Living Out Loud (10 page)

There is a flip side to this, too. I suppose everyone who has ever worked part time has thought: If I can do this much at home in four hours, just think what I could do in an office in ten. I also miss the easy camaraderie of working around other people, in a place devoted primarily to work. There is nothing like ten minutes perched on the corner of a colleague’s desk to work out the kinks in a difficult paragraph. There is nothing like a leak in the dishwasher or a surprise attack by a boy armed with
Babar the Elephant
to derail a train of thought.

But I feel now that there is lots of time to get back on track, even though there are never enough hours in a particular day. When I was twenty-five, I always felt as if a bus were coming around the corner with my name on its front bumper, and that I’d damn well better have spent the day working on a good opening sentence for my obit. Now it seems as if there are so many years ahead to pick up where I left off, or backtrack if I need to, or change direction entirely. If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being the mother of young children.

That is one reason why part-time work is still largely the purview of women. Part of this may be because society still finds it acceptable for us and unacceptable for our male counterparts. There is also a school of thought that says it is because we are finally proving that biology is destiny, that we can’t or
won’t cut the mustard, that men are born with a will to push forward and that women have tried to graft it onto an unwilling tree. I can never remember whether that is the fear-of-success school or the fear-of-failure school. In any case, it doesn’t apply to me or to many other women I know. I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.

In the last month or so my son has finally decided I do work. He says I work upstairs at a “puter.” He says Daddy works at an office. When pressed, he occasionally says that Mom writes things and Dad helps people who are in trouble with the law. But mostly he sees it in terms of location: I’m upstairs, Dad’s at the office. Perhaps that’s how I should think of it, too. This is where I am right now. So far, it feels O.K.

F
or most of my life I have pursued a policy toward my body that could best be characterized as benign neglect. From the time I could remember until the time I was fifteen it looked one way, and from the time I was fifteen until I was thirty it looked another way. Then, in the space of two years, I had two children and more weight changes than Ted Kennedy, and my body headed south without me.

This is how I began to work out. I work out for a very simple reason, and it is not because it makes me feel invigorated and refreshed. The people who say that exercise is important because it makes you feel wonderful are the same people who say a mink coat is nice because it keeps you warm. Show me a woman who wears a mink coat to keep warm and who exercises because it feels good and I’ll show you Jane Fonda. I wear a mink coat because it is a mink coat, and I work out so
that my husband will not gasp when he runs into me in the bathroom and take off with an eighteen-year-old who looks as good out of her clothes as in them. It’s as simple as that.

So I go to this gym three times a week, and here is how it works. First I go into the locker room. On the wall is an extremely large photograph of a person named Terri Jones wearing what I can only assume is meant to be a bathing suit. The caption above her body says Slim Strong and Sexy. It is accurate. I check to make sure no one else is in the locker room, then I take my clothes off. As soon as I’ve done this, one of two people will enter the locker room: either an eighteen-year-old who looks as good out of her clothes as in them who spontaneously confides in me that she is having an affair with a young lawyer whose wife has really gone to seed since she had her two kids, or a fifty-year-old woman who has had nine children, weighs 105 and has abdominal muscles you could bounce a quarter off and who says she can’t understand why, maybe it’s her metabolism, but she can eat anything she wants, including a pint of Frusen Gladje Swiss chocolate almond candy ice cream, and never gain a pound. So then I go out and exercise.

I do Nautilus. It is a series of fierce-looking machines, each designed, according to this book I have, to exercise some distinct muscle group, which all happen in my case never to have been exercised before. Nautilus was allegedly invented by Arthur Jones, husband of the aforementioned slim strong and sexy Terri, who is his seventeenth wife, or something like that. But I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy. Over each machine is a little drawing of a human body—not mine, of course—with a certain muscle group inked in red. This is so you can recognize
immediately the muscle group that is on fire during the time you are using the machine.

There is actually supposed to be a good reason to do Nautilus, and it is supposed to be that it results in toning without bulk: that is, you will look like a dancer, not a defensive lineman. That may be compelling for Terri Jones, but I chose it because it takes me only a little more than a half hour—or what I like to think of as the time an average person burning calories at an average rate would need to read
Where the Wild Things Are, Good Night, Moon
and
The Cat in the Hat
twice—to finish all the machines. It is also not social, like aerobics classes, and will not hold you up to widespread ridicule, like running. I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults.

Actually, there are some of the Nautilus machines I even like. Call it old-fashioned machisma, but I get a kick out of building biceps. This is a throwback to all those times when my brothers would flex their arms and a mound of muscle would appear, and I would flex mine and nothing would happen, and they’d laugh and go off somewhere to smoke cigarettes and look at dirty pictures. There’s a machine to exercise the inner thigh muscles that bears such a remarkable resemblance to a delivery room apparatus that every time I get into it I think someone is going to yell
push!
and I will have another baby. I feel comfortable with that one. On the other hand, there is another machine on which I am supposed to lift a weight straight up in the air and the most I ever manage is to squinch my face up until I look like an infant with bad gas. My instructor explained to me that this is because women have no upper body strength, which probably explains why I’ve always found it somewhat difficult to carry a toddler and an infant up four flights of stairs with a diaper bag over one shoulder while holding a Big Wheel.

Anyhow, the great thing about working out is that I have met a lot of very nice men. This would be a lot more important if I weren’t married and the mother of two. But of course if I was single and looking to meet someone, I would never meet anyone except married men and psychopaths. (This is Murphy’s Other Law, named after a Doreen Murphy, who in 1981 had a record eleven bad relationships in one year.) The men I have met seem to really get a kick out of the fact that I work out, not unlike the kick that most of us get out of hearing very small children try to say words like hippopotamus or chauvinist. As one of the men at my gym said, “Most of the people here are guys or women who are uh well hmm umm …”

“In good shape,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have put it like that,” he answered.

Because I go to the gym at the same time on the same days, I actually see the same men over and over again. One or two of them are high school students, which I find truly remarkable. When I was in high school, it was a big deal if a guy had shoulders, never mind muscles. So when I’m finished I go back into the locker room and take a shower. The eighteen-year-old is usually in there, and sometimes she’ll say something like, “Oh, that’s what stretch marks look like.” Then I put on my clothes and go home by the route that does not pass Dunkin’ Donuts. The bottom line is that I really hate to exercise, but I have found on balance that this working out is all worth it. One day we were walking down the street and one of the guys from my gym—it was actually one of the high school guys, the one with the great pecs—walked by and said, “How ya doing?” My husband said, “Who the hell is that guy?” and I knew that Nautilus had already made a big difference in my life.

LOVING
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MAN