Full Body Scrub
When I found out I was dying, people asked me what I wanted. And I wanted to party. I wanted to party and party and party. I wanted mushrooms and morphine and a lot of fucking nicotine. We rented a place in New York, a whole week, but when I found out that I may not die, my friend Amy goes, “so we had all these parties for you and now you’re not even going to die?”
∾
I get on the train.
A woman gets on the train.
5’3 probably, maybe 5’2 if she weren’t wearing Yeezys. Carries a Louis Vuitton purse. It’s big, like the ones nannies for rich families buy with their first paycheck. She wears leggings, dark green. Her hair is in a ponytail, sticking out of a baseball cap that says “on shrooms” on it. What? On shrooms? Ma’am, it’s 9AM on a Tuesday. We’re on the G train. I can’t think of a worse time or place to be on shrooms, except, honestly, the Y train.
She looks like someone I would’ve known in high school. The type that didn’t stand out in any way back then, because we all blended together in our desperate attempts to not stand out. Take her hat off and she could’ve been any number of girls in my graduating class. Hell, she could’ve been me.
Two men talk next to me, interrupting my train of thought.
“My mom sent me to sleepover camp from eight to fifteen. That’s where I learned to be a man.”
“No mommy, no daddy.”
“Crying.”
“You see it on the movies. Like Shawshank Redemption.”
“I was always told watch out for quiet ones and don’t worry about the tough guys, because someone really scared of you will be the one to hurt you. So I always learn, don’t have nobody in fear of you, they’ll take advantage.”
“Do something crazy out of fear.”
“It's self-preservation.”
“This is my stop.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The first man goes back to staring at his phone.
I watched Shawshank Redemption on the plane home once. Went to sleepaway camp as a kid. Have recently become the quiet type. Probably did a lot of crazy things out of fear.
A woman in a late 90s Chanel blazer steps on the train. Hurdles would be a better word than steps, though it still doesn’t match the panic in her gait. Something manic about her energy, about her orange pants, about the way she tucks her 3 inches of hair behind her ears. I find it familiar and still somehow unnerving. She sits down. Not in a seat, on the floor of the train. I get it, it’s busy, standing on the train can be nauseating. But just plopping down criss-cross apple-sauce? I wouldn’t do it.
An old man stares straight ahead, which just happens to be right at me. I don’t think he notices, his gaze feels as though it’s fixed to my right shoulder, and though my fear of strangers often consumes me, something about this man doesn’t really worry me. Trench coat, briefcase, Russian maybe. I’m not sure why I think he’s Russian, other than the scowl that has been fixed to his face for the entire ride. Maybe it’s rude to assume he’s Russian because of his scowl. I’m Russian, technically, if you go back far enough in my family tree. Maybe he and I are related. Maybe he’s staring at my right shoulder because he recognizes something about it. Reminds him of his sister’s right shoulder. His sister who died in the war. What war? I’m not sure. The Cold War?
Everyone stares down at their phones. Not the Russian man, but they didn’t have cell phones during the cold war, maybe he’s stuck in the past. There’s a lot of very clean white shoes in my line of vision. Converse, Supergas, Adidas. All very shiny, can’t be more than a few weeks old. Or maybe they are older than that, these people just keep them in pristine condition. But they’re not Jordan's or anything, they’re just white Converse. Maybe he polishes his Converse. Freak.
Every time I glance at the Russian man, I see him quickly move his gaze away as if he was just looking at me and I've caught him. Maybe it’s not an “as if” kind of thing. Maybe that’s exactly it. Hit the nail on the head with that one. He just did it again. I chuckled when the automated train conductor voice forgot to say the name of the stop. The Russian man chuckles too. Is he in my head?
I get up. He gets up.
I get off. He gets off.
I go left. He goes right.
“Watch it, ked!” His Boston accent thick, the shamrock tattoo on the back of his neck visible to me for the first time.
∾
I’m lying in a bed of my own dead skin. I try to be as still as I can, but I can’t help it, I start to twitch. My eyes are fluttering, trying to avoid contact with the half-clothed, elderly Korean woman that is scrubbing away at my skin as if hoping to discover something better underneath the fleshy surface. The ceiling is like the ones they have in office buildings or classrooms, with big square panels that pop out when you push them up. My freshman year dorm had this kind of ceiling, and we’d hide things up there during room checks. Hot plates, wine, candles.
It smells like a waterpark. Not like pee and BO, but the overwhelming smell of chlorine. Like artificial cleanliness. My grandmother’s pool. I once expected it to smell like eucalyptus or tea tree oils, when I first came here. Now the odor is familiar.
When asked to turn onto my side, the old Korean woman named Ana has to awkwardly stop my slippery naked body from rolling off of the table and onto the beige tiled floor. I am surrounded by grey, fingernail-sized flakes of skin that were part of my body only moments ago. Now they sit next to me, rolled up like tiny joints, my own flesh being washed away with a bucket of water the woman pours over me, unannounced.
This must be what cars feel like when the drive-through wash has the giant brushes that make the entire car shake, scrubbing away all the sticky goo. This is a good type of disassociation. I’ve been trying to tap into that recently, recognize places in which it can be used to my advantage. When I’m cold, I can remind myself that my body is just my shell and I can barely feel the freezing wind for a few minutes. On this table, I can ignore the ways my body has wronged me, and I can enjoy the act of being scrubbed of an older version of myself. Ana is scrubbing off all of my wrong doings, all my mistakes, all the bridges I’ve burned and the things I’ve never said and I will emerge from this table a new me, one that has never been tainted with life’s misfortunes.
I wonder if Ana just sees me as another vehicle to clean. I wonder if standing here scrubbing me is one of her life’s misfortunes. My mind turns back to where it was minutes before I laid down on the table. To the calamity. I begin to subconsciously pick at my fingernails, forgetting the calmness I was trying to embody only moments before. The woman notices my hands change position and she swats them back to where they were, limp.
“Turn.”
I flip over, ass up.
∾
I don’t go to the places I used to go to. None of the bars, markets, nail salons. Almost dying was like getting that second skin, the one Ana puts all her elbow grease into revealing for me. I go to the Korean spa, I go to Target, and I go home. I sit on the train; I ride it to the very end. Never thought to keep sitting, see if they kick me off. Don’t want the confrontation. I stand outside the train station for a bit. Maybe call someone. It’s nice to talk on the phone in unfamiliar places. It makes my mom think that I’m getting out and doing something with my life. When I talk on the phone, it’s usually with her, until she starts to bother me, and I call my dad instead. They’re happily married, but I don’t think they check in with each other about me. Not anymore, now that it’s not life or death.
Talking on the phone with my mother sometimes makes me feel like I’m dying again. There’s always some new thing she swears by; a smoothie, a vitamin, a philosophy, standing outside in the dirt barefoot for 10 minutes every day, sun salutations, thanking your food, a probiotic that her friend tells her a yogi she met swears by and has changed her life. Hasn’t changed my life. A homeopathic doctor in Calabasas who asked me very personal questions, but not the type a psychiatrist would ask, the type one of my aunts would ask when they used to pull me aside after dinner; “have you found that your eating disorder affects your bowel movements?” Come to think of it Suzanne, yes, it has, and the chicken was great, thanks for dinner. My aunts don’t ask me anything like that anymore, they stare at me wide-eyed, finally wanting to listen, hoping I’ll bestow some knowledge onto them about near-death. I wish they’d ask me the questions they did when I was sixteen. Drive me to a familiar kind of crazy. I wish they would pry into the minute details of my personal life, peeling back the protective wall I keep up around me these days. Like that game we played on Christmas Eve at Aunt Mary’s house when we were kids. One giant ball of wrapping paper is passed around the room and everyone takes a turn tearing away one of its layers. Inside each fold of paper were hidden trinkets; chocolate, a battery, doll clothes, empty gum wrappers, coupons for a sleepover at Aunt Christine’s. Hidden gems between layers of trash. We don’t play games anymore, Aunt Christine married a republican, and my family walks on eggshells around me.
When I facetime my dad, he shows me his paintings and asks me what I think they need. Like he thinks that my brush with death showed me something unseen to those never personally touched by it. I still don’t know how to talk about art. I never saw myself walking into the light, God or Buddha or L. Ron. Hubbard’s hands outstretched to me.
I tell my dad he could use some more red in the top right corner. He nods his head, says I nailed it, and when I see him post the final painting on Instagram, there’s no red in it at all.
I talk to Sarah, who had a kidney transplant in the 10th grade and had to miss an entire semester of school. Our moms ran into each other at the country club last October and my mom told her mom what was going on with me. So Sarah reaches out because her mom told her to, and now we sort of just talk at each other. I would call her my closest friend only because there are no other people in that race at the moment, so she has taken the lead. She goes to GW, is in Sigma Delta Tau, is thrilled with her life, and even more thrilled to have someone to tell it all to. I get annoyed with it sometimes, listening to her go on and on about her life, rarely leaving gaps in the conversation for me to say anything but “woah” or “that’s crazy.” But I’m reminded that she could’ve died, almost did, and her current life shows no signs of it. I continue listening to Sarah in case I ever decide to be an active part of society again. She could show me where to start.
∾
That’s the thing about being faced with your own mortality. You can think about it, suffer from its weight, but you don’t really know it until it’s standing two inches away from you. Never had it slap you in the face, bruised with a deadline. And then suddenly, after months of growing comfortable with this being the end, they say just kidding, it’s not what we thought, go get that chemo and start living! I lived more when I thought that I was dying than I do now. Dying didn’t sound too bad once I’d sat with it for a bit. Finally do all the things that I was too scared would kill me. Let’s do ketamine, speed, eat high fructose corn syrup and food full of MSG. The things my mom got on my case about when I was expected to live until I was old.
I’m not interested in being old, but now that it’s looking like I may pass the age of twenty two, I want some sense of what it’ll look like. What it’ll really look like, not the way I’ve seen women age where I’m from, where they do everything to disguise its effects.
There’s a spa in Koreatown where all the old women go. I went once, before all this, with the girls I hung out with back then. We didn’t think it through enough, the nudity of it all. They didn’t even know what I looked like without makeup on and suddenly they were seeing me without anything, just my skin and the way my bones and fat make it slope and curve. We sat awkwardly in the tubs, having normal conversations in an abnormal setting. I kept my arms in front of my pudgy stomach, realizing that I couldn’t pull my knees to my chest like I did when I was wearing a bikini. There may be nothing hiding my bits of fat, but there was really nothing hiding my genitalia. I didn’t look at the girls I was with, too wrapped up in trying not to be seen.
∾
My mom asks me why I don’t move home if I'm not going to go back to school. I tell her I'd rather be dying again and she asks me why I can’t be kinder to her. I say I’m sorry, I love her, but I can’t move home. There is bad here, but there is worse there. Here, I can smoke weed and cigarettes inside and drink java chip frappuccinos without my mom asking me if I'm trying to die again. If I want human interaction, I can sit on the train and watch other people interact and my energy is saved for when I go to the Korean spa, to the market, run into the neighbor that lives on the first floor and is always asking me when I'm going to come see his comedy troupe.
I like going to the spa because it’s like sitting on the train, but naked. I sit in the large baths surrounded by old women that do not think twice about my presence. Everyone is naked, soaking, silently enjoying a private act in the presence of other people. The women sit with their eyes closed, heads back, solitary and meditative. Sometimes there are other young white women, usually with a friend or two, uncomfortable in this large and public display of nudity. Their presence makes me feel some sense of camaraderie. I was them once, scared of my body, scared of seeing it and having it be seen. They don’t look at me, avert their eyes, stare at their arms crossed over their stomachs.
I look for their tattoos and usually find one. The back of a shoulder, the inside of an arm, sometimes the lower back. No one stares at my arms, dark with ink, wound with illustrations of skulls and clichés that didn’t mean anything to me when I thought my body was soon going to be cremated.
Most of the time it’s the same few women that stick to themselves, scrubbing their feet diligently at the spigots. I look at everyone else, take in the details of their bodies. The way the older women’s breasts fall like my mother’s, their hands translucent and spiny like my Grandmother’s. I find familiar things here, surrounded by the bodies of other women. Their ailments, scars, limps, and illnesses out in the open, giving no disclaimers for their shells.
∾
With a six-month long timer put on my life, school was the first thing I lost interest in. Technically lost interest before the diagnosis, it just gave me real reason to leave. When we went to New York, a friend of a friend called a guy and he brought us drugs. Morphine, mushrooms, ketamine, speed. In those few months I did a lot. Told the school I was moving home to die. I didn’t go home right away, instead my parents came here, my mother crowded around me in my small apartment. She suppressed her need to nitpick. My dad stayed in a hotel, didn’t want to be in my way.
We packed everything up. My mom fought with her need to be logistical. Half of the time, she treated the move like it was under normal circumstances. Everything in boxes, eight suitcases, frantically going to and from UPS. My mother, who attaches no sentimental value to items, not childhood paintings or sports trophies, could not justify getting rid of any of my things. College essays with a B circled at the top, textbooks I never cracked open. She cried at my suggestions of getting rid of them, apparently wanting her only daughter’s memory to be that of an under achiever. I threw most things away while she was gone. In the time that my mother wasn’t on autopilot, moving things because it needed to get done, she cried. Sat on my bedroom floor and cried. Sat in my kitchen and cried. I felt like crying wasn’t my right, being sad wasn’t my right- she had to continue living while I would suddenly be gone.
And then it wasn’t a problem. The boxes, unpacked in my childhood room, where my life started and was expected to end, soon got packed up again. Sent back across the country, to a new apartment that didn’t know I was once dying. Unfurnished and newly painted. When my life started again I was surrounded by blank walls. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the need to fill them. Their emptiness didn’t necessarily calm me, but the possibilities of what could be put on them made my head spin. In those six months, when I thought that was the only time I would ever have, I over indulged. Bought clothes with two thousand dollar price tags, ate caviar out of the jar in the light of the refrigerator at midnight. The idea of leaving money behind after I died seemed silly, so I drained my bank accounts. Bought massages and pottery classes and hair appointments that I never went to. To die luxuriously seemed like a good way to die.
To live luxuriously isn’t of interest to me anymore. It didn’t better my time dying, won’t better my time living. I go to the Korean spa to feel comfortable in my body. I sit in the train to feel comfortable around strangers. I go to Target, buy Barilla pasta and hint of lime Lay’s. Soap, toilet paper, chapstick. I go home, leave it all out on the kitchen counter. I talk to my mom, I talk to my dad, I listen to Sarah. I shower, scrubbing the dead skin from my body, like it’s wrapping paper and I will find hidden gems underneath if I just scrub harder. Something good hidden under all of these layers of trash. I think that Ana knows something that I don’t. Something about finding a new version of yourself in the dead parts that still cling to you.
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