There were onsens in the wilds of Northern Japan, or so they'd been told: hot, earthy cracks in the ground for soaking. Ruthie imagined something like Old Faithful but cooler, something outdoorsy and borderline catastrophic. Ben, she was fairly sure, imagined placid holes in the ground, brackish tidal pools for humans. They were forced to imagine -- after two months in Hokkaido, the only onsens they'd seen were the fake kind, the chlorinated pools in crowded health clubs with $50 user fees. At Health Barn, which boasted three levels of Jacuzzis, Ruthie had peered into the locker room to see a line of Japanese women waiting with towels the size of washcloths.
They'd left quickly and spent the fifty bucks getting quietly drunk on Sapporo beer.
"The prices," Ben had said, paying the bill in their local mall bar. But it had been worth it: They were smiling like loons.
Ruthie and Ben lived in a fancy hotel, brand new, nestled in a vast mall complex. From their corner suite they could see Otaru Harbor. Little boats swept by and big ferries slid into the jaws of the terminal. They were closer to Russia than to Tokyo and so there were people who looked like them everywhere, women with sharp cheekbones and pale skin, and large men with chest hair. Ruthie was somewhat Russian, she remembered, on the Ruben side. While pacing the floors of the mall, she sometimes pretended to be non-American. There were rumors about places like Health Barn, where signs were posted, apparently: "No Russians Allowed."
When not in the mall, Ruthie perched on the hotel mezzanine with her laptop in a corner chair facing the sea. No one bothered her there, and so she read old journal entries, filed on disk by year, and attempted to create haikus. (The first and last lines came quickly -- the middles were hard.) The laptop got very hot, and felt heavy on her thighs, and the screen seemed to be bombarding her with unhealthy particles. Her head ached when she was done, but there was a dull pleasure in it too. One night in the mall bar she told Ben she wanted to go back to school to study more, she wasn't exactly sure what, just more. He nodded when she said this, then clinked his glass with hers.
Ben was the hotel's visiting Food and Beverage Manager, which is why, at the General Manager's weekly cocktail reception, he winked at Ruthie and said, "I manage the bevvies quite well." He was a chef once; he'd been Head Chef when he and Ruthie met aboard the MS Sunbeam. He had a suite on the bridge, right next to the Captain's quarters, and because Ruthie was the Dance Captain (and because she'd dated the real Captain briefly, before he returned to his wife and children), she felt she deserved to live there too. They ate oysters and finished the leftover bottles from passenger tables, the expensive dregs of reds and whites.
Now Ben was the traveling Food and Beverage doctor, he explained on visits back to Newcastle. He hired and taste-tested and marketed -- in Asia, in the Middle East, in Northern Africa. He was in and out in six months, a year tops, leaving the crew intact (head chef, sous chef, pastry chef, sommelier), leaving a local chef with his title, a hotel policy. Most F and B guys preferred the longer jobs, he explained to his father, in Dubai or Bangkok or Majorca. They got used to their cars and corner suites, their weathered beach loungers, their local girlfriends. Too much flying made them weary and constipated.
But it suits you, Benji, his father chimed in at the pub. You're young. And single, he meant, although Ruthie was standing right there.
When asked, Ruthie sometimes lied and said they were married. In Abu Dhabi she bought rings, two thin bands she found in the Gold Market, because it was illegal to share a hotel suite out of wedlock. She wore hers still, sometimes on the left hand, sometimes on the right.
Ruthie had a vague belief that someday they would have several rooms of their own, not in a hotel. She wanted at least one room she didn't have to share with Ben, quiet and smoke-free, with all her books stacked and alphabetized. She wanted a place to store her photo albums in a pretty town where the currency was familiar and wine bars were near. She would not be required to wear make up and heels to dinner and she would have one or two close female friends to bitch to in a healthy way.
It was August and they had four more months to go, with the possibility of a Singapore job after Christmas. And so, after work each night, Ben stripped down to his Calvin Klein underwear and put on his headphones with the super-long wire. He watched "Charlie's Angels" reruns as Ruthie read The Poet's Chronicle, sent from home. This was their latest compromise, like the air-conditioning on half-blast and smoking allowed only in the hallway.
Mornings, Ruthie's jaws ached. She had to massage her cheeks for a moment or two. She ran her tongue over her rigid molars and imagined them growing smooth as polished stone.
At the next cocktail party, Ben found Ruthie on the outskirts and whispered, "Come say hello." Then he steered her into the thick of things.
"Ruthie makes haiku," said Ben.
She braced herself, sensing that her bra strap was showing and that the crisp, jeweled wife of the GM was eyeing it.
Ben laughed a little, kindly, to fill the gap, and the GM's wife laughed too.
They bought a motorcycle, or Ben bought a motorcycle and Ruthie felt she should contribute. They spent several days in second-hand bike shops writing down questions about mileage and cylinder size and insurance and received written responses from the Japanese sales staff in near perfect English. Ben chose a green one, with Honda TRANS-Alp lettering on the side and a seat large enough to accommodate two. (Ruthie made him test it with her it in the store, to make sure she wouldn't slide off.) They bought helmets, a bike lock, a waterproof bike cover, saddlebags for storage, wind and water-resistant pants and jackets and gloves. Ruthie chose purple and Ben chose racing green, to match the bike. They went to CAMPLAND and bought small, lightweight versions of things: a gas stove, two collapsible stools, a tent that could be rolled to minuscule proportions.
"Like Star Wars figures. Matchbox cars," Ruthie said, carrying the tent to checkout. Things she'd once collected, she meant. Easy to pack up and carry.
On Ben's day off, they tried again to find an onsen, an outdoor one. Ruthie studied the piece of map flattened against her thigh, searching for some sign of it on the page. Three times they'd driven the circuit of the campground path, just wide enough for the bike, and three times the same nervous campground attendant had frowned at the engine, the noise.
"Stop it! Turn it off!" Ruthie said, yelling into Ben's back.
They parked; they peeled off their helmets, their layers of windbreaker. Ben lit a cigarette and said, "We need tuition."
He was British, he spoke this way, and so Ruthie had learned to interpret. This one was new: "We need tuition." He was busying himself with the saddlebags and the cooler, the interlocking bungee cords that kept everything in place.
He meant, "We need help. We have no idea what we're doing."
By the time she got it, Ben had gathered some kindling for their fire and washed his hands with a mini bar of hotel soap in lake water. He'd enlisted the campground attendant, who led them in the right direction, down a steep path, toward a row of metallic shacks. Inside the nearest one they found a small wooden tub, cauldron-like, barely enough room for two -- something Ma Ingalls would fill with kettle water from a stove. The lower half of the tub was lined with steel, and underneath the tub there was a hole, a space to build a fire. The attendant gestured with his arms: You fill the tub with icy water from the hose. You chop the wood. You stack the wood. You light the match. You cover the tub, like a boiling pot. You wait for the boil to cool; you get in. Ruthie and Ben nodded as he left them there.
It was getting dark and a gaggle of Japanese teenagers emerged from the adjacent shack, damp and flushed. To Ruthie they didn't look as though they've been naked together in hot water, drinking beer. They were folding their towels into tiny squares and sealing them in plastic bags. They were putting their bottles in the recycling bin. They mimed in Ruthie's direction, offering to chop wood, and she refused, miming back.
"It's getting dark," Ruthie said, and Ben agreed.
"So that's an onsen," he said.
"I don't think so. It's supposed to be natural. In the ground." She was annoyed about this. "This is an old-fashioned hot tub."
They cooked instead, in a roofed communal cooking area with little cement benches and square pits with grills. The sun had set and so they were cutting and slicing by poorly aimed flashlight and by reluctant coals. Ruthie chopped the veggies on a towel, on cement, by leaning in an awkward way, and Ben sawed through the meat with his Swiss army knife. They assembled the kebab cubes of beef with green peppers and mushrooms squeezed in between. Ben stoked their little pit. Ruthie prepped the baked potatoes and readied the condiments: butter squares swiped from the hotel café and packets of barbecue sauce and salt stored in a contact lens container.
They drank, first the mini bottles of Chardonnay from the cooler, then the little bottles of scotch mixed with warm Coke. When this ran out they tried the beer in the vending machine, Sapporo brand, the only brand in Hokkaido, it seemed. It was five dollars a can but they drank anyway. Beer in vending machines! They took turns. He bought two, she bought two, walking the long stretch to the glowing machine, plunking in the one hundred-yen coins. The fire wriggled before them and they couldn't seem to look away from it; the more they drank the more insistently it burned. They talked a lot, quietly, about the veggies and the meat and the stars and the motorcycle and the smells in the air and what they'd do tomorrow. (Hike? Swim? Sleeping was never an option, although Ruthie sometimes wanted it to be.) They didn't mention the empty hot tub shack.
They were closest there, Ruthie knew, away from the life they'd chosen.
When they didn't talk, they read. Ben had taken possession of the pocket-sized Lonely Planet phrasebook, practicing verb tenses he'd never use. Ruthie squinted at the front page of The Japan Times, absorbing only random details: Usu, where the volcano was cooling down, Yokosuka, where the USS Kitty Hawk had docked.
They cleaned up, a little wobbly as they stood. The cooking area had one stainless steel sink large enough for a human body, with freezing water running through the single faucet. Ruthie washed the dishes quickly, six concentric pans with lids that doubled as plates, like the rainbow colored beach buckets she'd had, the largest red cupping the smallest purple and the rest in between. She could mention this to Ben -- my beach buckets -- but it seemed too complicated to explain.
In the bathroom, with one fluorescent lightbulb and moths flapping desperately, Ruthie brushed and flossed and moisturized. Ben was peeing against a tree stump (she heard the swooshing from inside) and then she was standing outside the tent with him, clutching her plastic toiletry bag. She was waiting for Ben to switch on the flashlight, which he did, and together they dove in, zipping up tight behind them, scanning the tent walls for beasties, which was Ben's word for bugs. Ruthie turned to him. She was high enough to go for it. She kissed Ben hard and his breath was tar and oil and she was minty and his lips are so small and she kept going, she was clawing and humping like a crazed raccoon. Stay awake! she ordered. But his limbs were dead heavy, as though he'd spent the day lifting boulders.
She stopped. Too drunk to onsen, she thought and it seemed almost funny, and this was her last coherent thought before sleep, which was black and heavy -- a swift, final thud.
She woke an hour later, with a sinking panic (Was it just the booze or had something else happened?) and a dry mouth. It was black outside, and silent. Ben's arm was heavy on her stomach, pressing into her bladder. She had to pee. She pushed at the arm. (He stirred, turned away, slept.) She had to pee, so she unzipped, stumbled out, tripped in a shallow ditch, felt a sharp and exhilarating twinge in her ankle that woke her completely. The pain became something throbbing and consistent -- a tremendous relief -- and so she stayed where she was, crouching, and peed in the ditch. She felt mosquitoes on her back, biting, and slapped at them wearily. She peed on her toes and swore and wiped them dry with a flap of Ben's shirt and then she was weeping, great heavy gulps of it pouring out of her. They could hear her probably, the other campers, but she couldn't make herself stop.
When she was able to breathe again she counted the months. She felt sober then, though she knew she wasn't, and the number sank in and she allowed it to. There was a panic-tension in her belly not unlike the having-to-pee feeling. Four months. She slapped at bugs. Someone stirred in a nearby tent and so she rose, she breathed. She wiped her eyes and locked the flap up fast again. She crawled back in.
Ben had brought it up first, the camping idea. They were on the crew deck on Ruthie's night off, sailing out of Malta for Sardinia. They were drinking leftover wine and holding hands under a ship blanket, side by side on plastic loungers, the plastic a little greasy and worn. The waves were black and quiet and the engine churned mysteriously below. He said, "I wish we were in a tent right now," and Ruthie thought of ham and cheese sandwiches.
When Ruthie was seventeen, she and her boyfriend Nelson went camping because it was cheaper than a hotel room and because there were trees around, and the earnest smells of woodsmoke and pine needles. Ruthie could say to her parents, upon her return, "It was great. We hiked and got some pictures from the summit. Yeah, it was pretty busy. We played Frisbee." Which they had, briefly, before getting high from a Sprite can bong and retiring to the tent to undress. They ate the ham and cheese sandwiches they'd bought from Shop and Save. They drank beer, which Ruthie was still learning to like. They smoked some more from the Sprite can. It was a heavenly kind of privacy, there in the damp, flushed space of their little dome. They could be heard, but they couldn't be touched.
"We should do that, go camping," Ben said. She squeezed his hand by way of answer and they resumed their drinking and sea gazing as Malta became smaller and smaller and then nothing.
They flew to Maine during their next break from the ship, to meet her parents. It was summer and the campgrounds were packed. Ruthie hadn't unfolded her tent in years, but she remembered exactly how to put it up, how to poke the poles through the color-coded slots. She did this quickly, remembering, and Ben seemed impressed, nodding. He crawled inside the dome to spread out the bedding and Ruthie took a long drink from her water bottle and when Ben emerged, his face was set like stone. He lit a cigarette.
He'd found a triangular corner of a Trojan wrapper in the corner, a tiny scrap of her teenage self.
Ruthie later wondered why they hadn't laughed about it. She felt the option stretching before them for a full second or two, knowing it wasn't going to happen. Instead they fought quietly until a bearded father appeared near their site to retrieve his daughter's baseball. Ben ran out of cigarettes and then there was nothing left to do but drink themselves senseless and hope for peace in the morning.
But already something fierce had risen up in Ruthie, a self-protective instinct, like her mother throwing her arm across the passenger seat when braking. Already she was hardening her stomach against him, preparing.
In the morning they went swimming in the lake for distraction. Ruthie dried off before him and dozed on her towel, dreaming about the ship, about the Can-Can number. (They had to be on in ten seconds and Ruthie couldn't find her feather headband.) When she woke Ben's sneakers were there, beside her. She waited, trying to read her book.
The glare of the sun made her a little dizzy and she wanted water or a Slush Puppy. This would make them laugh and forget maybe, blue tongues and ice.
Ben was a strong, solid swimmer, competent arms slicing through with good, clean strokes. In Curacao they swam two miles one day, resting on a jagged rock near the shore, kissing and tasting salt and catching their breath and daring each other to swim naked, which they had, with their suits hooked around their necks.
On the lake there were speedboats and she couldn't find his face. She kept scanning heads and bodies in the water and still couldn't see him. She was breathing quickly, she was very hot -- she got up, she gathered their things, she unlocked the car and turned the key. She snapped off the radio to think.
She found him three miles away, barefoot, jogging in his swimming trunks.
"Cheers," he said, getting in the car. His voice was rigid and so she didn't bother clutching at him, as planned. He wouldn't look at her, but somehow she knew he'd be willing to laugh about this, much later, willing to bury this day and let her live with it. This is how they would have to love each other, by careful diversion, by swallowing.
Ruthie didn't mention the onsen for a while. She went to the health club on the top floor of the mall, called Freizeit. This appealed to her -- a solid German-sounding name. Membership included access to the ten-lane swimming pool, the waterslide, the sushi bar, the massage studio, the aerobics studio and the tranquillity chamber. There were vending machines stocked with toothbrushes, deodorant, anti-cellulite cream, trail mix, juice boxes, carob treats and, near the tranquillity chamber, beer and cigarettes.
The chamber was like an airplane cabin with reclining chairs in rows and pastel walls and muffled noises. There were stacks of thin green blankets, sweet smelling in a chemical way. There were Japanese men in bathrobes with blankets draped around their bare legs, or slung over their heads to block out the light, or gripped in their hands for comfort. They slept or stared at the soundless TV's, all set to different channels and bolted high on the peach-trimmed wall. When Ruthie fiddled with her airtight trail mix packet, the men stirred, confused.
Ruthie liked being the only blond-haired person at Freizeit. (No Russians, she'd noticed. Maybe they weren't allowed.) The aerobics instructor checked to see if Ruthie understood and of course she did -- it was just very simple dancing and she could count to four in Japanese (itchy-knee, sun-she); that was all she needed to know. Her classmates greeted her. (Ohio-goes-eye-mass.) They made room. They let her stand in the very front row.
After class, she showered. Everyone else sat on white plastic stools where countless bare asses had been, blasting away at crevasses with shower nozzles. This was a bathing thing, Ruthie knew: bright lights, ugly bodies. It should have been impossible to think about anything except getting dressed quickly.
There were no curtains, and Ruthie was the only one standing to bathe, the only one stooping back and forth to squirt shampoo and conditioner from the blue and green bottles on the tiled floor. Blue for shampoo. She was overcoming obstacles in a resourceful way, a good little camper.
In the Grooming Center, there were large mirrors and soft, flattering lightbulbs. There were complimentary tissues and bottles of hairspray and red plastic combs stored in a germ-killing machine that looked like a toaster oven. (Return comb after use, shut the door and all the germs will disappear. Or so she interpreted from the cartoon instructions on the wall.) There was a centrifugal spinning device for drying bathing suits in thirty seconds. There were heated toilet seats. There were children everywhere, plunked on the floor on Freizeit towels -- clean, sweet smelling, sucking on juice boxes. Ruthie watched them and then didn't, because she felt as though she was staring.
She watched two old women with tiny towels and loose skin. They dried their sparse, spidery pubic hair with blowdryers, digging free Q-tips into their ears, inspecting the results. They laughed in Ruthie's direction and then to each other. They stopped laughing, and talked amongst themselves. She was a minor distraction only.
Ruthie dressed, deodorized, applied eyeliner and lip gloss. She took her place on the mezzanine.
Ruthie and Anne, the Pastry Chef's wife, met for coffee. They did this weekly and ordered European things -- café au lait, croissants. They talked about the hotel or the touristy things they should have been doing, or the meanings of the kanji symbols on the menu. Anne was Chinese -- she met Klaus during his previous contract at a Beijing hotel -- but everyone assumed she was from Otaru, even some of the locals. The café waitress frowned when Anne ordered in English.
After the coffee they went to the supermarket on the first floor and Anne pointed to the symbols for chicken and beef, low fat and regular. Ruthie smiled and made a great show of memorizing, but didn't.
That night, Ben and Ruthie were invited for drinks in Anne and Klaus' suite, one floor down. Klaus opened a bottle of whiskey and Anne provided plates of cheese and crackers and cole slaw. Ben dug in and Klaus smoked and Anne opened the window.
"Once you know what to do, it's very relaxing," said Klaus. "It's a very relaxing clean." He was talking about the onsen they'd found the weekend before, in a little town just one hour away.
"You wash first," said Anne. "Then you soak. You must wash first, they are very particular."
Klaus ripped the page from his map-book and Ruthie had to stop herself from saying, "Don't." Ben decided they would find the onsen that weekend, for sure, and they all drank to this, although Ruthie had had enough at that point and wanted only to go back to their suite and hold her book in her hands.
Klaus told them, again, that Freizeit meant 'free time' and that he and Anne couldn't join because they had matching tattoos on their shoulder blades, the kanji symbols for Happiness. Ben said he though the no-tattoo-rule had something to do with triad gangs, but Ruthie thought it had something to do with superstition and hygiene. Maybe the traces of skin-ink were thought to contaminate the water, she said.
An empty moment followed.
When they took the elevator back to their room Ben said, "Onsen then?" He threw an arm around her shoulder and pretended to choke her, gently. It was a rhetorical question and so she chose not to answer. In their room, Ben reached for his headphones.
In her pre-sleep dilemma they were in the onsen but divided and Ben loved it. He got into an elaborate miming act with a naked Japanese man and charmed him and Ruthie was left alone, with no one to mime to.
In the morning, Ruthie was given an errand. She must buy new sneakers, for both of them. She whined a little -- she felt like whining. She said to Ben, "I don't know what you like."
"Get Nike, or Adidas. No Japanese knock-offs." He said awe-dee-doss and she corrected him and he smiled quickly. He was tying his tie in front of the steamed bathroom mirror, peering into a streak of clear space he'd made with his palm. This would leave fingerprints and she almost said something, but she knew what his answer would be: She didn't have to clean it, so why should she care? She grabbed her wallet, her keys, her gym bag, pre-packed the night before. She let the door close behind her firmly.
Most of the rules in Freizeit had to do with shoes. At first Ruthie wore her sneakers past reception, into the locker room. She sailed past the beaming receptionist and no one stopped her, no one so much as glanced footward. Instead the Freizeit manager called the hotel General Manager, who then called Ben into his office to explain: His wife must purchase a pair of shoes for the gym only, never to be worn outside.
Later, in Freizeit, when Ruthie bent to retrieve her special cleansing bar (clear, honey-colored, meant to replenish), a twinge cut into her spine and made her stop mid-stoop. She breathed out slowly -- the pain was sharp and persistent and lodged in a low vertebra -- and she focused on the concentric circle-holes of the shower drain. She remembered she was exposed, curtain-less.
It passed, and she straightened. Ben didn't know about the twinges and wouldn't. She wasn't prepared to reveal this yet, this deficiency.
"Your wife," said the GM. She wondered if Ben corrected him.
On Ben's night off they fought until Ben grabbed his wallet from the nightstand at last.
Off to grab a pint, Ruthie predicted.
But Ben said nothing. He stayed fixed in the doorframe and stared at the floor. "Ruthie," he finally said.
It's just a beer, for Christsakes--
But he didn't say that either. He said, "Let's not do this -- this tearing strips from each other." His face was soft.
Ruthie imagined the strips of string cheese she used to get in her lunchbox, little satisfying threads to peel and consume.
She told him this, and he left.
When she saw him next it was 3 A.M .and he reeked of Scotch. He was smiling toothily. "Cheese, Ruthie? What's fucking wrong with you?"
Ruthie wanted to remember how his face had looked before he left, but it was gone, crowded out by what she'd done in the four-hour interim (called her Nana, listened to Seal, George Michael and Sade, separated their laundry into whites and colors and placed the bags outside the door, read forty-three pages of "Tender Is the Night," consumed two and a half generous glasses of Japanese Chardonnay ("Good to Free Your Mind and Relaxing Conversation").
Instead of speaking to Ben she closed her eyes and summoned the characters: crazy Nicole Warren and dandy Dick Diver and the precocious Rosemary Spears. She gave them outfits and expressions. She and Ben had been like that once, pretty ex-pats abroad. They'd been good in water, on beaches. Entwined and buoyed by the sea.
When sleep finally came, Ruthie dreamed she was reeling off endless knock-knock jokes into a plastic Karaoke microphone. Ben smiled politely at her from the front row and this was enough -- she knew if she could make him laugh she could keep him there.
Late morning, from somewhere in his boozy fog, Ben shifted and suddenly squeezed her hand.
"I do love you, you know."
Something in Ruthie's stomach dissolved a little, but her jaw stayed locked shut. She couldn't tell which one of them he was trying to convince. She didn't say it back.
When they finally did hunt for Anne and Klaus' onsen, it was mid-October, their last trip of the season, before it got too cold and too dangerous on the bike, before it began to snow. Ruthie wore twelve pieces of clothing in all, including two pairs of socks -- she counted, from skin up, as they sped along. They had detailed directions and they were fully prepared: extra sweaters, extra towels, fire-starters, charcoal blocks, maps in English and in Japanese, a full tank of gas. It was brittle and fresh and Ruthie was hanging on to Ben's waist, the broadness of him, as they zipped over small hills and under boughs of turning leaves. The Hokkaido roads were thick with trees, like Maine.
In the morning, they hiked. It was sunny, a freak spell of fall warmth. The trail was longer and steeper than expected, and Ruthie kept slipping. The leaves underfoot were wet and her ankle buzzed a little, reminding her, but she ignored it and stayed upright.
They were panting from the elevation, from the beer and scotch the night before, breathing it out into the hills, like dragon's breath. (She'd use that, Ruthie thought -- like dragon's breath.) She liked this, feeling winded and absorbed, liked the burning in the chest, the idea of imaginary creatures.
"Okay?" Ben turned around to check on her, sweat marking the collar of his shirt.
"Yup," she said. She was thinking: We have it all wrong -- the onsens can't possibly exist, just a Lonely Planet hoax.
At the top they found a bedraggled rope swing hanging from a steep branch, Tarzan style, and Ruthie thought of the summer the boy died falling from the rope swing at West Harbor pond, how she hadn't really known him and how her father had cried with relief that it hadn't been her. She scratched at a scab on her back, a bug bite scar Ben hadn't seen, and wouldn't. She dug in her fingernails, drawing blood, bending her shoulder in an unnatural way to reach.
They finished the hike. They had to pack up quickly to make it back in time, before dark. They would lie to Anne and Klaus and tell them the onsen had been fantastic.
Ruthie clung to him, all the way home.
In December, in Freizeit, there were giant Telly Tubby-shaped Santas hanging from ceilings and smaller ones sticking to lamps and to the name tags of fitness trainers. At the reception desk there was one with a maniacal laugh, dancing like Elvis from the waist down. This was in bad taste for many reasons, Ruthie thought, removing her shoes. Wouldn't the children be startled, the wonder of all those chimneys diminished by logic? (All those Santas.) But in the locker room the children were calm -- they'd been plopped on the floor and wrapped in towels. The moms wiped and brushed and patted them clean and seemed not to worry.
Ruthie did a step class, the hi-impact portion accompanied by a remix of "Flashdance, What a Feeling." The song was still in her head as she did her sit-ups and push-ups on her private corner mat. When she was done, Ruthie headed to the tranquillity chamber, intent on her reward: a packet of carob-coated raisins. Tucked beneath a sweet smelling blanket, she allowed herself to doze.
That's when she saw it, a brand new sign in Japanese and an arrow. She followed (feeling brave and warm under the soft blanket cloth) -- What a feel-ing! -- down one flight, two, and there it was, two pristine cloth curtains, the black kanji symbols for man and woman. And, through glass, a steaming, secluded pool in actual earth.
She stripped down and stashed her sweaty gym clothes in the cubby provided. She rinsed the stool first, with hot water. She sat. She squirted a palm full of white gooey soap. (Or shampoo? The colors were different.) She lathered, taking her time. There was no twinge in her back and a mirror reflected it all.
She opened the French doors and stepped outside and it was gorgeous there, the air rigid, the steam rising, a fence dividing the men's and women's sides. The pool was shallow and so she squatted and slid like an eel along the bottom, which wasn't muddy, but hard and smooth, like baked clay. She smelled mushrooms and a pleasant kind of algae -- salad smells, clean and edible. She stood up, letting the chill seep in just enough -- then she squatted back down again fast, feeling goosebumps dissolve, wondering if there were boats beyond the fence, moving through the almost Russian harbor.
She invented a secret crack in the dividing fence and through it she placed Ben, all eyes and wet curls. He was lovely to see, and smiling plainly. He made a face at her and disappeared.