She's All That (5 page)

Spa Del Mar's well-appointed balcony room (which we get every time) includes two lawn chairs and a plastic table outside, plus two queen beds decorated in a palette of seafoam and jungle green inside. Whichever one of us really
needs
the spa weekend gets a bed to herself. This time, that would be me. See? There are distinct advantages to being a failure and having hair that ruins your life. Naturally, since I'm not able to pay, I don't call too many spa weekends of my own, but I knew it was bad when my straightened hair didn't even cheer me up. This weekend was a necessity.

It may sound like Spa Del Mar is a complete dump, but it's not. It's beautiful, with canopied sycamores and oaks and lush greenery surrounding—even a jacaranda tree that is bright purple when it blooms. The room is clean and neat, just nothing fancy. Plus, it has windows! Still, it is a bit shocking that Morgan is willing to come here. I think she equates it to “roughing it.” The evenings are spent enjoying fine spa cuisine by a chef from California's wine country. Throw in plenty of giggling and those forbidden organic truffles, and how could I not love it?

“All right, Lilly. We're here.” Morgan turns around on the stairwell and stares at me. “Are you ready to talk? We've given you the entire drive, and you haven't said a word.”

“You need to talk about it before you have the first spa treatment. The release of emotion starts the detox process,” Poppy adds.

“Can we get in the room first?” I say. I don't want to let on that my contraband jug of pickles and two liters of Diet Pepsi in the bag slung over my shoulder are killing me. Then again, I don't want to discuss my personal life on the stairwell, either.

Poppy opens the door and kicks off her earthy Clarks clogs. She breathes in deeply and lifts her hands to the ceiling. “I love this air. We really should do this more often. Mmm. It smells like they sprayed eucalyptus oil.” She opens the sliding glass door to our balcony, sniffs the sulfur from the hot tub below, and covers her nose. “Ugh, maybe not
that
air.”

“Come on, crisis meeting.” Morgan yanks the desk chair onto the balcony. All three of us take our places for the official “Spa Girls Board of Directors Meeting” where we discuss the reasons for the trip. Of course, we all know the reasons, and we're only rehashing old information, but venting is a necessary part of a Spa Girls Weekend.

We sit and look at each other.
We're here.
I'm significantly calmer knowing I'm here, and that I can always come here if I need to. And that my Spa Girls will always be on my side. Once, in college, there was this guy I was interested in, and I followed him to class. He caught me trailing him, turned around sharply, and said, “Stop following me, Afro girl! You need a muzzle on that thing!” I was heartbroken and humiliated.

The next day, Morgan dressed up in heels and a skirt and accidentally-on-purpose dropped her art history paper in front of him. When he saw the endless legs attached to the heels on the absolute vision before him, he became speechless and bent down immediately to pick it up. Morgan cut him off in mid-bend. “Don't touch my paper,” she said. “I don't know where you've been. And I don't want to.” Then, with a flick of her luxurious hair, she picked up her paper and sashayed off.

It was a small thing. The guy never knew she had anything to do with me or his rude comment the day before. I'm sure he didn't even get it, but her gesture made me feel six feet tall, with naturally sleek hair, and ready for the cover of
Vogue
. Poppy and I stood by laughing, entranced by our friend's unselfish-yet-childish act.

“It feels good to be here, doesn't it?” I ask. “It's been too long.”

“Let's hit it!” Morgan says, clapping her manicured hands together. “First, we need to give thanks that Lilly dumped Robert. I've been praying for that for ages.”

“Is that biblically acceptable? Praying for me to dump someone?” I ask.

“Take it up with God, Lilly,” Poppy says.

Morgan holds up a palm. “First of all, do not say he dumped you. I will not allow you to be dumped by a drone who thought Denny's was an appropriate date night choice in San Francisco. The finest culinary fare in the world, and he thinks letting you choose the chicken-fried steak is going all out. He
so
did not dump you. I will not give him the satisfaction of dumping you.”

“Okay,” I shrug. “But he sort of did.”

Poppy starts to crack up.

“Besides, I like chicken-fried steak,” I admit.

“Next subject,” Morgan says.

“Well,” I say. “We have an array of choices. We can start with my pathetic career, move on to my nonexistent love life, or if we're really feeling lottery-lucky, we can go with my hair. The
root
of all my issues.” I look at Poppy, and her mouth is open. “And if you say one thing about my negative energy, you're gonna feel my negative energy in the form of a palm!”

Poppy puts her hands up in surrender and giggles. “Listen, I'd rather have a nonexistent love life
without
a boyfriend than
with
one!” She clears her throat. “Robert…really, Lilly, if we're going to discuss pathetic…besides, neither one of us would have attended a wedding to that dimwit. He made Alan Green-span look like the life of the party.”

“He was bald,” I explain, because for me that's a good thing. Massive hair plus no hair equals children with normal hair, right? Because I would never inflict any child with my mop—and the life that goes with it.

“Lilly, I've tried to explain genetics to you,” Poppy says. “It doesn't matter if your husband is bald; you could still have a child with curly hair.”

I cover my ears. “I'm not listening.”

“I think we need to pray about our attitudes first.” Morgan bows her head and recites a prayer for me and my attitude.

She'd have an attitude, too, if she was living on a twin-sized futon with a hand-me-down silkscreen partition defining her bedroom. She'd have an attitude if she wanted to keep doing a job so badly that she was willing to work for the Wicked Witch of the West to do it, to abandon all pride and decent pay. These silent surrenders cause attitude to build up like a water balloon hooked up to a spigot.

“Do you have anything to add?” Poppy asks at the end of prayer.

“Do I ever!” I say, but quickly shut up as I see them both with their hands clasped in prayer. It wasn't the kind of thing I could add during prayer time. Apparently, the attitude request hasn't kicked in with God yet.

Poppy clears her throat. “Good, we should get started with our facials and come back with some solutions for you, Lilly. The natural oils will allow our brains to focus on solutions.”

“Solutions? My life has solutions? Other than the kind with the acrid smell that calm my hair, you mean? A solution where I don't look like Howard Stern?”

“Quit your whining. You're burdening me.” Poppy breathes in deeply through her nose. Now I know she sounds like a complete Californian, but Poppy really just likes to bug us with her energy talk. She knows we're only so open to the idea of light as energy, God's first building particle, being the healing life source of it all. So she loves to bring it up. Constantly. Just to challenge our grounded and conservative ways. She's also always bringing us some new elixir that has the consistency of yogurt and is the sickly green color of Shrek.

“I'm entitled to a bit of whining. Tell me something in my life that's actually on target.” They both stay silent. “See? You got nothing. Oh yeah, I deserve to whine. Bring out the pickles.”

“Pickles? Lilly, you didn't bring the pickles!” Morgan says.

I clutch my Sara Lang bag close to my heart.

“You'll get a yeast imbalance,” Poppy says, reaching out for the bag, which I yank closer. “The human body is made up of a careful balance of good yeast and bad—”

“Stop it,” I say calmly, not relinquishing my grip. “Vinegar is a preservative. How do you know that my body won't have a half-life of forty billion years from my pickle fetish? Maybe I'll outlast you both. Preserved like well-oiled wood.”

“Gross,” Morgan says.

Poppy grabs the handles and darn if that Pilates isn't making her tough. She wrestles it free. “You're not eating this poison.” She gasps as she looks inside the bag. “And diet soda? You've got to be kidding me. Toxic, Lilly! It's important for your future children. So important, in fact—” She rushes through the bathroom door with my coveted bag and locks it with a loud click.

I bang on it. “Open this door. Right now, Poppy! I mean it!” I pound again, and I can hear her in there fiddling. Then my ears pick up a sudden swoosh of liquid. “I want my pickles! You better not have done anything to—”

In another moment, she calmly opens the door and exhales with yoga intensity.

“What did you do?” I ask. “Ugh!” We're overcome with the sour vinegar smell emanating from the bathroom. “You did not ruin my pickles!”

“I'm going to prove to you what you're doing to the lining of your stomach. Just a little science experiment worthy of my Stanford biology undergrad work.”

I gasp as I see the sink filled with my pickles. Covered in a hazy brown sauce of diet soda. I have to admit, it is a revolting sight. “What did you do?”

“By the end of the weekend, those pickles will be a ghastly color, and the carbonation and fake sugar will have eaten holes right through them. That's what you're doing to your stomach.” Poppy flicks back her hair. “No wonder you stress about simple matters. Your body is completely overloaded from garbage, and the good bacteria can't overtake the bad in those quantities.”

“That is disgusting,” Morgan comments in her cool manner, as she looks at the sickly display of my snack life. “We are not going to smell that all weekend just for the sake of science, Poppy. Let them out of their misery. She can't eat them now anyway.”

“What would I do with them?” Poppy asks.

“Get a garbage bag or something. I am not brushing my teeth over pickles drenched in diet soda.”

I slam the door on the bathroom to avoid the smell and point at the Spa Girls, who are now seriously on my bad side. “You two are
so
not friends. We came here for me. And I wanted pickles! What kind of friends would deny their friend the wallowing she so richly deserves?” I slink to the floor. “Where did my friends go?”

“Where did your
friends
go?” Morgan blinks wildly. “You wanted Steve Collins in college, and we protected you from that as well,” Morgan reminds me. “And Robert, Lilly? Completely not worth damaging your stomach lining for. Clearly, you're not the best judge of what's best for you lately. You need us, face it. You would have been in Florida eating the early bird specials by the time you were thirty. We're rejoicing in the loss of Robert, because he was a loser with a capital
L
, only out of his mother's house because this area actually rewards geeks with good pay. And if you're going to harm yourself, use chocolate like normal women.”

I'm still not over the pickles.
“You two can afford nice things. I can afford pickles. I can't believe you would be so cruel. It seems to me we all had a fetish for Now & Laters in college. Just because you got money and changed your habits, now I'm supposed to follow suit? How about a little commiseration? Alms for the poor and all that!”

Poppy slides down beside me. “It's good to unleash this anger. Tell us about Sara Lang now,” she says with a Zen-like quality.

I'll admit, I'm fired up just hearing that woman's name. “She's evil. When I think about her black nails and her scary, icy-blue eyes over the well-concealed eye bags—and to give my job to that man!”
If you can call someone who wears more
eyeliner than me a man.
“She actually thinks twenty-five-year-old men want her, when they laugh at her!”

“What else? Let it out.”

“She thinks I can be bought. She offered me big money to be her CFO. As if I'd do a job I hate
and
work for her!”

“What did you say?” Morgan asks.

“She offered me a finance job,” I repeat. Their looks of pity quickly dissipate.

“Are you going to take it?” Poppy says as she puts her hair into a clip. Poppy has the most beautiful hair you've ever seen. It's an incredible hue of natural red, and it falls down her back in gentle curls. She's got a speckling of freckles across her nose and deep blue eyes. In other words, she's everything I'm not. And she wastes it in bad cotton clothing.
So criminal.

“No! I didn't accept it.” I cross my arms, waiting to hear another reason besides my own happiness to turn down a solid salary. I'm definitely tempted. Then I notice my friends aren't jumping on the supportive band wagon. “Do you think I should do it?”

“You don't want to do finance,” Morgan shrugs. “You could have gone back to finance years ago. What have these years of training been about? All those years of learning how to make computer patterns! How to drape a fabric with CAD? No, you definitely can't take it. You have to try.”

Wouldn't it be nice to actually think everyone has options? Of
course, I do have options. They just require living in poverty a little
longer. In my mind, I was on my way to a pair of fashionable walking
shoes…maybe Borns, or the like.

“I don't
want
to do it!” I exclaim. “But I want to make a decent living wage, and I'm tempted. I want to pay my Nana back so she can have a decent place again.” But in reality, I'm not too tempted. Fabric makes me feel alive. Finance…well, finance makes me feel nothing, quite frankly.

“Your Nana has a great place. There aren't many grandmothers who live in a marina studio apartment overlooking the San Francisco Bay. I don't think she's in nearly the hurry for that money that you think she's in.”