Khaki

EVERYONE ELSE’S BUSINESS

When I went off to college, practically every person in Kinston told me that I should rethink my interior design major. “If she wants to learn how to move furniture around, you just send Khaki on down to the shop,” I remember one of my daddy’s friends chuckling.

If you aren’t from a small town, you might not know how everyone is all up in everyone else’s business every minute of the day. So you have to have a thick skin. I loved design and persevered through the insults and snarky comments. But that small-town cynicism must have gotten in anyhow because I am one of the world’s most skeptical people. I believe in Jesus, but that’s about it. Ghosts: fake. Bigfoot: no way. The Loch Ness Monster: biggest crock of all. So going to see an herbalist whose “office” was a garage with a few braided throw rugs lying around, old floral bedsheets draped along the walls, and a ratty tan corduroy sofa that would have seemed more at home in your daddy’s old dorm room didn’t seem like an ace in the hole to me.

We drove way out into the country—I mean, Graham and I live in the country, but this was the country—to a 1900s farmhouse that needed painting a decade ago with a condemned house with fourteen rusted-out cars as a neighbor. I looked at Graham and said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I think I’ll take the knife.”

He took my hand calmly and said, “Let’s just try it. If you get freaked out, we’ll leave. We have nothing to lose.”

“Except our lives,” I muttered under my breath. He rolled his eyes. But, I mean, really, he set himself up for that response, didn’t he?

So, the garage wasn’t Duke University’s Integrative Medicine Center, but it was at least clean. And Esther reminded me of Pauline—if Pauline wore floral-print tribal garb and talked with a thick Trinidadian accent. Esther’s warm smile, comforting Dove chocolate hands, and acknowledgment that “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but give it time” softened me a touch.

She helped me up onto a massage table that was soft, warm, and comfortable. I figured that, worst case, I’d at least get to rest for an hour or so.

The soft, tinkling music, candlelight, and Esther’s waves-crashing-to-the-shore accent did make me feel a bit like I’d been to the islands. She wanted to “read my feet” first thing. As soon as she raised the sheet to check them out, the strangest thing happened.

I rose up on my elbows, looked at Graham, then at Esther, and said, “Is it weird that I taste pickles? Am I having a stroke or something?”

Esther laughed, the beads in her hair tinkling and said, “I put dill oil on the point on your feet that leads to your mouth.” She winked at me. “I wanted to show you that the points in the feet correspond to the organs of the body.”

Graham smiled at me supportively, and I lowered back down as Esther continued the “foot treatment” that was definitely more deep tissue and less Swedish. “Less time at the computer,” she instructed as she kneaded away at my big toe, my body writhing in pain.

So, yeah, I spent a lot of time at the computer, like every other person in the developed world. She moved on from that poor mangled toe and said, “Ah. I feel here that you had a lot of strep throat as a child. Many antibiotics can leave the door open for sickness.”

She had her eyes closed as her fingers padded up and down the balls of my feet. “Your lungs weren’t fully developed when you were born, and your breathing has been difficult ever since,” she stated. “A thyme and honey syrup will help you when it’s cold out.”

I was starting to feel a bit like that time I went to the psychic with my sister. Graham cleared his throat and, when I looked at him, he made a face like he was impressed.

Esther opened her eyes and said, “Do you have pain in your thighs?”

“Yes!” Graham exclaimed.

I cut my eyes at him. Then I looked back at Esther. “Does that mean something’s wrong?”

She nodded slowly and said, “Ah, yes. I feel some stagnation of the liver here.”

That was all well and good, and I’m as into my health as the next person, but, honestly, I was here to get pregnant, plain and simple. If my liver was sad and my thyroid was slow, so be it. I wanted a baby. So, I said, “What does this have to do with my endometriosis?”

Then Esther said something that made so much sense I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it on my own.

“Ah, sweetness,” she said. “In our mind and in our body, either we’re sick or we’re well.”