Carry The One

by Carol Anshaw

  She then placed a hand over her heart, as if to subdue the wildness of its beating. She was just, Carmen now saw, going to keep making it impossible.

  “Look—” she said, pushing at the air with the palms of her hands, a gesture usually reserved for talking lunatics down off ledges. “Just, let’s say—don’t ever touch me like that again.”

  Quite a few of the people around them—loungers and readers and nappers and mothers of the small children pushing toy sailboats around the pond—had stopped and were watching this showdown.

  “Hey, sorry,” Carmen said, trying to bring this stupid situation down from its hysterical heights, while not really giving Heather anything. As she apologized, she held her voice as far back from sincerity as possible, as close as she could get to the synthesized voice on the machine at her parking lot at work. The voice that said “Please take your parking ticket. Thank you.” This was the voice she also used with obstreperous women at the shelter, to not give them the satisfaction of getting a rise out of her.

  At first Carmen thought Heather’s toughness was a protective exoskeleton, but on closer acquaintance she had come to think the girl might be hard clear through, harder than the young hookers who came to the shelter when they were desperate. Often they were on the street because of circumstance. Usually they were addicts, and hookers only by bad luck. Many of them slept with teddy bears. Heather—Carmen would have put money on it—did not have a teddy bear.

  “Have you found us something good?” Carmen nodded at the book dangling from Heather’s hand.

  “Oh,” Heather said. For a suspended moment Carmen thought this might be all she was going to say. But then she began again, with seemingly great effort. Like someone trying, despite the ice pick in her chest, to cough out the name of her murderer. “Yeah, well … there’s this hammam. It’s, like, a steam bath.”

  “Oh yeah. My sister Alice went to one once when we were teenagers. We were in Morocco with our family. This was during a period when my father was painting deserts. I didn’t have the nerve myself. For the hammam. It sounded too—I don’t know—too exotic.”

  “Right,” Heather said, as though Carmen had pulled up a potbelly stove and a rocking chair and a piece of whittling, and had begun telling Heather about each of the big snows in a lifetime of winters. “So do you want to go, or what?” She followed this with an impersonation of sign language, a little roll of her hands then a pointing away, a lifting of eyebrows to indicate a question. She did this when she wanted to be particularly nasty to Carmen, brought her ear into the mix.

  It only now occurred to Carmen that Rob not only asked her to look after Heather, but probably asked Heather to pay some attention to Carmen. Which would explain why everything Heather said sounded Novocained. So Carmen would understand that her attention was not voluntary.

  “Sure,” Carmen said to the idea of the hammam, even though it was the worst idea Heather could have picked of all the terrible ideas in her guidebook. The actual reason Carmen hadn’t gone into the hammam in Morocco with Alice all those years ago was her ridiculous modesty, which she still dragged around. But maybe this hammam would be an updated, Westernized version, someplace where everyone bundled up in large, fluffy robes.

  On the Métro, though, she borrowed the guide from Heather and read, with a heavy heart, that this place came highly recommended (of course it would) for its cultural authenticity. “A bit of the ancient medina in the heart of Paris with mysterious rituals of ablution,” she read, translating this into “everyone will be stark naked.”

  The hammam turned out to be part of a larger building, white-walled as it would be in its native desert setting. Once through its portals, they were in an interior garden where many people, mainly men but some women, all in Arab dress—veils on the women and, on the men, wool robes and pointed leather shoes of a lurid yellow—sat drinking glasses of mint tea and talking in what gathered up into a mild din, a pleasant hubbub. Through another archway, in a tearoom, a sea of men huddled over cigarettes or ate from low tables a variety of vividly colored pastries, as well as some that looked to be sealed, like souvenirs, in honey.

  “Here it is,” Heather said.

  On a large wooden door to their left a cardboard sign hung at a tilt:

  AUJOURD’HUI—LES FEMMES

  “What luck,” Carmen said as Heather pushed against the door, held it open behind her with just the tips of her black fingernails, and they entered.

  With a few stairs down then a short hallway, they went back several centuries. They stood in a room that was ancient and cavernous, detailed with Moorish arches and tiled floors, the walls narrative with worn mosaics.

  To their immediate left was a high counter.

  “C’est votre premiere fois?” asked the red-haired woman behind it. She towered over them, like a schoolmistress in a dark dream.

  “Oh,” Carmen said. “Oui.” It was most definitely their first time. And with that, she had run out to the end of her hammam vocabulary, and put up the palms of her hands in defeat and supplication. The counter woman took pity and exchanged their shoulder bags for a single claim check and two towels.

  “Là-bas,” she said, pointing with a hand whose fingers bore at least twenty rings. “Déshabillez-vous là, et ensuite entrez dans le hammam.”

  Carmen nodded and stared around the room. In the center a small stone fountain was lapped by water. Brushes, like shoeshine brushes but bigger, lined the base of the low surrounding wall, also sandals, all of a uniform wooden type. Around the sides of the room were raised platforms covered with padded gym mats, on which women were sitting or lying in various states of dress, more accurately in various states of undress, as hardly anyone wore much more than underwear. Most were naked. They ranged in age from young teenage girls with their mothers to extremely aged women. Most appeared to be Arab—Algerian, maybe Moroccan. The rest were French, Carmen guessed, although two had such an assertively blond look she figured them for Scandinavian tourists. They also came in an amazing variety of sizes, from cigarette-thin women to women larger than any Carmen had ever seen. Women who, naked, looked like giant soft-serve sculptures, their bodies great, graduated, overlapping fountains of flesh.

  Some of these women were sleeping, curled up and lovely in their being both unclothed and at the same time not vulnerable, there being nothing in the situation to be vulnerable to. Most, though, were awake and socializing in an unfocused way that Carmen—her own friendships maintained through agenda-heavy meetings or the camaraderie at political actions—had never encountered other than with her sister. She could definitely imagine being here with Alice—well, if everyone wore a little more clothing.

  Along with the socializing there was a lot of languorous grooming, the way cats lick each other, the way monkeys pick through each other’s fur for nits. In this assuaging fashion, the women here rubbed each other’s limbs with oils, or combed each other’s hair or applied henna. Many of them, Carmen now noticed, had hair of the same muddy red color. So much here was strange to Carmen, that for the first few moments she was taken out of herself, her fears left far behind. They came back in a rush only when she realized this wasn’t a TV travelogue, but rather a ritual in which she was immediately going to be expected to participate.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Heather said in a low voice next to her, the first words of kindness she had ever spoken to Carmen.

  “No. Let’s go on.” Carmen nodded toward the open archway at the far end of the room, from which steam rolled out like a low-lying fog.

  “Like the entrance to hell,” Heather said. “You know. In cartoons.”

  As they stood there, leaning in slightly toward each other, an attendant—a wiry woman who had just scurried in from the bar area with a tray full of jiggling, clinking glasses of mint tea—came up to them and motioned with a cock of her head for them to take two adjacent mats. After she had set down the tray, she cleared the towels of the previous occupants, then pointed at the pegs lining the wal
l.

  “I think we hang our stuff there,” Carmen said.

  Heather hopped up onto the raised platform. Carmen followed, stepping onto the squishy mats next to an ancient woman who had also just arrived. She was wearing a chador, her face covered by the traditional veil, but she also had with her an Adidas gym bag.

  None of Carmen’s old locker-room routines of disrobing would work here. There was no dark corner, no locker door to slip behind. Worse, they were on a platform that created the effect of a stage. She felt bereft of her clothing as she stepped out of her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her bra, transferring all this protective coloration onto a pair of side-by-side pegs in the wall. She was profoundly chilled, even though, only moments earlier, the room seemed too warm, too close with the sighing breath of all these women. Who—Carmen suddenly realized—had now become quiet, as if holding their breath collectively. She found herself awake in the middle of her worst nightmare. They were turned, looking her way. She instinctively crossed her arms in front of her breasts, and felt a flush spreading through her.

  Only when she was able to look up again did she see it was not her they were fascinated by, but rather Heather, who had emerged from her leather and denim and gender-generic underwear looking like the poster girl for famine relief. The head of an adolescent on the body of a child. Her ribs bowed out below her tiny flattened breasts, her arms looked snappable as dry twigs, her collarbones jutted like stones at the base of her neck. The flesh stretched over this frame was the watery blue-white of nonfat milk.

  Heather, snapping her underpants off a toe, looked up and caught the stares of the assembled. She didn’t seem offended, or put off. Carmen saw she might find their interest flattering. She had, after all, gone to a great deal of trouble to come to this, and might well want to show off her accomplishment.

  Suddenly Heather wasn’t just a jerk or a spoiled little rich girl. In a rush of pure impulse, Carmen wanted to fold her up in her arms, stand Heather’s toes on her own and dance her around this ancient room like she used to do with Gabe when he was little and having a bad day. But, of course, she couldn’t.

  Carmen feared for girls. After Casey Redman, they all seemed fragile, vulnerable, miraculous in making it through girlhood. And Heather, Carmen now understood, might well not.

  “Ready?” she said now, challenging Carmen with her nakedness, daring her to show pity or revulsion or fear.

  Carmen looked away, at nothing. “Okay.” She saw that some women were emerging from the steam bath in their underpants, and so she left hers on. She kept her arms crossed over her breasts and followed her Virgil, into the depths.

  Which began with a bank of showers surrounding two tables with padded, cloth-covered tops, on which lay women undergoing what must certainly be the

  NETTOYAGE DE PEAU-55 FR

  advertised on a paper sign taped to the wall.

  “What does it say?” Heather asked.

  “It’s some kind of skin cleansing,” Carmen said, and they stood for a moment watching the women on the tables being ministered to by huge, hulking masseuses with massive arms and red hands, who looked to be sanding down their victims with rough, wet cloths. Carmen couldn’t tell whether this process would feel heavenly, or torturous.

  Beyond this they found another large cavern with raised, tiled cubicles lining the walls. Within these, women in pairs and threes were taking amateur turns at rubbing each other down, and pouring water over each other from the sawed-off plastic liter soda bottles that littered the floors. There was water everywhere, from the fountains and the hoses snaking around on the tiles, also standing water in all the many depressions worn through the ages both in the floor and in the sitting platforms.

  With Heather leading the way, Carmen followed so closely that, to counter a slippery step, she put up a hand and touched the sharp blade of Heather’s shoulder. She seemed so insubstantial and vaporous, and with the steam rolling up and around her, it almost seemed an outstretched hand would pass through her.

  They moved slowly over the slick floors, through a third chamber and into a fourth, the heat growing progressively more oppressive, the steam clouding ever thicker until finally Carmen could barely see anyone else, and only a misty specter of Heather. Which relaxed her a bit in her modesty, and made it easier to look straight at Heather without flinching.

  “Want me to dye your hair?” Heather asked over her shoulder, the first joke she has ever made with Carmen.

  “How could anyone stay in here long enough to do anything?”

  “Challenging, though, in a weird way,” Heather said, holding onto Carmen’s arm briefly, for support.

  They tottered over and sat down in a shallow lake on the edge of an empty, tiled alcove. “Let’s see how long we can stand it,” Heather suggested, and disappeared behind the drape of vapor that closed around her as she reclined.

  Carmen moved to the back of the niche and collected water from the small fountain carved into the wall, pressing her face into it, then spilling the water down the front of her body, over one then another shoulder. For the next small stretch of time, she lost Heather’s terrible troubles along with her own small ones. For a few moments in the depths of this place, so far inside it was almost impossible to think of an outside; she became someone she felt only vaguely acquainted with.

  When she tried, she had great difficulty standing up. She waited an extra beat for some confidence of balance to return, then reached through the mist to find Heather, and finally made contact with a hip that was an immodesty of bone, thinly veiled with flesh.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “It is kind of intense,” Heather admitted.

  “Let’s go back,” Carmen said, taking Heather’s hand, the two of them moving forward with the smallest, most tentative of steps. Carmen was still a little woozy when she entered the previous room, but at least she was freed from the weighted air of the deepest chambers. They progressed—or rather regressed—slowly, until they reentered the first, mildest steam cavern, where they stopped and sat for a while and watched two women large as sumo wrestlers, in black thong underwear, one scrubbing the other in a slow, trancey way, cooling the cloth under a running tap, wringing it out, then scrubbing some more.

  “This place is a trip,” Heather said, and Carmen could see she was trying to cut the experience down to size, trim it into a tidy story to tell some night, to someone else in black, in the Dunkin’ Donuts lot.

  “Let’s cool off,” Carmen suggested and they stood again, much steadier now, and retreated into the showers, which only ran cold, and were stunning.

  “Ahhhh,” Carmen said.

  Heather moved in next to her, under the same flow of what felt like brilliant liquid ice. Carmen sensed her presence through the water and opened her eyes to meet Heather’s vacant, wash-blue stare. She saw that Heather was putting herself through a decompression process, pulling herself out of this unalterably shared experience into the pale Paris afternoon they were about to reenter, once again separate. But she wouldn’t be able to get there. They could no longer retreat into their previous positions exactly because they had been here together. Carmen saw that everything up until this afternoon had been prelude between them, overture, that now was the exact starting point, the place where she and Heather might begin.

  At the hotel, she called Matt and Paula’s number and mercifully Gabe picked up.

  “How’s it going?” she said.

  “Big doings here.” He was talking not in a whisper exactly, more like a TV golf announcer during an important putt. “The twins started a fire in a new house going up on the next block over. Then they stuck around to watch their handiwork. The cops picked them out of the crowd right away. The toes of their sneakers were melted and charred. Dad’s furious. And freaked. Those girls are so sweet looking, but they are total criminals.” He stopped and for just a beat, they were both listening to the same soft ocean of fiber optics. Then he said, “Hey, how are you? Heather try to push you of
f the Eiffel Tower?” And Carmen unfolded with gratitude for him. In contrast, she envisioned the road ahead of Heather, the next few years. The creepy boyfriends. The unsavory interests, the phases and episodes and therapy and medications. All requiring enormous amounts of parental attention and intervention. Getting Heather through to adulthood looked like a staggering proposition.

  The three of them went for dinner to a restaurant Rob knew, in the Marais. Filled with diners at the far end of their youth, riding a surf of conviviality, ordering cigarettes, which were then brought to the table on silver trays, the pack opened, the matchbook folded back, everything in a state of readiness, as if smoking were an urgently necessary element, an integral part of the hilarity, along with the many bottles of champagne brought up the circular steps from the basement, their popping corks punctuating the laughter and conversations—French in the upper registers, underlaid with a few more pedestrian languages.

  Rob ordered them a Bordeaux, something excellent he knew about, something he’d written in a thin leather notebook he kept in an inside breast pocket. Rob hadn’t gone to college. He’d attended a cosmetology academy and in the years since had risen to a social level he’s had to cram for.

  For dinner, he ordered the steak frites. Heather, who, like Gabe, was vegetarian, ordered a spinach terrine and the vichyssoise. Carmen—an ocean away from Gabe’s censorious gaze—ordered quail. She had never eaten them, but here they were in the capital of haute cuisine, so why not be adventurous? She imagined small, delicate chicken-like pieces in some complex sauce. What arrived were two very dead birds with their heads bowed.

  “Oh gross, how could you possibly?” Heather said, throwing the back of her hand across her eyes, an actress in a silent movie. “Really,” she said, “I’m going to be sick if I have to watch her—” here she stopped and turned away from her father, toward Carmen, granting her the concession of direct address—“watch you eat them.”