by Dana Spiotta
“It is if you want to reach your highest potential, if you want to make real gains.” What did she want? Did she want gains? Who didn’t want gains over subtractions? Quantifiable, trackable, tape-measure gains. There were the podcasts and then the YouTube videos. And Nico in real life, the in-the-flesh embodiment of a fully cultivated male body.
Never before had she cared about these things, but here she was. Her middle-aged fascination with these young, hyperfit men was a mystery to her. It was not sexual, not at all, almost the opposite. She gawked at them and their robust narcissism. Wondrous beings who felt no shame in exhibiting their vain pursuit of perfection. In fact, they bragged about it. They weren’t self-absorbed; they were optimizing. Not just looking better, they insisted, but improving life span. Not just life span but health span, which meant you looked and felt good, you became and remained a paragon human specimen. You attended the unquestioned goal of getting ever stronger, lowering body fat, building lean muscle mass. The daily hours in the gym, the measuring of dietary macros. Tabulating blood sugar and ketones and heart rate. They considered themselves biohackers, pushing their bodies into whatever shapes they wanted. Fitter, Stronger, Better. Better look and better performance.
But, she wondered, better performance of what? Strength for what? Enhanced life span to do what? The rigor and discipline she got. The community, sure, the endorphin release, definitely. (Endorphins were a form of endogenous morphine; they did make you feel a kind of body bliss.) But the precious treatment of your own life span, the obsessive yet superficial self-betterment, the fetishy focus on the body, the relentless and desperate pursuit of constant improvement? And although it might seem that strengthening meant no longer weakening and that pursuing “gains” stopped or even reversed the decline we all experienced, this couldn’t be true. Your body went in one direction, didn’t it? It wound up and then slowly wound down. Her wacked periods were a clear sign of the direction her body was taking. Maybe for men it felt like less of an overt direction? But beyond the futility of body gains, what amazed her was their persistent insistence on boosting the self when the world—and this country, in particular—was in disgraceful shambles. The progressing, ever-widening gulf of disparity in every sphere. And were we not also on the verge of an environmental apocalypse? People seemed more fixated than ever on notions of “self-tend, self-care, self.” In the current context, wasn’t naked pursuit of health obscene? The self-contemplation down to the microbiomic makeup of your alimentary system, yet such contemplation was divorced from any reflection.
This seemed, now more than ever, the most American of myopias, this unapologetic—boastful, even—attention to the surface self. It sort of made sense, though. A retreat to the local. The hyperlocal and controllable: your heart, your lungs, your flesh.
Fecal transplants, stem-cell injections, increased mitochondrial sensitivity. “One set to failure,” Nico said. Isn’t that what we are all doing, one set to failure, she joked, but he just smiled and lifted his glorious, chiseled, unwavering chin at the barbell. Let’s go, Sam.
She did her reps. She needed the wave of endorphins that came with intense exertion.
5
After weight lifting, she walked to the shower area, which was open. She heard laughing. A woman was showering with her adult daughter, who had Down syndrome or something like it. The mother poured water on the daughter’s round belly from a little bucket, and the daughter laughed and hugged her. They were naked and joyful, and Sam didn’t want to make them self-conscious, but she found herself mesmerized. They had old-looking bodies (daughter in her late forties, mother in her late sixties), and Sam had never seen naked old bodies in a state of play. They didn’t notice Sam; they were busy. The mother washed her daughter with a soapy washcloth. Sam showered, not watching them but hearing them. The daughter bellowed when her mother rinsed her. Sam glanced at them and then down at her own old body as she washed.
There is a lie in young fit bodies. There is something human—touching—in the older body, in its honest relationship to decay and time. Seeing the two women’s bodies, Sam felt a form of enchantment. To look, to behold, to abide age gave her an almost narcotic clarity; she could, for this moment, as long as it lasted, see and face what life really was. It was as if people mostly live in a state of terror about what is to come, what is happening to their bodies. It wasn’t just terror; it was shame. You had to hide the shame of your body’s age and your body’s fragility from others and from yourself. This state of terror and shame made us desperate, cruel, occasionally savage. But here was human love, joy, innocence. The mother wrapped her daughter in a towel and used a second towel to dry her daughter’s long hair. The daughter moaned again. The mother caught Sam glancing at them, and smiled at her, as if to say, I know you get it, I know you see us. And Sam had a constriction in her throat as she recognized how familiar their gestures were to her; there was a time she had experienced this particular kind of body intimacy. She didn’t feel envy, exactly, but a wistfulness, a futile longing. When Ally was little, she let Sam wash her, dry her. Ally squealed with joy, and no one was self-conscious, everything was easy. Sam wrapped her clean child in a huge cotton towel, and then she hugged Ally close, as if they were one body. What she was witnessing wasn’t as perfect as that (the child body was not complicated, not weighted with mortality or decay), but it was close. This mother got to have that body love, that pure mothering closeness, for the rest of her life. What would sixty years of that be like! Of course what lurked beyond this tableau was also what gave it its poignancy. What becomes of the daughter when the mother dies? Or what of the mother when the daughter dies? Sam knew that raising a child like this one had many challenges, and she recognized that her own loneliness colored how idyllic it seemed as she gazed at the two of them.
Yes. That’s what this emotion is, Sam thought. Loneliness.
6
In the sauna afterward (heat “stress” also improved health markers; it was good, homeostatic stress, Nico insisted, but Sam just did it because the heat felt soothing to her soon-to-be-sore muscles), she thumbed through a sweated-upon, ancient People magazine. There was an article about the old lady who had again been arrested for sneaking onto a flight without a ticket. The tone of the article was condescending, amused: “Run, Grandma, Run!” was the headline. Marilyn Hartman, the “Serial Stowaway,” was up to her old tricks.
Marilyn’s story had long obsessed Sam, since she’d first read about the woman a few years earlier: a sixty-something wacky old lady had snuck onto a plane to Hawaii. And was apprehended only when she landed. She had been given a warning, but she kept sneaking onto planes. What got to Sam was not what got to other people. News reporters treated it as a joke story—kooky grandma foils the authorities. But as Marilyn repeated her transgressions with dutiful, obsessive regularity, some articles took on a different tone. It wasn’t a funny story; it was a sad story about mental illness and poverty. She was an object of pity. She had a thought disorder. All of which was probably true. But Sam felt drawn to her for still other reasons. One was her photo—her mug shot—in which she smiled meekly, as if she were apologetic for making you look at her. Sam believed that this woman—Marilyn—went unnoticed because no one wanted to notice her. She was a testament to the inconsequence of old ladies. It was such a strange confluence of privilege (no jail for you) and dismissal (because you are innocuous, really). This was insulting—as if she were prima facie a harmless creature. A judge finally admonished her and diagnosed the reason for her recidivism. “I think you’re addicted to the attention,” the judge said before releasing her. Sam resented the condescension and the dismissal. The refusal to allow Marilyn any substance, any potency.
Sam had set up a Google alert about Marilyn, who confounded everyone by continuing her stowaway tricks, and yet she was not jailed or jailed for long. Partly they kept releasing her because she was up to nothing—her intent was simply to ride the plane or
hang out in the airport. (The perversity of it impressed Sam—her purposeless travel and wanting/needing to be in airports and on planes.) But partly she evaded jail because people read her as benign. And in the trough of the inoffensive, she was protected. Paradoxically, that protection both advantaged and effaced her. To be seen, a woman like Marilyn would have to really push it. Be angry. Get hugely, impressively muscular or fat. Be loud and obnoxious. Dangerous. Or maybe it was possible to embrace your invisibility and do something with it. Turn it into a covert power. Do something good.
Sweat started to drip off Sam. Her eyes blurred. The last article she had read about Marilyn had described how she’d been banned from Heathrow Airport. But despite that, she not only stayed at the airport, she made it past security and onto several planes. She was relentless, and no one cared. She operated on a stealth bandwidth; she hardly existed.
Something else about the article unnerved Sam. In her current state, what was the difference between the Serial Stowaway and her? Was it simply money?
Oh god. Sam sweated, but along with the sweat, she was also starting to cry. Out of self-pity, really? Moved to tears by her own insecurity, her fears, her precious vulnerability? She was sickened by this sentiment for self. So weak. But! What if she didn’t have Matt’s money, what would she do or be? She couldn’t even get a job as a waitress or as a temp or in retail. She was too old. And it wasn’t about being too proud. She wasn’t that proud. She would work in a diner or be an aide at a school. Drive a bus, work at the DMV or the post office. She would do those jobs, but even those were unlikely at her age. She could be one of the people who check receipts at Walmart, the greeters. Walmart hired old people. What would her life be like if that were her job? Who would she be? And still, part of her wanted to see, wanted to know. Seeing the stowaway, the old-lady hobo, it made her curious. Subtract everything and see what was left.
One reason she had stayed in her suburban life for so long also became one reason she had left, another “real” reason: money. She was terrified of how much she needed the money she had. When she was young, being poor was no big deal. She was elastic and even a little scrappy in her twenties. But as she approached and then entered middle age, that changed. She had left Matt, but she kept accepting money from Matt. (And there were always excuses for taking more money. She needed money for a laptop to replace the stolen one, for example.) She was so lucky, so grateful, so wedded to her money. She was dipping her toe into doing without in a totally controlled and safe (cowardly) way: How much do I really need? How little can I get by on? Can I be Dorothy Day with an allowance from an ex? And even if you renounce wealth, does that make you a different kind of poor? Genuine renouncing, not her faux, Sullivan’s Travels bullshit. (That was the name of the movie. She did remember it.) If she just lived on the money she made and got a second job and even food stamps, would it be the same as someone who struggled that way all their life? She knew for certain that it would not be the same.
Not only did she take money from Matt (“Our money,” he kept saying, “Okay, our money,” she agreed), but in the second month after she left, she had begun sleeping with him again. But not sleeping, of course, as he didn’t spend the night. Just having sex with Matt.
7
He was due at noon. A nooner on a hot August day. Especially hot for two bodies in her narrow bed. She refused to get an air conditioner. (Not in that beautiful casement window. Also climate change/global extinction. Oh that, he’d said. Another letterpress, elegant flyer card had been tucked into her door frame. wake up: nte. And this time she had realized what the letters stood for: Near-Term Extinction.)
This would be the fourth time they’d done this. It was becoming a regular thing they did. The first time he came over on his lunch hour on some pretext of signing a paper or bringing her mail. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a pretext, he clearly didn’t plan or hope for anything. But she could tell by his face that he had wanted to see her. To look at her in person. That particular expression, the one in which he didn’t smile and his eyes were open and steady and trained on her, in which he actually saw her, not some replicated, familiar “Sam” he had seen already, that expression gave her an erotic charge. And reminded her of their intensity when they first met in the ’90s.
8
He walked next to her at a NARAL march. He didn’t have a sign in his hand, but she did (Sharpie on a flap of flattened cardboard, “women against women against women”), and he told her it was funny. Sam liked him right away. He looked preppy in a button-down shirt, flat-front khakis, and a brown leather belt. Not like the men she usually saw at women’s marches. No Jamaican beanie on blond dreads. No buttons about Earth First! or Sandinistas. Okay, he was very handsome. He was beautiful. Should you trust or not trust a man who goes to a reproductive rights march by himself ? Should you trust or not trust a beautiful man? It actually didn’t begin with her sign. Matthew and Sam began when she caught him looking at her.
The security was very tight; riot-gear police lined the streets, keeping them corralled and disengaged from the city. Inoculated protest was how it felt to her, sort of pointless. She made herself march anyway. Two months earlier, she had attended a protest against the Gulf War. She was stuck behind some “Peace and Liberty Party” activists and their preprinted signs. They were vaguely culty, dishonest, one notch up from the Lyndon LaRouche idiots. She hated protests for this reason, but what else could she do? She didn’t want war, or to be complicit with the sickening bellicosity and patriotism of Bush. In the name of, and so on. But even if she knew the reasons she should be there, in the local specifics the marches were awkward and not doing much. So she was glad to let this man walk beside her. Chants were being hurled and repeated, but they were in some odd zone where two sets of chants could be heard, and the rhythms were competing with each other. A person to her left was going with the group ahead, but a person next to her was going with the group chanting from behind. Matthew looked over at her in the midst of it, and they started laughing. Then he noticed her joke sign and suggested they leave the march when it reached Central Park and people pooled and huddled for the speakers. (One harbinger of what would work between them—Matt finding Sam funny, and Sam loving getting a laugh out of Matt.)
“We won’t be able to see or hear anything,” he said. “Want to get warm somewhere, get a drink?” It was a bright day, but it was bitterly cold.
“Yeah,” she said, and she followed him past the police line, across Fifth Avenue, and onto Madison, a world of business, of men and women in suits, much more adult-seeming than the two of them were, protesting and not-working at midday. She pressed the cardboard in half and shoved it into the slot of a garbage bin. He put a hand lightly on the middle of her back and guided her to a basement restaurant. Lunch was finishing, and only a few people were in the dining room. They sat at a little table against the wall. Probably the space had been there forever, if not necessarily in this incarnation. It had that old New York vibe, a quaint devotion to commerce that she found oddly comforting after the march.
“I like seeing businesspeople doing business,” she said. Matthew smiled at her but raised his eyebrows. “It means that not everyone is concerned. Not everyone is as spooked as I am. Life is just going on. Nothing to panic about.”
He nodded, considering but unconvinced.
“What I mean is that no one is hysterical. No one here is thinking about Saddam Hussein or the unborn fetuses.”
“Because they’re thinking about money,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right. There’s something reassuring in that. The adults are still making money. The world isn’t ending.”
“Or, the world is ending and someone will be figuring out how to make money off it until it ends. Until the very last second.” (He was smart. He had leftist political views. He thought she was funny.)