She laughs, tilting her neck back. Not a ring on that neck. Not a blemish. “You certainly know some… terminology, don’t you?” She takes a sip of the red champagne. Hers looks thick and dark, the color and viscosity of blood. Does it have any bubbles? Not any that I can see. But then again the room is dark, isn’t it? Silly to be afraid. Sure the white faces in the wall are a little weird, but it could just be a rich-people thing. Like the jellyfish behind the red curtain. Part of the eccentric spa décor. Eclectic, as Sylvia would say.
The woman is still chuckling to herself, still looking in the mirror, her thick red champagne in her hand. “Glycolic,” she repeats, shaking her head. “Oh my.”
“Daughter of Noelle,” someone calls softly. A small woman in a black suit standing in a doorway. A woman like a whisper. “We’re ready for you.”
The woman with the magazine stops chuckling. She looks at me, suddenly so very serious. “Letting go is so worth it,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
But she’s turned away again, staring at her selves in the dark.
* * *
Scared. No reason at all to be, really. Just a treatment room like any other. Dark as a womb. Thick with herbal steam. Heated massage table in the middle. The woman like a whisper stands in the corner smiling. She looks like so many aestheticians I’ve seen before. Serene expression. Eerily ageless. Voice like air. Barely there, really, like a ghost. Her English accented slightly, though from where, I’m not sure. She’s telling me to undress, she’ll take my robe now. She doesn’t leave the room like they normally do. Just stands there and smilingly waits for me to strip. “Great,” she whispers. “Just great. Now lie down, please.”
What sort of treatment is this? I want to ask, but now the question seems stupid. Ungrateful. It’s free, isn’t it? I think of those white plaster faces screaming out of their black frames in the waiting room. Anyway, I tell myself, too late now, isn’t it? Your clothes and your purse are in a locker a maze of corridors away. You’ll have to be led back to them later like a lost girl. You’ll have to find the woman in silver somewhere on the winding stair. You’ll have to beg her for your shoes. A tightness in my chest. My breath is shallow and quick. The whisper woman is telling me to close my eyes. I feel her lay a blanket over my body. “Breathe,” she says. “Three deep breaths, there you go. I’ll take them with you. Shall I take them with you?”
“Yes.”
And then she rubs her hands with some sort of scented oil. Eucalyptus, maybe? Holds her hands suspended over my nose and mouth. We breathe together. I feel my chest rise and fall. “There,” she says. “That’s better, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say. And it is. Much better. I close my eyes in earnest now. The eucalyptus-y scent thickens. Fresh steam rolling in from somewhere like a fog. A warmth spreads through me that feels delicious. I let her wash my face about a thousand times. Rag after hot steaming rag descending upon me, smothering my skin. Her soaped hands sliding across the planes of my face, washing me away and away. I start to drift off as she applies a thick, cold paste to my cheeks. The first of several masks, perhaps? Just a facial, then. That much is clear now.
“I could really use this facial,” I say. “I haven’t had a facial in a while. I go to a place in Montreal, but it’s nothing like this, of course.”
The woman says nothing. Just continues to massage the cold paste onto my face.
“My mother came here though,” I offer to the dark.
Silence. More cold paste.
“She died recently. That’s why I’m in town. Taking care of things. That’s why I’m here tonight, too. I guess someone here knew her. I guess she was a member.”
Still nothing.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I add. “She had terrific skin. Did you ever—?”
A hand on my shoulder, gripping. Then: “I’m afraid not.” She begins to knead my cheeks more forcefully.
“They offered me a free treatment. That was nice of them.”
I can feel her smiling in the dark. “They’re very generous.”
I hear that water fountain again in the distance. Soft ambient music. An airy drone like the endless reverberation of some otherworldly bell. I notice something glimmering out of the corner of my eye. I try to look without moving my face, still under her lathering hands. Then I see it: a small white jellyfish. Glowing in the corner of the dark room, in a little glass box full of water. I know it’s the tiny one I held in my palm last night. The one light as a wish. You’re going to go on quite a journey together, the girl-woman in black said.
“What is that?” I ask. “A jellyfish?”
“Shhh,” whispers the whisper woman. And then she says, “I’m just going to turn on the light so that I can assess your skin. It’s a bright light. So I’ll be covering your eyes, is that okay?”
“Of course.” And now I’m really smiling. Because, jellyfish aside, all of this is familiar. First some cleansing and massage. Now assessment followed by extractions. I can handle extractions. There was never anything to fear. Which is a little disappointing, frankly. Maybe I wanted to be obliterated. She presses a damp cotton pad over each of my closed eyelids. I can’t help but think of pennies on the eyes of the dead. The ferryman taking his change as I float on the river Styx. She shines a lamp over my face. The light’s so bright, I can see it even through my closed eyelids and the damp cotton pads. Flaming red. I feel the fact of her eyes. Looking at me.
“Well?” I say at last, because I can’t take any more of her silence. “What’s the verdict?” And I laugh my nervous laugh that betrays me. “Am I congested?”
“That’s a way of putting it,” she says quietly.
“Lots of extractions to do, then,” I offer. Listen to me offering.
She’s silent. No sound in the room but my own breathing and those chimes. The eucalyptus scent is beginning to be oppressive.
“If you have to do extractions, I can take it. I’m very seasoned. I’m—”
“It’s all here,” she whispers at last, touching my face. I feel her finger pads trace my forehead furrows, the deep creases between my brows. The veins around my nose and the muzzle lines around my mouth. Nasolabial folds, I know they’re called. Laugh lines that weren’t even born from laughing. I feel her fingers glide their way back to my forehead. Trace the scar, its shadowy star shape. She touches it so tenderly that a thin tear leaks from my eye. She takes the cotton pads from my lids. “Open,” she says. I do. And there I am in the oval mirror she’s holding over my face.
“Memory and skin go hand in hand, you know,” she says. “Good memories, good skin. Bad memories…” And here she trails off. Because the mirror speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
I stare into it. I stare and stare at my own wretched reflection. So close I was once. On certain days, in certain lights. It’s the closeness that kills me. The almost but not quite. The grasping and the disappointment. The resignation and the desperation. All etched in my face. The hope’s still there in my eyes. Dumb, persistent, unquashable. It gives me a slightly crazed, haunted look. Hope is a weed that Marva nurtures in the shade. Have faith, she entreats. Never give up, she pleads, on your #skingoals. It might just be a matter of the right combination of acids. Of not looking so closely, so punishingly in the mirror. Under such very bright lights, tsk, tsk. Herself under very bright lights as she says this. Looking so terribly flawless. Looking like evidence of godly design.
I feel the whisper woman hovering over me, just beyond the glass, smiling encouragingly. She could be thirty-five. She could be sixty-five. Beside her, the jellyfish is glowing more brightly, more whitely in its tank.
“What if we do something about it?” she says in a voice that is like a caress.
“Like what?”
“How attached are you to your memories?”
I look into the mirror again. The shadows and miseries imprinted there on my skin. My pores gaping open at me like silently screaming mouths. The toll of the years casts a grayness that perhaps will never be lifted. I see my paltry almost. My utterly unbearable closeness. Closeness to what? Mother’s face flashes brightly in my mind.
And I say to my own reflection, “Not attached. Not attached at all.” Beside me, I feel the jellyfish quiver in its tank. Like it’s sighing.
* * *