Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

  Near the bottom, we encountered the Mean Witch. She was in that same mannish bathrobe and looked just about as cranky as she had the night before, but today she was wearing, I must admit, some ultra-stylish Chanel glasses. She was headed back up with her newspaper and, as she squeezed by, said, by way of a greeting, “Please tell me that baby doesn't wake up screaming every morning at four.”

  I should have said, “Only when we poke him with pins,” or something that would have shown at least a little chutzpah. But all I could come up with was—once again—”Hi! I'm Lanie.” She paused a minute, I guess to see if I could do any better than that, then kept on her way up the stairs.

  At which point Alexander, in a moment so predictable I should have put money on it in advance, turned to me in his loudest, most oblivious voice and said, “Why does the Mean Witch wear such big shoes? Does she kick people?”

  She paused on the steps, but then kept on walking.

  I covered. In a voice as loud as Alexander's, I said, “The Mean Witch from our bath-time story? She has magic feet!”

  It was a pretty good save, given what I had to work with. But I could tell from the way the Mean Witch closed her apartment door that she had not been fooled.

  I decided to look for a new park. I'd heard someone the day before say something about the park near Fresh Pond. I'd seen a street sign for Madison, and we were going to find that park. I strapped Alexander and Toby in, plied them with raisins and cheese bunnies, and decided we were going to need a better stroller. In Houston, we'd driven everywhere: to the park, to the grocery, sometimes even to the mail box at the end of our street. Everything was so spread out, there was really nowhere to walk to. Plus we ‘d had a backyard with a swing set. Leaving the house often seemed like asking for trouble.

  But here, it was different. It was a walking town. At the end of our block, we had a bakery, a pizza shop, a grocery store, a book store, an antique shop, an ice cream stand, a bank, and a tattoo parlor. And there was no parking, anyway. And the roads in this town were so tangled up and crazy, they looked like they'd been laid out by ferrets. Not to mention those kamikaze roundabouts everywhere. I was happy not to drive. Strolling made much more sense.

  I resolved to look on eBay for a cheap jogging stroller. Because we had no money. We'd had very little money back when Peter was working at the music library, and now, with him in school, we had even less. We had the opposite of money. Our only cash would come from his teaching assistantship and whatever piano lessons he managed to set up. Plus our little savings account, which was already destined for a speedy death. And it never even occurred to me to ask my parents for money. My brothers, David and Tommy, borrowed enough for all of us.

  I had decided, years back when I quit working, to take a Mary Pop-pins approach to being broke and make a game out of it. I imagined myself like the thrifty main character of a movie, using my noggin to make being penniless hip. Everything we owned came from resale shops and garage sales. And though I always found great kids' clothes for absolutely nothing at thrift stores, great furniture was a little trickier. We had some very cool, retro-looking things in our house, like the Dick Van Dyke–style coffee table (seven dollars) and the wicker chaise lounge with the broken back foot (twenty dollars). We also had a lot of bad, bland, office-y looking stuff. The Formica end table. The vinyl armchair. The polyester rug I'd found for thirty-five dollars at, of all places, the grocery store.

  In the end, I decided it couldn't really be done. You can't really furnish a terrifically hip apartment for next to nothing. Especially not when that apartment is also ankle-deep with trucks, Legos, puzzles, balls, Play-Doh, and a million other unsightly kid things. I had just decided, instead of worrying about it, to turn off the part of my brain that cared about being stylish or impressing others with my decor. Given our circumstances these days, we just had to be frumpy.

  I told myself it didn't matter. I wasn't defined by my furniture, for crying out loud. But Peter and I had a tendency to make friends with people who made far more money than we did. And had far better houses. And better furniture. It was hard not to feel some envy.

  “They aren't happier,” Peter said once.

  “They're a little bit happier,” I said.

  “No,” he told me. “I read an article about it. The more things people have, the more things they want. People who win the lottery wind up depressed and suicidal.”

  I shook my head. “I'd wind up happy.”

  “No,” he said. “You'd be miserable like everybody else.”

  Somehow this prediction did not strike me as very supportive. “Do you mean this is as happy as I will ever be?”

  “Yep,” he said, pleased to have the inside scoop. “Enjoy it.”

  I'd been pushing the kids along the sidewalk up a long, gradual hill. Our double stroller had those wiggly front wheels that went sideways in every sidewalk crack. And, with Baby Sam in the backpack, by the time I got to the top of the hill, I was winded. I stopped for a minute in front of a hardware store to rest.

  It was a very short rest. I couldn't have stood in that spot for longer than sixty seconds. But, in that time, amazingly, I managed to poke two straws into two juice boxes, hand a breadstick back to Baby Sam in the backpack, and look up to see none other than Josh walking toward us. He hesitated midstride when he saw me. I raised my hand in a wave and gave myself this pep talk: He did not just see you naked. There was surely a glare on the window. And he was concentrating on his work. Your luck is bad, but not that bad.

  “Hey, Lanie,” he said, bobbing his shaggy head a little.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Out for a walk?” he said.

  I clearly was. “Yep.”

  “Great day for it,” he said.

  “Sure is,” I said.

  “I needed some supplies,” he offered, holding up his bag as if he needed to explain himself.

  Then we ran out of things to say. He made a couple of slow nods, and I did, too. And just as I was about to say, “Well, see ya,” he leaned in a little bit and said, “I didn't see anything, by the way.”

  “Didn't see anything when?” I shouldn't have even asked. A half a second slow on the uptake and I'd dug myself a conversational grave.

  “Before,” he said, gesturing toward our building with his head. “When you were naked in your kitchen.”

  Chapter 5

  The boys and I never did find the park. But between our house and the place where I thought a park ought to be, we found something else. A gym.

  We were on our way home, the big boys getting restless in the stroller and Baby Sam drumming on my head with breadsticks, when I saw it. The place was called Fitness Express, with a train logo and the motto: “We think you can.” It seemed to me like a gesture from the universe, and, without even pausing, I pushed our double stroller right toward the doors and wrestled it through.

  Once in, I walked over to the beefy man at the entry kiosk, crumbs from Baby Sam's breadsticks all over my head, and said, “How much is a membership?”

  Now, it takes some guts, I think, to walk into a place like that when you are feeling as frumpy and self-conscious as I was on that day. I didn't know what the people on the other side of the lobby doors looked like, but I knew they didn't have yogurt stains on their shirts or raisins ground into their pants pockets. I had never been in a gym before, but it seemed like a pretty sure bet that I didn't belong in one.

  But, at that moment, at least, I felt determined to become the kind of person who did belong. The faux-pregnancy debacle had catapulted me toward a frenzy of self-improvement, and I was damn sure going to make the most of it. I wanted a gym bag. I wanted a crisp, non-nursing sports bra. I wanted to pull my hair back into a no-nonsense ponytail and strut right through the lobby like I'd been there a thousand times.

  The guy at the counter told me it was $149 to sign up, which was exactly half of everything we had in our savings account. On another day, I would have walked right back out. I never even spl
urged on toenail polish for myself. So it shocked even me when I threw our budget to the wind. Even though I had trained myself to ask before every purchase if I needed something or just wanted it, I didn't even hesitate on the membership fee. I said, “Sounds good,” and handed over my only credit card.

  I wasn't totally clear about what joining the gym would mean. Would everyone there feel a sense of camaraderie? Would we wear matching sweat suits? Would I come to think of these people here as some kind of very energetic extended family? The questions flittered past me, but I wasn't too worried about the answers. I was so rarely certain about anything, but I was certain about this. It was a good thing to do.

  That night, before dinner, Peter gave me a chocolate bar.

  “Dammit, Peter,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You aren't supposed to bring me chocolate anymore. We talked about this.”

  “We did?”

  “Yes!” I put my hands in my hair.

  “What if I want to do something nice for you?”

  “Then bring me something that is not chocolate.”

  “Flowers?” he asked.

  “Yes!” I said. “Except they're expensive. And they just die in the vase and turn brown. So maybe something else.”

  I could tell I'd stumped him. So I pushed on and told him about joining the gym.

  “You did?” he said. “Why?”

  “It's only thirty dollars a month.”

  And Peter said, “Can we afford that?”

  And I nodded with such an expression of certainty on my face that Peter didn't even really notice when I said, “Sort of.”

  “We can't afford flowers,” Peter said. “But we can afford a health club membership.”

  “That's right,” I said. “That's exactly right.”

  There was still some negotiating to be done about time. Now that we had children, we were both operating at such a deficit of personal time that we had become a little bit Grinch-ish, negotiating our hours of freedom with peevishness and precision.

  Here's what I wanted: for Peter to be “in charge” of the kids after bedtime so that we could put them to bed at night, and I could head out to the gym to jog (or walk, or hide in the locker room) for an hour.

  Here was the sticking point: If Peter was in charge, that meant he had to listen for wake-ups—whether it was the baby crying in the crib or Alexander wetting the bed. Which meant he couldn't wear his headphones. Which meant he couldn't practice.

  Peter tried to suggest just wearing one of his earphones—literally keeping an ear out for the kids—and it was so funny to me that he didn't know himself better by now. When Peter was practicing, or composing, or sometimes even just thinking about music, the outside world often ceased to exist for him. All other sounds fell away. His ears turned inward. And though it was sweet that he thought the sound of his children crying might penetrate his ears, he was wrong. When Peter was in the zone, his ears were impenetrable.

  Practicing put Peter in the zone. And since he practiced every night obsessively for hours and hours, losing an hour and a half of that time just really seemed to blow his mind.

  “I don't understand,” he'd said after dinner. “You're really joining a gym?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “But what are you going to do there?”

  “I'm going to exercise, Peter. Like everybody else.”

  “I've just never seen you go to a gym before.”

  And here, I wanted to say, “You've never seen me as a frumpy housewife before,” but I held back. There was, at least, an off chance that he hadn't noticed the ill effects of pregnancy, sleep deprivation, and stay-at-home parenting on my body, and I certainly wasn't going to be the one to bring these things to his attention. I figured Peter must have viewed me with gentler eyes than I viewed myself. If he saw me the way I saw myself, he'd have left me a long time ago.

  Even after he was on board with the exercise concept, he was still struggling with the babysitting.

  “What am I supposed to do with myself all that time?” he asked.

  “You could clean the kitchen for me,” I offered. It didn't really answer his question, but it shut him right up.

  And the next thing I knew, that very same night, the boys were all asleep, and I was walking up our long street toward the gym. No gym bag. No fancy sneakers. And, sadly, just an old nursing bra that had lost most of its hooks. But I had Peter's iPod (a gift from his folks), I'd downloaded some workout music from a site called PumpYourselfUp.com, and I was ready to rock.

  At the swinging door from the lobby into the gym itself, I felt a tickle of nervousness in my chest, but I pushed through.

  It was less Olivia Newton-John than I'd been expecting. I'd anticipated spiky hair, neon headbands, shimmery spandex leotards—and maybe a leg warmer or two. Instead, it was a gray office building with exposed brick walls and fluorescent lights. It was understated. A few ficus trees and some cubbies and it could have been an office in New Jersey. And the people seemed quiet and mild-mannered. Except for the sweat, the breathing, and the Beyoncé, these folks could have been surfing the Internet at work.

  And with that quick evaluation, I scurried to a treadmill, eager to fade into the background as quickly as possible. I got on. I turned on the iPod. I started jogging. Just one foot in front of the other. I cranked up the speed until I was jogging in step with the music. And that was it! I was exercising!

  I should mention that I was not a total stranger to exercise. Before we had kids, I had been a casual kind of three-or-four-times-a-week jogger. But I'd always been a little snooty about gyms. It just seemed strange to me to pay all that money for something like going on a jog. Jogging, I thought, should be done outdoors and—most important—for free. Why anybody would pay money to jog in place in a hot room with lots of other sweaty people, I could not fathom.

  But, back then, I also used to jog during the morning hours. The sun was up, people were commuting to work, and I figured the scary men who might prey on joggers were fast asleep. Now I would be jogging at night. It was dark by the time the kids were asleep. Nighttime was a whole different thing. And so, the gym. Hot, sweaty, way too close to other exercising people, but safe. At least, safe enough. All I had to do was get the hang of the treadmill, where balance turned out to be tricky.

  I had to keep my eyes in one place to keep from getting wobbly. Later, I'd observe that most everybody in the gym had the balance thing down. People read while jogging, or chatted with a friend on the next machine, or watched TV. One woman carried little hand weights. Another shook her finger like a band leader to the music on her headphones. A man in a T-shirt that said you asked for it, you got it turned around every few minutes and walked backward. Hardly anybody had to concentrate on it as hard as I did. But, that first night, it was okay. I was happy just to stay on.

  And then I fell off.

  My very first trip to my very first gym, and within twenty minutes of stepping onto the treadmill, I went flying off the back like skeet. I had thought I felt something under my foot and, like a person out on a real road might do, I stopped to look down. But, of course, I wasn't on a real road. I was George Jetson on a conveyor belt. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor with belt burns on my elbows.

  The woman on the machine next to me turned without stopping and, as if shouting down a ravine, called out a horrified, “Are you okay?”

  “I'm good,” I said, waving her back to her workout. A few other people glanced back at me, but for the most part, they either didn't hear, or didn't want to acknowledge, my fall.

  I stayed on the floor. The fall had deflated me. I didn't belong here. What kind of a goober falls off a treadmill? I decided to go home. I was looking for a back exit and wondering if I could get my money back when someone came up behind me and lifted me to my feet. As it was happening, I assumed it was one of the chiseled, spiky-haired trainers, acting as a kind of lifeguard. And I felt so thankful to be rescued like that, for someone who belo
nged here to literally get me back on my feet. I felt a rush of gratitude for whoever had decided I should not have to pick myself up off the floor alone.

  But when I turned, I did not find a buff trainer in workout gear. I found the opposite: the goofiest-looking person in the gym.

  It wasn't his face or his body, which were handsome enough. It was his clothes and his hair. Midforties, he wore an untucked plaid button-down, jogging shorts, and flip-flops. He had wet blue eyes that looked a little like he'd been crying. He had a five o'clock shadow, I'd later come to know, at all hours of the day. And he had wavy, seventies-looking, overgrown, Ted Koppel hair that looked like he'd settled on a hairdo in high school and had never looked back. A room full of normal people in Nike and Adidas, and I had to be rescued by the weirdo.

  I couldn't think of what to say.

  He was a little sweaty from his workout. He pointed at me and said, “Careful!”

  I nodded, and said, “Yes,” as if I were making a mental note not to fly off the treadmill again.

  Then he asked, “First time?”

  I stared at him.

  He said, “I haven't seen you here before.”

  “First time,” I nodded.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “I can't imagine anything more humiliating than flying off the back of the treadmill.”

  I nodded again.

  “All these people,” he went on, looking around, “looking at you like you're a total idiot.”

  I drew in a breath to reply, but then wasn't quite sure what to say. I froze for a second, lungs full of air, and into that little pause stepped one of the trainers at the gym. To be precise: the sexiest, flirtiest of them all. The kind of man you almost dread talking to because you have to rise to his perfection, and the effort is exhausting. Though at this moment, his showing up was pure relief. He was saving me from Ted Koppel, and I felt a burst of gratitude.

  “Saw you go flying,” the Sexy Trainer said. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “You are a lawsuit waiting to happen.”