Living Out Loud

by Anna Quindlen

  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

  A

  MAN

  HUSBANDS AND BOYFRIENDS

  I watched Gone With the Wind on television recently. It’s my favorite movie. It’s hokey, it’s predictable, the color’s lurid, I throw balled-up tissues at Olivia de Haviland when she’s on screen. I love it. Each time I see it I notice something new.

  This time, I noticed that in some ways it perfectly illustrates one of the great truths about men. Most men fall into one of two categories for the purpose of relationships: Husband or Boyfriend. These are not literal classifications based on marital status, just the best I can do. (I once classified them as the Good Guy and the Louse, which was an oversimplification made when I was depressed, menwise, and before I had admitted that I found the Lice much more interesting than their nobler brothers.)

  Ashley Wilkes is a classic Husband: upright, dependable, prone neither to wild partying nor to gross flirtation. He will show up for dinner on time and be the kind of father a kid can depend on for lots of meaty talks about life and honor.

  Rhett Butler is, of course, vintage Boyfriend: entertaining, unprincipled, with a roving eye and a wickedly expressive brow above it. I’ve watched Scarlett turn around and see him for the first time at the bottom of the staircase at Twelve Oaks plantation at least a hundred times. “He looks as if—as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy,” she says, one of the few insightful things she says in the first half of the film, before she eats the radish and swears that she’ll never be hungry again. And still my heart stops and I have trouble breathing. Give a damn? You bet I do.

  This is because, unlike the obtuse Scarlett, I have never had any difficulty deciding between the Boyfriend and the Husband. Perhaps it is the way I was raised. My mother told me I should marry someone who could dance and who would make me laugh. She also said I should find somebody who wouldn’t bore me. She never said a word about a good provider. It was good advice, as far as it went, but since my mother had married a Boyfriend, it only went so far.

  Of course, I married a Boyfriend, too, fell for him like a ton of bricks the first time I saw him wearing a sport coat with blue jeans and a wicked grin. I can’t say I’ve never regretted it, because there have been times when I’ve wanted to turn him in for Ward Cleaver. But the truth is that if I had
it to do over again, I would do it exactly the same way.

  It’s sometimes hard to accept this, although God knows why. Boyfriends rarely pretend to be Husbands. But lots of women fall for someone who is the life of the party, a dancing fool who has a weak spot for women, and then become enraged when they find themselves married to someone who is the life of the party, a dancing fool who has a weak spot for women. They expect matrimony to turn Jack Nicholson into Alan Alda. Yet they know that if they woke up in bed one morning with Alan Alda, they’d soon yearn with all their hearts for just a little Sturm und Drang, a little rock ’n’ roll.

  I don’t mean to sound so down on Husbands. I think these are good times for them, with women marrying later in life and actively seeking stability and maturity in a man. Teenage girls have no interest in anything but Boyfriends, and women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number. But women who have been around a bit are, I think, more likely to see the virtues in a Husband.

  A Husband provides a shoulder to lean on; when you lean on a Boyfriend’s shoulder he may very well say, “You’re wrinkling my jacket.” You know what you are getting with a Husband, and at a time in your life when you’ve had too many unpleasant surprises—a man who demanded a commitment and then moved to L.A. the minute he got one, another who insisted he wanted to get married and then married his ex-girlfriend the day after you split—knowledge is power. You think you know what you are getting with a Boyfriend, but they’re a little like kaleidoscopes: infinite permutations, many of them garish.

  Men can work their own alchemy on the mix, too. The most obvious manifestation of the much ballyhooed midlife crisis is that the longtime Husband turns into a Boyfriend, starts driving a red car, wearing leather pants, and talking knowledgeably about the kinds of bands that generally hit the Top 10 with songs with only three words in them (“Yeah,” “Love,” and “Baby”). There are also a few documented cases of Boyfriends turning into Husbands, although not many. These can usually be linked to career changes, promotions, and fatherhood. (Even Rhett started to act pretty straight after Bonnie was born.)

  My husband, a bred-in-the-bone Boyfriend, was terrified of this aspect of having children, convinced that on the morning after our first son was born he would awaken with a drawerful of pajamas and cardigan sweaters and the urge to say things like, “Now, son, I think we should have a little talk about that.” Not a chance. His most recent foray into fatherhood was to teach both his children the words to “You Give Love a Bad Name.” The eldest can also play air guitar along with the song. On the one hand, I hate “You Give Love a Bad Name,” although my children sing it rather well. On the other hand, my husband would not think twice about scandalizing a Confederate ball by bidding $150 in gold to dance with me. And, like Scarlett, when someone said, “She will not consider it, sir,” I know what I would say without a moment’s hesitation: “Oh, yes, I will.”

  AIR-CONDITIONING

  Every family has its divisions. There are the people who like white meat and the people who like dark meat, the people who like the country and the people who like the city, the people who like showers and the people who like baths, the people who like electric blankets and the people who know deep down that some night some quirk of wiring is going to stun them like a bug flying into one of those purple bug lights.

  Each summer my thoughts turn to still another division between family members, the one between people who like air-conditioning and people who don’t. Such a division exists right here within my own family, in this very house, which is, as I write this, about 7 billion degrees Fahrenheit. Hotter than the sun’s surface. Hotter than the planet Mars. Hotter than Michael Jackson was a scant few years ago.

  I am the person in this family who thinks that air-conditioning is one of the more wonderful modern inventions, right up there with hot rollers and Cuisinarts. I think air-conditioning feels good in the summer, just as heat (not, I repeat not, electric-blanket heat) feels good in the winter.

  The other adult in this family is opposed to air-conditioning. The other adult is six feet tall and wears a tie. Most important, he is a lawyer, so he can make almost anything sound at once logical and abstruse. So far, he has won. The children nap in their tiny saunas, the A-B-C wallpaper peeling and blistering. There is perspiration on my computer screen.

  This has put a strain on the family. In the car, which has air-conditioning only because it was bought off the lot, options included, the children are startled from their first comfortable sleep of the season by my voice, screaming, as we pass a hardware store:

  “BUY AN AIR-CONDITIONER!”

  No reply. We speed down the highway.

  The other adult will insist that he has already bought an air-conditioner. It cools one floor of a four-story row house. He says he is not opposed to air-conditioning qua air-conditioning, just air-conditioning in rooms where people sleep: if I start to doze off in the living room it becomes out-of-bounds.

  In an apartment across the street one of our neighbors got laryngitis sleeping in an air-conditioned room. “If you have the slightest iota of humanity,” I told her, “you will not say anything to him.” She nodded. She couldn’t speak anyhow. Inevitably, the other adult in our family ran into her and tried to engage her in conversation. When he came inside the house (as hot as a mirror lying on the ground at the equator) he was smiling. “Told you,” he said warmly. I appealed to my mother-in-law. The other adult said that if no air-conditioning had been good enough for her sons when they were little, no air-conditioning was good enough for ours.

  “This is a lie,” my mother-in-law said coolly, sitting in the living room of a condominium that has central air-conditioning. “In the beginning we had one air-conditioner downstairs. On hot nights the boys would come down and sleep on the floor. Later we got air-conditioners for the entire house.”

  “Later they bought a fake Christmas tree, too,” my husband said hotly, when confronted with this.

  You may be saying to yourself, Hey, why doesn’t she go out and buy an air-conditioner herself? She just sent $197 to Benetton for fall fashions that are too young-looking for her. She has money. Don’t tell me she’s waiting for (chortle, snicker, frown) MALE APPROVAL?

  Well, she doesn’t go out and buy one because she can’t get the thing into the house, O.K.? It weighs a ton. I practiced on the one we already have. I can’t lift even one end of it. And I am up to forty pounds on the Nautilus biceps-triceps sequence. Otherwise I would buy one, stick it in the window, and sweat out the other adult’s remarks for the next twenty, twenty-five-years.

  I thought of appealing to other men for help, but here are my options: my brothers (read my husband’s brothers-in-law), my brothers-in-law (my husband’s brothers), his friends (right), my friends (who are also his friends). I know what would happen. They come in, they stand around hitting one another’s upper arms and shuffling their feet and making male bonding moves and perspiring profusely, and finally some brave soul says: “Yo. We don’t think he’d like it, you know?” Then they drink my beer and leave.

  So here I am surrounded by fans, their big dull blades pushing warm air from one end of the house to another. It occurs to me that I missed my big chance. Twice I’ve been pregnant in this kind of weather, a water balloon with feet, and I did not take the opportunity to complain enough. Now I have no leverage. The children are good-tempered and they like to watch the fans go round and round. The older one thinks sweat is fun because it tastes like salt.

  I think back to the days when I was renovating this old house and the plumber was putting in the new furnace. “Baseboard heat?” I remember him saying. “You could put in central air.” I looked around at my moldings and said “Nah.” Now every time I see his truck go by I want to leap out of the window of this house (as hot as those chilies lying in wait in Szechuan food) and yell “COME BACK.”

  The other adult in the family drinks a beer
and watches the ball game. “There are only three or four days of the year when you really need air-conditioning,” he says evenly. I fan myself with a copy of Vogue and wonder if climate control is grounds for divorce in this state. He also likes electric blankets.

  “I DON’T LIKE THAT NIGHTGOWN”

  I have been married for almost ten years to the same person. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe. Neither of us were sure that any human being could be expected to live over the long haul with anyone as stubborn, opinionated, and difficult as the other. Somehow it has worked, and it is not a gross exageration to say that this is partly due to the fact that I am a much better cook than he is, and he tells much better jokes than I do.

  A lot of people don’t understand how important these little things are to a marriage. I realized this when I was reading a magazine article about bachelors, many of whom were participating in organized sports instead of having relationships with women, just like their football coaches told them they should do when they were seventeen. Many of these bachelors seemed to think that it would take a lot of compromise and change on the part of both partners to stay married. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One touchstone of marriage is security, and nothing makes you feel more secure than knowing exactly what another person is going to say or do at any given time. If my husband just cut into a slightly pink pork chop and scoffed it down, instead of holding a piece up at eye level, looking at it as though it was a murder suspect, and saying, “Is this cooked enough?”—well, I’d become pretty suspicious, I can tell you that.