In San Gabriel Valley, there was a businesswoman so wealthy and powerful that when her spa attendants had a pay dispute with their employer, she built them their own spa in her office building. She owned the whole building and paid them a generous salary, regardless of how many other clients they saw. In return, after her high power meetings, she would go downstairs and get a massage.
My mother, her arms sheathed in lace driving gloves and face shielded by a visor with a brim recalling the rings of Saturn, drove me to this spa on a Sunday when I was visiting her. “You wouldn’t guess by looking at her how successful she is. She started on a sales team, all men. Beat all the quotas, then invested her money into beating her customers at their own business. She is ruthlessly persistent. She climbs mountains for fun.” My mother, fairly ruthless herself, spoke of this woman with great respect, and I, a lowly corporate cog, felt awe, too. I imagined a figure Athena-like in wit, Amazonian in stature. Probably clad in Kirkland Signature athleisure wear.
“This is the best spa in the valley. You are lucky I have a membership.”
When we arrived, a woman in a puffer vest escorted me into the dimly lit lobby, past an office with a desk piled with file folders and a Buddhist altar in one corner, then past a kitchenette with beauty paraphernalia drying on a dish rack. I wondered about this so-called spa’s sanitation protocols before entering a room that could have been inside a Burke-Williams. I undressed, donned the usual terry cloth wrap, and lay on the table. The aesthetician switched on a light so bright that even with cotton over my eyes, I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. I feared my eyelids might burn away.
“You don’t have children, do you?” She turned my chin one way, then another, running her finger under my jawline. “You have the face of a woman without children.”
“Oh. Thank you?” What was I supposed to say?
She began rubbing a very cold cream on my face, moving her fingers in rhythmic circles.
“The skin of a woman without children glows like glass but is as taut as a sail in the wind. She looks and feels a decade younger than a woman who has had children. That woman has given her glow, along with everything else, to her children. All my clients, and I have had thousands, come to me hoping to regain their glow, but I can only restore a small fraction of what they’ve lost.”
She told me of one client whose teenage son beat her. Another had a husband who gambled away their savings. All of them had skin like re-used wrapping paper.
“Except one.”
“Oh?” I took the bait. My mother had warned me this woman liked to talk. I didn’t mind. Spa gossip was the best gossip, even, maybe especially, if the spa was questionably licensed.
“This client was very beautiful in every way. She married a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who helped perfect her already perfect appearance. He hired a personal trainer and a famous nutritionist, one used by celebrities. She never cooked a meal. I gave her weekly facials and slimming treatments. They delayed having children until he’d completed her many surgeries. Then, they hired a surrogate so as not to ruin the masterpiece they had created together. My client made sure the surrogate wasn’t attractive at all.”
The aesthetician sighed. She began rolling some kind of heated device over the contours of my face. It kind of hurt.
“What happened?” I waited for the reveal though it was obvious, inevitable, where this story was going. Clearly, things hadn’t panned out for Miss Plastic America.
“Every woman becomes pretty in pregnancy. It’s your reward before the baby comes out and takes all your collagen. The husband, mesmerized, ran off with her. The bastard had made her sign a contract before the wedding, so she didn’t get much. But she has half custody of the child. And, at least I can still help with her glass skin.”
“Well, a pittance from a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon must not be bad if she can still get facials!” I scoffed at this vain woman, preserved as a taxidermist’s prize model. I would have rolled my eyes but they were still covered by cotton.
“No! *He* doesn’t pay for her treatments!”
“So who pays?” I ventured, though I was a little scared by her indignation. She still wielded that hot roller near my face.
“Who do you think?” She added, with sly amusement, “Your mother says you were the top of your class.”
Then I remembered what my mother had said in the car:
You wouldn’t guess by looking at her.