And the day after my anniversary will always be the anniversary of the day my father died, even if he comes back -- which I am guessing he won't. Needless to say, this weekend marks some momentous occasions, for better or for worse, and it needs to be endured. My mother emailed me yesterday to remind me to do good things for myself in the next few days, to put the bad stuff out of mind and to celebrate myself for Mothers Day. "I will," I assured her, stuffing the little shopping bag full of clothes I just bought in the trunk while I tried not to chip my fresh purple manicure. All these good things I was doing for myself were making me feel too stressed to chat with her at length; I didn't want to be late for my facial.
I rarely get facials, and every time I do I think about one of my favorite old I Love Lucy episodes, when Ricky was in crisis because he thought he was going bald. Lucy sat him in a chair in the kitchen, put a smock on him, and poured everything she could think of on his head, except maybe the kitchen sink. She cracked eggs, pounded his scalp with pots and pans, massaged all sorts of mysterious ingredients into his hair as piles of viscous goop dripped down his shoulders like molten lava. Probably a blessing that the show was in black and white.
Yesterday, no longer able to tolerate the puffy purple bags under my eyes and the crevices in my distinctly nonelastic and dull lifeless cheeks, I allowed myself to splurge on whatever facial treatment my trusted esthetician recommended. She suppressed a laugh when I asked what a basic age-defying facial would cost, amused by the idea that I thought a basic anything would make a dent in fifty-three and a half year old face (yes, it's my half birthday today too). So several hundred dollars later I was lying on a table in a soft and fluffy towel robe under boiling hot blankets that seemed to weigh about three hundred pounds and must have just been pulled out of some mutant, evil mircrowave. I could vaguely hear the sound of a babbling brook being piped in through the ceiling, and I closed my eyes and tried to figure out how I would relax while I was literally shackled to a bed of hot coals and unable to scratch the suddenly uncontrollable itching on my face because my hands had been stuffed into hot and oily oven mitts. (You get a lot of bang for your buck when you spring for a facial.) Trapped, I settled in to get pampered and try not to wallow in the misery of the weekend's depressing commemorations.
My far from basic facial included all sorts of miracle ingredients and a variety of autumn vegetable extracts, a virtual cornucopia of bullshit. I felt a lot like Ricky Ricardo, particularly when the microdermabrasion portion of the torture began, which brought to mind the image of Lucy taking a toilet plunger to Ricky's head and turning him into a grotesque and screaming bobble head. I could feel the little battery operated device lifting my tired skin, lifting and inverting the wrinkles until I imagined I was starting to look like a chipmunk. Whatever Lucy did to Ricky, he never lost his hair. Maybe I would actually emerge from this torture chamber looking young. I couldn't see the little vibrating electronic plunger through the collagen mask, but I was thinking I could probably find a more pleasurable use for it.
Or maybe not. (The suction aspect is kind of scary.) But damn it I had pampered myself and resisted the urge to wallow in misery this weekend. So happy anniversary to me and happy mothers day and dad, I still miss you. If I had any money left I'd continue to pamper myself all weekend, maybe treat myself to a heart stopping Brazilian bikini wax. Thankfully, though, the well is as dry as my skin, so I'll just wallow. It's cheaper, and it'll pass.
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