An Austrian Touch

As a matter of principle, mom usually doesn’t argue with strangers when she’s lying naked on her back in a dimly lit hotel room.

So, when the Austrian woman kneading her inner thighs paused mid-massage and declared mom was no vegetarian, she merely smiled and tried to change the subject.

“You're not vegetarian if you eat eggs and dairy,” the masseuse insisted in her guttural accent. “Do you eat fish?”

When mom replied in the negative, the woman scoffed. “Fish is not an animal,” she declared. “You need protein. Where do you get your protein from?”

Perhaps the woman mistook mom’s sigh for one of pleasure, for she proceeded to rub her thighs rather vigorously, until mom felt an urge to cross her legs.

“How long have you lived here?” mom asked weakly, steering the woman away from rhapsodizing on the 101 ways an Austrian sausage could bring one pleasure.

Mom had signed up for a one-hour massage as part of an offsite team building session with great expectations. The morning at the boss’s house with her co-workers had passed pleasantly by, followed by a leisurely lunch at a local resort. The massage was supposed to be the grand finale of a day away from the office on company time and dime.

Pleasant visions of a relaxing rub-down were dashed to the ground as soon as the masseuse entered the room talking incessantly and proceeded to butcher mom’s name despite her mastery of four European languages.

In the hour that followed, mom learned about the woman’s birth in Argentina following the collapse of the Reich, her return to Austria, her migration to Chicago, her grandson’s near fatal shooting, her mother’s advanced Alzheimer, her husband’s Italian ancestry, her twin sister’s leukemia, her daughters’ children and her older son’s divorce.

By the time she rolled over, mom knew more about the woman’s family than she did about dad's erogenous zones.

Biding her time until she could collect her clothes, mom listened with one ear until she lost track of whether the woman’s paternal grandfather or her maternal great grandfather had sired 16 children with three wives and a mistress.

“Where are your roots?” the woman asked her.

Before mom could point to her head, the masseuse clarified, “Are you Islam?”

Upon learning of mom's roots, she proceeded to tell her about a girl in her village who was abducted and vanished without a trace. “It’s so sad, you know ... She was so beautiful and young … Such a good girl, with no boyfriend or anything. Nobody knew who took her.”

Mom clucked sympathetically, hoping the woman wasn't talking about a close relative.

“She was 16, white as snow and innocent. So sad …,” sighed the woman, shaking her head.

Mom asked gingerly, “Er, did this happen recently?”

“No,” said the woman, looking up at the ceiling to calculate. “It happened in 1881, I think … Or maybe it was 1887.”

As mom gaped open-mouthed, the woman continued, “We think the gypsies took her. She was so white, they probably sold her in Turkey, or Arabia, or India,” she spat out.

Suddenly recalling mom’s ancestry, the woman transitioned into another subject dear to her heart – her grandfather’s second marriage.

Apparently, her grandparents had nine children until her grandmother passed away in childbirth. Grandpa married a local woman who already had a daughter, but the couple never had any children together.

“I have a feeling they never had sex,” the woman declared, oblivious to mom’s eyes popping out of their sockets by now. “Interesting, no? They were both fertile, but they never had any kids. I wish I knew why.”

As the massage drew to a merciful climax, mom, in an effort to be polite, asked the woman whether she had always wanted to be a masseuse.

“I’m doing this for my twin sister,” the woman explained. “She’s dead, but I’m actually using your body to massage her.”

For her next team building, mom will probably opt for the pedicure package.