We’re in the temple of bullshit.
“Well,” Pam starts, as if she knows the answer to that scintillating question, “the average whale is about a hundred feet long. Human females are about five feet tall. So, I’d guess the ratio is twenty to one.”
Mom does math in her head. “How much does a female vagina hold? In terms of liquid?”
“About six hundred milliliters,” Lüq answers instantly.
“That’s twenty ounces or so,” Pam adds.
“Then,” Mom says seriously, as if we’re working at Draper Labs and our complex volume calculations are going to help rescue Matt Damon from Mars, “there is no way a woman whale has a vagina that holds four hundred gallons of whale sperm, like I said. And,” she adds with a dramatic flourish, her voice rising as Evangi and Gagai gather with Elle, “that is why the ocean is so salty. That buoyancy in the hot spring here at the spa comes from whale sperm.”
“Are our clients going to get pregnant with baby whales?” Gagai screams.
Pam and I facepalm simultaneously.
I swear Amanda and I were switched at birth. Seriously.
“No,” Mom says, shaking her head as if Gagai were the stupidest person on earth. “Of course not.”
“Whew,” Gagai says, playing with the chain at the end of her eye jewelry. Pam does a double take and gives me a look. I shrug.
“The amniotic fluid in the spa comes from women who are already pregnant, so it neutralizes the sperm,” Mom adds emphatically.
As you can imagine, Mom was of tremendous help when I worked on my AP Biology homework in high school.
“How did you know the volume limit of the average vagina?” Pam asks Lüq as Evangi and Gagai chat eagerly with Mom in a conversation that would make the owner of Snopes.com choose an icepick lobotomy.
“I must know for the vajacials,” hu explains.
I suddenly realize that Pam has been discussing vaginas and sperm and has not fainted. Not even a blush. She’s conversing as if this isn’t a source of embarrassment or anxiety, and I tuck that piece of information away—again—for a future conversation with Amanda.
Who now calls out, “I don’t want to get pregnant by a whale. Andrew would be jealous.”
What the hell is in that wheatgrass juice shot?
“I am afraid to ask this,” I start. I pause. I take two deep breaths as Lüq gives me a closed-mouth smile and waits patiently. Finally, I spit it out.
“What is a vajacial?”
“It is a facial for your vagina.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Are you always so fearful about new experiences?” Lüq asks.
“Only when they involve having strangers at a spa exfoliate my hoo-haw.”
Mom’s sex talk antennae pick up the word “hoo-haw” and she comes over to us.
“Non, non, non!” Lüq assures me. “We do not exfoliate the sacred rose petals of the garden, the entry gates to the finest lotus flower that is the jewel of your womanhood!”
Lüq should get a time machine, transport himself to 1983, and write for Harlequin.
“Do you use cucumbers, too?” Mom asks.
Lüq’s eyes get really wide.
Pam finally blushes.
“The vajacial involves a steam bath for the rose petals—”
“STEAM?” I can’t help it. I scream, because my delicate rose petals are about as interested in coming into contact with steam as they were in touching hot wax, which is to say, NOT. I’m more likely to let my mother be my birthing coach one day than I am to let someone steam my va-jay-jay. You steam broccoli. You steam carrots. When you steam rose petals, they curl up and die.
Nope.
Amanda startles in her womb bath and flips over, her thin piece of silk falling off, and now she’s topless, bobbing in the water, and it looks like her mouth’s open and—
Gag.
She comes up, grasping the silk across her chest, spitting furiously. “I just drank whale sperm!”
“I hear it has plenty of protein,” Mom says, trying to be helpful.
“None of this is true! That’s not how this works, Mom. That’s not how any of this works! The ocean is not salty because of massive amounts of whale ejaculate, and people who get massages in this amniotic ocean water bath aren’t protected from pregnancy because of pregnancy hormones in the womb juice!”
“It is the vajacials that protect women from pregnancy, right?” Elle asks sweetly.
“It’s basic biology that protects them!” I fume. “Wait.” I look at Amanda. “Did you actually have a vajacial?”
Gagai is helping Amanda into a thin bathrobe the color of celery. “Yes,” she mutters.
“And did it transport you into a past life where you could see your inner vaginal self?”
“No. But I think my cervix smells like sandalwood now, and I pulled a muscle in my inner thigh from squatting for so long.”
“Squatting? You squat?”
“Yeah. Over the steam bath machine.”
“This sounds worse than childbirth!” Not that I would know, but...
SPLASH!
Mom has put on some thin, silk outfit like the one Amanda wears, and jumped into the hot spring womb juice. She dips her head under, like a dolphin, and comes up in the swirling clouds of mist that dot the water’s surface.
“This feels amazing!”
“But won’t she get pregnant?” Elle asks, her lower lip trembling. “She didn’t do the vajacial.”
Pam slips her arm around my shoulders, a gesture that is less maternal and more in solidarity over the fact that we are actively experiencing the Dunning-Kruger Effect in real time.