“What’s the problem,” she said. “We’re a couple. A couple of assholes.”
I booked the mud baths, unsure why I even hesitated in the first place. Having been best friends continuously since junior high, Lisa and I are like two peas in a twisted pod. We often tell people, hospitality workers mostly, that we’re married, just to watch the expression on their faces slowly change from coolly welcoming to wholly confused. “We’re on our honeymoon,” she proudly stated to a maître d’ in Honolulu, while I stood behind her braiding a little strand of her hair. “We’re celebrating our twenty-fifth,” I once confided to a concierge in Key West, “but, please, don’t tell anyone. We’re keeping it hush-hush for obvious reasons.” He answered, “Twenty-fifth what?” In reply, I stuck my tongue in my cheek and wriggled it around a bit. It just seemed like the right thing to do. He didn’t ask any follow-ups.
The girl behind the front desk of the spa was pretty and young. She struck me as the type who played varsity field hockey: long, lean, no makeup, and a golden tan. Her name tag said BRITANEY and so I immediately hated her parents.
“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.
“I’m getting into the Jacuzzi now,” I announced.
“Good for you, princess,” she said. “I’m getting out of here before a redwood takes root in my vagina.”
“OK, I’ll shut my eyes.”
The first sound I heard from Lisa’s direction was barely audible over the motor of the mineral bath. It was the kind of noise a middle-aged man might make getting out of bed after a solid sleep. Uuuunnnngh. The second sounded more like the first guttural emanations of a German charwoman suffering an appendicitis attack. Aaaaaoooo guhhhhpffft. And the third, the final audible cry of an elderly bison as it submits to a pack of hungry coyote. Mmmmbuh.
“Are you OK over there?” I asked.
“Pawk,” she said. “I’m stuck.”
* * *
Lisa and I have been calling each other Pawk for more than twenty years now. I am Pawk. She is Pawk. And together we are Pawk. It’s pronounced the way people with thick New York accents say pork.
The name stuck after a visit to our friend Sandra’s condo on Long Island. She had just given birth to her second son, Vincent, affectionately referred to as Baby Bincent by Isabel’s first son, Nicholas.
As soon as we sat down on the living room sofa, Nicholas, who was almost three and excited to receive company, brought Lisa and me one of his toys, a colorful limp-limbed clown.
“That’s one of his favorites,” Sandra said tepidly. She was nursing Vincent in a nearby chair. Her normally well-maintai
ned hair was stringy and she looked like she was having trouble staying awake. “It speaks if you squeeze it.” Sandra, still in her early twenties, was the first of our high school cohort to have children, so her situation was foreign and awkward to us.
Evidently, the purpose of the doll was to teach some basic anatomy. When you squeezed its hand, you activated some microchip and the doll said, “Hand!” If you squeezed its leg, the doll said, “Leg!” Lisa and I must have been thinking the same thing, because she whispered in my ear: “Do you think this thing is anatomically correct?”
I replied, “Did you squeeze its . . . you know?”
“That’s the first place I squeezed. It’s dead down there.”
Playing with Nicholas, we could ignore the fact Sandra was married, with two small humans to keep alive. Responsibility frightened us. So, we kept squeezing.
“Head!” said the doll.
“Head!” yelled Nicholas.
“Head!” cheered Lisa and I.
Squeeze.
“Hand!” said the doll.
“Hand!” yelled Nicholas.
“Hand!” cheered Lisa and I.
Squeeze.
“Tummy!” said the doll.
“Tummy!” yelled Nicholas.
“Tummy!” cheered Lisa and I.
Nicholas was getting all riled up, twirling around the living room with his hands in the air. His joy was contagious because we were all laughing like a bunch of kids on a playground. Then Lisa pressed the doll’s shoe.
“Foot! Foot!” said the doll. Apparently it had a glitch in that extremity because it said foot twice. Or maybe it was just ticklish.
Nicholas stopped in his tracks and stared at both of us.
“Pawk,” he announced, the way one might answer the question of what’s for dinner.
“What did he just say?” I asked Sandra. She shrugged.
“Pawk!” Nicholas yelled.
Lisa and I looked at each other. Then back at Nicholas. Then back at each other.
“Pawk!” we cried in unison.
We’ve been Pawk ever since.
* * *
“Pawk, I’m stuck.”
“You’re not stuck,” I assured her. “Just try harder.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can. I’m dying. In the mud.”
“Would you like me to call an ambulance?”
“Funny, douche canoe. But I’m not kidding. Help me out of here!”
“OK, OK,” I said, more than mildly annoyed. “Close your eyes!” I climbed out of the Jacuzzi and reached for my robe, which I had hung on a nearby hook. It looked so clean and white and soft. If I wore it to pull Pawk from the mud, it would get filthy. That’s not the way this should go, I thought. I want a pristine robe after my mineral bath. And so I decided to remain naked.
“Keep your eyes closed. I’m coming over,” I said.
“I honestly have no desire to see your dick. Just get me out of here before I fucking boil.”
During all of her grunting and groaning, Lisa had managed to swing her legs over the side of the tub. She must have inverted her center of gravity because her head was thrown back into the mud, her frizzy copper hair splayed around her like a slow-burning fire. As I gazed down upon her she struck me as a giant overturned turtle slowly sinking into a prehistoric tar pit.
“Oh, that’s not good,” I said. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Give me your hands and I’ll pull you up.” She raised her arms from her sides. I took hold of her wrists and she took mine. I steadied myself as best I could on the slick concrete floor and pulled. Her shoulders barely broke the surface. “You’re gonna have to help me out a bit here,” I told her.
“I’m trying,” she growled. And opened her eyes.
“You’re peeking!” I yelled.
“I can’t see anything except the ceiling!”
“Well, shut your eyes anyway.”
“Why do you get to have your eyes open?”
“How am I supposed to pull you out without looking?”
“Oh, I don’t even care at this point.”
“Believe me, it’s not like I want to see any of this.”
Now’s probably a good time for me to add that Lisa is not a small girl. And I’m not saying this with any judgment, because life happens and I adore her. But whenever I picture her in my head, I see her as she was when we were young, a little wisp of a thing, five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet. After thirty years, two kids, a bad marriage, and a decade of working overnights in a hospital, she’s put on some weight, much of it in the bust region. Lisa doesn’t say whether she minds it or not, though she will frequently note that many men are drawn to it. I, on the other hand, was doing everything in my power to avoid looking at it.
I propped my foot up on the tub, between where Lisa’s legs were dangling over the edge, and pulled as hard as I could.
“Puuuuuush!” I yelled.
“You’re hurting meeee!” she yelled.
I kept pulling and she kept falling back into the mud, again and again, until we were both laughing so hard we had to pause, twice, to catch our breath.
“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up,” I said after ten minutes.
“Let’s give it one more try. Really put your back into it this time.”
“You need to squeeze your abs more.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Like one of those mothers who summons enough adrenaline to lift a Volkswagen off her kid’s leg, I found the strength to pull Pawk from her bog. One might think I deserved a heartfelt thank-you from my oldest friend in the world. Instead, Lisa—covered in so much mud that only the whites of her eyes resembled human tissue—asked: “Do your balls always hang that low?”
“It’s hot in here,” I said, covering my junk.
“Because, wow. That’s . . . really something.”
“It’s not too late for me to drown you,” I said.
Back in the reception area, Britaney told us we looked refreshed. We thanked her and said we enjoyed ourselves. I was halfway out the door, when I stuck my head back in. “Don’t forget to nominate your mother for the show,” I said.
“I won’t!” she answered.
Pawk went back to our hotel, where we split a bottle of wine and fell asleep before sunset, our salad days far behind us.
RICH AND FAMOUS
A few years ago the principal of the high school I attended asked my sister Courtney, whom he knew through a friend of a friend, to ask me to deliver the commencement address. Whether intentional or not, taking this route was a smart move on his part. Courtney could basically ask for both my kidneys and I’d carve them out myself. Oh, you want to use them as bookends? In the guest bedroom? That’s cool. Would you also like my pancreas? It might make a good doorstop. No? OK. Just let me know if you change your mind.
But even coming from Courtney, this request seemed like a huge imposition. You see, I loathe teenagers. Can’t stand the sight of them. If you don’t count rapists, murderers, KKK members, terrorists, child molesters, religious extremists, animal abusers, most celebrity chefs, all Kardashians, bankers, career politicians, and people who market sugary breakfast foods to children, teenagers are hands down the worst humans on the planet. Being in the general vicinity of just one pimply-faced bag of hormones is enough to provoke stirrings of diarrhea in my lower intestine. Four hundred at once?
“No fucking way,” I told Courtney.
“What? Why not?” she asked, sounding more surprised than I would have expected.
“Because. I don’t want to go back there.”
“This again,” she said. I could feel her rolling her eyes on the other end of the telephone. “They’re not asking you to travel back in time and repeat puberty, just give an inspirational speech. ‘I’m Clinton Kelly. Congratulations. The best years of your life are ahead of you. Blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bye.’ ”
“I don’t want to.” Wow, that sounded whiney even to me.
“Oh, my God,�
�� she said with a laugh. “You’re being such a . . . dork.”
Perhaps, but that’s familiar territory.
* * *
When Courtney was born, I was thirteen and having a rough time in junior high. By the eighth grade I had neither mastered the social game of adolescence (destroy others lest you be destroyed) nor fully constructed the persona that would eventually allow me to cope with the horrors of high school (that I was a member of the upper-middle class who had somehow found himself, through no fault of his own, living in a squarely middle-class town). Mostly, I was horrified by the way kids my age behaved toward one another. Pushing, shoving, cursing, name-calling. It was all so vulgar. Once, a guy named Steve—in home economics, of all classes—whispered in my ear that he was going to rape my mother. I asked for a bathroom pass and cried in the boys’ room until the period ended, not because I thought he would actually do it, but because the kind of person who would say such a thing actually existed in the world.
The way I saw it, Courtney was an innocent soul entrusted into my care, at least when my parents left us home alone to meet friends for dinner. I was determined to construct for my baby sister a future free of humiliation and sadness.
When she was three, I would sit with Courtney for hours flipping through magazines and catalogs playing a game I had invented for her called Pick One. At every spread, she had to choose from the two pages the one she liked better. This task would make her confident and decisive, I told myself. Some choices were easy, like a page of dense women’s-magazine text opposite an advertisement for tampons. “This one,” she’d say, pointing to the tampon ad, because in it a woman smiled ear to ear while riding a bicycle. Tampons are fun! But some decisions were more difficult, like when it came to the Toys“R”Us catalog. On the left, an Easy-Bake Oven; on the right, a Barbie Townhouse.
“You can only pick one page,” I’d say. “You have to make your decision and live with it forever.” The pressure was for her own good.
“The Barbie house.” She looked up at me for signs of approval. I gave her a slight smile as if to say, Whatever you choose is the right choice. But in my heart, I was doing backflips in piles of glitter. Yes! The townhouse! An oven without a house attached? How stupid. And that stove is so old-fashioned. A townhouse would have a modern oven in it, something with a convection setting, plus lots more fun stuff, like a private elevator! And if you played your cards right—kept yourself thin, learned how to toss your hair at cocktail parties—you could probably marry a rich man and hire a servant to do all the cooking for you.
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