Chapter Text
The two-hour car ride begins with an entire Spice Girls album to “pump up the energy,” but even Janine’s stamina flags this early in the morning. She switches to some slow-jam R&B greatest hits CD, which puts everyone to sleep immediately. Tashi wakes first about a mile from Montauk. Her sister is yawning as she drives in silence. When she looks in her rear mirror, she sees that Tashi is awake and mouths, “Hi!”
“Hi!” Tashi mouths back. Suzie stirs and blinks awake. She unsticks her hair from her cheek. Her eyes widen when she sees the giant green sign ahead of them, which reads EXIT 44 E | 27 East | Montauk.
“Oh. We’re almost there.”
“Ten minutes to the resort, max,” says Janine. Katerina yawns and stretches, pressing her palms to the roof of the car hard enough to flex her biceps. She cracks her neck.
”You were so real for scheduling us massages first thing. All I would be doing otherwise would be counting down the hours!” She swivels in her seat and gives Tashi a huge grin over the arm rest. “Are you excited? You work so much. When was the last time you even got to relax?”
Janine laughs. “Tashi hasn’t relaxed once in twenty-two years. This is gonna be her first time ever.”
“Really,” says Suzie. She looks at Tashi pensively. Tashi resists the urge to nervously flick her fingers together — a habit she’s picked up from Art.
”No. It’s just been busy lately with tennis travel and the wedding and everything. So this is the first time in a while. But not forever.”
“Well, hopefully the next day and a half will be so good that you’ll remember to do it a little more often,” says Janine. “Kat, dig around in the dashboard for that Katy Perry album, Teenage Dream. I gotta get the energy going.”
Katerina yanks open the dashboard and clatters around inside. Amidst the din, Suzie clenches her jaw before neutralizing her expression. Imperceptible tension to the average person, but Tashi is familiar with the Donaldson style. And anyway, Tashi is online enough to have seen the things that college students say about Katy Perry these days. It’s gracious of her to hold her tongue, because the criticism is probably deserved.
After everything has been shoved back into Janine’s dashboard, Katy Perry’s voice floods the car at top volume. It’s light and sweet like cotton candy until her belt kicks in for the chorus, which Janine and Katerina shout-sing together. Tashi joins in to be polite but, not for the first time, the music leaves a pit in her stomach. Something about Katy’s voice in particular invokes a hazy, broken-knee-gap-year memory of a glittering room full of people ugly on the inside. It’s never been worth it to try and figure out what night she’s remembering; there were too many like that, back then.
Suzie is looking at her again — is it so obvious that she hates the music too? But when Tashi turns her head to look back at her, she finds inquisitiveness, and then something like recognition in her eyes. She looks away and starts belting Last Friday Night along with the other girls. Tashi joins in too, surprising herself with the number of words she’s picked up through osmosis during long cross-country drives. She wills herself into enjoyment alongside Suzie, and by the time they reach the cottage, she’s sort-of-maybe found it.
The wood-paneled cottage that Janine has booked for them is steps from the beach. It’s grey in February, the tang of salt and seaweed punctured through with a crystalline chill that settles in the nose and tongue. Even still, the beach is full of bundled up vacationers chatting as they walk their dogs by the shore. She watches the waves roll in and out through the giant rear window, grateful for the central heat that reaches every room in the house. Katerina, Janine, and Suzie are still getting settled, less accustomed to the rhythm of travel than Tashi has become. Ever since Katerina’s ankle gave out last January, she’s been stationed close to her family in Beverly Hills.
(This, of course, would never have happened under Tashi’s watch. But Katerina had never offered her the promotion that could have moulded her into a star. In life, there are sometimes inevitabilities borne of choice; it isn’t her fault that Katerina chose wrong.)
Down the hall, Katerina and Janine are chatting and giggling in their shared room. So, it’s not surprising when Suzie emerges first in a fresh black t-shirt and matching black leggings, face washed with her hair tied in a braid down her back. She folds her hands behind her and watches as a man struggles against the wind and the unrelenting resistance of the sand under his feet.
”That could be you tomorrow morning. Janine scheduled some sort of wellness beach walk at 8:30. Said it’s healthy to get outside once in a while.” She adjusts her glasses. “I can’t go, though. I have to sleep in to prepare for my flight. Sorry.”
Tashi laughs. “That’s fine. I doubt Janine will be up for it either. I don’t think she’s exercised at all outside since I started paying for her Equinox membership.”
Suzie quirks a smile. “I thought so. You should see the amount of wine she and Katerina shoved into their suitcases. They’re going to be pretty hungover tomorrow, I think.”
“Ugh, I hope not,” says Tashi, wrinkling her nose. “Janine’s a horrible driver after a night out. In high school, she side-swiped a lamp post the night after a rager. Crushed in the right headlight. And there wasn’t a lot of money to fix it right away because that was the year —”
Outside, a golden retriever breaks loose of its leash and dashes towards the freezing ocean. Its owners, two men, tag-team the dog until it’s back on the leash. The dog shakes off to dry itself, getting them even wetter in the process. Suzie shivers empathetically.
“That was the year you got hurt.”
“Yeah. There’s a lot of Adidas money in this knee.”
They watch the beach in silence a little longer. A nuclear family strolls by, underdressed for the weather. The woman holds an infant against her breast and pushes a stroller in front of her; she’s smiling. Neither husband nor wife seems bothered by the wind that whips around their faces or the sink of the sand at their feet. What must it be like to be so weightless?
“Suzie! Tashi! Are you ready?”
Katerina and Janine sashay out of the bedroom wearing snug black leggings and graphic tees. Janine frowns when she sees what Tashi is wearing.
“You’re still in like a business outfit.”
Tashi looks down at her outfit and tugs at her maroon cardigan. Her sensible heels from this morning have already been swapped for sneakers. “Capris and a cardigan are pretty casual.”
“For a spa day?”
Tashi shrugs, growing annoyed. “For anything!”
An alarm goes off on Janine’s phone. Katerina checks her glittering Swarovski wristwatch. “Fifteen minutes til our first appointment. No time to change. But the massage is undress to your comfort level anyway so I don’t think her outfit matters that much. Suzie, are you ready to go?”
Suzie puts on her black cross-body sling bag and gives a thumbs up.
”Let’s ride,” says Katerina.
It’s a fifteen minute trek to the spa building where they’ll be spending most of the day. The ageing cobblestone path leading to the wood-paneled building clings together with sand-based fillers and small, asymmetrical rocks shoved between the cracks. Her hair is blown askew by the time the enter the warm, vanilla-scented lobby. Janine steps up to the secretary — blonde, natural makeup, probably a part-time yoga instructor — and tells her the name of the party is under “Duncan.” The secretary nods, prints Janine a copy of their spa schedule for the day, and directs them to sit down in the cool, gray waiting room.
Tashi sits down next to Janine and peeks onto the printed schedule. “Why did she print it? Is it different than the one you made before?”
Janine shakes her head. “No, it’s the same. Just a little more detailed with the rooms and stuff.”
”Okay.”
Her leg feels jittery; she shakes it ever-so-slightly as she inspects her surroundings. The walls are rippled stone, cut into and polished to glisten in the yellow light. On the other wall, a small fountain juts out into a tiny pool, bubbling pleasantly. Suzie grabs an Architectural Digest from a marble-topped side table and flips through it half-heartedly. She pauses on an article about house-flipping foreclosure homes and reads it with a grimace.
”You guys aren’t going to do this?” she says, looking up at Tashi midway through the article.
Tashi shakes her head. “We don’t need to do that to make money.”
“You would if you did?” asks Suzie, frowning. Tashi sits with the question, imagining what financial catastrophe it might take to switch from accepting tennis sponsorships to flipping houses for cash. Art’s too good to quit out at the moment, so it would have to be an accident. Or some sort of social embarrassment, maybe. A revelation so humiliating that all of their sponsors would pull out immediately, leaving them with nothing. Something like —
“We won’t,” she says. Suzie nods and returns to flipping through the magazine with glazed-over eyes. A different tall, blonde woman comes over with a few cups of water, but Tashi doesn’t take any. It would be very unbecoming to have to get up to pee mid-massage.
Finally, four massage therapists step into the room in single file. Two of them are, mercifully, Black – though judging by the way Janine squeezes her shoulder, that is entirely by design. Her heart swells with fondness as the massage therapist gently leads her away. Maybe trying to relax isn't going to be so bad after all.
It takes Tashi a while to figure out what, exactly, undressing to her comfort might mean. Besides Art, it's rare for anyone to see her naked – or even in a bathing suit. She strips down to her bra and underwear, inspecting her body in the full-length mirror. The words of former coaches and players and classmates still plague her. Focus on aerodynamics. You'll be faster. Your outfits will look better. The camera adds ten pounds! She touches her stomach, softer since she stopped playing, and imagines its potential impending growth. Stretch marks and baby weight and all of the little indignities of age.
But none of that is happening today. So, she takes off her bra and lets her massage therapist, Letitia, inside. Tashi lays face-down on the table before she's told. The donut that envelops her face smells like lavender and old leather. Letitia oils up her hands across the room, humming quietly. She turns on an instrumental CD that Tashi immediately recognizes from her sporadic yoga classes when she was still a tennis player — Montgomery Smith’s Rest and Relaxation.
”Good morning, Tashi,” she says. “Have you had a massage before? Do you need any explanation of what might happen?”
It’s been ages since she’s had a massage, but the practice isn’t totally foreign. Just something from another life.
“No, I’m okay.”
Letitia lays her hands on her back and starts her massage. Already, the first song is nearing its close, a decrescendo of its instrumentals matched with intensifying crashing waves. Tashi closes her eyes, transporting herself back to the last time she heard this CD. It must have been 2007 — Stanford offered free yoga classes in a studio with a hardwood floor that smelled like floral perfume, rubber mats, and feet. The teacher, Tanya, was a tan woman with brown hair, flexible in a way that made Tashi’s cheeks hot. Tashi couldn’t keep up with the dancers in the class in flexibility but made up for it in strength, holding planks longer than anyone else. It was okay, because Tanya never checked the dancers’ form like she checked Tashi’s, nudging her body millimeters up or down with her soft hands.
Her knee was whole, then. Strong and loose. Free of the aches and pains that have nagged her since the accident, alerting her to rain, to stress, to overexertion. Her body was unfamiliar with the tug of scar tissue, the way incisions were numb but other people felt them anyway, sibilant with empathy at the sight of barely-healed skin. That same hiss passes through Letitia’s teeth when she massages Tashi’s calf. She gently squeezes the divot behind Tashi’s knee, kneading the scar tissue there with her thumb.
”Does this hurt?”
Tashi shakes her head. ”There’s a spot the size of a quarter back there where I can’t feel anything at all. Just pressure. That’s where your thumb is right now.”
The massage therapist presses down on it harder with her thumb. She gives attention to the scar tissue before moving down further to her feet. Tashi drifts into a trance state as Letitia works her heel. In her mind, Tanya is shifting from Mountain Pose into Extended Side Angle. As she exhales on three, her arm stretches, palm out, towards the sky.