My Body(27)
Your hair will be washed while you lie with a hot, wet towel draped over your entire body. Your attendant will scratch the shampoo into your scalp so hard you worry your skin will split open. But it won’t, and soon you’ll feel blood flow into your temples. Your hair will be brushed with determination and without mercy. This might be my favorite part.
I’m sorry to return to the white light of the locker room and the women dressing themselves and prepping to resume their lives. I dislike snapping my bra back together against my back and slipping a T-shirt over my head. As I dress, my body quickly forgets what it was like to be naked and unobserved. The women in the locker room know to keep their eyes down and not look at each other’s bodies, not wanting to break the spell. I’ve never once been recognized at the spa, or at least no one has ever made it known that they recognize me. I slide my sneakers onto my bare feet, suffocating them, and I walk differently as soon as I have them on. I check my cell phone and answer emails as I head up, up, up to the ground level and the parking lot. I feed a validated parking ticket into a machine and start to drive, exiting the parking lot on Wilshire with the window rolled down but the radio turned off. A sense of loss overwhelms me as I leave. The silence feels right.
I pause before making a left to join the traffic, noticing a truck in my peripheral vision, blocking my turn. I sink in my seat and wait, but it doesn’t move. I finally look at the driver and notice that his window is also down. He waves.
“Hey,” he says. He has gaps in his top teeth. “Can I get your phone number?”
I shake my head, then pull out of the lot, using both hands to angle the steering wheel and swerve my car around the bed of his truck. I roll my eyes but I can’t help but check the rearview mirror to study my face, polished and free of makeup. I guess he thought I looked pretty, I think. I smirk a little despite myself. I notice that my lips look pale. As I drive home, I reach into my bag and put on some lipstick.
The Woozies
MY FATHER BUILT the house I grew up in. Tucked away in the sprawling suburbs of North County, San Diego, on a street that was unpaved for most of my childhood, the house sits on top of a small hill in clear view of the road. If by chance my father is in the driveway getting the newspaper or returning from a walk, people driving past will roll down their windows and yell out, “Your house is amazing! It looks like something out of a fairytale.”
The house is small, no more than eight hundred square feet, painted dark green and covered in ivy, with the windows and doors trimmed in white. It looks like it sprang naturally out of the yard where eucalyptus, pine, and our past Christmas trees grow, some to over twenty feet. Funky potted plants and cacti sit positioned like guards at the doorway. The house is a magical organism, a place both to absorb and be absorbed by.
The effort and consideration that went into each small detail are palpable: the stain of the golden wood floors, the mismatched doorknobs and lamps collected by my father over the years, the copper piping that clings to the beams, exposed along with the interior of the roof. The walls dividing the rooms are truncated, reaching just about halfway to the ceiling. When guests come over, they run the sink in the bathroom for privacy.
My father loves to talk about the house and how he built it. Growing up, I loved to listen, following him from room to room as he recited tales attached to its features: the full-length mirror in my bedroom that he installed for his girlfriend, a ballerina, before he met my mother; the tiny ceramic jar in the dining room that my grandfather found in the rubble of Hiroshima (“Careful, it’s probably still radioactive”); the painting in my parents’ bedroom fixed to the wall with a hinge that opened to reveal a hidden TV (“I just don’t like the look of TVs”). Guests trip on the uneven steps that lead from the double doors (“They were Jimmy Cagney’s”) to the entrance to my father’s studio. “You know,” my mother says, partly embarrassed, partly proud, “it’s an artist’s house.”
My father and the house were bound together. He was the architect, the groundskeeper, the historian, the author of the fairytale. Though my mother and I lived there, too, it was unmistakably his.
On many days while I was growing up, the house felt glorious; it would fill with my father’s excitement over a new painting he was working on, or with my mother’s joyous preparation for a visit from friends. They both enjoyed tending to the house, and at times like these, it thrived, sparkled. Sunlight appeared in places usually cast in shadow. My parents would flirt, referencing scenes from Woody Allen films they both loved and recounting stories of living in communist Poland when my mother was teaching there on a Fulbright. In the early evenings, they’d drink wine while my father blasted the Band and Van Morrison. Those nights I often woke up to the rhythmic sound of my parents having sex.
More frequently, I woke to the sound of their arguments. My father would slam the front door so forcefully the whole house shook. The rooms (if you could call them that) couldn’t contain my parents’ energy, much less their fighting. I was sucked into their screaming matches, positioned between them, at times literally, as they hurled cutting insults and accusations I could only partly comprehend. In an attempt at privacy, I’d close the door to my room and get down on the floor to play with imaginary friends and stuffed animals. But I could still feel the waves of tension wash over me. I’d sink like a rock dropping to the bottom of an aquarium, perfectly still. I could hear my parents’ thoughts even when the house was silent. When the house was silent, it felt the loudest.