I Hate Everyone, Except You(57)
“Oh. My. God. You’re from What Not to Wear,” she said when we checked in.
“That’s me.”
“Oh. My. God. I love that show. I always wanted to nominate my mother. She needs you, like, so bad. She wears sweatshirts and mom jeans. All. The. Time.”
Because approximately five thousand teenage girls tell me that every year, I have a pat answer: “You should totally go to our website. There’s, like, a form for that. And I shit you not: We actually read every nomination.”
“I’m so doing that,” Britaney said. I knew she wouldn’t. That’s why I didn’t feel bad about lying to her. The producers would never even consider flying twenty crew members in from New York to ambush some dumpy mom in Calistoga. If she had lived closer to a major airport, maybe. And only if the casting department could find three other women nearby with different style problems. What I wanted to say more than anything else was, Don’t worry about your mother, Britaney. Save yourself. Save your goddamn self!
“You’re signed up for a couple’s mud bath,” she said after checking her ledger.
“Yup.”
“It’s for two,” she said, by way of clarification, I suppose.
“I’m one,” I said. “And she’s two.”
Lisa chimed in: “And we can’t wait to get naked together. Do we take off our clothes here? Because I can.”
“No,” said Britaney. “Please don’t. I’ll show you to your room.”
She led us down a long hall to a private vestibule for getting undressed that connected via a wooden door to the treatment room itself. Inside it were a large L-shaped mud bath, a curtainless shower, and a bubbling mineral tub big enough for two, which were to be used in that order. Mud, rinse, soak. “If you need anything, just call,” Britaney said, without pointing to a phone or intercom of any sort.
Despite what we tell certain service professionals, Lisa and I aren’t exactly comfortable being naked around each other. Sure, we had gone skinny-dipping in the ocean together for years—we spent practically every warm day together at Smith’s Point Beach on the south shore of Long Island throughout high school and when I was home from college—but our swimwear never came off until after we were submerged up to our chins in the water. Then, we’d float for hours, holding our bathing suits in our hands and laughing about the horny electric eels and pecker-craving piranha lurking, unseen, beneath the surface.
We undressed quickly, facing opposite directions, and I grabbed a white waffle-knit robe from the peg near the door. “See you inside,” I said and sprinted into the treatment room.
A combination of volcanic ash and earthy peat, the mud was dense and dark but also rather fluffy—and hot, thanks to the scalding, mineral-rich water that was pumped in from an underground geothermal spring. Once properly submerged, I had the sensation of being trapped inside a soaking wet, sulfur-stinking sponge, which is more enjoyable than it sounds if you’re willing to believe the environmental and psychological toxins you’ve been hoarding are fleeing your body like bats out of a smoky cave. Make me feel better about my life, mud gods. I don’t want to be a salad whore anymore.
Lisa entered after I had placed two cucumber slices and a cool, damp washcloth over my eyes. “Now what?” she said.
“You do the Dance of the Seven Veils. What do you think, you do? Get in.”
“How do I do that, smart ass? This thing’s taller than I am.” The tub had a wide flat edge, covered in white tile, which rose about three feet above the ground. At six foot four, I was able to step right over it. For Lisa, five feet tall on a good day, it wouldn’t be so easy.
“Hop up on the side, swing your legs in, then lie down like I am.”
From the sound of it, grunting mostly, Lisa was taking my advice. “OK, I’m in,” she said, “but this doesn’t seem right. I’m just sort of lying on top.”
I laughed. I neglected to mention that you don’t really sink into the mud. “You’ve got to wriggle your butt down into it. Really jam it in there.”
“This is ridiculous.” After an extended period of moaning and breathing heavily, she said, “This motherfuckin’ mud is hot as hell. Why didn’t you tell me it would be this hot?”
“Why don’t you just shut up and relax. You’re ruining my spa experience.”
“Oh, I will ruin your spa experience, all right. And when they do the autopsy on your body, they’re gonna find mud in places you never knew existed.”
Usually, I enjoy Lisa’s empty threats, but she was starting to get on my nerves. I wasn’t even close to becoming detoxified. “No, really. Are you ever going to stop talking? Or is that trap of yours set to run for the full forty-five minutes?”
“Oh, I still have more to say, dick whistle. This stuff reeks. You just spent three hundred bucks so we could steep ourselves in a giant pile of steaming horseshit.”
I let out a groan and stopped responding. Eventually Lisa went silent. She was either dead or exhausted, and I was grateful either way. We lay in our tub at a right angle, our toes pointed toward each other, for about twenty minutes. Once sufficiently overheated and pleasantly light-headed, I removed the washcloth and cucumbers from my eyes and checked to make sure Lisa’s were still covered. I stood up and with my hands and forearms wiped from my naked body the excess mud, which fell back into the tub in thick glops. I jauntily stepped over to the shower, my back to Lisa, and rinsed the remaining mud from my newly detoxed cracks and crevices.