Standing Naked in a Pool of Her Clothing

In a softly lit gallery at the Chicago Institute of Art, portraits of women bathing hang on the stark, white walls. The women are slender and sinuous, stocky and sturdy; they are blonde and fair skinned, brunette and bronze; they kneel or lie in shallow tubs twisting their bodies in awkward, yet somehow graceful, poses as they scrub or dry themselves with plush towels.

In one painting, a woman lies on her side facing a copper bathtub, one leg lifted and resting on the tub’s edge. A maid, in a white blouse that balloons above her starched cuffs and a red skirt that billows over the floor, lifts the woman’s hair with one hand and with the other dries her back. I marvel at the women’s comfort with touching and being touched by one another.

In another painting, a slight woman leans over the narrow edge of a slipper tub. A towel drapes over the back of her neck, over one shoulder, and across her chest, leaving one breast exposed. Her silky auburn hair falls over her face, and she raises one arm to lift it away. As I study the painting, I feel a pleasurable guilt—not that of a window peeper, but more like someone who has been invited into an intimate moment in a stranger’s life. I am fifty years old, and for the first time in my life, I grasp the difference between sensual and sexual, a distinction that my prudish girlhood had not prepared me to appreciate.

Years later, as I soak in a pool of hot water at a Korean bath, I look across the room where four young women sit on their stools, studying their naked bodies in mirrors as they scrub themselves with rough cloths, making small, slow circles over elbows, hands, legs, feet, breasts, and neck. Their hair is gathered at the tops of their heads and cascades in shiny black rivers down their long necks; their slender bodies curve in at their waists and out at their hips. Holding their arms above their heads, they sway like dancers as they caress first one arm, then the other, with the porous scrubbing cloths. With no sense of voyeurism, shame, or uneasiness, I watch them scrub for several minutes. Not even Degas had captured such beauty.

I come from a family that dressed in bathrooms and closets. So I was glad none of them was watching when I walked up the stairs at the Boryeong Mud Spa, took off my shoes, set them on a wooden mat outside the door, went into the women’s bath, and bought a ticket for four thousand won (about six dollars) from the attendant. She gave me an expandable bracelet with a small metal disc numbered 368 and pointed to several rows of lockers. After wandering a bit, relieved I was the only one in the room, I found my locker, but I couldn’t open the door. I was fumbling with the bracelet when the attendant came around the corner, grabbed my wrist, and held the disc to the lock, which made a grinding noise, and popped the door open. She gestured that I should take off my clothes and put them in the locker.

As I struggled to decide whether I should strip or flee the room, I heard my mother’s voice: You are actually planning to get naked in front of other people?

My Irish-Catholic mother had such an aversion to the naked body that she once took my little brother’s crayons and scribbled clothing on the nude women in our illustrated Bible. “Whoever decided Eve was naked?” she said as she colored a dress on the picture of Eve leaning against the apple tree in the Garden of Eden. Years after her death, I still hear my mother’s voice.

The attendant pointed at the locker, so I took off my jeans, my socks, and finally my turtleneck sweater, folding and stacking them in a tidy pile in the cubbyhole. When I was done, the attendant pointed at...