Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  twenty-two

  reverse your namaste

  Meredith offers DB Sweeney a piece of her Thomas’ Light Multi-Grain English Muffin. They’re just one point for the whole English muffin. Really. Even though the proffered piece of English muffin is slathered seductively with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light spread (spread of what, though, that is the question), DB Sweeney will have none of it. He is not a fan of any of Meredith’s Weight Watchers food, and she thinks on occasion, on occasions such as now, as she is celebrating the fact that she has conjured a snack that is, at most, a point and a half, that DB Sweeney is very likely smarter than she is.

  It’s Wednesday night and G-Doga Doggie and Me Yoga class starts in an hour. She didn’t make a dinner reservation for tonight, just in case she decided she wanted to go. Sunday afternoon came and went, and she didn’t go to Gary’s yoga class. She felt like maybe she shouldn’t. But she did get Baron Baptiste’s yoga DVD, since Baron Baptiste was Gary’s teacher, and she has, much to her own surprise, been doing (she means practicing) yoga every morning. And actually, she’s been feeling quite fantastic.

  DB Sweeney looks up at her, in a way that she thinks might be soulful, or even might be full of yearning, though the yearning part, that could just be her imagination. She wonders if DB Sweeney knows that tonight is G-Doga class, even though he’s only been there twice? She looks down at him, right into his eyes, and thinks she needs a sign. Or not even so much that she needs one, but just, you know, she could use one.

  “Do you want to go to G-Doga class tonight?” He just looks back at her. Maybe he doesn’t care.

  “Do you want to see Gary?” she asks and DB Sweeney barks and gets up on both hind legs. “Okay,” she says, very seriously to him, “Okay.” She heads back to her computer, saves her review of Hola (mediocre tapas in Chelsea, uninspired and not recommended) and e-mails it in to Douglas. Gary said he’d never be one of those New York guys who spends his time screaming at people through his cell phone. She’d had a feeling when he said it that maybe it boded ill, that if she continued in her quest for a lawyer, a banker, a junior tycoon, that maybe she’d find herself one day, even one day soon (soon and for the rest of her life!) watching someone scream at people through his cell phone. But the only person she knows who screams like that is Douglas, and this isn’t one of those stories, there is no way in hell, even if hell is filled with power types on their cell phones, that she’s going to wind up with Doogie.

  “Okay, dahling,” she says to DB Sweeney, glancing at her watch, “give me two seconds to change, and then we’ll go to Doggie and Me Yoga class.” And as she turns up the volume on the iPod dock (“Wig in a Box,” even though she doesn’t wear a wig to G-Doga), she thinks of course DB Sweeney is right, as right as he probably is about the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light spread.

  She should go. There’s really no reason for it to be weird. She thinks it’s not her fault that when he folded her napkin into an origami swan, the only thing she had to say to that was, “Oh, look, you folded my napkin into an origami swan for me,” when maybe she could have said something nicer. And really, just because she feels a little bit loopy for the first five minutes after she sees him, it’s not like that has to mean anything, it’s not like that has to be some statement of fact, some road she just has to follow. And she really likes the G-Doga Doggie and Me Yoga class and she’s sure DB Sweeney does, too. And she thinks that once you’ve taken the leap and admitted to yourself that you are indeed the type of person who gets quite a lot out of Doggie and Me Yoga, once you’ve accepted that, embraced that even, it would be a shame not to go.

  She looks at her watch again. “DB Sweeney,” she says, “let’s go. If we leave right now we can walk, and it’s a really nice night to walk.”

  As she walks into the room up on the second floor of the 92nd Street Y, she sees all the familiar faces and one of them, of course, is Gary’s. He smiles over at her, and it’s not a sad smile, it’s not a “I folded your napkin into an origami swan and it could have been a moment, it could have been a really romantic moment, and you just blew it off, you just took the origami swan that could have been symbolic of so many good and groovy things and you made it so that it was nothing” smile. It’s not like that at all. It’s just a regular Gary smile, if there’s anything at all about brightness and kindness that’s regular, and she doesn’t think there is.

  He opens his palm up, facing out to her, and closes it. She smiles and waves back. It’s okay, she thinks, it’s fine. She grabs a mat from the bin and walks to an empty spot in the circle and unrolls it.

  After the oms everyone does a sun salutation and then a few other poses: a lunge, a twist, a bending forward and looking up with a flat back. All the dogs stretch and, to tell you the truth, some of them are a little more unruly tonight than on other nights, but unruly in a charming way. Jessica, the tiny Boston terrier so filled with pizzazz, keeps skipping off to the side, over to Gary and Ellery’s mat, looking up at Gary, a bit lustfully. Gary makes eye contact with her and mouths, Yes, to her, at which point she shuffles back sideways and settles back next to her person.

  “Okay, guys,” Gary says next, “let’s put our hands behind our backs in prayer position.” It’s a little awkward, and it hurts Meredith’s arms a bit, but she manages to get into the pose. She notices that this might not be an accomplishment of the highest order, as all the other people are doing it, too.

  “Reverse your namaste,” he says, referring to what Meredith knows is also Sanskrit for “prayer position.” But she can’t help thinking that he might be referring to the other meaning of namaste, too. The one that means “the divine in me recognizes the divine in you.” She wonders if maybe it means that what you’re supposed to recognize as divine might need to get shifted? Though she could just be imagining that.

  “Feel that,” Gary says, “if you’re new to it, it’s gonna feel a little funky, a little weird, and it might even hurt a little bit. But as long as it doesn’t hurt too much, just try to stick with it.” And she thinks, No, it doesn’t hurt too much, and she resolves to try to stick with it.

  “Now. Straddle your legs,” he instructs. “Pivot your feet and lean forward over your right leg. Try to keep your reverse namaste. Try to feel it.” She tries to feel what it feels like, she listens to the rest of the room breathing in and breathing out, the panting of the dogs. “It feels good, right?” he prods. “What’s good about it, I always think, is the same thing that’s good about a headstand. It’s a fantastic thing every now and then to flip your perspective around, quite literally, to look at the world from a different place, right?”

  Everyone breathes in, everyone breathes out. No one says anything, but she imagines everyone answers him, and as everyone slowly returns to their standing positions, she thinks how eventually, after a long time maybe, she’ll learn how to do a headstand. She stumbles slightly, right before she arrives at her standing position, and thinks that maybe the headstand might be kind of far off in the future, but she reminds herself that yoga, and especially doga, is not about judgment at all. She turns her attention where everyone else’s attention has suddenly turned, toward the door where Jessica is showing quite a lot of tooth and growling loudly at a rather indifferent looking Havanese.

  Later, after the parading of the dogs, when there’s still some time left, and everyone is together breathing in and out in downward dog, Gary says, “Let’s flow,” and claps his hands twice. Everyone knows the routine, and everyone moves together, jumping forward from their downward dogs, stretching up with flat backs and leaning in again and then swan diving up, and back down and stepping back, all together. She feels the door open, feels Gary slipping out to turn on music. She loves the music. And then he’s back in the room, she can feel it. He claps his hands together twice again, right as they are all in downward dog, about to go through the sequence again.

  “Hey, El,” she hears him say, “why don’t you lead one more parade?” And she’s at t
he top of her swan dive now, raising her arms over her head, and she sees Ellery get up, his tail up straight behind him, his mouth so clearly in a smile, marching along to the first few bars of the country song Gary has put on. One by one the dogs follow him. DB Sweeney looks up at Meredith, and she nods yes, and he gets in line, too. And she’s still at the top of her swan dive. Everyone else is flowing without her, but she feels frozen, because she’s caught up in the lyrics, the lyrics; of the song Gary put on are starting to hit her.

  Well, I spent a lifetime looking for you.

  And the dogs, they are all serpentining in the spaces between the people; how does he get them to do that? How does he speak to them this way? And everyone’s flowing, except for Meredith and except for Gary. She’s just standing at the top of her mat, Gary’s looking right at her and softly singing the chorus to “Looking for Love (In All the Wrong Places).”

  And how on earth could he know? Could he know about the bankers, the lawyers, the junior tycoons? Surely not. Surely it’s just a coincidence. But lately, she’s starting to wonder about coincidences, if there really is such a thing.

  He’s looking right at her, and he presses his lips together a little bit because he’s about to laugh. And she’s about to laugh, too, so she does the same thing, presses her lips together to stop herself, because she doesn’t want to ruin the moment in the room. She doesn’t want to alter one molecule of it, the way the dogs seem to be marching in time to the tune and the words, the way the possibly deeply weird people (herself included) are all losing themselves in the yoga. And all she can think is, Who does this? And she looks again at Gary, who’s still singing, kind of campily now, “You oh, you, looking for love,” and for a moment, before she lets herself remember all the things she thinks about, she could tell you, just for a second, what happy feels like.

  As she and DB Sweeney walk home down Third Avenue, she thinks about reversing her namaste, and she thinks about the things in her life she needs to look at differently. She thinks about dieting. In particular, she thinks that this time, like all times, she’s always seen dieting as failure. She thinks that rather than try to find a way to succeed at it, the best measure of success for her might be to just stop doing it. She wants to taste everything and experience everything and be everything. She loves food, and to her food is living, and she wants to live. She doesn’t want failure anymore and she thinks, wonderfully, joyously, that if she simply looks at it all just a little bit differently, if she just tilts her perspective, reorganizes her priorities, she doesn’t have to have failure anymore.

  Her mind goes back; it’s as if something has taken her all the way back to the middle of February and she’s standing on the sidewalk, looking into the window of Bouley. And the reflection she sees, she no longer thinks of it as the reflection of someone else, she no longer sees a stranger. She takes a breath and she looks again, closer, and she sees herself.

  “DB Sweeney,” she says out loud, and she doesn’t even mind if anyone hears. DB Sweeney looks up over his shoulder at her, in the way that puts Gary in mind of corgis, and puts her in mind of Greta Garbo. “When we get home, I’m going to throw away the scale.” And she feels free. She thinks maybe it’s the first time she’s ever felt so free. As they continue to walk, she repeats the same thing, again and again. Rama.

  “Rama rama rama rama rama.”

  twenty-three

  la bonne fin

  “This is what I wanted, this is what I got. This is what I wanted, this is what I got,” Stephanie repeats it to herself, over and over again, like it’s a mantra, like it will help. This is, after all, what she wanted.

  “This is what I wanted, this is what I got.” Except she’s not sure if what she really needs is a mantra, she only knows she needs something to get her through today.

  She goes to the dresser, and she takes out his socks. The socks are the last things left to pack. She wonders how many pairs he needs, if it matters.

  “Oh,” Aubrey says, emerging from the bathroom, showered, shaved, and dressed, and whatever else, in under fifteen minutes. “You didn’t need to do that.”

  “No, I know,” she says. “I wanted to.”

  “Well, thanks,” he says.

  His eyes stay fixed on the bag on the floor, all packed, the socks on top.

  “Ready to go?” she asks him.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he says and runs a hand through his still-wet hair, not meeting her eyes. His hair is longer now, longer than she’s seen it in a while.

  “Alright then,” she says.

  “Alright.”

  Ridgewood, New Jersey, is not very far from Kent, Connecticut, just two highways mostly, with a few other roads, but still it’s a very long trip. As they pull up to the gate, she does so slowly, and she stops the car for a moment right outside the entrance, two brick pillars and a wrought-iron gate. The pillars are six, maybe seven feet high, and the gates are open. She thinks it’s a good thing that the gates are open; she imagines they must look very ominous when they’re closed. On one of the pillars, the one on their right, there is a small black plaque that says, in gold lettering, Bonfin. They both look at the sign.

  “It’s very tasteful,” Stephanie says.

  “Yeah,” Aubrey says. “My mother would approve.”

  “I think,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say, and because she wants to agree on something, wants to be the same as him on something. “I think my mother would, too.”

  “But, you know,” he says, not looking at her, “let’s stick with the plan.”

  “Of course,” Stephanie says and nods her head, perhaps too vigorously. The plan is not one of the many they haven’t stuck to lately, but the plan they made at Aubrey’s request not to tell their mothers, and that includes Aubrey’s father, because he does in fact have a father, too. But nonetheless, Meredith’s mother would approve, as would Aubrey’s, they would approve of the way the sign looks, though perhaps not of what it is a sign for, not of what it really means.

  “If I want someone to talk to,” she begins, “about this?”

  “You can always talk to Dr. Petty,” he says quickly. But she doesn’t want to do that, not because she hasn’t, throughout much of this, thought it might be nice to have her own therapist, not because she hasn’t on occasion wondered if it would be okay in the middle of a Weight Watchers meeting to say, “You know, instead of one toffee crunch ice cream bar for dessert, I actually had three. And I know that’s probably not the best use of points, but you see, my husband has an addiction to prescription painkillers and I haven’t told anyone, not even Meredith, and it’s a hard secret to keep and even if it wasn’t (but it is) it’s a hard thing to live day-to-day not knowing what’s going to happen next.” She wonders if she’d get a gold star. But she doesn’t want to talk to Dr. Petty because she has, this whole time, thought of Dr. Petty as Aubrey’s, and she’d like Aubrey to have that. She’d like him to have more things that are his.

  “Well, if I don’t want to talk to Dr. Petty,” she continues, and he turns to look at her, “would you mind, and just say so if you do, that’s all I need to hear. Do you mind if I talk to Meredith? I won’t if you don’t want me to. I just . . .” and she doesn’t finish the rest of the sentence, she’s not exactly sure how to. So she just lets it linger there like blank spaces in the air, and she wonders if he can fill in the blanks.

  He considers it for a moment, and then he says, “No, you should talk to Meredith, you should call her. I don’t really know what’s been going on with you two, and I’m sorry if it’s had anything to do with—with what’s been going on.” He turns away from her as he says it, and adds on again, “You should call her.”

  “I don’t know if I will right now,” she says and they both stare out the window a while longer. Eventually, she takes her foot off the brake and lightly turns the car through the gates. As they pass through, she takes one last look at the plaque. It’s as if someone’s last name should be on it instead, and
Aubrey’s not going to rehab at all. They’re going to a dinner party, or a weekend-long retreat at the Connecticut mansion of fabulously wealthy friends.

  They turn up the long driveway, and the building at the end of it is more sprawling Connecticut farmhouse than it is Connecticut mansion, but still, it’s very peaceful. She wonders if that will make it easier, what he’ll have to go through here, what he’ll have to look at, what he’ll have to face. She’d like to think it won’t be as bad because it’s so peaceful, because it’s so pretty.

  At the end of the driveway, Stephanie pulls into a spot marked Visitors and as she does she wishes that Aubrey was just a visitor, to so many things. She puts the car in park, and turns off the ignition and takes the key out. She holds the key in her hand and turns to look at him. She looks at his profile because he’s staring straight ahead, out the front window, not looking at her.

  She knows on some level that she’s telling his story, that she’s been telling his story all along. And she knows there isn’t any way that Aubrey doesn’t look horrendous in it. But he’s not, he isn’t. She knows that in this story she’s been telling, that Aubrey is the villain. And he isn’t, deep down inside, without all the Vicodin, he’s really not a villain at all. It’s the Vicodin, she has to believe, that is the villain. Or maybe it’s 75 percent Vicodin and 25 percent Aubrey. Maybe that’s how it works out. And now that she’s thinking of it, she would have liked, in telling his story, to have put in more flashbacks, more images of Aubrey when he was everything that was good in her world, when he was all brightness, all light, before he was always in the basement. She thinks she should have done that, that it all would have come across better that way. But it just never seemed to fit in. The time never seemed to be right. And also, she’s been so busy.