How to Ruin A Day at the Spa

[SureWoman]

By Lisa Romeo
www.LisaRomeo.blogspot.com

The husband: adored, and for once, not so clueless on Valentine's Day. The gesture: a gift certificate to a luxurious day spa. The reason: a hope that one very stressed-out wife (that would be me) will, after some serious pampering, feel less like staring vacantly at the checkbook and more like doing something in line with the holiday. Results: mixed.

I had not even been in the intensive half-body wet rosemary seaweed mud wrap for an hour when it began – threatening images of fortune tellers and fretting over fate. Even when swathed in mud, or later when I was scrubbed in salt, or finally when I was swaddled under steamy towels, I couldn't shake the perpetually discordant combination of outer ahh and inner grrgh.

Turns out, it’s a bad idea, when inhaling fragrant, soothing hinkleberry-anise body cream, to replay in one's head the scenes from the evening before. It only makes one feel guilty about the obscenely expensive gift certificate. We're frugal people, but I appreciated my husband's gesture. I had been fidgety lately about important matters -- career, kids, weather we could ever again afford the suede boots – or anything -- in the Nordstrom (or even the Target) catalog. So he signed me up for the whole shebang: sea salt wrap, deep facial massage, mud reflexology treatment, other stuff I can't pronounce, and made me promise to relax my butt off.

But the night before, I had taken my wired, worrywart self to a networking event for “creative professionals”. For fun, or for those short of business cards, stories or lies, a Tarot Card Reader, a Fortune Teller, and a Palm Reader were stationed beside the chocolate fountain.

Barbara, a writing buddy of mine, the kind of person who can listen to my worried nattering for hours and then say the one singularly wise thing which instantly clams me, wanted to have a go. “Come in, it’ll be fun,” she nudged. “Aren’t you curious?”

“Oh look, cranberry biscotti,” I said, moving determinedly down the dessert line. Here's the thing: I know, with clairvoyant-like certainty, that the cream puff, fudge torte and pecan tartlet will migrate to my hips and lodge for decades. The other stuff, the stuff I don't know, I don't want to know. Really.

I like sure things. I research. I brainstorm, make lists, prioritize, prognosticate, calculate, write Plan B, run numbers, prep, outline, know my options, analyze, and think outside, inside and all around the box, all in order to cover the bases, minimize the downside and maximize the uptick. I labor under a comforting (albeit admittedly ludicrous) conviction that I actually am in control. Nowhere in my head is even a smidgen of room for anything Tarot Card Reader or Fortune Teller or Palm Reader might offer. Which is what I told Barbara, and when she kept pestering me, I had to tell her why.

Once, my college roommate Anne and I had consulted a certain Madame Dominique, who read our palms for the outrageous sum of $15 (which was a movie, pizza, beer and a joint in 1980 dollars).

“Ah, you have boyfriend?” Madame said. I fingered the heart-shaped locket clearly visible around my neck. Anne smirked.

“His name begins with R?”

“Roger,” I confirmed, slightly startled.

“You will marry and have three children," Madame said. Then, "No, two.”

“With Roger?”

“With a very tall man, very dark tall man.”

Roger was shorter than me and creamy as pancake batter.

“You are a student, well someday," Madame barked.

Anne pointed to my Syracuse University sweatshirt and we both stifled groans.

“You will get a job with animals,” Madame said.

Now that was ridiculous. I was a journalism major. I glimpsed Anne circling an index finger at her temple.

“Oh, this line, not happy. No.” Madame clicked her tongue and dropped my hand.

“What? Tell me,” I insisted.

She sighed. “The premature loss of a sibling." Then she stood, turned and shouted, "Next?”

Anne grabbed my limp elbow and took in my horrified expression. “Yeah, well all siblings croak one day,” she said and led me toward Baskin Robbins where I had a double dip chocolate chocolate peanut butter chip, no sprinkles.

Back at the networking event, Barbara listened to my 20-year-old story, unimpressed. She made me watch as our Novelist Friend begged Tarot Card Reader to reveal if her dream agent would call, as Documentary Dude inquired of Fortune Teller if his new film would fly, and as Bartender Boy solicited a prediction from Palm Reader for the night’s tip total.

I suggested we find the expert who was giving tips on the newest in 30-second "elevator pitches."

Next day at the spa, my Austrian masseuse implored, “You zeem zo tents. Relax. Be in the moment.” Impossible, not when I'm in the past with Madame Dominique twitching about my brain. She looms, and I wonder about fate and predictions and coincidence. Roger the college boyfriend broke up with me two weeks after I saw her (he said I was too serious, but I told him to think long and hard about that). My first journalism job was writing about horses (animals, no?). I have two children (and there was one miscarriage). I am a student again, starting grad school in my 40s (she'd said "a student someday," right?).

Sophia is kneading my rigid neck when suddenly I leap up, knocking all 102 pounds of her against the damask serenity screen, which topples to reveal a flat screen TV. From the creamy gold restroom, I drop my cell phone into the faux-marble sink, where it rattles and pings, before I can punch Barbara’s number.

“Remember the palm reader from college?” I say.

“Again with Madame fraud?

“What if she meant me? You know, when she said `premature loss of a sibling'? What if I am the sibling who dies prematurely? I'm overweight and my cholesterol is...”

“Where are you?” Barbara yelps. “Maybe I'll come right over now and kill you myself and then she'll be right.”

“I’m at the spa and I’m a failure at relaxation -- and now I might die.”

“Look, didn’t Dominique the Dumb also say your friend Anne would be world famous?” Barbara says.

“Yeah?”

“Okay, Anne who?”

Point taken.

Back on the massage table, I let Sophia finish. I relaxed, seriously. I felt like the world's silliest twit for even thinking about Madame Dominique again after all these years, much less allowing her routine predictions to throw me. Wasn't it reasonable that a college girl would marry and have 2.5 kids? Take a class again, someday? Ok, she had me on the animal job. But the sibling stuff? I realized I agreed with Anne; that if my brother dies at 95, it will still be too soon.

When my day at the spa came to an end, so too did my anxiety. I felt cleansed as I drove home, calm and serene. I couldn't wait to get back to my thoughtful husband as more pleasant images leapt to mind – ones more in line with the red hearts I'd placed in our front window that week, more in line with the knowledge that by the time I arrived, the husband would have already stashed the kids at Grandma's for the night.

As soon as I got in my back door, there he was and as usual, I stood on tiptoe to kiss my very tall, but very pale-skinned husband. And it was then that I remembered – about his telling me how, years before we dated, he'd lost all the pigment in his formerly deep olive skin.

I decided not to call Barbara. Yet.

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Author Bio: Lisa Romeo's writing has been published in the New York Times, O-The Oprah Magazine, Tango, Literary Mama, and many other print and web venues, literary journals and anthologies, including the just-released Feed Me! Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image (Ballantine). A former equestrian journalist and public relations expert, Lisa teaches writing and is at work on a memoir. She lives in northern New Jersey and recently completed an MFA degree. Visit Lisa at www.LisaRomeo.blogspot.com.