by Jen Scoville

it seems appropriate to tell this story of a gift he gave me during our last Christmas together. What's that classic tale, The Gift of the Magi, where the sweetheart cuts off her golden locks to pay for a fob for the watch her lover just sold to purchase beautiful bejeweled hair combs for her? Well this was nothing like it. This was the gift of the massage guy, less poignant maybe since we were well out of love by the time I got around to actually capitalizing on my "deep-tissue" rubdown, but despite the terrible pun, the cruel irony is just as heavy handed.

We girls always hope for a romantic gift, don't we? Something pretty, soft, or sexy. Something frivolous, yet cool. Something that says I don't know why you want this but I was smart enough to figure it out and here it is! The year before I got a toaster oven (which I did want but not for Christmas for chrissake!), so of course I was ecstatic that what lived inside the tiny flat box was something just for me that you couldn't plug into the wall. We'd had massages before, in fact my ex had a whole slew of them paid for by the insurance company following a nasty car accident, but we couldn't afford them on a regular basis so this present really could be considered a luxury. But just like the gift of the shirt that's too small, last year's self-help bestseller, or the one Doors album without Jim Morrison on it, I noticed something right away that worried me.

"Frank's Formidable Fingers?:"* [*The name has been changed to protect the guilty] Isn't this the guy we met out at the pub that night? Isn't this the guy who does the 15 minute massages at your work?

I must admit I was a little disappointed in the lack of immediate gratification and that $100 bucks of OUR money was spent on such a gamble, but my ex assured me that this guy was good, that the strong hands of a man would make all the difference in the world. So, I relished the thought of the most fabulous massage of my life, and I vowed to save it until I was really, really, really tense.

Two months later we broke up. Too bad I was too miserable to pick up the phone to make an appointment. But soon after I put myself on the self-prescribed, post-dump, spoil myself silly kick, I remembered the gift certificate. Formidable Fingers or not, what a better way than to spend $100 bucks of HIS money in tactile bliss.

I phoned the number printed on the certificate.

"Hello?"

"Uh.... I'm looking for Frank's Formidable Fingers? Maybe I have the wrong number."

"Nope, that's me, how can I help you?"

"Well, I have a $100 gift certificate for a massage. I got it for Christmas but I haven't had time to use it until now."

"Oh yeah, I remember." (He remembers? Why does he remember?)

"I'd like to schedule something. Is your practice open on Saturdays?"

"I do most of my work on site, but you can come here to the house next Saturday, uh, what's say we say 10:30?"

I examined the paper again. It looked to be created by a professional printer: no handwriting, no xeroxes. (He probably has one of those home offices, I thought.) I wrote down the directions he gave me and put the appointment in my date book. It was rubbing after all, how can that ever be bad?

When Saturday rolled around I got up early and showered so I'd be nice and clean to touch. On my way out the door the phone rang and I turned around to answer it. It was Frank. His formidable fingers had overslept and he needed an extra 1/2 hour to prepare. That was fine, I told him, but I did think it was a little weird that he didn't mind making me adjust my schedule. Then it dawned on me that the money from my gift certificate was long gone and this was just a debt he had to pay. Like detention on a Saturday, or defensive driving. Something told me just to call back and cancel but this was my last present and I was an enthusiastic single girl now who did new things all the time and I wasn't chickening out.

His directions were easy to follow and I arrived at the modest brick house on a cul-de-sac right on time. I rang the bell and immediately a million dogs started barking and a woman who sounded like she was at the end of a long hallway called to me that she would be right there. Then I heard more dogs and a kid; a shriek, a bark, and then a wail. The blonde woman answered the door with a toddler under one arm and a puppy under the other. "Frank," she screamed down the hall and consequently in my face, "your massage is here." I tried not to take it personally.

Frank showed me in and he was basically still in his pajamas: saggy athletic shorts and an oversize tye-dyed t-shirt, stuffing the last bite of breakfast between his teeth. He led me down the hall toward his office, through a cloud of pot smoke mixed with the ineffectual cover-up of sandalwood incense. "I don't really have an office here," he garbled with a mouthful. "This room is kind of a shambles but we can go in here."

The room he brought me into did have a massage table set up in the middle of it (phew!), but it was dusty as hell and stacked with boxes and unpacked papers. There were some old barbells in the corner and a rickety antique armoire with the door hanging off its hinges. I recalled the nice-smelling (if a little new-agey) rooms of previous massage experiences. Candles, Enya on the CD boom box, aroma therapy, all these things were mysteriously lacking. "Strip to a comfortable level and get under the sheet. I'll be back in a few minutes." I felt more like I was about to get a military physical than a massage. What ensued I've yet to come up with an acceptable term for.

The first thing Frank did wrong was talk. What a mistake to get a massage from someone you've met only once, someone who knows people you know and chooses to remind you of this non-connection every five minutes. Our only course of conversation was an hour of the worst kind of small talk: did I know work mates of my ex, what does he do at the company, what's my favorite club or restaurant in town, and do we frequent that bar regularly? Where was the Enya, or the soft jazz? Heck at this point I would have even settled for the Grateful Dead. No music, just the incessant chatter of Frank, and any aroma therapy I was getting was unintentional and unsettling: Frank's hot breakfast taco breath wafting in my face every time he was doing anything remotely near my head. But his hands were working okay, and I tried my best to relax into the rubbing, breathe out my mouth (to cover the stench) and tune him out. "Mmmhmmmm" I'd answer when required. And with my eyes closed I could forget about the fact that I was laying naked in what was essentially somebody's dusty garage.

A tenuous peace this was.

"Daddy, Daddy!" A knock on the door was followed by a child's whine. Frank excused himself to answer it. "No Kyle, I'm doing a massage in here, you're going to have to find your mother." "No Daddy, I want you!" Frank excused himself again and left the room to attend to this matter. "KAREN!" I could hear him yelling down the hallway. And more barking dogs. Any kind of tiny spell I had manufactured was broken. How could he operate this way?

When he returned to the room he apologized, and then in a false air of armistice he lifted the sheet completely off of me and said, "turn over, time to do your front." Apparently I'm a goddamn pro at following orders because I flipped over in the direct line of his view. "You lost a lot of weight since I saw you last," was the inappropriate comment I think I heard him make, but I was so humiliated by the fact that he didn't give me any privacy (and I didn't demand it) that the only thing that shook me from my state of horrified detachment were the sharp pains emanating from my pelvis. He was digging really hard between my hip bone and the place where my thigh connects to it, and when I flinched he said "oh yeah, women like this spot a lot." Now to be fair, I didn't think his comment was intended to be sexual, but I certainly did not enlist his services to have my ovaries tousled. I have no idea why I wasn't screaming at this point, except I do have a high tolerance for pain and an even higher one for professional composure. Shouldn't massage therapists be in touch with people's bodies enough to know when someone is holding their breath it probably isn't pleasant? "There ya go," he said as he finished, though I don't remember what his hands were doing when it ended. The way I felt, he might as well have turned me over and slapped my ass. This guy was a massage misogynist.

I got dressed and exited the room, thinking that even though there was no money to be exchanged Frank would be outside the door waiting for me -- pleasantries and such -- I mean the man wasn't a barbarian? When he wasn't there I led myself down the hallway to find the back of his head, sitting with his wife and kid on their L-shaped sofa watching television (on a bright, sunny Saturday, mind you). "Thanks and have a great day," he said, without even turning around. I showed myself to the door: the walk of shame. Two days later I got my period, a week early. Damn. I hope I'm still able to have children.

Don't worry, I haven't given up on massages. But I'm not going to anyone's house for one. And I'm sticking with women, no matter how "weak" their hands. The good thing is I did learn from this so-called gift, lessons that my former relationship in all its years had failed to teach. I learned that I was too polite, too tolerant, and too much of a wuss to make a fuss about practically anything.

These days I can make a fuss about practically nothing. But I had absolutely no complaints about this year's Christmas gift -- a fabulously frivolous set of walkie-talkies -- or the boyfriend that gave them to me. Over and out.

Blah Blah Blah: What's the worst present you ever got?