The Shame by Makenna Goodman

Author:Makenna Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Just for fun, Celeste went on a little trip to a spa in Quebec by herself. She wanted to spend some time alone, away from it all. The spa was eco-friendly, the meals grain-free. Every morning she woke up with a glass of Green Tingle: juiced parsley, apple cider vinegar, fresh ginger, and turmeric. She had foam above her lips and a towel around her head. She sipped her coffee, read her book, and her legs were crossed on a padded pool chair. I went to the spa website, and in big letters it said: “Stop and notice how you feel.” I felt a yearning. According to information on the website, Celeste’s first thermal stage could be to increase her temperature with either the eucalyptus steam bath or a Finnish dry sauna. Then she could close her pores with a brief dip in the Diable River, the Nordic waterfall, or the cold plunge pool. Finally, she could rest her body in the solarium, the firepit, or the zero-gravity pavilion. Celeste had never felt better. She was filled with a sense of self-love, she was well-fed but had a lightness, she was sleeping deeply, she was massaged twice daily, and by the end of it, she had spent less than she would have on a normal weekend out in Brooklyn. She returned rejuvenated, back to life but with a glow.

I, too, had an experience at a sauna, with one of the deans’ wives at her rural mountain estate. She had invited me many times, and I finally said yes. We were naked, and although our limbs and curves had seemed utterly disparate when clothed, here in the sauna they were carved from the same stone; breasts were just breasts, knees were knees, a dimpled haunch was obscured by the dim light and faint cloud of steam. At one point I felt a drip of sweat fall from my torso onto my thigh, and for a minute I worried it was breast milk, seeping as if in response to a sudden need.

The dean’s wife was telling a story about her husband, who I knew struggled with darkness. When I’d asked her how he was that day, she used the word “discouraged” instead of “depressed.” “‘Depressed,’” she said, “connotes a feeling of being stuck in a state. ‘Discouraged’ is an emotion that ranges, day to day, on a continuum.” This made sense, and I wondered if I, too, was discouraged. The dean’s wife shifted on the cedar bench, and I could hear the click of her knee joint. The previous week, she said, the dean had run over a deer on his way home from work. The road that night was a sheet of ice, and he put the brakes on when he saw the deer. But the deer had stopped when it saw the dean’s headlights, and when it tried to sprint, it slipped, and all four legs flew out from under it. The dean had no time to think and drove right over the deer’s hind end.

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