sad because she really did like having him as a friend, and it sucked that he’d ruined everything. When he wasn’t overstepping boundaries, he was funny, supportive, and understanding. In a way, what Mark had done to her was as bad as what Steven had done to her. Mark hadn’t given her an STD, but he’d violated the trust in their relationship. Karen didn’t know how she’d be able to trust any man ever again.
Feeling itchy again, she took another shower, using more Rid—she hoped she wasn’t overdoing it, making it worse. Then she went down to get the laundry and the clean bed sheets when she heard someone in the house. Was Elana home? She went through the kitchen and saw a man—well, a boy—coming down the stairs.
“Hello.”
Karen was angry—not at the boy, whoever he was, but at Elana. First she’d tried to leave for the party in some slutty outfit and now she’d brought a guy home with her? How many times had she had that talk with her about how boys weren’t allowed in her room? Worse, this boy looked older, definitely not someone she went to school with. They’d probably come in while she was in the shower, but Karen had spoken to her many times about dating rules. Karen understood that Elana was getting older and she wanted her to make her own decisions about when to have sex, but she had to have respect for her mother.
Karen gave the boy a hard time, then recognized him. He was that kid who worked at the country club—Owen, that’s right, his name was Owen. Karen had seen him there many times and she thought she’d seen him other places before too—maybe at school pick-ups?—when he was younger, but out of context she hadn’t recognized him right away.
She felt bad for lashing out at him—he probably didn’t even know he’d done anything wrong; it was Elana whom Karen needed to speak with. The boy’s—Owen’s—attitude surprised Karen, though. She didn’t think she’d ever spoken to him before, so she hadn’t really had much impression of him except that he was “the local kid who worked at the country club.” He was cocky, yeah, telling her, “You have to learn to chill,” but his self-assurance was charming. He caught her off-guard; she wasn’t expecting him to have such a strong personality. It was hard to take him seriously, though, because there was always a twinkle in his eyes, an undercurrent of something, maybe sarcasm. He was very cute—not gorgeous, but charming, definitely charming—and Karen understood why Elana liked him because he was definitely the type of mysterious boy whom Karen would have liked at her age.
And then he was holding her hand. It was so unexpected, she was caught so off-guard, that she didn’t know what to do so she didn’t do anything. It took awhile—well, several seconds—for it to register that it was happening again. After Mark had held her hand not once, but twice, now another guy was doing it. Not even a guy. A kid.
Finally she jerked her hand away and said, “Why did you just do that?”
Staying cocky, Owen didn’t offer any real explanation. Karen should have been upset, furious even. Especially after everything she’d been through today, this should have put her over the edge, but it was hard to muster up much anger about it. Owen holding her hand just didn’t seem nearly as violating as what Mark had done to her. After all, Owen was just a boy. Mark was a forty-four year-old married man who should know better.
Later, when Karen was carrying the folded laundry upstairs she heard music on low in Elana’s room and through the space under the door saw that a light was on. While she wanted to have a talk with her to refresh her on the dating rules, she decided it could wait till morning.
In bed, Karen’s vagina still felt itchy, but only when she thought about it. She considered another treatment of Rid, but she really didn’t want to overdo it. As she wriggled around, trying to find a comfortable sleeping position, she told herself that a positive about the past couple of days was that at least she had reached such a low point in her life that things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Okay, today would be a day to forget, but tomorrow would be better than today, and the day after would be better than tomorrow.
She had to have faith anyway.
OWEN WAS pumped. He had one beautiful dead MILF in the trunk of his car and another beautiful live one revved up and ready to go. Was he the luckiest guy in the world or what?
If he hadn’t totally scored his next mom, Karen Daily, saying goodbye to Deb would have been so much harder. But now it would be sad, yeah, but it wouldn’t be tragic. And he was amazed how easily it had all happened, how he didn’t even have to try. Seriously, after that lame-ass attempted sex with Elana what were the odds that when he was leaving the house her mom would practically throw herself at him? And sealing the deal with her would be so much easier than it had been with Deb. Deb had been married with two kids, but Karen was a divorced mom; she was already a player. He could come over to the house one day at a time when he knew Elana wasn’t home and be like, “Is Elana here?” and Karen would go, “No.” Smiling, showing him that she knew exactly what he was thinking. She wouldn’t have to invite him in, they wouldn’t need words. He’d probably bang her right there in the foyer, up against the front door. Then they’d christen the rest of the house and before long they’d have a regular thing going on. They wouldn’t even have to hide it. So she had a young boy-toy boyfriend, why would anybody give a shit?
He thought about dumping Deb in the Hudson—that would be quick, easy—but he decided it was a bad idea. He wasn’t sure how to weigh a body down enough to make it sink, and he didn’t want to take any chances of it popping up tomorrow and somebody finding it. No, burying it in the woods was a much better idea and it had worked that other time, so if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right?
As he drove, hearing Deb shift in the trunk every time he made a sharp turn, he was proud of himself for coming up with such a great plan so quickly. Seriously, how many people would be able to pull that off? On TV, they always talked about how cool-under-pressure some basketball players were when they could make a foul shot with the game on the line, or how a golfer in the Masters had “ice in his veins” because he could make a big putt on the eighteenth hole when it was do-or-die. Or what about the President, having to make big decisions about bombing countries or whatever, dealing with all that pressure and shit? He was like the President, like an NBA superstar. He had ice in his veins, was the coolest guy on the planet, Mr. Chill, and no one could take him down, absolutely no one.
“Fuck you!” he shouted. “Fuck all of you!”
Owen had never done drugs, but he thought this was how it must feel as he pulled into the grounds of the Oak Ridge Country Club. There were only a couple of cars in the lot—the night security dudes—Pedro and Johnny—but that was cool, he could deal with them. They hung out in the clubhouse most of the night and almost never went onto the grounds of the club, where Owen was planning to go. So he drove past the main entrance to the club, way down to the end of the road. No security cameras to worry about here—that was for damn sure. Sometimes grounds crew guys came here at night, but there were no cars parked in the area and Owen doubted anyone was around. There was no major work going on at the club, and no reason anybody would be working OT, especially on a Saturday night. So
he drove through the maintenance gate and backed into a spot near the sixth and seventh holes of the golf course, right near the beginning of a dirt path that led into the woods. He’d been on the path at night a couple of times last summer with Deb. They’d met up over here then gone into the woods and screwed under the stars. What had Deb said? Oh, that it was romantic.
Weirdly, he could hear her now, saying, “It’s so romantic here.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t bury you anywhere else, baby,” he said out loud as he got out.
Lots of cricket noises, fireflies, an almost full moon—the rain had totally passed—but not much else. He went to the storage shed and, using the flashlight app on his phone, found what he needed—a wheelbarrow and the biggest, strongest looking shovel he could find. Then he returned to the car and looked around, not worried at all—he was so cool under pressure it was crazy. He didn’t see anyone or hear anything except crickets, so he popped open the trunk. He yanked Deb up and out by her feet and then grabbed her hair and propped her up next to him. Holding her like that, face to face, they could’ve been dancing. He maneuvered her on top of the wheelbarrow, centering her the best he could, and, taking her purse with him, carrying it over his shoulder, he went into the woods.
The flashlight app wasn’t bad—it made a long stream of whitish light and Owen had no problem seeing where he was going. The issue was that Deb’s head was hanging off to the side, dragging in the dirt and mud and, once in a while, bouncing on rocks. He didn’t care if her face got fucked up, it was just the CSI shit he was worried about. He knew that if the cops looked around here they would definitely find some blood or hair. But then he thought, Yeah, but they won’t look here. He was proud of himself for not getting caught up in bullshit worrying, for sticking to the plan. It showed him again how strong he really was.
Once Deb had said to him, “I didn’t think I’d ever feel this way again.”
“You were right about that, baby,” Owen said, out loud, pushing the wheelbarrow. Then he laughed—he didn’t care, because no one was around to hear, so why not laugh, why not enjoy this? He didn’t know if he believed in all that life after death bullshit, but he knew that if Deb was up there somewhere looking down she’d probably be getting a kick out of this too. Who knows? She was so kinky, she might think that being dead and wheeled out to their spot in the woods was the hottest thing ever.