Small Great Things(26)

Last year, for my birthday, my mother gave me a gift I have consciously avoided until today: a gift certificate to a day spa for a ninety-minute massage. I can do a lot in ninety minutes. File one or two briefs, argue a motion, make and feed Violet breakfast, even (if I’m going to be honest) squeeze in a rollicking romp in the sheets with Micah. If I have ninety minutes, the last thing I want to do is spend it naked on a table while some stranger rubs oil all over me.

But, as my mother points out, it’s expiring in a week, and I haven’t used it yet. So—because she knows I’m too busy to take care of details like this, she has taken the liberty of booking me into Spa-ht On, a day spa catering to the busy professional woman, or so it says on the logo. I sit in the waiting room until I am called, wondering if they really thought that name through. Spa-ht on? Or Spat on?

Either one sounds unpalatable to me.

I stress about whether or not I am supposed to wear panties under my robe, and then struggle to figure out how to open my locker and secure it. Maybe this is the grand plan—clients are so frustrated by the time they get to the massage that they cannot help but leave in a better state than they started. “I’m Clarice,” my therapist tells me, in a voice as soft as a Tibetan gong. “I’m just going to step out while you get comfortable.”

The room is dark, lit with candles. There is some insipid music playing. I shrug off my robe and slippers and climb under the sheet, fitting my face into the little hole in the massage table. A few moments later, there is a soft knock. “Are we ready?”

I don’t know. Are we?

“Now, you just relax,” Clarice says.

I try. I mean, I really do. I close my eyes for about thirty seconds. Then I blink them open and stare at her feet in their sensible sneakers through the face hole of the massage table. Her firm hands begin to run the length of my spine. “Have you worked here a long time?” I ask.

“Three years.”

“I bet there are some clients you walk in and see and wish you didn’t have to touch,” I muse. “I mean, like back hair? Ugh.”

She doesn’t answer. Her feet shift on the floor. I wonder if she’s thinking that I’m one of those clients, now.

Does she really see my body like a doctor would—a slab to be worked upon? Or is she seeing the cellulite in my ass and the roll of fat that I usually hide under my bra strap and thinking that the yoga mom she rubbed down last hour was in much better shape?

Clarice, wasn’t that the name of the girl from Silence of the Lambs?

“Fava beans and a nice Chianti,” I murmur.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry,” I mutter, my chin mashed into the massage table. “Hard to talk in this contraption.” I can feel my nose getting stuffy. When I lie facedown like this too long, that happens. And then I have to mouth-breathe and I think that the therapist is listening and sometimes I even drool through the hole. More reasons I don’t like massages.

“Sometimes I think about what would happen if I got into a car crash and was stuck upside down like that,” I say. “Not in the car, you know, but at the hospital in one of those neck braces that get screwed into your skull so that your vertebrae don’t shift? What if the doctors flipped me onto my belly, and I got congested like I am right now and couldn’t tell them? Or if I was in that kind of coma where you’re awake but trapped inside your body and you can’t talk, and you desperately need to blow your nose.” My head is pounding now, from being in this position. “It doesn’t even have to be that complicated. What if I live to a hundred and five and I’m in a rest home and I get a cold and no one thinks to get me a few drops of Afrin?”

Clarice’s feet move away from my range of view, and then I feel cool air on my legs as she begins to massage my left calf. “My mother got me this treatment for my birthday,” I say.

“That’s nice…”

“She is a big fan of moisturizing. She actually said that it wouldn’t kill me to not have dinosaur hide for skin if I wanted my husband to stick around. I pointed out that if lotion was what was keeping my marriage intact I had a much bigger problem than whether or not I had time to schedule a massage…”

“Ms. McQuarrie?” the therapist says. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a client who needed a massage quite as much as you do.”

For some reason, this makes me proud.

“And at the risk of losing my tip, I also don’t think I’ve ever had a client who was so bad at getting a massage.”

This makes me even prouder. “Thanks,” I say.

“Maybe you could just try…to relax. Stop talking. Clear your mind.”

I close my eyes again. And start going over my to-do list in my head.

“For what it’s worth,” I murmur, “I’m bad at yoga too.”

—

ON DAYS WHEN I work late and Micah is still at the hospital, my mother picks Violet up from school. It’s a win-win-win—I don’t have to pay for a sitter, my mother gets time with her only grandchild, and Violet adores her. No one throws a tea party like my mom, who insists on using her old wedding china and linen napkins and pouring sweet tea from the pot. I know, when I come home, that Violet will have been bathed, read to, and tucked in. There will be leftover lemon drops or oatmeal raisin cookies from the afternoon’s tea party, still warm inside a Tupperware. My kitchen will be cleaner than I left it that morning.