by Cathy Alter
“This is all good,” said Dr. Oskar more quietly. “But I think you need to try and direct your impulses.”
“All right,” agreed The Loud Talker.
It was so hard not to applaud when he walked through the waiting room and out the door. I really did admire his passion and vocal range.
“Let me see your finger,” ordered Dr. Oskar when he came to fetch me. I offered my hand like a Southern belle.
“I’m not going to say I told you.” He winked at the sight of the ring. “But I told you.” Leading me into his office, he mock-whispered, “Don’t tell anyone about my special engagement predictions. I don’t want to go into the wedding business.”
After I gave him the blow-by-blow of Karl’s proposal, I shared my name-change theory with Dr. Oskar.
“Well, yah, I think you have had enough people screwing with your identity,” he mused. “Maybe now that you know who you are, you will have to take care of a little business.”
When I agreed, Dr. Oskar asked what else I was doing to prepare for married life.
“This month, I’m working on getting the perfect body.”
“Why?” he gasped, clutching his chest.
“Because I want to look hot in my wedding dress.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he argued. “You will look beautiful because you will be standing next to the person you love.”
I wanted to make a joke about Karl loving wattles, but I just agreed with him. There was no use debating someone so intent on celebrating.
After two weeks of Glamour’s Pilates workout, I was impatient to see harder results. The circumference of my upper arm, waist, and thighs hadn’t decreased by even a fraction of a millimeter. I needed more of a challenge. I could hardly believe it, but I was ready to pump up the jam.
Before I could switch into high gear, I had to make sure I wouldn’t die in the process. I have never been a heavy smoker, but since dating Karl, who was at least a welterweight, I had often gone cigarette for cigarette with him, especially on the weekends when we were really letting ourselves go. I was worried that any new and unusual activity would cause my lungs to collapse and my heart to beat straight out of my chest.
Conveniently, on the backside of the Glamour exercise article was one about quitting. “How I Quit Smoking” featured four inspirational stories about shaking the cancer stick. While one quit cold turkey, one underwent hypnosis, and one just stopped hanging out with her pack-a-day posse, I instantly recognized myself in Lucinda Rosenfeld, a writer who worked with a pack of Dunhills on her desk. I had just read an article about Joan Didion, who still smoked, though only five cigarettes a day and only at her typewriter. The attachment to cigarettes, admitted Rosenfeld (and I think Didion might concede), “felt almost romantic.” She continued, “We were in it together, Tobacco Man and I.”
After a health scare (the left side of her body went numb for a few days), Rosenfeld got herself down to one or two smokes a day. Today, Rosenfeld, who confessed she “never got over her love affair with cigarettes,” smokes one Dunhill a month, usually around her period.
Not only did I need to reduce my smoking for health reasons, next month Karl and I would be boarding a sixteen-hour, smoke-free flight to Hong Kong to celebrate his grandmother’s eightieth birthday. If I could cut down on my smoking now, it would help me get through a long flight without eating my hand in a fit of nicotine withdrawal.
While I was at my doctor’s office getting him to write me a prescription for everything under the sun in preparation for my trip (sleeping pills to help pass the time in coach, and Cipro, prednisone, and Tylenol with Codeine for any run-ins with Asian parasites), I asked my doctor, who looked exactly like Dr. Hibbert from The Simpsons, if he could check out my lungs.
“I want to know if I’ll heave one up,” I explained.
After listening through his stethoscope, he gave me a tube and told me to blow as hard as I could.
“Keep blowing,” he instructed. “Like you’re Dizzy Gillespie.” When my eyeballs felt like they were going to fire from their chambers he said, “Okay, now you can stop.”
I was sure I had failed miserably and all the jotting he was doing on my chart was for my emergency open-heart surgery. “Your cardiopulmonary exam was completely normal,” he said. “Now go run a marathon.” Even though I had already downsized to Didion’s daily intake, I was still more iron lung than Iron Man. Fortunately, he checked my chart again. “Actually, you better not,” he countered. “You have bad knees.”
Once I had been green-lighted, I wanted to find something more demanding than the rigors offered by an exercise ball and a couple of three-pound weights, the favored gewgaws in both of Self’s fitness articles, “Abs, Defined” and “Look Sexy, Coming and Going.” I flipped through Elle, a magazine that rarely, if ever, offered step-by-step service pieces with models demonstrating leg kicks. Instead, writers were commissioned to guinea-pig exorbitantly priced weight-loss spas or designer boot camps and write about their experiences in feature-length articles. This month, Maggie Bullock had a piece in the magazine entitled, “It Took Seven Weeks, Five Days, and Two Hours to Lose 14 Pounds of Fat and Gain a New Addiction to Fitness.” Bullock didn’t accomplish all of this alone, she explained. “The stylish, two-year-old establishment [at which I already make an occasional appearance] is introducing the Life Program: an eight-to ten-week body blast that includes six no-nonsense hours of personal training and five days of meal delivery a week. Would [I] like to be the inaugural member?”
Bullock declined to reveal the cost of her Life Program, but she did reveal the price of a comparable body makeover at another posh Manhattan gym: $12,225.
Bullock’s express route to fitness followed a predictable trajectory. First, she whined and resisted. “As it happens, working out every day isn’t extreme,” she wrote. “It’s insane.” Then she had her breakthrough. “Santos hands me two 12-pound weights [I started at 8] for my chest presses, and for once I don’t sputter any expletives.” And finally, Bullock attained her just rewards. “By week four, the worrisome bulge that once crept over the top of every low-rise waistband is gone.”
I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before now—but I could put myself through the same paces as Bullock. And I wouldn’t need twelve thousand dollars to do it, because I had something even more valuable in my back pocket: my friend Danny, a personal trainer who owed me a favor for writing all the copy on his business’s website, free of charge.
I would have used Danny sooner if he hadn’t fallen off the wagon. And by wagon, I mean freebasing cocaine and waving around a loaded Glock. Danny, a Dubliner, was once the drug lord of D.C., supplying all kinds of illegal substances to a network of middlemen throughout the United States. He was busted in what he described as the biggest sting of all time and spent a few years in federal prison.
But Danny had since cleaned up his act. He often quoted from a book written by a monk who prescribed washing dishes as the correct pathway to God. Even better, he now taught early-morning boot camp to the well-heeled thunder thighs of Washington.
When I showed him Bullock’s article, Danny crumpled it up in a ball. “This is shit,” he said, kicking it across the room with the toe of his Timberland boot. Lucky if he clears five feet on a good day, Danny looks like a cross between an Irish street fighter and a koala bear. Studying me very seriously, he said, “I can help you with this.” So I agreed to meet him the next day, in the gymnasium of a defunct Catholic school where he held his boot camp.
His gym smelled exactly like my worst nightmares from fourth grade: sweaty rubber balls, squeaky floor varnish, and the body odor of a million bullies gone by. But the space was remarkably clean and morbidly quiet. No grunting he-men. No flirting around the free weights. No pulsating music. And, thankfully, not one mirror.
“I don’t want you to mistake my gym for a good time” was Danny’s way of saying hello. He was wearing a navy hoodie and a knit cap pulled low over his forehead. H
e looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week.
Since it was my first day, Danny promised to go easy on me, just wanting to test my flexibility with a few squat thrusts and pushups. He correctly sensed that I have spent the majority of my life lifting nothing heavier than the remote control. Danny gave me a couple of what looked like duckpin bowling balls and asked me to hold them while lunging across the gym floor. After about four giant steps in, I felt like a tiger was ripping flesh from my thighs.
“Drop your jaw and breathe,” barked Danny. “Louder,” he commanded, “I want to hear you breathing from across the street.”
Next, he gave me seven-pound dumbbells (even though Self always suggested three pounds) and told me to raise them over my head, keeping my elbows close to my ears. After three reps, my arms started to shake wildly. “Oh, you can do one more.” And I did, because Danny was yelling this order at me. I also got yelled at for moving my head to shake a strand of hair from my eye, for putting a weight down to wipe my slick palms, for not lifting slowly enough, for lifting too slowly, and for wandering off between sets to get a drink of water from the ancient porcelain fountain. After forty minutes, I was released from my torture. As I hobbled out, Danny waved after me. “Next time, we’ll start the real workout.”
When I woke up the next day, the only thing that didn’t hurt was my hair. My inner thighs were so sore, it felt like the first time I had sex. Putting on underwear became another method of exercise.
“I don’t know about this, Danny,” I said when I called him an hour before our scheduled second workout. “I was hoping you wouldn’t go so hard on me.”
“Just get your lazy ass over here,” he said, hanging up before I could weasel out.
I got the full workout: three exercises for my legs, and God help me, four for my chicken-bone arms. To get the cardiovascular benefit, I hustled from exercise to exercise, jumping between shoulder presses, bicep curls, and some horrible form of abuse for my triceps. This quickness eventually made me feel light-headed, so I soon resorted to the Ol’ Shoe Tie, a stalling device that allowed me to catch my breath for a few seconds. This also gave me the opportunity to watch a young woman wrestle with the never-ending lunges across the gym’s expanse. After she made it halfway across the floor she started yelling, “I ain’t doin’ any more.” Her trainer, a soft-spoken man named Dennis, kept a silent vigil at her side. She continued lunging.
After a few more sessions with Danny, I began to notice some muscles I never knew I had before. When Danny pinched the back of my arm with his fat calipers, he remarked, somewhat shocked, “Either this thing is broken or you’re a quarter inch less flabby.”
I had also gotten pretty good at some of the more complex moves—the standing squat, for example. (I had a habit of sticking my butt out like one of Jay-Z’s backup dancers, according to Danny.) More importantly, I was finally earning a bit of praise from Danny. “You got it…that’s right,” he said encouragingly as I swung a ten-pound medicine ball up and over my head. I felt myself grin through my sweat like an idiot. At least my constant need for male approval had finally resulted in a healthy byproduct.
“This just goes to prove the thesis of your experiment!” cried my friend EB, who was calling to congratulate me on my engagement. Since the first month of my project, he had been flagrantly hoping, despite my fears that third-wave feminists like Katie Roiphe would be placing a bounty on my head, that all good women’s magazines led to proposals.
“Do you know what this means?!” he practically hollered into the receiver. “Now you can subscribe to all the bridal magazines!”
“Why would I want to do that?” It was a disgusting suggestion. I had read a bunch before my first wedding and thought they were a joke, full of advertisements for hideous dresses on the scale of parade floats and exhaustive checklists for what do to each month leading up to the big day.
“So you can create the perfect guest list, register for the gifts of your dreams, and all the other stupid stuff brides have to do.”
I was resistant to adding bridal magazines to my mix. They represented mistakes and long-held resentment, carryovers from my first walk down the aisle. Especially Martha Stewart Weddings, the field’s queen bee. My mother, who would never deign to read any of her Martha Stewart Living magazines (“Who has time to paint the insides of flowerpots?” she once demanded to know), became a proselyte as soon as she picked up her first Weddings. When I expressed a wish for daisy centerpieces, my mother spat, “Martha thinks daisies are weeds.”
Besides, I doubted Martha would have had anything constructive to say about once sleeping with your officiant. Karl and I had asked Zelly to marry us, since we both saw him as the conduit that had brought us together. But what Karl didn’t know was that the New Year’s morning I had woken up with my black eye, I had also woken up next to Zelly. Like most of the stunts I pulled back then, this was a trick I would have preferred not to turn. But luckily, our one-time-only romp, the product of way too much wine and easy familiarity, had suffered none of the awful hangover. We were able to resume our friendship as if nothing had happened. Which was easy, since I barely remembered anything at all.
After I hung up with EB, I emailed Zelly. “Not to diminish what happened between us, but I think it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Karl went to his deathbed never knowing about our little fling.”
A little while later, I received his response: “I was thinking the exact same thing,” he wrote. “My lips are sealed.”
Whether I was looking for justification to keep my dirty little secret from Karl or just desensitized by it (as long as I was keeping Bruno underground, why not add Zelly to the bomb shelter?), my reasoning was bolstered by an article in next month’s issue of Glamour. I was skipping ahead in my reading to February, in preparation for my trip to Hong Kong. I would be away for two weeks, and I thought I’d better get a head start so I wouldn’t have to pack an additional twenty pounds of magazines in my luggage. Since I would be spending a week with Karl’s mother (Karl and I were using the second week to travel alone to Vietnam), I was hunting around for articles that would help me deal with my future mother-in-law, who, let’s just say, was best manageable in small doses. The thought of seven solid days together already had me feeling exhausted. And in search of clever methods to deal with her, I came across a sanctioned way to deceive Karl.
In Marjorie Ingall’s “10 Things Every Relationship Needs to Survive,” keeping secrets came in at number 10. “Every relationship needs a little mystery and a few boundaries,” Ingall wrote. “That’s why you should be allowed your stash of old love letters (from someone else), a sundae when he thinks you’re on a diet, a fantasy life with your UPS delivery man.” And a sexual past that should remain in the past, I added. Maggie, one of Ingall’s interview subjects, agreed. “[My husband] has no idea I’ve slept with half of my male friends. He doesn’t need to.” “Total honesty,” concluded Maggie, “is bull.”
I remembered when I was much younger, I asked my mother her trick for keeping my father happy. Without even thinking, she said, “There’s no rule that says you have to tell your husband everything.”
Not that I enjoyed taking advice from my mother, but again, like the article in Glamour, I was looking for a way around the truth.
“Cathy, I couldn’t disagree with you more,” said Jeanne, when, during our last walk before my Hong Kong trip, I confessed my secret about Zelly and my plan to keep it one.
“But it was no big deal,” I tried rationalizing. “It meant nothing, and it only happened once.”
“It meant nothing,” she said slowly, “to you.”
For the first time in a long time, I barely took notice of the cardinals flitting from tree to tree, the sight of deer tracks pressed into the mud, and the smell of wet earth as we passed by an inlet of pooled water. All I heard, even as we walked on in silence, was the angry refrain of Jeanne’s epic warning. “A marriage that begins with a lie is a lie.”
If this month was tru
ly about fitness, I also needed to exercise Karl’s right to the truth. I had no choice but to tell him.
“Take him for a walk,” advised Jeanne when, upon returning from our own walk, I phoned her with doubts about confessing. “If you tell Karl at home, and he happens to be looking at a lamp when he hears the truth, then that lamp will forever be associated with that bad news. You don’t want that kind of energy in your apartment.”
Ironically, I decided to take Karl for a walk to buy new lamps for our bedroom nightstands. I had planned to come clean on the way home from the store, right as we passed by the Embassy of India. Across from the embassy was a small bench placed in front of a statue of Gandhi throwing handfuls of flowers. In my perfect universe, having the flora-flinging Gandhi as Karl’s focal point would somehow bring him peace when he heard the news about his fiancée schtupping one of his best friends.
“I have something I have to tell you.” I sounded disembodied and foreign.
“Uh-oh,” Karl said, squaring his shoulders. “Is it bad?”
“It’s not good.”
“Just tell me.”
So I did. “It was wrong of me not to tell you sooner,” I said when it was all over.
“Why didn’t you just come clean?” he asked, sounding confused. Not angry. Just hurt. “How can Zelly marry us now? It’s weird. Don’t you think it’s weird?”
And this is what I can’t tell him—even after telling him so much. It’s not weird.
We walked in silence, which was worse than suffering through his rage. But Jeanne had reminded me that I couldn’t control Karl’s reaction, or the stony aftermath.