The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (15 page)

Today as I am clambering up the stairs an immense pink man in tiny white shorts careens up behind me. “You sure look beat!” he roars happily. I am ready to enter into a discussion of
his
looks, but he is gone. I feel the familiar sensation of burning rubber right below my follicles, indicating that quite soon I will be overwhelmed by fury or sorrow and the rest of my day will be spent in raging immobility. I sit down on the steps. I won’t be able to run now, but I don’t dare go home, either. This man has just happened by, and I am about to have been
upset
by him.

Life’s blows are so swift. One is just living along (walking up some stairs, for example), and at just any moment one could contract a viral inflammation of the brain, or a loved one could be getting squashed by a car, or a carton of lead statuettes could fall on one’s foot. Had I done one more round of exercises, I never even would have encountered this man who has revealed, with one careless stroke, the ruin that is my life.

A Strange Lack of Consequences

It turns out that I was all right after I met that man yesterday. Something was his fault (at least, nothing was my fault). But it didn’t turn out to be his fault that I couldn’t run, because I
could
run. I ran, I saunaed, I showered, I got dressed, and I went home.

One thing that’s quite nice about this running is that you just keep doing what you have just been doing, without having to stop to think about it.

I Risk Conscious Feelings of Desire

I can no longer deny myself awareness of the fact that while I wear plain navy-blue sneakers—carried over, probably, from my horrible camp days, which, like everything else, scarred me for life—everyone else has highly evolved, stripy, elegant sneakers in the colors of toys designed in Italy for rich kids.

In the sauna today someone tells me that you begin to lose weight after you begin to run two miles a day. “Of course,” she adds, “you have to stop eating, too.”

Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Not that I’m running every day, either.

I Converse like Others

I am beginning to have conversations about running, just as other people do. But I can’t quite get the hang of it. When people say to me, smiling, “You don’t mean
you
run,” I think it must be true that in some real sense I don’t. It angers me that I must be so assertive on such shaky grounds to make people believe that I run, and that then when they believe me, they don’t care.

I am a Self-Reliant Person

I develop a routine of stopping about halfway through my run and either walking around the track or shaking myself up on a shake-up machine I’ve watched other people use. I can run more this way, and the second stint is easier.

Kathy says she would like to use the machine, too, but she thinks it may be embarrassing. I am immediately embarrassed, but then I remember that it cannot precisely be said to be myself who is embarrassed. I go and use the machine.

Today I overhear a conversation between a man and a woman I know. “Oh, hey,” she says. “I got those Adidas you told me to.”

“The green ones?” he asks. “Fantastic.”

My God. For years I have understood Adidas to be an airline. I undergo a sudden perceptual intensification, as if I were a special instrument being trained onto its proper task by expert operators. I pull up a chair and sit down. My acquaintances smile and sparkle and toss their beautiful hair. The woman is saying, “You’re right about running outside. It’s a whole other thing, really fantastic.” Their eyes shine, their teeth flash.

“I run too!” I say suddenly.

“You?” They turn and gaze at me. “In those?” They point at my black boots with their high, spiky heels, and they laugh. I pull my feet under me and look at the floor.

Something like a pain is accruing around my left heel. If it keeps up, I may go see if the physical office might pertain to it.

My pain is still there. If it is there again the next time I run, I’ll go to the
PHYSICAL OFFICE.

Sure enough, my pain is there again. I’ll go to the
PHYSICAL OFFICE
the next time I run, if I still have it.

Today my heel hurts so much that after a few laps I have to stop. After standing at the edge of the track for a bit, I bolster myself up and follow the arrow to the
PHYSICAL OFFICE.

Breakthrough

The
PHYSICAL OFFICE
turns out to be a small greenish room. A grinning man welcomes me, and we nod to each other many times, and then I explain that I’ve done something to my heel. The man prods it. “I don’t know,” he ventures. “Seems like you’ve done something to your heel.”

I agree this must be it. “What should I do?” I ask. “I really can’t run.”

“It’s probably a good idea not to run for a few days,” the man tells me.

“Do you think I should get running shoes?” I ask.

The man looks reflectively off into the distance. “You know,” he says, “you could probably use a pair of running shoes.”

“Well, thanks a lot, then,” I tell him airily. We nod and smile and wave.

Suddenly I know just what I want, what to do about it, and where to go to do it. I have sometimes passed a place, it suddenly occurs to me, called Runners World, which has in its window a line of glowing shoes.

I Get Help

I go looking for Runners World, and there it is, to my surprise, right where I expect it to be. Several people are in the store, all talking about running, and I sit and listen to them with interest for some time until a man leaning on the counter asks if I would like some help. He seems to be the ideal man, intelligent, handsome, and concerned, so I tell him yes, I would. I explain that I think I may need shoes. He asks me where I run and how much.

“Then this is the shoe for you,” he says. “The SL 72.” He hands me a pair of boxy, royal-blue shoes with white stripes and deeply ridged soles. I had hoped for something more streamlined, with slanting, aerodynamic stripes rather than these neat, horizontal ones, in a less wholesome color; but if this is the shoe for me, this is the shoe for me.

And when I put them on, my feet are more comfortable than they have ever been before. The man who has selected these shoes for me alone tells me that he is a running coach at the Y.

“Do you run in the morning?” he asks. “Lots of girls run in the morning.”

I feel that there is nothing I can’t say to this man. I lean up to him and ask softly, “What’s the difference between running inside and running outside?”

“Colder outside,” he says, and hands me my shoes, all tucked up into their box.

My shoes live in my locker along with my tank suit, goggles, and swimming cap (which, who knows, I might want to use sometime), my yoga pants, my T-shirt, my soap and shampoo and skin cream, and several pairs of tube socks.

I can run more easily and quickly, and my feet don’t hurt.

Jennifer is in the locker room today when I go in, and I show her my shoes. “Hey, wow,” she says. She reaches into her locker. “Look!” she says, holding out to me an identical pair.

Winter

I see Ellen today, and before she gets a chance to ask what I’m up to, I tell her that I’m running a lot lately. She is delighted to hear it. It seems that she, too, after getting home from the office, reading to the kids, clearing up after the dinner guests, studying for her orals, and knocking off an article or two for some little journal, likes to get in a few miles.

Yesterday I asked the woman in the laundry around the corner why I always get less underwear back than I put in. It has taken me years to ask this question. The woman tells me that naturally I always get the same amount of underwear back that I put in and turns back to her work, looking both insulted and smug. I stand and stare at her, unable to think of anything to say, while tears of hatred run off my face.

I spend the rest of the day walking in short bursts and stopping in phone booths, where I stand for five or ten minutes. There is no one I can bear to call. I think the woman in the laundry may be right. Even if she is wrong, it is unlikely to be her fault, really, that my underwear is disappearing. Even if she takes pleasure in depleting my raggy stock of underwear for some reason, it hardly matters. But then, why am I so angry?

In the locker room I overhear a woman telling some friends that she has picked a fight with her boyfriend this morning, saying brutal and humiliating things to him and getting him to say brutal and humiliating things to her. After she throws him out of the apartment, she slashes every one of her paintings.

At this her friends gasp. “Oh, no!” they say, with a horror that to me is obviously utterly formal and hollow. “How terrible!”

“No it isn’t,” the woman says. “They were bad paintings. They were all shallow and vain and cowardly.”

Oh, how I wish I could paint! My paintings, too, would be shallow and vain and cowardly, and I would go home right now and slash them to ribbons.

The locker room is full of ex-smokers, doing prodigious amounts of exercise, talking torrentially at uncontrolled volume, gaining weight at a fantastic clip, lying in the sauna till they’re faint, crying, drinking quantities of carrot juice, and bearing in, over the weeks, a bright rainbow of shoes.

Kathy is back in town after months away, and I get to take her to the Y on my guest pass, and we use my locker. “Hi,” “Hi, Kath,” “Howrya doin’?” people say, glad to see her but not at all surprised, because everyone comes and goes. Kathy has returned to find me a good person to go running with.

Running

Sometimes it’s quite easy to run. I step out on the track, and I run around and around and around, and once in a while, a spring is released in my body after a mile or so, and I am flooded with power. Sweat springs to my surface, and I speed along with no effort, as in a dream of flying. I try to forget these episodes as soon as they’re over; I feel that running on the basis of hoping for another one would be like believing in God in order to pray for a Mercedes.

Sometimes it’s very difficult to run, and boring, too. Each lap seems endless, and my legs feel stiff and weighted. It’s even difficult on these days to remember how many laps I’ve done. On these bad days, I sometimes feel so tired that just going home is a major endeavor. People in the street seem to sense my fatigue and say wounding things about me. These people should be more careful. People look so solid, I look so solid, walking along; but hit suddenly with something heavy, people could just topple over or gust into the air like old, empty cardboard boxes.

On extremely good days, I step smartly out the door to go home, and people in the street move over to include me in their numbers, or even nod approvingly as I walk along exhibiting human health. On such days the winter seems mild and pleasant.

An Unpleasant Encounter

Today I get to the Y much later than I’ve ever been there, and everything is completely different. The basketball court below the track is thronging with tiny little girls in bright leotards shimmering on balance beams and bouncing into the air on trampolines, like bright kernels of popcorn. The track is very crowded, and the people on it look serious and fast. A lawyer I know is among those running, and I feel self-conscious. There is an implicit pressure in the growing dark at the windows, so unlike the pale, tranquil wash I am used to there.

After I run a mile, I take a breather by the side of the track, and a man standing near me says, “You weren’t out there very long.” I can’t tell what this man is up to, but I can tell it’s not right. “How much did you do?” he asks.

“’Bout a mile,” I tell him.

“That’s not very much,” he says, in the whining, punitive tone of an adult bent on forcing a child to admit to a wrong-doing. “How long have you been running?”

When I was about thirteen, a man sitting next to me on a train put his hand more or less up my skirt. He just sat there then, perfectly happy, and I just sat there, afraid of hurting his feelings in case he hadn’t noticed where his hand was, or had a good reason for having put it there, or something, until the stop before mine, when I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I have to get out soon.” Ever since then I have made an effort to evaluate dispassionately my rights and needs against those of others; but it’s not so easy, as we all know, and I often err to the advantage of one party or the other.