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scrub. • Ayurvedic total-body massages employing charcoal and frankincense to…
     
    “Umm…” Julie Oliver stopped reading and slid the peach-colored, almond-scented flyer back across the table. “Are you sure you want me to go with you?” she asked doubtfully. “I don’t know, Marti, that doesn’t really sound like something I’d enjoy all that much.”
    Marti Lau shook her head. “What, a week in Cabo with enough pampering to last a lifetime? Free transportation, free food, free everything? What’s not to like? And sunshine! Wouldn’t you like to see what color the sky is again?”
    To clinch her point, she gestured out the window beside their table, which overlooked Puget Sound, or as much of it as could be seen on this typical early-November day in Seattle. A dismal, freezing mist hung low over the dull gray water, totally closing out everything more than a few hundred yards offshore. As they watched, a big, green-and-white state ferry slid slowly away from Colman Dock and disappeared almost immediately into the murk, looking forlorn and bedraggled and without a single passenger out on the open, wet deck.
    “Well, why doesn’t John go with you?” Julie said, then turned to address Marti’s husband directly. “You’re the one who’s always grumping about the Seattle weather, John. I would have thought you’d love a chance to be in sunny Mexico for a week.”
    “Yeah, but not enough to sit still for getting scrubbed with a turnip,” John Lau said. “No, thanks, not my kind of thing.”
    “Julie, I just don’t see what your problem is,” Marti said. “You already said you could get away.”
    Julie nodded. She was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters in Port Angeles, she was overdue for some vacation time, and November was a good month to take it. “I could, yes…”
    “Think of those warm, oily massages-”
    “That’s just it. Actually, I’m not that crazy about massages.”
    Marti stared at her. “How could anyone not be crazy about massages?”
    “Julie doesn’t really enjoy being touched by other people,” said Gideon Oliver, her husband and the fourth and final member of the party. “Neither do I, for that matter.”
    Marti guffawed. “That sure sounds like the recipe for a happy marriage.”
    Julie smiled back at her. “Well, I make certain exceptions.”
    “I’m relieved to hear it. Come on, though, will you at least think about it? It’d really be fun.”
    “I am thinking about it,” Julie said, getting back to her wild-salmon-and-tarragon-mayonnaise sandwich. “Quite seriously.”
    Old friends all, they were lunching at Maximilien in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where Marti had just sprung the surprise she’d so ponderously hinted at on the telephone the night before. She had bought a twenty-five-dollar raffle ticket at a charity event a month earlier, and had wound up winning the grand prize: a one-week, all-inclusive stay at Cabo San Lucas’s posh Mandalay-Pacific Spa, to be used anytime before the end of the year. For two. And she wanted company.
    She poked impatiently at her cheeseless vegetarian tarte flambe. (Marti was a nutritionist at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in the city and imposed on herself – and claimed to like – the same meatless, fatless, saltless, sugarless regimen she inflicted on her captive clientele.) “So,” she pressed after all of thirty seconds, “have you thought about it?”
    “Yes, and it does sound tempting. But, well…”
    “I know what’s worrying you,” Marti said. “What would we do with the boys?”
    “The boys?” John demanded.
    “The boys?” Gideon said. “Are you by any chance referring to-”
    “Well, I wouldn’t quite put it that way,” Julie said, ignoring them, “but I can’t help wondering how they’d get along for a week without us.”
    In this they were engaging in the affectionate self-delusion of wives everywhere that, in the absence of their domesticating