“My bow-day,” I said out loud, studying the glistening skin of my hips. The whole of the ocean stretched out before me, and yet I felt trapped. My body.
K-Spa
KOREATOWN IS SQUISHED right in the middle of a bunch of other neighborhoods: West Hollywood, Silver Lake, Mid-Wilshire, and Downtown. The clientele of the K-Town spas reflects the mixing pot that is LA. Spanish, Korean, English, Russian—the women speak their languages in hushed tones, mindful of the levels of their voices. No one wears jewelry inside the spas, and, at just $30 admission, it’s difficult to tell who is rich and who isn’t.
There are women with large breast implants that sit unnaturally beneath their skin; there are women with no breasts at all. There are women with scars from cosmetic surgeries, women who look like burn victims, women with faded purple lines from C-sections above their pubic hair, women stripped bare from menopause. Some women attend in pairs, but most come alone and keep to themselves. They let their faces droop, the corners of their mouths turn down, and their eyebrows sink. What on the subway would be called resting bitch face here is just looking relaxed without pretense or performance.
Understanding and agreeing to the rules of the spa is crucial to the experience. It can take a moment to absorb those rules: Shower before you use any of the pools, keep your hair up, no bathing suits. No phones. These guidelines are posted on the wall in clear view of the entrance, laminated to guard against the steam. But the implicit rules are far more important, and come only with experience: Do not make eye contact or look directly at anyone’s body. This is a place where no one is scrutinized or evaluated.
Of course, the Korean clientele are the experts; the rest of us are just students. Novices watch them out of the corners of our eyes, imitating their rituals. They are the least self-conscious and the most focused. They sit on plastic buckets turned upside down on the slippery tile floors and gaze with indifference into the small, clouded mirrors that are secured to the walls. They rub their naked bodies down with hard-textured cloths that grind and grind and grind against their skin. They wash their hair with an impressive squirt of shampoo and brush it aggressively. Sometimes they are silent; other times they speak quietly but assertively to each other in Korean. Whether they’re young or old, I feel shy and juvenile in their presence. They seem to possess an inherent understanding of how to take care of themselves. There is no fussiness involved. It is what it is: they clean their bodies with matter-of-factness and purpose.
I’ve never been good about taking care of myself. Cleaning my body is not a habit I take pleasure in but a concession to social expectations; I know that being dirty is embarrassing and not feminine. I’m always distracted and annoyed in the shower, forgetting to shave the backs of my calves or to rinse my hair for an adequate amount of time. For me, the ritual of cleansing has always been an inconvenient necessity, something I have to do for other people.
My lack of care extends beyond hygiene. I dread doctors’ appointments so much that I’m often more perturbed by having to schedule one than I am by whatever ails me. I’ve managed to avoid seeing a dentist for most of my twenties, a whole seven-year streak without a cleaning that I finally broke at the age of twenty-seven. I don’t like the way they make me feel guilty for not flossing. When I’d tell friends about avoiding the dentist, they’d screw up their faces: “The health of your teeth is crucial, Emily!” I’d shrug, feeling a little embarrassed, a little alone, a little strange.
Yet I also frequently wake in the middle of the night worried about the condition of my teeth. I want to be healthy and alive, but I hate the inevitable question, “How long has it been since your last cleaning?” usually asked by a stranger, likely a man. I don’t want to hear him say, You really should take better care of yourself. I want to be the one in control of my body, even if that means denying it.
For a long time, I didn’t think my body was worthy of the attention required to take care of it. I expected my body to function, but I tended to ignore it, even when it called out to me. When my right hip ached after hours of airplane travel, I wouldn’t stretch my muscles. “Pain is information,” my friend Sara, the kind of person who attends six a.m. yoga classes, would say to me. “Your body is trying to tell you what it needs.”
But I wasn’t interested in listening. If I woke up with an empty stomach, hollow and gasping for fuel, I threw bitter coffee into it instead, urging my body to function faster, move faster. I’d wait to eat until my eyesight became blurry and my hands shook and I couldn’t function at all. I wasn’t avoiding food; I just didn’t want my physical needs to take precedence. I had no patience or time for nourishment.