funds for a new temple, but my father had overestimated the size of his rural New Hampshire congregation, and although he assured me that they were closing in on buying land somewhere, I didn’t see it happening anytime soon. By now, anyway, his congregation had grown used to readings from the Torah that were routinely punctuated by the cheers of the crowd at the basketball game in the gymnasium down the hall.
The biggest single annual contributor to my father’s temple fund was the ChutZpah, a wellness retreat for the mind, body, and soul in the heart of Lynley that was run by my mother. Although her clientele was nondenominational, she’d garnered a word-of-mouth reputation among temple sisterhoods, and patrons came from as far away as New York and Connecticut and even Maryland to relax and rejuvenate. My mother used salt from the Dead Sea for her scrubs. Her spa cuisine was kosher. She’d been written up in
Boston
magazine, the
New York Times,
and
Luxury SpaFinder
.
The first Saturday of every month, I drove to the spa for a free massage or facial or pedicure. The catch was that afterward,I had to suffer through lunch with my mother. We had it down to a routine. By the time we were served our passion fruit iced tea, we’d already covered “Why Don’t You Call.” The salad course was “I’m Going to Be Dead Before You Make Me a Grandmother.” The entrée—fittingly—involved my weight. Needless to say, we never got around to dessert.
The ChutZpah was white. Not just white, but scary, I’m-afraid-to-breathe white: white carpets, white tiles, white robes, white slippers. I have no idea how my mother kept the place so clean, given that when I was growing up, the house was always comfortably cluttered.
My father says there’s a God, although for me the jury is still out on that one. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate a miracle as much as the next person—such as when I went up to the front desk and the receptionist told me my mother was going to have to miss our lunch because of a last-minute meeting with a wholesale orchid salesman. “But she said you should still have your treatment,” the receptionist said. “DeeDee’s going to be your aesthetician, and you’ve got locker number two twenty.”
I took the robe and slippers she handed me. Locker 220 was in a bank with fifty others, and several toned middle-aged women were stripping out of their yoga clothes. I breezed into another section of lockers, one that was blissfully empty, and changed into my robe. If someone complained because I was using locker 664 instead, I didn’t think my mother would disown me. I punched in my key code—2358, for ACLU—took a bracing breath, and tried not to glance in the mirror as I walked by.
There wasn’t very much that I liked about the outside of me. I had curves, but to me, they were in all the wrong places. My hair was an explosion of dark curls, which could have been sexy if I didn’t have to work so hard to keep them frizz-free. I’d readthat stylists on the
Oprah
show would straighten the hair of guests with hair like mine, because curls added ten pounds to the camera—which meant that even my
hair
made objects like me look bigger than they appeared. My eyes were okay—they were mud-colored on an average day and green if I felt like embellishing—but most of all, they showed the part of me I
was
proud of: my intelligence. I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.
The problem was, you never heard anyone say, “Wow, check out the brain on that babe.”
My father had always made me feel special, but I couldn’t even look at my mother without wondering why I hadn’t inherited her tiny waist and sleek hair. As a kid I had only wanted to be just like her; as an adult, I’d stopped trying.
Sighing, I entered the whirlpool area: a white oasis surrounded by white wicker benches where primarily white women waited for their white-coated therapists to call their
The biggest single annual contributor to my father’s temple fund was the ChutZpah, a wellness retreat for the mind, body, and soul in the heart of Lynley that was run by my mother. Although her clientele was nondenominational, she’d garnered a word-of-mouth reputation among temple sisterhoods, and patrons came from as far away as New York and Connecticut and even Maryland to relax and rejuvenate. My mother used salt from the Dead Sea for her scrubs. Her spa cuisine was kosher. She’d been written up in
Boston
magazine, the
New York Times,
and
Luxury SpaFinder
.
The first Saturday of every month, I drove to the spa for a free massage or facial or pedicure. The catch was that afterward,I had to suffer through lunch with my mother. We had it down to a routine. By the time we were served our passion fruit iced tea, we’d already covered “Why Don’t You Call.” The salad course was “I’m Going to Be Dead Before You Make Me a Grandmother.” The entrée—fittingly—involved my weight. Needless to say, we never got around to dessert.
The ChutZpah was white. Not just white, but scary, I’m-afraid-to-breathe white: white carpets, white tiles, white robes, white slippers. I have no idea how my mother kept the place so clean, given that when I was growing up, the house was always comfortably cluttered.
My father says there’s a God, although for me the jury is still out on that one. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate a miracle as much as the next person—such as when I went up to the front desk and the receptionist told me my mother was going to have to miss our lunch because of a last-minute meeting with a wholesale orchid salesman. “But she said you should still have your treatment,” the receptionist said. “DeeDee’s going to be your aesthetician, and you’ve got locker number two twenty.”
I took the robe and slippers she handed me. Locker 220 was in a bank with fifty others, and several toned middle-aged women were stripping out of their yoga clothes. I breezed into another section of lockers, one that was blissfully empty, and changed into my robe. If someone complained because I was using locker 664 instead, I didn’t think my mother would disown me. I punched in my key code—2358, for ACLU—took a bracing breath, and tried not to glance in the mirror as I walked by.
There wasn’t very much that I liked about the outside of me. I had curves, but to me, they were in all the wrong places. My hair was an explosion of dark curls, which could have been sexy if I didn’t have to work so hard to keep them frizz-free. I’d readthat stylists on the
Oprah
show would straighten the hair of guests with hair like mine, because curls added ten pounds to the camera—which meant that even my
hair
made objects like me look bigger than they appeared. My eyes were okay—they were mud-colored on an average day and green if I felt like embellishing—but most of all, they showed the part of me I
was
proud of: my intelligence. I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.
The problem was, you never heard anyone say, “Wow, check out the brain on that babe.”
My father had always made me feel special, but I couldn’t even look at my mother without wondering why I hadn’t inherited her tiny waist and sleek hair. As a kid I had only wanted to be just like her; as an adult, I’d stopped trying.
Sighing, I entered the whirlpool area: a white oasis surrounded by white wicker benches where primarily white women waited for their white-coated therapists to call their
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