Chapter 5 Lily
LILY
WHEN I WOKE BEFORE MY first day at the spa, my throat felt strained, as though I’d been trying to scream in my sleep.
My heart zinged, and I couldn’t catch my breath.
I tried to focus on the details of my bedroom, the inventory of familiar things: my old bookcases along the wall, lined with paperbacks.
The watercolors I’d done in high school hung over the desk.
The red ladder-backed chair that had once belonged to my great aunt.
I could hear my mother moving through the kitchen below me, the whistle of the teakettle and the creak of her opening cabinets.
I rose and sipped a glass of water. After a few minutes my breathing slowed to normal, but heat lingered in the tips of my ears, my cheeks.
I got in the shower and lowered myself to the floor, rested my head on my knees.
I didn’t have much time to spare—it was a twenty-minute drive from Margate through Ventnor to Atlantic City—but I closed my eyes and let the water hit the back of my neck.
I had been the same way after my dad died: anxious and jumpy during the day, grinding my teeth in my sleep.
It took all my strength to stand up and lather shampoo in my hair.
After the shower I washed my face, brushed mascara on my eyelashes, and a memory surged up: the last time Steffanie and I got ready together to get into the club at the Taj Mahal.
Sixteen years old, taking swigs from a Poland Spring bottle filled with Stoli while her parents packed for a weekend trip to Cape May.
I shook my head. Over the past few weeks my brain had gone vulnerable, all of my worst memories coming to the surface.
I hadn’t thought of that night in years.
As I swished blush over my cheeks in a lazy arc, I remembered how painstaking we had been with our makeup and clothes that night.
Then Steffanie’s face a few hours later, bloodless, with black makeup smeared around her eyes.
Her legs sticking out from underneath the bathroom stall, and how I knew they were hers because it had been field hockey preseason and I could make out the tan lines from our shin guards, pale shins and browned knees.
I pushed the image away and pulled a brush through my hair.
You are only pretending, I told myself as I stepped into my pants, slid into the cheap black blazer I’d found at T.J.Maxx.
Pretending to live at home for a few months.
Pretending to care about this receptionist job.
Pretending that New York and everyone in it didn’t exist for now.
Yet before I left I slipped on a little freshwater pearl bracelet that my grandmother had given me when I graduated from high school.
I hadn’t worn it in years but maybe it would bring me luck.
Even if I was just pretending, I had, for better or worse, inherited my father’s penchant for superstition, and with the way my thoughts were tilting, I needed all the help I could get.
I EXPECTED to see Emily at the desk again, but instead I was greeted by Deidre.
She told me she usually took it upon herself to oversee training personally, as she liked to instill the spa’s values into new hires.
Though the things I learned from her couldn’t be called values, exactly: more like dictums, or threats.
Never cross your arms in front of your chest. Never say “hi” instead of “hello.” Never say “you’re welcome”—it’s always “my pleasure.”
At the spa, there was no hint that beauty could be dangerous, could be seen as a prize ripe to be seized.
Instead, as Deidre toured me through the space, I saw that everything about the spa had the air of the sacrosanct, of mystery and ritual.
The wall of little glass vials of serums, which were dispensed with droppers, like medicine or poison.
The sauna, with its cedary smell and hard, bare benches that seemed built for prayer or penitence, the vaguely threatening glow of the red coals in the corner.
The bar of teas and glass jars full of trail mix, banana chips round and pale, like communion wafers.
We passed the ladies’ restrooms on the way through the women’s lounge, and I found that I couldn’t escape the thoughts of Steffanie, even here.
Her attacker had dropped her underwear into the toilet bowl, a bloom of pink lace under a murk of waterlogged toilet paper.
Earlier that night we’d felt admitted to a new kind of existence, as the bouncers eyed our obviously fake IDs and still slashed Xs on the backs of our hands with black marker, and when the bartender poured us each a double shot of rum for the price of a single.
The memory made me dig my nails into my palms. The world was always conspiring to make young women vulnerable while labeling it as “fun.” Made it seem like we were in control, like we were making all the choices, and then it was our fault when things went wrong.
Us and our short skirts, our makeup, our taste for rum, for liking the things we were told to like, wanting what we were taught to want.
Deidre led me out to the lobby again, and I was relieved to see that Emily had arrived.
“Lily, I’ll leave you in Emily’s capable hands for the time being.
She will walk you through check-in and scheduling procedures.
At two o’clock please come to my office, and we will review the material from the training manual, including etiquette, preferred language, and wardrobe expectations.
And please, for your next shift take care to apply some powder. ”
“I will,” I said, flushing as I brought my fingers to my forehead. Emily and I were silent as we listened to Deidre click click click away.
“So, you’re here after all. Brave of you to join us. How’s your morning with the Skeletor been?”
“Oh. She’s not that bad …” I was already thinking of Deidre’s bony wrists, how her upper arm was so narrow I could probably close my pointer finger and thumb around it.
“Bullshit,” she said, smiling. Her real smile, as far as I could tell, was slyer than the one she saved for Deidre.
Mouth closed, eyes crinkled, a slight wrinkling of her nose.
“If by not bad you mean totally sadistic, sure. Anyway, if I’m supposed to show you check-in, let’s get to it.
” She tapped a button on the keyboard in front of her, and the computer screen came to life.
“Our software is from like 1994, so it sucks. This company invests everything in product research and marketing so they probably won’t upgrade during either of our tenures here.
For now we will just have to deal. Here’s the check-in screen. Notice anything?”
I did. There was a lot of blank space next to each time slot.
“No one’s coming in today. Mondays are the worst, but we are underbooked in a big way, even on the weekends.
I think they should really be focusing on creating a more approachable brand image, attract younger clientele.
But what do I know. I’m just chipping away at my BA one lousy class at a time.
Anyway, enough about this joint. What’s your deal? You new in town?”
“Sort of. I grew up here, lived in New York for a few years, now I’m back. Living in Margate with my mom.”
“Jesus, why the hell would you come back?”
“Breakup.” I didn’t want to go through the whole story with Emily. She was so self-possessed. I risked becoming her counterpoint: a ridiculous hysteric, babbling about betrayal and performance art. Breakup. The word was so simple that it felt untrue.
“That’s rough. Still should have stayed in the city.”
“It wasn’t … it wasn’t really an option. What about you?”
“From a flyover state. Religious family. Ran away from all that shit, clearly. Went to L.A. when I was eighteen and tried to find work as an actress.”
“Did you ever get any roles?”
“Some soft-core porn, but other than that, nothing. Waited in a lot of lines to try out for Coke commercials.” She drummed her fingers on the counter.
“I’m just kidding about the porn, you know.
Thought about it but it actually doesn’t pay shit.
Not unless you’re willing to let someone fuck you up the ass on camera, and you don’t even get much for that.
Oh, and speaking of cameras, you should know that Skeletor is crazy enough to actually review the footage—when she’s not back there in her office watching it live. ”
She took me by the shoulders, forced me to pivot, and gave me a little shove.
“There. Memorize this spot right here. If you hold your phone out six inches, the cameras won’t be able to see what you are doing, only that you are standing here reaching for something.
” She crouched, reached around my knee, swung a cabinet door open.
“And here, behind the gift certificate boxes. That’s where you’ll want to stash any contraband.
Soda, candy, gum, pills—whatever your jam is. ”
“Pills?”
“Hey, whatever gets you through the day. Anyway, you get one free meal in the cafeteria every shift, but they use the same vendor as that prison over in Delmont. That’s all to say you’ll want snacks.
But whatever you do, don’t buy a hot dog from that guy with the cart out front.
I made that mistake when I was new and I shat my brains out for three days straight. ”
The guffaw I let out surprised me. I didn’t recognize it as my own right away—it’d been so long since I’d really laughed. Emily shrugged. “Just trying to tell you what I’ve learned the hard way.”