Peter's Worst Fear

“Put your arms across your chest and I’ll put on one more hot herbal towel,” said my masseuse, and I started to get a bad premonition as she tucked in the sides of a bottom sheet.  I felt like an Egyptian mummy.  I couldn’t move a muscle.  Before I knew it, she was giving me parting instructions, “I’ll stop in every ten minutes or so.  This treatment takes thirty minutes.”

I was at Rosemarie’s spa in Guerneville.  My ten o’clock appointment was for an herbal wrap, and as a treat to myself, a massage.  The herbal wrap was business.  I do massage in my home.  Should I offer an herbal wrap?  There would be an investment in specialty sheets and towels.  I rarely receive a massage because I’m always too busy giving them.

I had stripped off my clothes and lay on my back on top of a normal massage table, a steaming hot, herbal-soaked sheet underneath me.  “Okay, Peter, now I’m going to use hot herbal-soaked towels on various parts of your body,” said my regular masseuse, Susie Garber.  She was a jovial, heavyset woman, who had done twenty years as an Army nurse.  She loved the care giving, but not the hospital routine.  “You’ll love this Peter; makes you feel really clean.    One on each leg.    One the length of your torso.    Better keep that out of my way.    Good.” 

Then she was gone.

I was trapped.  Panic mounted in me; it was sheer terror.  I could barely control my breathing.  Crazy thoughts went through my mind; what if the building caught fire, I couldn’t even wiggle a finger, what if I suffered a heart attack or hyper-ventilated.  I did what everybody does when you are gripped with fear; I promised God that I would devote my life to spiritual acts.  I thought back to how the seed of this fear had been planted in me.

I was seven years old, sitting in our kitchen on a summer’s day in Detroit.  My mother and I had just finished listening to a soap opera.  It was Our Gal Sunday, “the story that asks the question, ‘Can this girl from a little mining town in the west find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?’”

“What are we going to do next?” I asked.

“Well I’m going to change the sheets and later, you can help me with the mangle, but you’ll have to find something now to keep you busy.”

“Will you turn on the Victrola in the dining room?”

“Okay, I’ll put on Beethoven.  You can stand on this chair and conduct.   That’ll keep you busy for a while,” then she left the room.

I stood on my father’s oak chair.  I used a spoon as a baton.  Arturo Toscanini would be hard pressed to match my depth of emotional feeling or the vivacity of my baton work.  I didn’t have the long gray hair like Toscanini, but my head whipped around just like his, talking with my eyes and facial tics to each section of the orchestra.  The baton was delicately flicked like a touch on the triangle, perfectly timed to bring in each new musical idea.  All too soon, the symphony ended.

I looked around the room and noticed the nine by twelve carpet in the middle of the floor.  Hmmm, I thought to myself.  What would it be like to roll up in the carpet and then unroll yourself?  I lay down lengthwise along the edge of the carpet.  I grabbed the tassels that fringed the carpet and started rocking back and forth until I thought I had enough momentum.

And there I was, just like the older me on the massage table.  But at seven, there wasn’t a lifetime’s experience to help in describing the feeling.  All I knew at seven was; I’m going to die, I’ll be here forever, I can’t breathe, I can’t even scream, I can’t see and I’m afraid.

Later my mother walked back into the room.  “Oh my, what have you done now?” and she unrolled me.  She doesn’t remember the event; I have lived sixty years with the fear of claustrophobia.  When Susie came back in the room to mop my forehead with cucumber water, I tried to keep some calm in my voice and said, “I think for the rest of the herbal wrap, I’d like to have my arms out in the open, above the sheet. 

I decided not to use this herbal wrap service again.