Читать книгу Beyond Measure - Rachel Z. Arndt - Страница 10

ELLIPTICAL

That lady is ripped! a dude says to his friend as I stream by on my bike. That lady is ripped, I repeat in my head—that lady is me. Freewheel whirring in downhill coast, wind against my arms during one of the last sleeveless days of fall, I arc toward the gym, its rows and rows of machines aligned by muscle and routine, that need to do something because it’s what you’ve always done—tie the shoes the same way, use the same locker, start on the same machine—that is the heart of the gym ritual.

Walking through the locker room to the locker room door, I tighten my ripped tricep next to the mirror, glance sideways to catch the curve of muscle and then relax as I continue past the woman drying her hair under a hand dryer; the woman sitting naked in front of a mirror, putting on eyeliner; the swimmer dripping her way from pool to shower.

Just outside the door gleam two vending machines: one filled with candy, the other with soda on one half and on the other Gatorade. The drink is supposed to replace what’s lost in sweat, but at the gym, the drink of choice isn’t a replacement but a supplement: protein shakes, grainy greenish-brown sludge men drink from glorified sippy cups they jiggle up and down in between reps.

I walk to the second of three floors, as I always do, to do what I do every time I go to the gym: lift weights, and before that, use the elliptical for twenty-five minutes. Or is it go on the elliptical? Or run on? Word choice depends on the relationship with the machine, whether you consider it to have pedals or paddles or platforms, whether you can pretend that the deliberate forward thrusts, which actually keep you in place distancewise, bear any resemblance to jogging (when really that resemblance is already owned by the treadmill).

A personal trainer on the stairs tells the couple trailing him that keeping a notebook is key—it’s for your own personal knowledge, he says, and so you can add more reps. Without those base numbers, from where does one improve? To what does one add on? The relativity of the gym demands careful record-keeping, a supposedly objective take on reality that winnows down the subject into numerals in the name of progress: Let go of identity for the sake of the body and its mechanized system of levers and pulleys and other simple machines mirrored in the gym equipment.

The couple follows the trainer downstairs, the bro floor with no cardio machines, only racks of weights and men in T-shirts that have the sleeves cut off to draw pecs into sharp relief against bright billowing cotton. The trainer keeps turning to make sure the pair is still behind him.

A man on the other side of the stairs pulls at his shorts.

Another man plugs his headphones into his phone, the cord running up his shirt, pressed between synthetic fabric and sweat-slicked skin.

A woman pulls at her leggings.

Split into frames by glass panels, exercisers duplicate in mirrors and grow to a mass, to a metal-on-metal ringing. They hold their bodies relative to the others and compare. They keep this comparison secret but will copy movements the next day, spaced by time. The main thing is to grimace: Lips touch so sweat doesn’t get in the mouth, and sweat pools above the top lip until there’s too much and the drip drips from lips to rubber floor. The rubber floor absorbs the hit of barbells and says oomph at the end of a set when men cannot bear to hold on to the weights long enough to place them on the floor and so just let them go.

This is the privilege of leisure time.

A map of this place could be points of avoidance: where I stop walking toward the same machine as the man in the paisley bandanna headband because I notice his water bottle holding his spot; where I wait for someone to finish on the tricep pull-down machine, rope taut in his callused hands, and practice the look of not waiting. Some knees part away from each other and others are held apart by thighs like trunks, which is to say developed.

The gym’s windows were made to hold the bodies out of reach but to hold them nevertheless. I try not to look too long. I let the rubber bear the breathing and the illusion of progress. I try to steer my attention toward the future body, more beautiful and more a specimen than the current version. But really I just want to stay the same. Sometimes the click of tendons on shoulder blades is enough.

A laminated paper sign at the top of the stairs announces the arrival of “gym wipes”: Once there were black terry-cloth towels and now there are disposable alcohol-coated paper towels in a dispenser that doesn’t have quite enough tension to let the perforations break. We never meant for the towels to be used for sweat on the body, the signs say.

Sometimes someone above walks by in dots, a body turned low-res by the hole-punched metal wall. Each ass-out squat of the man squatting puts the man on the verge of losing control, his body lurching against itself like a trembling outboard motor, starting cord tugged successfully, smoke thinning over the lake.

Modern fitness comes from desk jobs and disco and heart health and dieting. It comes too, before that, from photography and war. Magazines at the turn of the twentieth century popularized the image of the superhuman strongman, with his thick neck and gladiator sandals and barrel chest. Then came wars, then the Cold War, when American presidents fretted about “soft,” feminine American men. Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. Four years later, Kennedy wrote in Sports Illustrated that “the magnitude of our dangers makes the physical fitness of our citizens a matter of increasing importance.” Ever since, US presidents have worried about an unfit citizenry, testing kids in school to make sure that they hit benchmarks and, it seems, based on the lack of progress, to validate these presidents’ worries.

Meanwhile, Americans took to fitness on their own. Less often at the factory, more often at desks, workers with leisure time noticed their suited bodies turning mushy. Fitness could give powerful men the bodies of powerful men, and, the corporate thinking went, it could actually make them more powerful. Exercising, and having the world know you exercise, became morally virtuous. If you could control nothing else in your life, at least you could control your body. People performed health in the private public of gyms, turning it into an individual pursuit, with proof of each person’s willingness to give over leisure time to self-improvement evident in the most public of spaces: the body. The gym was the factory and in it, machines, like the machines of regular factories, replicated human movements. But in these new factories, the workers were the product and the consumer at once.

I never like to admit I use the elliptical. It’s a women’s machine, I’m told, both explicitly and by all the women on all the ellipticals, hair flopping in sync with the beaten cyclical orbits that move less like Earth’s and more like Pluto’s. Per the standard thinking, because women use ellipticals more than men do, ellipticals are considered lesser—less real, maybe, or just less difficult. The number of calories burned, according to the elliptical (an estimate at best, like all machines’, but a number nevertheless), suggests otherwise. The movement does too: Each step comes with a punch forward, a pull back, arms connected to poles connected to foot paddles, a bad bow-and-arrow imitation. The heels gently tap in the downswing, the legs like tongs.

Lines of ellipticals, lines of treadmills, bicycles, stair climbers, each front row prime real estate because it faces the windows—the windows the street, its gray cracked concrete that makes every car sound like it has a flat tire—and not the hamstrings and calves of the going-nowhere orbiters in front. The word “machine” is anathema to the idea of these machines; they are supposed to reproduce the natural, real activity so closely—some of the bicycles even have videogame courses that require steering and gear shifting—that users won’t notice they’re not going anywhere. On the treadmill, there is everything but forward motion and the task of passing other people on the sidewalk, deciding whether to weave right or left around another body, steps softening, momentarily, so as not to alarm anyone. On the stair climbers there are real stairs. On every machine, including the bastard elliptical, what’s replicated most closely, though, is yesterday’s stint on the same machine. Motivation turns muddy: If you’re not at the gym because you can’t be outside, moving in the real world, then why are you there?

On my way to the elliptical in the front left corner, five machines from the nearest exerciser, I see someone I know and consider exit strategies: the opposite direction, toward the upper deck of the pool, around the staircase, down the staircase, toward the stationary bikes, darting toward the weights and skipping the elliptical altogether—which I try for, but she does too, sees me, asks, What’s up? and I point to my iPod clipped to my T-shirt hem and mumble some nonsense, after pretending I hadn’t yet noticed her, about being in a Beyoncé zone. She smiles, as eager to end the conversation as I, zigzags past me, waves goodbye as she bounds down the steps, away.

Around me, around the elliptical I muscle into motion, drops of sweat gather on the floor, as if the rubber itself were perspiring. I can’t hear myself breathe over my music playing through noise-canceling headphones except when the seal between ear canal and earbud cracks open, loosened by moisture. I notice slowly, mostly by feel, then by sound: the creak of the machine every time my right foot comes forward, my breath on the downbeat, the foot-on-plastic of the overzealous runner who kicks the hollow front of the treadmill on each gazelle spring into the same place.

As exercisers multiplied, so did gyms and so did equipment: To barbells and dumbbells were added weightlifting machines, which narrowed each exercise down into a simple movement, the bench press becoming a seated push forward, the squat becoming recliner-based. By connecting the lifter to the weights with cables, and by seating the lifter in an apparatus that allowed only specific movements, a machine could keep the body controlled. It could hold the body in place. It was the modern gym itself, writ small.

Machines for cardiovascular exercise popped up too, bringing running indoors, to the treadmill, on which distance and time were complemented with new metrics: calories, METs, watts—metrics that grew more arbitrary the more of them there were.

Next came fitness classes. People lined up in rows and columns like aerobics machines, faced mirrors instead of windows, and formed, willingly, into a panopticon. At the spinning classes I used to go to, at six thirty in the morning, often I was one of only two or three participants. As the teacher barked commands and encouragement—Climb that hill! Come on, y’all!—I tried to ignore the room’s emptiness, the bass soaked up by just a few bodies, the bass that bounced off the hard walls and buzzed with the flicker of fluorescent lights beyond the door, the bass that beat against the sea of black light in the cycling studio that turned our bodies into rickety jellyfish. White towels draped on our handlebars gleamed in artificial brilliance.

I liked to choose a bike about three-quarters of the way back, on the side closest to the door. I’d stand next to the bike, lower the saddle until it was even with my hipbone, and turn the screeching bolt until nothing wobbled. The class always began with a “cadence check”: We’d spin our pedals into a chain-driven hum, adjusting resistance until we were moving without much effort at a certain number of revolutions per minute. Difficulty was relative to ability: There were no numbers on the bright red dials we turned to tighten or loosen the hold on the bike’s flywheel, only the feeling of the effort of spinning in place. Knowing yourself, per the quantified-self fantasy of knowledge through numbers, was as simple as listening to the teacher say, Eighty rotations a minute, please. All other variables, unnumbered, fell away. Gears didn’t matter, no one could pull ahead, no one could fall behind, and we all sweated together but individually, each moving according to personal tolerance for discomfort, or for “pushing yourself,” depending on your take on willpower: Is it the willingness to bear a burden, or is it the drive to succeed?

In the gym, it’s both. There is no endpoint. Once, after getting home from the gym and showering, while standing at the bathroom sink putting on mascara, five minutes to spare before leaving for work, a subway ride underwater during which I could have put on mascara like other women, entire polka-dotted makeup bags spilled out on their laps, I realized I would be standing there putting on mascara every morning forever with five or ten minutes to spare, a subway ride ahead or not—I would be doing this for the rest of my life. And when a clump glued together my eyelashes, and a piece of black flaked onto my cheek, I realized too that not only would I be doing this same thing forever, I’d be doing it imperfectly forever. Every morning a new mistake. Or every morning, more optimistically, a chance for improvement.

And so I found myself a few days later, walking back from the gym, about a half hour before daily mascara application, walking so automatically that I couldn’t even remember leaving the gym, trudging down its sticky indoor stairway and out onto the street, where bodegas offered ATMs and beer and the only people outside had dogs, that trudging the trudging of physical exhaustion early in the morning but also the trudging of daily repetition. Every day some kind of fitness—in the winter, indoors, the same walk there and back, a collection of similar exercises only occasionally shifted upward a notch, in more reps or weight. The improvements were for improvement’s sake—so I could see the numbers rising—a way to distinguish now from before, before from the future, when things would be the same and different because, while each machine moves only one way, there’s always a whole stack of weights waiting to be pinned to the cable.

Prancing on the elliptical, I happen to glance up from my magazine propped atop the machine, covering the nagging timer, to see the man on the ElliptiGO heading east in the right-hand lane of a six-lane street. Every day I spot him through the second-story window. The bright green tubes of the thing—a bicycle-like device driven by an elliptical movement, rather than by regular pedaling—catch my peripheral vision. I see him and I scoff. Why not ride a bike? He’s doing it backward: Instead of making the real-life transportation stationary and stabilizing in the gym, he’s turned an exercise machine into a vehicle, deliberately shedding the control the gym offers. He has a single metric—distance—to measure his progress, and he has the entire real world around him, not exercising, distracting from his pursuit of himself.

When his whole body lunges forward it actually does, whereas above, in the steel and glass of the gym, I lunge to stay in place, each push forward the backswing for the next but also a rewinding of movement, like each next step is a redo of the last. His progress is too literal.

From my stationary machine, I watch him imitate me, and I see in the window’s dim reflection me imitating him, and in this doubling I grow dizzy, which the machine warns in a very serious serif typeface is a sign I should stop exercising and see a doctor, rest until I can see straight, but I won’t stop and wait to climb back on because I’ve already climbed on, I’m already watching the man on the ElliptiGO and between us window washers on a crane one floor below, where they’re scrubbing away the film that gives me myself, bounced back in makeshift mirror, and in removing that film removing the veil between my leisure time working out and the non-leisure time of the workers outside, but only temporarily, because later it will rain and pollen and the dust from the construction site across the street will dry on the window, turning it opaque enough to hold me again and in that holding force me, because habit is repetition is habit, to come back the next day to verify I can still do exactly what I did the day before.