Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  “I wanted to say,” she says after they have each ordered a Kirin beer, but haven’t yet received their menus, “I really like the chant we did last night in G-Doga class.”

  “Rama,” he says, and then adds softly, perhaps a bit conspiratorially, “Rama rama rama.” She resists the temptation to chant along with him, too.

  “I think the dogs really liked it, too,” she says, and it’s true, though the dogs do seem to inherently like just about everything Gary does, everything Gary says to them. Dogs can be so wise.

  “Yeah,” he says and chuckles softly. “They like it, but they don’t really need it.”

  Meredith looks at him, slightly confused. He learns forward, his face brightening up as he begins to explain. She thinks his face brightens because he’s a teacher, because it’s his natural state to explain things. “Well, you know how Rama is Vishnu?” She nods, yes, even though she doesn’t really know that, but she’d like to seem like she does. “And repeating rama rama rama means joy joy joy?” She nods back at him, with a bit more confidence. “Well, that mantra, that chant, joy joy joy, it’s actually more for the people than for the dogs. Joy is so much more innate for dogs than it is for us.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says and nods very seriously. She thinks of DB Sweeney, of all the dogs in G-Doga class, of all the dogs she notices now everywhere. Joy. There is a part of her that wants to reach across the table, just so she can touch him. She takes a sip of her just-arrived Kirin instead. She looks across the table at him; he looks comfortable, relaxed, at home. She feels weird. She wishes the menus were here because then she could make suggestions as to what it might be nice to order.

  She takes a moment to do some sort of math, as all dieting surely must require math. The Kirin is two points, though it’s a big Kirin, bigger than say an Amstel Light, so maybe it could be three. And if she has sake, and really, she’d like to have sake, that’s another two points, or that could be three. And she’s already had seventeen points today, that’s more than she’d planned for, because instead of one mint cookie crisp bar, she actually had four. (Those mint cookie crisp bars are the best thing going.) At this point she doesn’t have so many points left in her day, which doesn’t leave a lot of options if dinner is going to consist of anything that doesn’t come ready for you in a cardboard box, its name written alluringly across the front.

  Having dinner at a restaurant, at any sort of restaurant (even a Japanese one, which is slightly easier) is hard when you’re a Weight Watcher, harder still when you’d like to have a drink. At this juncture, Meredith would like to ask you a question, if she could. She actually doesn’t care who she’s even asking, she’d just really like someone to have an answer. How are you supposed to review a restaurant on six points? Especially when six points, if you haven’t been paying close attention, is roughly the equivalent of two tuna rolls?

  She feels the tides of her mood beginning to turn, and it’s not that she would ever have described herself as completely pleasant or even cheerful, but she thinks that since she started dieting, she’s become a lot more moody. Definitely more moody than skinny. She thinks it could be because she’s been trying too hard. She looks across again at Gary, who still looks so at ease, so at home, and she thinks, again, Try easy. A dish of steaming, salted edamame is placed on the table between them. One cup of edamame is four points, this could be two. Cups, that is, not points. She can’t count anymore. She takes an edamame and bites down, sliding the soybean out of its shell.

  “So, do you live in this neighborhood, too?” she asks.

  “No,” he says, placing a soybeanless edamame shell next to hers. “I live in Williamsburg.”

  “Brooklyn?” she asks.

  “Brooklyn,” he says with one of his patented grins. They should be patented. “I’m a big Brooklyn fan.”

  Meredith takes another edamame, and takes a moment to consider this. It could be the first bad sign. They’re always out there, waiting. Meredith is an admitted Manhattan snob. She is aware that there are people who adore Brooklyn, who embrace it wholeheartedly as a vital, vibrant part of New York City. She knows these people are many, that their legions are myriad and vast. She’s just not one of them.

  “Do you know I’ve never been?” she says in lieu of anything else.

  “Really? How can the restaurant critic for The NY not have been to Brooklyn?”

  “Um, well, Andrew Bamfield?” she says, referencing the critic who covers Brooklyn restaurants. “He does all of Brooklyn, and I do all of, most of, Manhattan, so I don’t really ever have the time to get out there.”

  “You should one of these days, it’s really terrific,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s really lovely.” Meredith has never thought of it as a place that might be lovely, or as a place that might be terrific, she has really only ever thought of it as far.

  “It’s a lot quieter than Manhattan,” he continues, and there’s a small part of her that thinks, after ten years of living in Manhattan, quiet would be very nice. “I can’t see living anywhere else,” he says.

  And she can’t quite imagine living there, under any circumstances, and so she just says, “Yes,” in lieu of anything else.

  “Manhattan,” he continues, “there’s just too much honking, too much noise,” and she thinks, but doesn’t say, It’s Williamsburg, it’s not Iowa.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I wake up to birds chirping every morning. What do you wake up to?”

  “My Bang & Olufsen CD player,” she says matter-of-factly. He stares at her blankly for a few seconds. And then the menus arrive.

  “Well, great then,” she says, “let’s take a look,” and she redirects all her focus on her menu. A few minutes, a few edamame, and a few more sips of Kirin beer later, Gary speaks up and says, “Just let me know, Sarah, if there’s anything special you’d like to me to order.”

  “Well, funny you should mention it,” she says, looking up from her menu and over at him. “I’m going to get the sashimi, the oysters with ponzu sauce, and the octopus and cucumber with spicy sauce to start.” His eyes widen ever so slightly. She continues, “And then the Chilean sea bass as an entrée. Do you think you could order as many of the deep-fried appetizers as you’d feel comfortable? Or, let’s say the tofu, the lotus root, and the crabmeat?”

  “No problem,” he answers. “Oh, and do you mind if I get the sea urchin, too?”

  “Oh no, by all means, get whatever you want. As long as it’s not the same as mine. And that’s fine, because I am definitely not getting the sea urchin. Though if you could get some of the fried appetizers, too?” And tell me maybe what they taste like. She wonders how much detail she can get him to put into his descriptions of the tempura, of all the fried appetizers, so maybe she won’t have to try them at all. And she knows that’s wrong. As wrong as say, sea urchin.

  “Sure,” he agrees.

  “But, sea urchin, really?” she has to ask, and just saying the words sea urchin suddenly makes it so hard to swallow, suddenly makes it so that she could very well be in danger of gagging. Sea urchin is not the only thing in the world that she can’t abide, oh there are a few others, but it might be the only edible thing she can’t bear. She thinks it might be the only food she’s never eaten, and that’s saying a tremendous amount, as she’s eaten quite a lot.

  “Big fan,” he says, displaying more of his teeth, and she thinks, Brooklyn and sea urchin, and she thinks maybe it’s not just that the tides of her mood are turning but that the tides of the evening are actually turning, too. Brooklyn and sea urchin (gag) might be working together to point out that this, she and a guy named Gary, a country music-loving doga instructor, might not be a match made in heaven. The waitress arrives, they place their orders, and she makes an executive decision, the kind she’s good at making: she won’t linger too long on the sea urchin, as nothing good can come of sea urchin. In fact she’ll change the subject altogether.

  “Do you think you’ll always be a yoga teacher, and a doga te
acher?”

  “I do,” he says, nodding, “Yoga, and doga, they’ve become things I can’t imagine my life without. And I love to share that with people.” She thinks there are things she can’t imagine her life without, too; thinks of how hard and how long she has worked to make it so that those things would be vital, inextricable parts of her life, her career, her raison d’être if you’ll forgive the drama. She thinks of the Zone she never got into, the carbs she couldn’t do her job without, and the points she can’t calculate. She has another question: she’d like to know why she is trying so hard to take away from herself the very things she can’t imagine her life without? Maybe it’s just what people do. But then maybe it’s not.

  The conversation goes on as they make their way through their many appetizers, Meredith at some point abandoning all math, choosing to forgo point counting in favor of experiencing flavors, taste, and quality. Gary asks her to talk about being a restaurant critic, and she shakes her head, no, and indicates the waitress. He nods in understanding, and she thinks he might as well have called her Meredith. But still, she leans forward and softly tells him how she really does love it, but how she’d like to do more, how her sights are set on other things, the book deal, the TV show, the film rights.

  “Do you want to try the sea urchin?” he asks her.

  “No, I really don’t,” she answers.

  As they dig into their sweet potato tempura and deep fried marinated chicken, she asks him about his future plans. “Do you want to write a G-Doga: Doggie and Me Yoga book, or maybe even franchise? I bet you could franchise. And in this day and age, what with Cesar Milan being just about everywhere, I would think a TV show of your own would be completely within the realm of possibility. Ellery would be great on TV.”

  “I don’t think so. No,” he says, and she looks at him. She’d like to be able to hold on to electricity. She had thought that maybe electricity could have connecting qualities, that it could bring two things together; but maybe that’s not really what electricity is for. She feels as she looks at him, as the air of contentment about him seems to morph into complacency, that there is a small robot, a small ambitious robot inside her head, tilting its metal head in confusion and repeating over and over again, “Does not compute, does not compute.”

  Gary leans forward conspiratorially—he doesn’t yet know that they’re no longer on the same team—and says to her, “That’s not really what yoga is about.”

  “No,” she says, “of course not. I just think it’s such a market waiting to be tapped. I was just thinking you could have so much success at it. You could be a huge success.”

  “I think we measure success differently,” he says to her. The sentence hangs there in the air, between them, and she reaches for a slice of baby yellowtail. She doesn’t say anything and watches as he takes another clump of the disgusting sea urchin.

  “You sure you don’t want to try it?” he asks again between bites, slurps.

  She shakes her head, no, “Really. I’m sure.”

  “Look,” he says, placing his chopsticks on the smooth green stone that is there on the table, especially for that purpose. “To me, being able to live in the moment, in the present, is success. And with the life I’ve built for myself I can do that. To me, that’s success right there.”

  She nods. He continues.

  “Sure, there are other things I could do, things that would certainly be more financially rewarding, but this is what I want. The heart wants what the heart wants, and it’s a really great thing to want what you have.” Want what you have. She was sure that saying went the other way around. She nods at him, and maybe the way she nods, maybe it’s a little sadly. And he keeps talking.

  “I mean,” he says, “I have inner peace, I have rama, I have joy, and I get to share that with people, and I get to try to bring some of it into their lives. And no, I’m not going to live in the apartments some of my clients live in, but I’m also never going to be one of those guys I see everywhere in this city, screaming into their cell phones on the street.”

  “That’s true,” she says, and she pauses for a moment. She thinks that she’d still like it if he had his sights set on a G-Doga empire, or at least a DVD. She stares at the gelatinous orange glob that is the sea urchin he has left aside for her. And there is of course a very good chance that sea urchin is delicious, that it’s wonderful, and that if anyone could appreciate and enjoy the virtues of sea urchin, it could indeed be her. But there’s a line that gets drawn, everyone has one, everyone has drawn one somewhere, and hers is at sea urchin.

  She gets this feeling lately—when she looks into DB Sweeney’s eyes and he seems to have so much in them, lifetimes of history—that she doesn’t know very much at all. But she thinks she knows that she wants Gary to be something he’s not. And she thinks she knows that’s a terrible idea. You can’t want people to be something they’re not. Because that’s asking too much of them. People, she’s learned, can have a hard enough time of it just being themselves.

  “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m just going to go to the ladies’ room.” And he stands up when she stands up, and she has no idea in the world what to say, there isn’t anything, and so she says, “Thanks.”

  Alone in the bathroom, she looks in the mirror, and she thinks, no, she knows, that as much as she does endeavor not to go there, she has gone not only to the ladies’ room, but also to the bad place. And the only thing she can think, for reasons most practical, is that electricity, and kindness, and that smile, aren’t everything. They’re not enough. To ask him to be something other than he is, is as wrong as her asking that of herself. She wants to be yogic—if that’s even a word—about it, and not blame herself. She wants to understand it about herself that when you’ve spent the past—how long has it been that she’s been dating?—eighteen years, waiting for your banker, your lawyer, your junior tycoon, your somehow-more-suitable-for-you variation on the Joshs of the world, the Kevins (though perhaps with a name more like Aubrey’s), that it would be a really big leap to a G-Doga instructor. It would be a leap that would be really hard to make, especially for someone who never quite learned how to deviate from a plan, whose plan always included living in nice houses and having summer homes and sending her kids, if she ever did have them, to private schools. She washes her hands quickly and turns away from the mirror. She really can’t look at it anymore, not right now.

  As she makes her way back to the table, she notices as she approaches that her napkin appears to be upright on the table. Upon closer inspection, as she pulls out her chair, she can see that her napkin has been folded into an origami swan.

  She looks not at Gary but self-consciously around at the other tables, at the waitresses, to see if it was they who had taken her used napkin from the table where she’d left it, when she’d gone to the bathroom for a bit of a refresher on reality and self-loathing, and folded it so lovingly into an origami swan. She wants, right now, very badly, for it to have been them. But she knows it wasn’t. The swan is so buoyant, so poised for flight, and there is something so personal about it that there is no way this swan is the product of something that’s done for everyone, every time a napkin is left alone on a table. She knows even before she looks up at Gary, who has somehow improved upon his smile, who can, right at this instant, only be described as beaming.

  She looks into his eyes, and there are things she could say, there are so many of them. “Oh,” she says, uncomfortably, “you folded my napkin into an origami swan?”

  He nods and he smiles and she can’t think of anything except, This is one of those things. This is one of those things, one of those things that could go either way, if you would let it. It could be like the moment you first saw DB Sweeney, or the moment you first heard “Don’t try hard, try easy” and thought it was spoken only for you. It could be the very moment that you know you are a goner. Or it could not be. And Meredith thinks, I don’t want it to be, and so she just says, “Thanks,” and attempts to take a sip from her a
lready empty beer.

  They stand together on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. But it’s not a real together, it’s the together that’s a few feet apart. The air is springtime. Spring really is here, she thinks, even though she suspects it’s still winter in her heart. She crosses her arms in front of her, she’s never realized how often she does that.

  “Well,” she says, “thanks so much for joining me and for ordering all the dishes.”

  “It was nice, thank you,” he says.

  “Okay, well, I’m heading that way,” she says, but she doesn’t point in any direction. “If you just want to grab a cab here, that’s cool.” She doesn’t mean to be unkind, and she hopes it isn’t coming out that way. She doesn’t want it to; she just wants to walk home alone, to be alone with her thoughts, even though she hates her thoughts right now.

  “I think I’ll just take the subway.”

  “Eighty-sixth Street is definitely the closest. And it’s an express,” she says, though he probably knows that, spending as much time as he does at the 92nd Street Y. “I’m fine to walk alone.”

  He looks at her for a moment; he tilts his head. He gets it. She feels awful.

  “Goodnight then, Meredith,” he says and as he turns and walks toward Second Avenue, she stays glued to the cement and watches his shoulders. She tells herself that his shoulders, they’re upright and they don’t seem at all forlorn. She wonders if she’ll ever find what she wants, and if she does if it will have a smile so sweet.

  As she said she was fine to do, she walks home alone, down Second Avenue. It’s not a part of New York she has ever paid much attention to, even though it is, technically, her neighborhood. She passes the innocuous noodle shops, and sushi bars, and several boring bistros, the dime-a-dozen Italian restaurants. Restaurants she wouldn’t review, and probably wouldn’t even eat at. Nothing special, she thinks and she wonders if she can even define the word. She still feels awful. She tells herself she shouldn’t. The heart wants what the heart wants, she tells herself. But she worries about her heart. She wonders if maybe hers is the heart that wants the wrong things, wonders if hers is the heart that wants mostly a prewar classic six on Central Park West.