Ms. Delicious says be good

I’d say around half the time I go to the Massage Parlor (aka therapy for the elderly) they give me a shoulder-thumping good massage and when I lift my face out of the pink leather hole I’m able to rotate my neck like a normal person instead of hearing it crunch and grind like a robot. But about half the time, due to their bizarre rotating masseuse policy, I tell them my shoulders and neck hurt and they spend seven minutes hitting pressure points in my feet, two and a half minutes on my calves and then use their fairy-light fingertips to brush around my scapula for 20 seconds, and then I’m done. I know the body is all interconnected and whatnot and that by grinding his thumb into the ball of my foot the massuese was probably releasing all kinds of tension I didn’t know I had. But the kicker is that he was kind of hurting me by pressing so hard on my tender feet and along my not-so-meaty calves and the only reason I didn’t howl in pain was that I believed he would work his way up to my shoulders, and I WANTED that kind of pressure on my shoulders.

My shoulders, you see, are not meek and out of shape like the rest of my body. They are slowly turning to bone and as part of this transition my muscles now feel like marbles under the skin. Some people store all their tension in their derriere, and I wish that was my case, because holding tension in your shoulders only makes you look like you have no neck which, as I’ve learned from America’s Next Top Model, for a person of my stature (under five feet), makes me look very small indeed. It also makes me look like I have some kind of unusual reflex problem. “Can you make that lesson plan by fifth period?” Cute Young Sensei will ask and up fly my shoulders. My earring gets caught in the fabric of my shirt and when I notice and try to relax myself I nearly rip them out of my earlobe.

Yesterday, though, at the massage place they must have seen I was in a tired state because instead of hooking me up to the heart-stopping electric “massage” suckers they put me on a table near the back with a heat pad under my lower back and one on my stomach. I was given a sheep-shaped eye pillow wrapped in kleenex to block out the light, and I was left to relax for fifteen minutes. When they came back to turn it off I must have given them a blurry-eyed stare and a disjointed attempt to sit up because the girl said, “a few more minutes?” winked, and then turned up the heat. So that part was relaxing. Although what do I have to do to get them to move the heat pads up to my neck, where it really counts?

My shoulders, besides not getting me the attention I need from the masseuse, have gotten me a few sly comments from my new first year students. In class the other day while the students whiled away the time working on their “Who I Am” books, one of the boys, goaded on by his peers, said, “Peaquah Sensei, you have a nice scapula.” I paused for a second thinking: scapula, sternum, scapula, sternum, which is closer to my chest? because it’s one thing for a student to yell out, “Hey, India!” to Praju and have us shut that down, but it’s quite another issue if he’s commenting on the tissue and bone that make up my rack. I quickly deduced he was talking about my bony, bird-like shoulders that stick out of my back because I have very bad posture.

I said, “Thank you.”

The boys went back to work.

There are eight boys in this new first year English class–as opposed to three in the third year–and they’re kinda rowdy. Instead of having only one or two boys in the class when they’re split in half I have four. This is nothing compared to the Oral Communication classes which seem to be comprised entirely of boys from the baseball team and girls who don’t say anything, but still. Four boys can get into a lot of trouble.

A few minutes later the boys stopped working, dug around in their dictionaries and giggled behind their hands. “You have a nice collarbone,” the same boy said.

I visualized myself in the grey turtleneck I was wearing and realized that no one could see my collarbone which meant they were just imagining what my collarbone looked like which meant they were probably imagining other parts of my clothed body. I thought about how to respond to this.

Actually, in all honesty, I didn’t think at all, but instead walked over and gave the boy a light smack across the face. In fact, I was walking down his row when he said it and I took a few steps forward, then took three steps back, connected my fingers with his cheek and pushed. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t hard. In fact, I would actually call it more of a tap than a smack. Ms. Delicious burst out laughing.

“You’re very cheeky,” I said to the boy.

It was a good moment, but a moment that lost some of its ooomph when I had to explain what a cheek was and the difference between being rude and impolite. It wasn’t outrightly rude, I said, because the boy was beginning to look quite sheepish and embarrassed, but it wasn’t something one should say to a teacher.

After that I had good fun wagging my finger at him when I thought he might be up to no good, and the class really seemed to get into that. I clapped my hands and yelled, “Boys!” once when they weren’t listening and the girls broke into peals of giggles.

“Be careful,” I said, once, passing by their row, as I saw their eyes searching for a new bone on which to comment.

“What does she mean?” I heard the boys whispering in Japanese. “Be careful?”

Ms. Delicious, who was walking right behind me, didn’t miss a beat. She put her hands on the boy’s cheeks, looked him in the eyes and said, “Be good.”