My father dropped us off. People moved around us in expensive sneakers with bubbly soles of fancy foam. We walked down a corridor that led to another corridor that made a third left to lead us to a café. The food was included with the cost of the day pass. My mother ate a hard-boiled egg from a cardboard box, which had been refrigerated, while I drank a vitality shot, consisting of ginger, lemon juice, and chili powder.
We put on white robes and then took them off and sat in a hot tub. The hot tub was large and sun streamed through a window that ran the length of a wall and looked out on a lawn. The lawn had snow on it. The snow made me think of death. It sometimes angered me how, upon seeing snow, like a shearling coat on a fancy woman, my brain leapt first to Robert Frost. Miles to go before I sleep, before I sleep, before I sleep, a chorus crooned in my head, like a TikTok reel. Each time I thought it would end it started back up.
Waiting for Death on a Snowy Morning, I kept thinking, my fingers twitching for my cell phone. Tweet that, I thought, and I grabbed the thought like a puff of dandelion and attempted to boff it away in my mind’s eye. Just be just be just be, I told myself.
“Can I show you something?” my mom asked, and I walk-swam over to where she was standing above a jet. “Put your leg in front of it.”
The jet of hot water shoved my skin as far out of the way as it would go, creating a donut-shape on my upper thigh. This reminded me of the forehead injection fad that had been popular when I was in high school, which in turn reminded me of being in high school. Although I had recently crossed a threshold—one that felt, in some general, though indefinable way, significant—into my late twenties, this memory reduced me to my younger self, and I sank into a self-conscious state: it became difficult to recall how to hold my body, how to be in it, how to be.
“Woah,” I said. I climbed out of the tub and dripped over to the icy plunge pool. The water was so cold my skin ached, pounding like metal. I forced my steaming face beneath it, cooled my cheeks.
“You have to make some noise,” my mother called from the hot tub.
“Ahhh,” I said. I was unsure what genre of noise I was making. Perhaps it was a scream. “Eek.”
I climbed back out of the plunge pool and returned to the hot tub. Music was playing, unintelligible syllables. Two women in their twenties lay on lawn chairs in white robes reading from e-readers. They did not look up. Fruit lay in a bowl nearby. I did not want the fruit, but I was shaken by the sense I should take it, tuck it in my locker for later. At the same time, I felt that to do so would be an unforgivable faux pas, one that each attendee at the spa would be able to read as an infraction on my forehead, like a saline injection. Just be just be just be, I told myself.
“Do you want to go to the eucalyptus steam room or the normal steam room?” my mother asked.
I shrugged. “Eucalyptus?”
In the spa, my mother was at ease. She wore her robe like it was pajamas, nothing special. She breathed in steam and then exhaled it. She patted a towel down on the step of the steam room, lay her head atop it, allowed her robe to fall open. I caught sight of the edge of her breast through the vapor, an old slice of scar pocking its surface. I sat upright, in through my nose, out through my mouth, my hunched back pressed against the damp wall. I told myself to relax. I tried to think of the word for relax in as many languages as I could. All I could come up with was the word, “relax,” in a French accent. Rélaxe, I repeated silently, as a large plop of hot water dropped directly on my nose, jockeying straight toward my clenched mouth.
◆
My mother had paid for the day passes. Most of the other spa attendees were staying there for a week, more. For so long it was mundane. They picked at their food, they left it on the table. They ordered another course.
I wandered up the stairs, down the hall, a stop at the desk, back down the stairs, down a different hall, two steps up, onto a treadmill. I treaded, mill-like, constructing a post to promote my poem entitled “Debt,” which had been published that day. Of course, my poem entitled “Debt” had been published that day. I suspected some cosmic roast, punishment for my participation in wealth culture. I did not believe in the cosmos. Picture, screenshot, picture, picture, screenshot. Likes rolled in, like money, but not. The likes were meaningless in the spa. I returned to the bath house. We were to take a class.
The Pilates studio was filled with thin, muscular, older women. Retired literary agents, or retired lawyers, or people who went to the spa for a living. There were also younger women. They were more confusing, in terms of who they were.
“Who here does Pilates?” the instructor asked. A few hands wavered in the air, indicating sporadic participation. This response, though, struck me as somewhat unsettling—many in the room seemed at an age where this sort of tremor might become increasingly matter-of-fact. A woman my age raised her arm hard, no waver. She wore a sports bra and high-waisted leggings. My competition. Except of course, this wasn’t a competition.
The instructor was magnanimous. Nothing could be a wrong answer, unless something was the wrong answer. She was on the older cusp of the room, she had white hair, she was knowledgeable on the history of Pilates. I trusted her, nearly with my life. I had, in fact, at one time known that the founder of Pilates was named Joe. Joe Pilates. There is often a man named something like Joe behind things. Sometimes Josh or Matt or Mark. I placed my body in a pose.
The instructor explained patiently how to adjust our pose for slight improvement.
“Do you feel that?” she asked. The room nodded its assent. “Poifect!” she announced. “It’s subtle.”
I got to my feet and moved in a way that resembled dance. I felt like I belonged in that moment, that movement. I was blowing the other women out of the water. I was telling my body to behave a certain way and it was responding. This, this was how to enact a life. Did your body respond better the more money you had, or was that more closely related to practicing certain activities, certain movements? If you only engaged your core enough, could you become proficient in circumventing the sensation of debt? Could you become practiced in the eradication of pain? I was on the brink of some breakthrough. But then I was thinking of lunch.
I picked up my towel and my water bottle, stickered with my first name and last initial, and prepared to leave the studio.
“Do you dance?” the instructor asked me.
“I used to,” I said.
“That will never leave you,” she promised. It only sounded slightly like a threat.
◆
The likes continued to flitter in. We were having massages after lunch. It wasn’t quite guilt I was feeling. My body was in a robe, I was pouring quite a lot of water into it, through each pore I could manage. I slurped from my sippy cup, I blasted eucalyptus into my respiratory system, I sat in the hot tub and removed my body from the warm water’s casing. I toweled myself in a large bathrobe. I locked my phone in my locker, I removed it to check my likes. I returned it to its pod. I opened the locker by holding my wrist to its sensor. My wrist did not have a chip implanted in it, of course, but bore a bracelet, insensitive to water.
It was true, in fact, I was in debt. Attending college had a considerable cost. And it was true, someone in my family could likely afford to pay that debt. Though I wasn’t sure who I would ask. This would not be the easiest matter to bring up. I glanced at my mother, floating across from me in the hot tub, her gray hair spilling over its marbled lip. Her eyes were closed; she looked at peace. I brushed the bumps on my legs under the surface of glinting water. I had never missed a payment. I had always had a job.
The people that worked at the spa seemed blasé, they seemed to assume their own invisibility, or not to care if they were overheard. They looked like people I knew, the workers restocking towels, clearing away the dirty ones, like friends I had, people I went to parties with. They spoke in normal tones. They had dyed hair. They were my age, or they were the age of the elderly women who inhabited the spa, moving like turtles. Beebee stood at the desk; she handed me an Emory board upon request. I wandered back into the changing room.
“Excuse me,” I said to a woman, sitting on a bench, as I brushed by her.
“Mhm,” she pardoned me, as if sitting in a decorated box, robes glittering through a latticed partition.
◆
It was time for lunch. Down a corridor, around and around, the maître d’ would be so pleased to seat us. We sat down with pleasure. There were specials, and of course, too, a salad bar. My mother ordered a virgin Bloody Mary. I picked at things: hummus and salad, roasted carrots, brussels sprouts, fish. Gelato, cookies that came in personal plastic ziploc baggies. We debated taking another class. We liked the structure, though not being told what to do. Perhaps that was untrue.
My mother and I did not talk about things of substance at the spa; it was neither the time nor the place. We discussed the food, the rest of the week. I considered mentioning my future beyond this breach of scheduled time, but instead I placed a mint sprig and a half a walnut in my mouth. I was thinking rélaxe and I was thinking rélaxique, and I was not thinking about what I would do with my life in a few short months. I was holding my body in a pose. I was just being. I was having time bought for me, like a lunch, or an airline upgrade.
We walked away from the table without paying because the bill was included. It was, as they say, “all-inclusive,” which seemed, as is exclusively the rule in such places, laughable.
◆
The music playing appeared scientifically constructed for Spa Vibes. Needless to say, the vibrations eking off the other guests seemed, at minimum, unsettling. I am not saying to be rich is to be bad. Nor is it to go to a spa. I was maybe thinking those things, quietly and to myself. I was luxuriating. I was self-consciously retaining a profound skepticism of self-care. I was, to be completely honest, enjoying myself.
“You can laugh,” my mom said, after bringing up for a fourth time the tile on the hot tub, on which she wished to model the bathroom she and my father were in the process of renovating, “but I have a lot of chronic pain, and aqua-therapy is very good for it.” I was not planning to laugh. Of course money can help with pain. It is often one of the best things for it. The tile was a cool grey, muted, shiny when sunlight slithered silky at its edges.
Truthfully, my body felt quite soothed after the massage. I lay on a heating pad while a woman my mother’s age pummeled my muscles.
“Let me know if it’s too hard or soft,” she intoned. I murmured my agreement. Of course, I knew I would never complain.
◆
More water. A woman entered the tub. The light was lashing long and soft now, late afternoon, like what is called heavenly, like butter in a dish never shunned to the shelf of the refrigerator.
“Hi,” the woman said.
She wanted to speak with us. Her voice was notably similar to an actress starring in a popular television show lambasting the rich, also set at an all-inclusive resort. She spoke slow and nasally, drawing out her syllables, like her mouth was opening to the side, not up and down. She was telling us about her children. Her older daughter was a first-generation college student, she told us. This did seem confusing. I was attempting to refrain from assumptions. Her son, she informed us, was an actor at a prestigious liberal arts college that many people I knew had attended. He was there at the spa with her, though, of course, not in the women’s bathing area. Her blonde dyed hair was piled high in a bun atop her head. The hair tie pulled at the strands. Her eye makeup was mascara-y and blobbed, curtaining her eyes in little pointillist dots.
I was experiencing difficulty making small talk in the hot tub. The heat made it so my brain struggled to recall what a person was supposed to say in a conversational situation. But was this a conversation? It was somewhere between waiting on line and being stuck in an elevator. It was not like being at a cocktail party, or at pre-school pick up, though the woman seemed to be treating the circumstance accordingly. I bounced around on the shelf, allowing the jet to carve into my back. I scooted my elbows up on the ledge while my mother said something friendly and neutral in response.
The woman stood and extricated herself from the tub, encased her body in the freeze of the plunge. Another woman stood there, as if the water were room temperature, an arm clasped over her breasts the sole indication otherwise. The women began to talk. I removed my body from the heat. I looked down at my mother, the ends of my hair spilling chlorinated drips onto my toes, where polish peeled in chunks. She, too, seemed unnerved by the conversation, though I was unsure if I was merely projecting this discomfort upon her. Around us, women huddled in damp floating clumps. Thoughts burbled in my brain, but the still of the room suppressed any slight instinct I had to allow them a surface.
“I’m going to go to the gym,” I told my mom.
“Okay,” she said. She was going for a swim.
“See you in an hour.”
◆
Downstairs, I knew where different rooms were. I could live like this, I caught myself thinking, as I sampled a “health liquid” from what appeared to be a slushie machine. The sign said it was composed of green tea, vitamins, and electrolytes. It tasted like puddle water. I felt healthy. I wandered looking for the electric bikes. I walked past an archery range the size of a basketball stadium. I walked past a squash court. All the rooms were empty.
At the end of the hall was the bike room. It was dark, windowless. I peered in. I had this thought: I am peering in. I pulled my head out of the room. I leapt backwards. In the corner of the dark, windowless room, there was a man, pedaling, like the world would halt if he did.
Men in dark rooms are murderers. Everybody knows this. The room had an excessively horrid energy, if I believed in things like energy, which I do not. I do believe in murderers. It’s only smart.
Back down the hall, around the bend, through a little lobby, toward the treadmills. There were windows, and lights, and people who seemed less likely to chop my body to little bits as I tortured myself on a very expensive version of an exercise device. I stepped onto the treadmill, prepared to walk at a pace specifically selected by the machine to increase my heartrate.
It would of course be a cliché for someone to die at the spa. For a rich person to get their comeuppance like that, body chopped to little bits and stuffed in a locker. For their bracelet to be hung on the little knob outside, so when it swung the right way the locker opened back up to reveal the unimaginable. How grotesque. Chunks of rich person body spilling out, like pieces of fruit from a bowl.
It is, of course, less common for rich people to die at random, grotesquely. Unlikely.
Of course, something did happen at the spa. This is where things started to get messy. My body, it was leaking, little drops, salty, at the edges of my hair, other places too. The sun was setting. It was time to take a shower. With this came a sense of dread. The dread was the departure. Worse—the dread was the dread of the departure. I stalked to the steam room.
Stairs, corners, loops, lockers. Leggings stripped off, robes re-robed. No one in the steam room. Like the greatest relief. Eucalyptus in the nose, out through the mouth. I could hear workers walking by, gathering towels, lost water bottles, their name stickers latched firmly, barnacles on oyster shells. Fewer and fewer people. The day pass ended at five. It was four-thirty. The guests had left. Only me, eking the last few drops of eucalyptus. Justbeingjustbeingjustbeing.
◆
I want to make the spa seem scarier. I want to say I could have died that day. One can always die. The spa is scary. It is its job to make you relax. Or it is your job to relax within it. You are compelled, it is the least you could do, an obligation. Stop it, they insinuate, or rather insist. Who are they?
People do sell this lifestyle. Stop thinking so hard, they instruct, a smile slathered on a face. Stop doing that. Be someone else. Don’t be.
I want to say I could have died, because I want to sketch myself a victim. I don’t like to place myself in the position of one who has. Pain, or is it money, or is it debt? I try to map this formula in my mind, to concentrate, to solve it. I envision swirling in a beautiful bathtub. Sunlight lapping along its ledge. Grey hair bobbing on the surface in a coiled braid. The muting of an ache. An aching suspicion.
I keep trying to move my body in a different way. I keep trying to practice, to avoid the inheritance of pain.
“Poifect,” I instruct myself. “It’s subtle.”
◆
In my mind, this is what unfolded next: I walked out of the steam and piled as many fruits as I could fit in my pruned arms. A sickly banana, a gently bruised red apple, two green ones. An orange tumbled to the dewy floor and rolled down the hall before bobbing slightly, pausing. I sat down in a plush spa chair and dug into the apples with my nails, white meat squishing and scudging under their beds, into my puffy waterlogged skin. I peeled the banana in long threads, draping the yellow and brown mottled tongues along my arms. I was careful not to make a mess; I did not want an employee of the spa to be obliged to clean up after me.
I lay there for a while. I don’t know how long. The only moment the whole day my mind went blank. I want to remember what passed through my brain and dissipated, steam in heat, as I sprawled out, a performance of health. I can only guess: my brink of future, my mother’s tub, the cost of being alive, what I’d eat for dinner, the appearance of my body, the smell of banana, a bathtub, chlorine, the cost of a treadmill. A cookie in a little plastic baggie. The intangible eke of owing. The look and feel of coiled shiny blonde dyed hair. Green health juice.
◆
The shower pulled strands of water through my hair until it was clean. Bubbles clotted the drain. I blew my hair dry; I used the curler. My hair boinged shinily. My mother walked into the room.
“I want to buy the eucalyptus infuser for your father.”
“Ok,” I said.
We walked mutely on carpet to the gift shop, which was closing.
“I would just like to purchase the eucalyptus infuser,” said my mother.
They had already closed the cash machine. They did not want to reopen it, but we all knew they had to. This was awkward, like trying to get the zipper started on a winter coat when it is jammed. I was participating in that activity to avoid engaging head-on with the tension of the transaction.
My mother bought the little bottle, stuck it in her free tote bag. We said goodnight like we were leaving a party. In some ways we were: free drinks, small talk, giggles, a sense of haunting. Bodies that shouldn’t be there, acting not quite normally.
The exit was unprepared to be found.
“It’s this way,” I said.
“It’s not,” my mother said.
No one was in sight. Empty corridors, around and around, staircases arising like challenges.
“Excuse me,” my mother said to a woman walking by with a menorah. It was the final night of Hanukkah. The lighting ceremony commenced at five thirty; our day passes didn’t grant us entry. “Where is the exit?”
“It’s just that way, up the staircase, make a left,” she told us, shiny hair, smile.
“It can’t be,” my mother insisted, “because then my daughter was the one who was right.”
The woman laughed with her menorah, lighter. She took a few steps in the right direction with us. She was, after all, the one who procures the light. I finally got my zipper to work. It slid up like an escalator.
My father picked us up. It was dark. We drove out of the complex, past the checkpoint. The security guard gave us a little salute. I sucked on my water bottle. I was a new person, and at the same time I was not. I owed some cosmic debt. Likes blinked, like tiny distant stars, reflected on water, glittering so wet.