My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

And There’s the Rub!

The whole spa concept is foreign to me. I don’t cleanse my face; I wash it. I don’t “release toxins” or parole them or give them time off for good behavior. Even the word “spa” is strange, like the back end of it got left off. Like someone was writing, “I’m off to the spay and neuter clinic,” but they collapsed in midsentence, the dog heaving a sigh of relief.

I have set all this aside, however, because I recently got a gift certificate for a local spa and have cajoled my friend Wendy into coming with me for a massage. We are now standing in the room known to ordinary (non-cleansing) people as a locker room. The sign on the door says “Women’s Dressing.” As though we are salads. Across the hall is the Water Closet. This spa has tried hard to be tony and European, right down to the medical background forms, which request that we “tick” boxes, rather than check them.

The locker room is pristine, and smells like no locker room I’ve ever been in. The smell turns out to be the lockers themselves: They’re lined with cedar. “Check, I mean tick, this out,” I tell Wendy. “In case moths attack while we’re off getting our massages.”

A beautiful young attendant arrives to show us how to operate the locks on the lockers. Then she leaves to get us bathrobes and towels.

Wendy looks stressed. “Do we have to tip her for this? I hate these places. I don’t know how to behave. What do I tip? Do I take everything off? Do I leave on my underwear?” Wendy is going to need a second massage to relieve the stress that’s accumulated while being here for the first one.

We are told to wait for our masseuses in the lounge. It’s a gorgeous, perfect lounge with expensive cheeses and orchids and pitchers of lemon water. We pour ourselves some water and finish our medical forms. Wendy is reading aloud: “Are you pregnant? Ha! No, I just look like it!”

A different beautiful young attendant comes into the lounge to refill the water pitcher and clear away the empty glasses. She glances briefly at the flabby, wrinkly things on the sofa, as if giving thought to how she might clear those away too.

At last our masseuses arrive to take us to the treatment rooms. I watch Wendy disappear down the hallway, her voice trailing off: “I left my underwear on. Was that bad? I wasn’t sure…”

My masseur, Leo, tells me to “disrobe to my level of comfort” and get under the sheet on the massage table. Then he leaves the room. I notice that a small pink flower is lying on the sheet at the head of the massage table, as though the last person was a shrub. The massage table is outfitted at one end with a small, heavily padded toilet seat. When he returns, Leo tells me to put my face inside the toilet seat, which he calls a “face cradle.”

Leo says he’ll be “opening up my muscles” and “getting blood into the area.” This doesn’t sound relaxing. It sounds like the tiger scene in Gladiator. I bury my face in the toilet and pray for leniency.

Eventually I relax. Things are going swell. Then Leo asks me if I want the “complimentary parafango treatment.” There are so many things I need to learn before I can answer this question.

“Fango means volcanic,” Leo adds, bringing me no closer to a decision.

“Oh,” I say. “In what language?”

He doesn’t answer. He must think I’m testing him. For the next few minutes, Leo gives me the complimentary silent treatment. This is fine with me. In my experience, conversations in which one party has her head in the toilet bowl are always trying.

I find Wendy waiting for me in the lounge. She got the parafango treatment on her feet. “And how was that?” I ask her.

“Really relaxing,” she says in a strangled voice that I have heard her use only once before, when raccoons got into the compost. “Can we go now?” Wendy gets up and moves toward the door very fast, faster than you would expect for someone whose feet have been dipped in molten magma.