Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  • But then, if she’s going to consider doing that then shouldn’t she consider getting a trainer for herself? She wonders if a Level I trainer at the Equinox would cost more or less than the “Positive Reinforcement Only” trainer listed here.

  • What is G-Doga and do people really do this?

  • And Biscuits & Bath, oh she has already thought about Biscuits & Bath. Sometimes lately when she lies in bed at night, when she can’t sleep, she wonders if, except for his apparent hatred of larger (read most) dogs, running as deep as his love for all dirty things, she wonders if she should take DB Sweeney to one of the group obedience classes at the Biscuits & Bath or will it just interfere too much with her work schedule?

  • Oh, and also, sometimes, when she lies in bed at night and she can’t sleep, she wonders if she’ll never find what she’s looking for, her lawyer, her banker, her junior tycoon, and if it says bad things that the last time she went on an actual date (not counting Josh, she doesn’t want to count Josh) she wore one of her wigs.

  She clicks at last on the link for G-Doga and discovers that it’s a yoga class for dogs, held weekly at the 92nd Street Y. The subtitle says, Doggie and Me Yoga. The animated words Zen, Relaxation, Stress Release, Thunderstorm Consolation, Peace, and Freedom jump out at her from a lavender wallpaper. She clicks; the class meets on Wednesday nights. Granted that is a work night, but there’s something about it, and she says to herself, Just add on a lunch. Frank Bruni has lunch. Just recently he wrote about a lunch he had at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon at the Four Seasons Hotel. She wonders if Frank Bruni is ever on a diet.

  “Look, DB Sweeney,” she says, pointing at the lavender screen as a transparent image of a somewhat perplexed-looking Clumber spaniel with his tail in the air emerges slowly into solid view. “What’s this? Do you think you might like it? Do you think you might want to embrace your inner Zen doggie?”

  There is a flash of lightning, followed by a clap of thunder. DB Sweeney leaps onto the desk, sending piles of paper onto the floor.

  “No, no,” Meredith says as calmly, as reassuringly as possible. Reassurance, she thinks, is what she should be going for. “You mustn’t climb on the desk.” She reaches for him but he is wily in his hysteria and evades her. Using the keyboard of her laptop as a springboard, he leaps off the desk, and charges, like a bullet, for the living room. She closes her laptop and slowly follows him back into the living room, where she sits down next to him on the corner section of the purple velvet couch.

  She looks at DB Sweeney, who seems to have relaxed slightly. He’s also making a very concerted effort at wrapping his body completely around her waist. Every few moments, his body shudders. She keeps her hand pressed gently against his side and notices how the spaces between each shake of his body are almost exact, perfectly timed, as if they’re programmed, determined long before this thunderstorm. She wonders how many thousands of years of instincts inform so many things about DB Sweeney, how many generations of dachshund, terrier, and corgi came before him and for some reason felt it was imperative to be wary of the thunderstorm. She wonders how many things she should be wary of that she doesn’t even know about.

  “Nothing bad is ever going to happen to you during a thunderstorm,” she promises him, and he looks up at her, with his big, brown, soulful eyes. The way he looks at her, it seems to say, You think so? Because I’m not so sure I believe you on that one. In fact, it says that pretty clearly. She pets him, a long steady pet from the top of his head, over his wiry back, down to his tail, and tries again, “You will never be hurt by a thunderstorm.” And right then, DB Sweeney puts his head down on his paws and lets out a world-weary sigh, and Meredith thinks it is a sigh that is weary not only of this world but of many, because he knows so much. She looks at him and looks out the window and thinks that what she tells him is true, he will never be harmed by a thunderstorm, no matter what his instincts, no matter what all his history may tell him. And it’s not an overwhelming sadness, but it is sadness she feels as she looks at the top of his head because she’s thinking of all his history, and she’s thinking of all the things he might never do.

  He might never catch a squirrel. He might never just get to run right out his kitchen door, graceful and free across the back-yard, because she doesn’t have a back yard, or even a kitchen door. DB Sweeney will never get to sire a litter because the DCNY had him neutered, and she wonders if he cares about that. She wonders if he cares that he may not have a great love of his life. It doesn’t occur to her, as she thinks this, that perhaps the great love of his life is her. She gets a little caught thinking about the things he won’t have, the things he may never have, and she tries to think of all the ways she’ll make it up to him. She sighs herself and thinks that he may never be the type of mini wirehaired dachshund-Norwich terrier mix, who will run on the beach every evening at sunset, who will hunt small vermin in the middle of a forest in his leisure time. But he will get to go to the 92nd Street Y, and he will get to practice G-Doga: Doggie and Me Yoga.

  sixteen

  the waiting is the hardest part

  There is no diet. There are a hundred diets. There could even be, if you took the time to look into it, more than that. But there’s also Aubrey. And Ivy. Aubrey needs her right now. Stephanie thinks that he might need her now more than he’s ever needed anyone or anything, that in some really dismal way this might be the pivotal moment of Aubrey’s life. In the midst of that, it just doesn’t seem like the time to try to lose weight. It really doesn’t. And she had hoped that would be enough, that knowledge. She hoped that it would make it so that when she looked at herself, she didn’t see a stranger, so that she stopped being so aware of all the extra that was never there before. It didn’t.

  For nine months, she would go out into the world and she was pregnant. Pregnant! People would smile at her and beam at her, and they would want to touch her, and sometimes they even did. And maybe that was just because they wanted to be a small part of everything that was beautiful and magical and special about her. And then she had this miracle, she had this baby, and when she went back out into the world, she was just fat. Stephanie wonders if there are so many people who don’t go on diets, not actually because there is no good diet, but because they, too, have too many other things going on that they can’t deal with. And that makes it somehow a little bit better, because that makes it so that she is not the only person, and she likes that. She’s never really wanted to be the only person, she’s never been such a fan of being alone.

  And Aubrey isn’t alone. She wants to tell him that even though she hates him a little bit, and maybe a little bit more each time that he tells her he’s got everyting under control, because she doesn’t believe him. And she feels a lot lately that her whole life is waiting, waiting for everything Aubrey tells her not to be true.

  Aubrey, right now, is at his therapist. And it seems weird and strange and as if the universe isn’t right at all (and actually it’s not) that Aubrey is at a therapist. If anyone would not have seemed the therapy type, it would have been Aubrey. Aubrey, smart and handsome and before the knee surgery, always pursuing something sporting. Genial and friendly and warm. She never would have thought, had she ever thought about it before, that he would have been in therapy. Of course she never would have thought him to be a drug addict either. And it could be true, what she’s started to think lately, that she isn’t very good at seeing things.

  Aubrey’s therapist, he’s actually more than a therapist, if there are gradations, if “more” is the right word here. He’s a psychiatrist, which is an M.D., too, so he can prescribe drugs, though Stephanie imagines more drugs are not what Aubrey needs. Unless somehow that would help him. She has no idea how to help him. The therapist’s name is Dr. Daniel Petty and his office is on Seventy-ninth Street, close to Amsterdam Avenue, and that’s not altogether close to Aubrey’s offices in Mid-town but it’s closer to his office than, say, a therapist in Ridgewood. She’d found Dr. Daniel Petty through their insur
ance, through the website, and it had been quite easy, to search. She was given different choices under Specialty, all these little boxes she could check off: substance abuse/medications management ; marriage/family; grief/bereavement. She checked them all.

  And the very fact that Aubrey had agreed to it, to Dr. Daniel Petty, the fact that he’d gone through with it, made Stephanie very sure that he didn’t have anything under control at all. Because really, why would he? It made her decide to not go on a diet anymore, and it made her decide, without even realizing it, to just start waiting for more bad things to happen. He’ll be back really soon, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself while she waits, and Ivy’s already upstairs and there’s nothing else to do. She can’t even think when the last time it was that she watched TV that did not consist of a Baby Einstein video, even though she loves TV almost as much as the movies. She misses TV, but when you’re so out of TV for as long as she’s been, she doesn’t know if there could really be any way to catch up. Too much has happened. It’s easier just not to try, much in the same way that after missing the first season, she just didn’t feel she could take up 24.

  “Hey.”

  She turns around quickly; she didn’t even hear his car pull up, didn’t even hear him come in.

  “How’d it go?” she asks him.

  “It went okay?” he asks it back.

  “Just okay?”

  “I’ve got it under control,” he says, walking behind the couch, standing there.

  “You liked him though, you think he’ll help?”

  “Yeah, it was fine.”

  She nods.

  “And you know what I was thinking on the ride home?” he asks her. There are so many things he could say right now. She wonders if any of them will help.

  “What’s that?”

  “I was thinking of how many Tom Petty songs could actually be about therapy.” She stares back at him; she blinks at him. That can’t be the only thing he was thinking.

  “Really, Aubrey? That’s what you were thinking?”

  “ ‘Breakdown,’ for starters. ‘Breakdown, go ahead and give it to me’?” She doesn’t say anything. “ ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’? Or what about ‘I Need to Know’?” He flicks his wrists, his hands in loose fists. She is appalled to see that he is pantomiming drumming. “I don’t know how lo-ong, I can hold o-on.”

  “Aubrey.”

  “ ‘Even the Losers’?”

  “Aubrey, stop it.”

  “No, come on, you try one, it’s fun?”

  She still doesn’t say anything, and they just stay there, Stephanie turned halfway around on the couch, twisting her neck, Aubrey standing behind her, and they just look at each other until Aubrey picks up the remote control from the table beside the couch. He reaches out, points it at the TV, and then he leaves the room. As soon as she hears his footsteps on the stairs, the stairs to the upstairs, as soon as she’s sure he’s out of earshot, she says the name of her own Tom Petty song, softly.

  “ ‘The Waiting Is the Hardest Part.’ ”

  She turns to face the TV, even though it’s been so long, there it still is, right there in front of her. On. There’s a woman in a white suit, dancing. A voice-over, a woman’s voice, is saying, “There’s more than one woman who has tried and failed more times than she can count.” Really, Stephanie thinks, I could have sworn, I really could have, that it was only me. She listens and she hears, “There is more than one woman who feels like the fattest person in the room.” And she thinks again, Really, because lately I always thought that was me. Cher is singing in the background—what song is it? She’s not good at that, at hearing lyrics or a tune and knowing what song it is. But she listens anyway, she needs a place to rest her mind. She thinks maybe that’s what it is, people who get all caught up in songs and lyrics; maybe they’re just looking, looking a little harder than everyone else, for a place to rest their minds. This is a song for the lonely, so says Cher. Stephanie thinks of her sister. Meredith has always cared so much about her music, has always known every lyric to every song. This is a song for the lonely. She thinks, if she remembers correctly, Meredith always really liked Cher.

  part three

  watch this

  seventeen

  i’m here because of db sweeney

  Meredith stares at her computer screen, at the Weight Watchers website. She’s arrived here because, as you can imagine, everything went to hell with the Atkins diet once she felt it a professional imperative to partake freely of carbs. She’s also here because she read in Departures magazine that Mario Batali is on Weight Watchers. She’s always had tremendous respect for Mario Batali, has always been a great admirer of his work. And because of that, and because she feels that she is perhaps a bit short of people to look up to, she figures she’ll give Weight Watchers a try.

  And so she’s here, on WeightWatchers.com, where she has recently signed on to follow the diet online, and where she is making what she feels is a concerted effort to figure out this thing they call Points. As far as she can tell, every food has a points value, and it’s just a matter of figuring out each value, and adding properly. And is it only her? Is she the only one who realizes the extreme closeness of the relationship between dieting and math? And is it at all possible that such could bode ill for the ultimate dieting successes of anyone who is really bad at math?

  A pop-up window has popped up on her screen to remind her that those who attend Weight Watchers meetings—actual meetings with other dieting people—are three times more likely to lose the weight and keep it off than those who go it alone. It even invites her to type in her zip code to find a meeting nearby. And while at times she does feel it is a possibility that she could know herself better, she feels extremely confident in the knowledge that the actuality of her attending a weekly Weight Watchers meeting, even if it was nearby, even if it was in her apartment, if all the fellow watchers of the weight came over and gathered around her purple couch, perched gamely on the ledge of her pass-through kitchen, the likelihood of her attending such a meeting is not very likely at all.

  And doing it online, it’s easy. All she had to do was give her credit card number, enter her current weight in, and select a goal weight. The credit card part was easiest. The typing of her weight, the number, her number, was significantly less uplifting. It never seems to make a difference, no matter how much she doesn’t want to be associated with a number, that number never seems to go away. The typing in of her goal weight, it did nothing to lift her spirits. Even though she made it higher than she imagined would be ideal (whatever ideal might look like, feel like, actually be), it was still so far, so many numbers away.

  “Come, DB Sweeney,” she says, walking to her closet, removing his leash and shaking it at him, in the way she has determined has the highest likelihood of resulting in DB Sweeney’s being desirous of a walk, as opposed to say, running into his leopard bed (she ordered it on the Internet at WallyBed.com) and pushing his paw in the air at her in what looks strikingly like the universal hand motion for Go away.

  “We’re going to our G-Doga Doggie and Me class! Yes, yes we are!”

  In the lobby of their building, they stop together to say hi to Jerome, the weeknight doorman, and he tips his hat at DB Sweeney in salute, as DB Sweeney marches by jauntily, all charm, charisma, and confidence. Meredith smiles and says, “Hi, Jerome,” and there’s eye contact and goodwill. That’s not to say that previously there was bad will, there never was, it was just sort of a blank.

  Meredith and DB Sweeney head up to the second floor of the 92nd Street Y. They pass through a door at the end of a hall, and walk into a large room. There aren’t lines painted on the floor, or bleachers, or basketball nets. But even so, the room puts her instantly in mind of a high school gym. She pushes the thought from her mind, as surely it can’t be a good one.

  There are eight yoga mats of assorted colors—blue, purple, green—spread out into a large circle in the center of the room. Meredith scans the eight
mats in a clockwise direction. There are seven dogs. With each dog there is a person; and in the case of one dog, two people. However, it’s actually quite hard to pay any attention to the people when there are seven dogs, each sitting on a yoga mat. The definition of “sitting” is used loosely here and ranges from actual sitting, to straining on the leash, to, in the case of a rather energetic Boston terrier, doing something that looks like dancing. Meredith has heard (actually with more frequency lately since she herself became the proud owner of a dog) how people, couples, sometimes meet each other at the dog run, how in some parts of the city, it’s a bit of a pickup place. Right now, she can’t imagine that, can’t see how you could notice any of the people, how any of them could make even the slightest impression in the presence of so many dogs.

  There is a large apricot poodle, straining on her leash, causing Meredith to steal a quick glance at DB Sweeney. She doesn’t mean to alarm him and she hopes the combination of large dog/straining/perhaps overly excitable behavior won’t result in DB Sweeney turning to his on-hind-leg stance/gagging noise behavior. She imagines such a stance would not be Zen and that a Zen, peaceful dog is probably the best thing to be here. Next to the poodle, there’s a small Pomeranian, also apricot; then a Westie; another large dog looking a bit like a cross between a wolfhound and a sheepdog; a black pug sitting remarkably peacefully on his mat, his tongue lolling gently out the side of his mouth. A Zen dog if ever there was one, Meredith thinks, and figures he must be an old-timer. And last (but you can just tell, not least) there’s the aforementioned Boston terrier, doing a side step, her bulging eyes rolling around in her head, her mouth wide open, displaying what appears to be only one tooth.

  At the head of the circle is an empty mat. That must be for the G-Doga master, Meredith thinks, and she pauses for a moment, she feels like she has to, on the absurdity of that phrase, the G-Doga master. And yet it seems to be the only one that fits. She and DB Sweeney don’t have a yoga mat. She feels this is perhaps cause for concern, until the woman holding the large (possibly preparing to be marauding) apricot poodle seems to read her mind and says, “There are mats in the blue bin, right there behind you, by the door.”