The lice lady.(Abigail F. Rosenfield)

Although she declines to use the title, Abigail F. Rosenfeld, a thirty-five-year-old Borough Park mother of ten, is a nitpicker of extreme, if secret, renown. Her business card puts it bluntly:

Lice Consultant Heads Checked & Cleaned Total Clean-outs, usually in less than an hour Satisfaction Guaranteed

Mrs. Rosenfeld is well known to the city's public- and private-school nurses, who, after sending lice-ridden children home, pass her phone number on to the shocked, enraged, or embarrassed parents of the infested.She always takes them in.

"People get desperate and do crazy things," Mrs. Rosenfeld explained one recent Sunday afternoon at her home. Wearing a floor-length black velour housecoat with gold-trimmed sleeves, she cut a benevolent, slightly Merlin-like figure. "I had one father of a two-year-old and a four-year-old walk in, very angry, saying, 'Everything on them has gotta be dead, because my wife just sprayed them with Raid!' Then I get the mothers who are using kerosene, Vaseline, mayonnaise, or margarine. The other night, I had a family who arrived at ten o'clock, soaked in olive oil, with garbage bags over their heads! Can you imagine trying to sleep with olive oil running down your face?"

Mrs. Rosenfeld, who is pregnant with her eleventh child, has battled lice, or Pediculus humanus capitis, for more than half her life. The eldest girl in a family of nine children, she was taught by a school nurse to recognize lice and developed her own method of combing out the insects and their eggs, or nits. She spent years helping her mother by combing out her siblings. Now she charges twenty-five to sixty dollars per head, depending upon the amount of work involved, and donates her services to the needy. Business is as steady as the pest is ubiquitous. "I don't work Shabbas, but I do maybe seventy-five heads a month," she said. "Last night, I had six, five of them boys, which is rare. The father had practically no hair, so I don't know how he got lice, but he did."

Mrs. Rosenfeld's uncanny ability to see the microscopic nits and her rock-steady bedside manner form the basis of her legend. Her removal method distinguishes itself from run-of-the-mill nit-picking in that she does not strip nits off individual hair shafts. Instead, she immobilizes the lice and loosens their eggs' grip on the hair with great dollops of ordinary hair conditioner. (She resolutely refuses to use Nix, Rid, Lidane, or other chemical remedies.) She then works a special German-made comb through the hair. Such is her confidence in ...