What Doesn't Kill You Will Make You Softer

I recently had a very interesting first experience. It seems like just about every day here in France there is some new “first” for me. Last night, for example, while out at a restaurant, I had my first encounter with a co-ed bathroom…but I’ve already talked ad-nauseum about bathrooms so we’ll keep that one for later. However I’m afraid that this specific “first” for me may prove to be a “last” as well.

A friend has been telling me for sometime now about how much she loves to go to the hammam, she goes on and on about how invigorating and relaxing it is and has invited me several times to join her. Once I figured out that she wasn’t just in the early stages of a speech-deteriorating disease, and that hammam really is a word, I took her up on her invitation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this silly-sounding word, a hammam is a Turkish bath. Apparently they are quite popular here in France with both the Arabic and Caucasian populations.

The words “relaxing” and “invigorating” somehow seemed to be the only descriptors that stood out to me in my conversations with my friend, so much so that I never really grasped the concept that this was a public bathing situation. My friend phoned me the day we were to go together to the hammam to tell me what to bring. She told me that I should be sure to bring a two piece bathing suit and my shower things. I immediately had visions of the high school locker room and a cold shiver ran down my spine. I tried to gather more information without sounding too prudish but wasn’t very successful. There were questions I wanted to ask but didn’t have the guts to, questions like: what exactly is it like there? Is it like a public swimming pool? Is it like a spa? Why do I need to have two pieces to my swim suit?

I’m afraid that after my tentative conversation with my friend I was left with very little useable information. I have come to discover that this is quite common. It seems that we often are too afraid to bluntly ask the questions that will truly help us understand what it is we so deeply need to know. Questions like: Who is God and why does he matter? What is really happening to the environment? Why do I need a two piece swimsuit? This is a very important question for me.

So based on the little bit of information I could gather without completely revealing my prudishness, and combined with my own rather geeky background, I cobbled together a picture in my head of what this “bath” would be like. Unfortunately the only images of public bathing in my head come from reading about ancient Rome, so in my minds-eye I envisioned us all in togas (modestly covering our two-piece swim suits) and eating grapes while we tossed water on steaming coals. This seemed intriguing to me, perhaps there would even be the exchange of philosophical ideas, the shaping of democracies, and the formulation of western civilization just like in Rome.

Let’s just say I was WAY off.

From the outside the establishment was very nice, very spa-like. I took this as a good sign. Inside we were shown to a locker-room of sorts and told to change into our swimsuits. I did manage to summon the courage to wear my two-piece bathing suit which I affectionately refer to as my burqini, but I think the actual name is a tankini. It is a very modestly cut tank top with a little skirt attached to the bottom half.

Yes, there really is such a thing as a burqini and I want one. I read an article about a young Muslim fashion designer who wanted to give Muslim women a way to go swimming without uncovering or being immodest. Her design is called a burqini and it has a dress-like top with long sleeves and a high neck which comes down to the knee with a pair of tight leggings and a matching headpiece all made of burqa-blue lycra and spandex. I think that this would market very well in the US, I am considering opening my own burqini boutique.

After changing we went down to the bath. It was actually very much like my Roman imaginings, but there were no coals and no philosophy. We sat in a large tiled room filled with warm steamy air and little faucets and basins which you could fill with warm or cold water to pour over yourself. This was ok, I could handle this. Sure it was a little weird to be sitting in my bathing suit pouring cups of water over myself in public (by the way this was a women-only night at the bath so there were no men, phew!) but when in France…

After a while my friend suggested a turn in the steam room. This took me off guard as I thought we were in the steam room and judging from my now very rosy complexion so did my circulatory system. Needless to say I didn’t last long in the steam room. After only a few minutes I began to feel a sudden kinship with lobsters. This must be how they feel when they are put into a pot of boiling water. The pain around your lungs as you try to sort air from water, the sensation of needing to gasp for air but there is no air to gasp. The feeling that your internal organs have gone ‘critical’ and your brain is slowly burning down through your body like your own self contained china syndrome. I politely excused myself.

Back out in the main bathing room women were chatting away while pouring water over their heads and lounging on the tiled benches. I was just beginning to relax and let my American up-tightness slip away when we were summoned. My friend had explained to me that we would be called at some point for our “gomage” which apparently was the whole point of this hammam thing. She had tried valiantly to explain what it was but I’m afraid that I still didn’t have a correct impression of what was about to happen to me. Based on her descriptions I had envisioned a spa-like atmosphere where we would be given skin treatments while Yanni music played in the background. Images of movie stars with mud and cucumbers on their faces wrapped in fluffy white robes, relaxing while someone rubbed their feet, this is what I had prepared myself for.

I followed my friend back to a room that resembled a torture chamber more than a spa. There were three tiled tables, at each was a high pressure hose coming out of the wall and a large drain in the center of the room. I suddenly felt like perhaps I had been kidnapped by the CIA and taken to a secret European prison. I began to worry that “information” was going to be “extracted” from me. I could see it clearly how it would be: large men asking questions from behind a bright light until I was driven to the point at which I confessed that the banana bread recipe that everyone loves is really Martha Stewart’s and not mine, that I really can’t make chocolate chip cookies, that I let my daughter wear dirty socks to school today, that I do take a bit of artistic license with my blog entries.

One table in this chamber of horrors was occupied by a woman who was completely covered in black mud and flower petals, this made me feel a little better, I felt like I could manage mud and flower petals without revealing my deep dark secrets. Just as I began to relax with this new confidence a rather swarthy middle-eastern woman approached me. I am almost certain she had a mustache and she looked like she could be the relative of a communist dictator. She told me rather tersely to sit on the table and to take off the top of my bathing suit. I clung to my burqini like a drowning person to a life raft. The woman insisted and in the face of what I felt was surely to be “information extraction” I gave in to the pressure.

I laid down on the table and the Stalinist woman began to scrub me with what I believe to have been industrial grade sandpaper. I lay there feeling disillusioned with my situation. I had expected the gentle touch of an experienced masseuse and instead was being peeled like an onion by the bearded woman.

After a while the woman stopped scrubbing, which was quite a relief, but then she started spraying with what felt like a fire hose. I looked enviously across the room at the woman in the mud. I was just about to confess to all the crimes I have ever thought about committing and beg for mercy when the spraying stopped and I was told I could put my top back on and leave. It was all I could do to not to grovel and thank the woman for sparing my young life, to tell her that my children would bless her for not taking their mother away from them so soon. I tired to nonchalantly walk from the room as if this is the sort of thing I do every day. Once around the corner and away from French eyes I gripped the wall and gasped for air, and then I began to feel it.

You can’t tell, because I am writing this, not sitting in front of you telling you this story over a cup of coffee, but I am a red-head, a VERY fair red-head. I have been accused on more than one occasion of being an albino (needless to say the movie DaVinci’s Code has not increased my popularity) and in High School the rumor was spread that I had narrowly escaped a fire and that was the reason I had no eyebrows or eyelashes.

Let me put the record straight once and for all, I DO have eyebrows and eyelashes, they just happen to be very blond and virtually transparent. I am NOT an albino and I have NEVER been in a fire. For those of you who don’t know, life is very different for a red-head. We are constantly assaulted by older women in grocery store checkout lines who, despite the unwritten American personal space laws, start petting our hair. This, I may add, is the reason I will never have long hair again.

Unlike typical blondes or brunettes, Redheads recall their summer vacations not by the year, or exotic tropical location, but rather by the degree of their sunburns. “Oh, the Bahamas? Let’s see that was third degree sunburns. And the summer we spent in Florida that was only second degree”. My beach kit consists of a tube of spf 50 or more sunscreen along with a large bottle of lidocaine topical anesthetic and aloe vera for the inevitable sunburn. The only time in my life when I have been tan is the first ten seconds on the beach as my freckles come out and run together in an attempted to protect my near-transparent skin.

All of this to say that I was very familiar with the sensation I was feeling as I stood outside Attila the Hun’s beauty salon. Pain. Not just ordinary pain, but radiating, throbbing, heat-filled pain, highly-offended-sensitive-skin pain. This is not a sensation I enjoy, in fact it is my kryptonite. I have had three children and pride myself on my ability to “suck it up” when it comes to physical discomfort but come anywhere near me with a needle, a band-aid, or ultraviolet light and my superpowers fail me. Anything that bothers my skin, even itchy sweaters, can make me feel sick to my stomach.

As I stood there gripping the wall I struggled to breath and “find a happy place”. I managed to recover myself mostly and went on to take a shower in the very public shower rooms but at this point I no longer cared. Just to be free of my torturer was a victory in and of itself. The shower was painful too as the high powered water felt like needles against my offended skin.

There were more events to this evening at the hammam. There was a massage, a period of time in the “quiet room” where we Americans were anything but quiet as we laughed about the gomage experience. After it all you are allowed to get dressed and sit and enjoy a relaxing cup of tap water…how nice. As I sat and sipped, I remembered the conversation I had had with my friend that got me into this situation to begin with. I remembered her words that had seemed so alluring to me. She had used the terms “invigorating” and “relaxing” and somehow, looking back over my glass of tap water, I felt I had missed that part. The only words I could think of as I sat here were “chaffed” and “embarrassing”.

I came home that night to a husband who expected a pampered, radiant wife. Unfortunately what he got was an extremely tender person who resembled a freshly steamed lobster and who walked rather oddly because her pants rubbed against her sore skin. I could see his brain spinning with all sorts of jokes about clarified butter, but as he is a good husband (and I’m not sure that he knows what clarified butter is anyway), he refrained. After about three days of red irritated skin, the benefits of this treatment finally became evident and my skin was nice and soft for about one afternoon before the cold winter air sucked all the life out of it once again.

I’m not sure what the point of this essay is really, if only to seek sympathy from the universe and validation of my suffering. In another essay about French bathrooms, I ended with a short moral about my experience, but I’m afraid I’m struggling this time. I could end with advice to my fellow red-heads about avoiding swarthy middle-eastern women and the benefits of having a large supply of lidocaine on hand.

My story could be more of a cautionary tale, a warning about the use of adjectives, in particular the words “relaxing” and “invigorating”. Perhaps as with antibiotics, the use of adjectives is far too frequent in our society. Their overuse can lead to great misunderstanding and disillusionment. But as I think about it now, I suppose am learning that, like all things in my French experience, what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger, or softer in this case. And hopefully what only humiliates me will make for good writing material.