The Pummeled Puritan

I was raised in New England, where even your parents don’t touch you, in a family so Yankee that witch hazel was considered a cosmetic and ginger ale a medicine. Since birth I’d been trained to treat my body firmly, frugally and without emotion--which perhaps explains why the Southern California spa craze had barely penetrated my consciousness. The extravagant expenditure of time and money, the sybaritic notion of, say, lounging half-clad in a steam bath, triggered such deep feelings of shame-based guilt that my entire being cringed just thinking about it.

Then, in rapid succession, my father died, I turned 50 and my husband and I divorced. My impulse was to square my shoulders and soldier on, but when a spa opened in the spiffy new Korean mall right up the street from my apartment it seemed I might be turning “West Coast” after all. What if I pampered myself for a change? What if I spent a little money? What if I admitted it wasn’t a sin to feel good and went for a combination body scrub and massage?

As I dialed the place to schedule, I realized that this experience probably couldn’t take place while I was in jeans, a jersey and a sweater, but surely they wouldn’t expect you to undress completely. They must give you a capacious robe, I thought, or at least drape you head to toe with towels. And, of course, this mortifying indulgence would take place in a private room, somewhere hidden and quiet, shielded from public view.

The day of my appointment, I walked to the mall, took an elevator to the third floor and stepped into the lobby of the spa. It was all very tasteful, I noted with satisfaction: the vases of orchids, the bowls of fruit, the rice paper screens. At the front desk, a woman who looked like a geisha instructed me to take off my shoes, handed me a towel and robe, and bowed in the direction of a blond-wood locker. Maybe she’ll do my massage, I hoped as I changed. Maybe she’ll expose only a few inches of skin at a time, keeping the rest discreetly swathed.

Just then, a fortyish woman appeared at my elbow. She was wearing a big black bra and panties and was built like a stevedore. “My name Song,” she announced boldly, looking me over with the tender curiosity of a mother sheep regarding a premature lamb. “You come with me.”

This was no geisha girl, I thought, as she shepherded me toward what I assumed was our little room. Instead, she led me down the hall, kicked open a pair of double doors, and pushed me into clouds of scalding steam. It took me a moment to realize I was in a giant sauna. Nothing in my Anglo-Saxon Protestant childhood had prepared me for a sight such as this: hordes of women, red as lobsters from the heat and naked as the day they were born, brushing their teeth, plucking their eyebrows and merrily scrubbing their crotches, armpits and feet.

I clutched a towel to my cowering Caucasian body. With a good-natured chuckle, Song ripped it off, shoved me under the nearest shower head, and turned the water on full blast, spraying me with what felt like a fire hose. As the others frisked about with carefree abandon, I halfheartedly squeezed out a drop of shampoo, self-consciously dabbed a bar of soap across my legs and swiped my back with a long-handled brush. Song watched this nonsense, arms crossed, for as long as she could. Then she grabbed my hand, ushered me into the next room and, in full view of the other masseuses and clients in the sauna, thrust me face down on one of several vinyl-covered tables.

Who were all these people? Couldn’t we go off by ourselves? While I reeled, Song donned a kind of sandpaper mitt and attacked me as if I were a chest of drawers she’d been assigned to strip of flaking lacquer. “Looka that!” she exclaimed, tapping my forearm with an accusing finger. I expected to find that she’d drawn blood, but she was drawing my attention to the rolled-up worms of grimy dead skin that--up to now--apparently had encased me from wrist to elbow in a thick layer of gray gunk. “S-sorry,” I said.

First she did my back, then my front, then both sides, finishing me off with what, as near as I could figure, was a cucumber-and-iron-filings facial. Then came the massage. I have a highly evolved massage parlor fantasy I’ve been fine-tuning for years, but this did not resemble it. For one thing, mine has a big muscular guy in it, and for another--oh forget it. Let’s just say I’d been laboring under the misimpression that massages were pleasurable. But as Song kneaded the muscles of my back, thighs and calves with steel fingers I was sure were bruising me, it was all I could do not to scream in pain. “Ouchie, ouchie!” she yelled, as I stifled another cry.

My body went rigid as a block of wood. “Relax!” Song scolded, manipulating one of my stiffened arms. “Gotta relax!” Beside us, another black-bra gal was working over her own customer. Song hollered in Korean. “Yours got any life in her?” I imagined her asking. “Mine’s practically in rigor mortis!”

Finally, mercifully, it was over. Song released me and I slunk down the hall to the Jade Room, a darkened chamber with a heated floor. Alone at last, I dropped down on a tatami mat, gingerly loosened my robe and thought about what had just happened: A woman I had never seen before and probably would never see again had touched my throat, my thighs, my breasts. As much as I love my mother, I couldn’t remember a single time she’d ever held me. I thought about that line from the Bible: All flesh is grass. The whole thing made me feel so fragile and vulnerable that, far from loosening up, it was all I could do not to revert to the fetal position and start sobbing. It was pleasant and all, with the warm stones soothing my back and the fragrant steam, but--nah, I thought. Once a Yankee, always a Yankee. This just ain’t me.

I jumped up, dressed and fled home, where I spent the next couple of hours scrubbing the floor, the tub, the hard-to-reach corners of the baseboards with a clump of old steel wool.