The Lonesome Bodybuilder

by Yukiko Motoya

  Around the time that we’d completed eighty of my four-a-week sessions, my coach encouraged me to start doing some posing. “I know it feels good to be getting bigger, but you should compete and get some people to see you. It’ll be something to aim for,” he said.

  The first few times he suggested it, I politely refused, saying big occasions like that weren’t my style, but my coach kept at it. “I really think we need to do something about your deep-seated lack of self-belief.”

  “Lack of self-belief? Mine?”

  “Yes. Maybe you don’t see it, but you’re always mumbling ‘anyway’ after everything you say, or talking about ‘the kind of person you are.’ I don’t know where that comes from, but I think you need to get your confidence back.”

  I knew the reason. Living with my perfectionist husband had made me think that I was a person with no redeeming qualities. It hadn’t been like that before we were married, but gradually, as I constantly tried to compensate for his lack of confidence by listing all my own faults, I’d acquired the habit of dismissing myself.

  “I can’t promise that I’ll compete,” I said, striking a pose for the first time in my life in front of the gym’s mirror. This was what being a bodybuilder was all about. Nervously I brought my arms up beside my face and held myself at the angle that made them look the most impressive.

  “Make it look easy!” said my coach, so I lifted up the corners of my mouth and kept trying my best to flaunt my muscles.

  My smile was still a little unsure. I dropped the pose without having been able to look my mirror self in the eye.

  “There’s no rush. We’ll work on it together,” my coach said, and draped a towel over my shoulders.

  One day, while I was giving out samples of jojoba oil near the store entrance, a fight broke out just outside between two of our customers’ dogs. The Yorkie’s collar broke off from its leash, and the little dog approached the much bigger dog, yapping loudly, which made the big dog pick him up by the neck. The big dog was a timid dog, the kind that would normally look around at a loss rather than get angry when another dog approached it sniffing and growling. The Yorkie’s owner tried to rescue her pet and, in desperation, hit the big dog with the Yorkie’s leash, which made the big dog even more confused and agitated, and it shook its head from side to side, still holding the little dog in its jaws. The Yorkie’s yapping got quieter and quieter, and by the time the big dog opened its jaws and unhooked its fangs, the unfortunate puppy had already breathed its last breath.

  No one said a thing, but I knew what they were thinking: Why hadn’t I—who’d been the nearest to the scene—pulled the two dogs apart, using my log-like arms? Why should they continue to lend support to muscles that were useless when they were really needed?

  A bodybuilder’s muscles are different from an athlete’s. They exist purely for aesthetic value. A proud bodybuilder never puts their power to practical use. Because I’d bought into these beliefs, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to stop the dogs from fighting. None of this needed to have happened if I’d stepped in and broken them up. The Yorkie had been a friendly, energetic puppy, popular at the store, and I’d held him in my arms a few times too.

  “I’ll stop training at the store from now on.” I told the owner this before I headed home for the day, and she nodded, saying maybe that was for the best. In the staff room, no one spoke to me. The atmosphere was strained. I said, “See you tomorrow,” and everyone replied, “Take care,” but as I passed the back of the store, I saw the yoga mat thrown out in the trash.

  After dinner, just as my husband was about to go back to the study, I said to him, “There was an incident at work today.” Witnessing the death of that Yorkie had shaken me more than I’d realized. I told him my worries, wondering whether I’d be able to keep working at the store, but he responded as usual with “Hmm” and “Right,” and then stood up to go.

  I noticed myself feeling incredibly angry. Picking the breadcrumbs off the table and gathering the dishes, I said, “I went to the salon today.” Before I knew it, I was holding up a strand of hair and saying, “I got it cut pretty short.” I hadn’t been to the salon in months.

  My husband paused in the middle of pushing his chair back to the table, and looked me over. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at me like that. He had a few more wrinkles on his face, but other than that, he’d hardly changed since college. Just the same as when we met at nineteen. After a moment, he said, “Looks good.”

  “Really? I thought you liked my hair long.”

  “This isn’t bad either.”

  “How much do you think I got cut?”

  “Hmm. Around eight inches?” He scratched the side of his nose. Then, perhaps noticing my strained expression, he smiled, as though to placate me. This was the smile I’d once found so appealing that I’d given in to his earnest invitations to go out with him, despite having been interested in someone else at the time. Surprised at the tears that fell one after the other down my cheeks, my husband said, “What’s wrong?”

  I went to wipe my eyes, but because of the tanning oil I’d slathered on earlier, the tears traveled smoothly down my arm.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “But you’re crying. Did you have a bad day at work?”

  He’d completely forgotten that I’d been telling him all about it until just a minute ago. When I shook my head, he moved around the table to my side and awkwardly stroked my shoulder. But my deltoid muscles were beautifully filled in from doing rack pulls, and it felt less like him comforting me and more like me letting him admire my physique. No. I couldn’t do this anymore.

  I took his little hand and said, “You only care about yourself. The longer I’m with you, the more unsure I become of myself. Am I really that uninteresting?”

  My husband didn’t seem to understand why I was so upset. I pursed my lips to stop the flow of tears, and took off my knit top and skirt, right in front of his eyes. Seeing the micro bikini I’d worn for practicing my posing, my husband said tentatively, “What’s that? Lingerie?”

  I left the house. There was still time before the gym closed. Coach. Coach, Coach!

  Even though I arrived breathless and in my bikini, Coach let me into the gym with a smile.

  “I want to train.”

  “But overtraining has real risks. You’ve got to rest up on your rest days.”

  “Just three sets of bench presses. They make me feel relaxed.”

  I kept pleading with him, so Coach said, “Very well,” and let me get on the bench.

  As I lifted and lowered the barbell in the deserted gym, the tears spilled from my eyes. “He just doesn’t understand.”

  “Your partner?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t understand anything.”

  “Have you tried talking to him?”

  “I can’t. My husband’s not interested in me.”

  “You still have to talk. Bodybuilding’s lonely at the best of times.”

  Lonely. Coach’s word caught in my chest.

  “I don’t know how to get through to him.”

  I let go of the barbell, covered my face with my hands, and let slip something that should never have been said. “I wish you were my partner, Coach.”

  Coach took my comment in silence. I knew he valued me as a client, so I didn’t say anything more. But how many times had I thought, while training, that he was much more of a partner to me than my husband? He helped me achieve things beyond my own limits, and was even more passionate than I was about my progress.

  After a while, Coach said, “Better now?”

  Thanks to him tactfully implying I hadn’t really meant what I said, I was able to nod and take hold of the barbell again.

  “Of all athletes, I most respect bodybuilders, because there’s no one more solitary. They hide their deep loneliness, and give everyone a smile. Showing their teeth, all the time, as if they have no other feelings. It’s an expression of how h
ard life is, and their determination to keep going anyway.”

  “But,” I said, to Coach’s quiet words, “if you’re always smiling like that, don’t you lose sight of your true feelings? Is it right to smile when really you’re so lonely you could cry? I . . . I wish now I could have shown my husband all my different faces. There’s so much inside me he doesn’t know.”

  I guess I won’t come here to train anymore, I thought. I’ll divorce my husband, go back to being an average, boring woman, and spend an eternity slowly dying while I wonder whether things would have been different if I’d gotten on that roller coaster when I was in middle school.

  Thump thump thump. At the dull noise, Coach went toward the big glass window. I sat up on the bench too. My husband was on the other side of the glass, striking it desperately with his fists.

  “Is that your husband?” Coach asked, and I said, “Yes,” in a slight daze.

  How had he gotten here? He didn’t know about my gym. I’d never seen him so visibly upset before.

  Coach said, “I’ll let him in by the back entrance,” and left the training room, and once he was gone I didn’t know what to do. My husband had caught me alone with my young personal trainer. He was so worked up. Was he going to shout at me? But part of me was ready for it. When I understood that this was the moment everything would finally become clear, the waiting seemed to take forever. My husband was still hitting the glass.

  I stood up and went to the window, and nervously struck a pose at him. Both arms up and bent by my head, chest out, emphasizing my V-taper. My husband looked incredulous as I posed in my bikini. When I put my fists by my hips, striking another pose, he shook his head, looking pained, as if to say, Please, no more. I knew he’d never wanted to see his wife like this. But this was the real me. Still holding my pose, I showed him all the expressions I’d never shown him before. My lonely face, my sad face, my indifferent face. My face when I thought his technique was lacking. This is me, I tried to tell him. I’m not a boring housewife. I’m not the kind of wife her husband would ignore.

  Coach must have called to him, because my husband went off toward the back door. My strength evaporated, and I sat down. I couldn’t think about anything until Coach knocked on the training room door.

  “I’ve brought your husband. The two of you need to talk. You’re so much alike . . .”

  As I wondered what Coach meant by that, my husband appeared from behind him. Instinctively, I was on my guard, but he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t crying either. He looked at me with a worried, uncertain expression and walked toward me until he was by my side.

  “I didn’t notice, until I found your gym membership card . . . that you’d gotten so big.”

  He held me tight and stroked my hair, over and over.

  I still work out, and on sunny days I sometimes put on some tanning lotion and head to the park with my husband. We gaze at the dog park and eat chicken sandwiches, and even sometimes hold hands as we walk over fallen leaves. His hands are still as slender as an artist’s, and my arms are chunky like a wild beast’s, thanks to my training. Passersby always do a double take at the contrast between our physiques, but we don’t give it a second thought.

  Coach says my posing has really improved. “I get the sense you’ve had some kind of breakthrough.”

  The store owner has smoothed over my relationship with my coworkers too. They say I should enter a bodybuilding competition, but I don’t know yet whether I will or not. They say that if I do, they’ll form a fan club and get me a fancy banner. At lunch break today, someone said, “I guess we should take your wishes into account. What would you like for it to say?”

  I said, “How about: You can now fling any roller coaster with your bare hands!”

  I want to increase my barbell lifts by another thirty pounds before spring. And I want to get a dog, an adorable Yorkie.

  Fitting Room

  She’d gone in, so there was no way she wasn’t coming out again. The only things in there were a rug and a mirror. But the customer had already been in the fitting room for three hours.

  What was she doing in there? Trying on our clothes, of course. Nonstop, since midafternoon. Whenever I asked her, “How are you doing in there, madam?” she’d reply, “I’m just getting changed.” When a customer says this, you really have to wait a while before asking again—because if you do and they have to say “I’m just getting changed” again, that would feel really awkward, as if you’d been trying to rush them; plus, they’d probably be insinuating that they were doing things at their own pace and wanted you to leave them alone.

  In terms of reasons a customer might not come out of the fitting room, one possibility is that they’ve actually finished changing but the clothes are hopelessly unsuitable. It’s happened to me too: there are some clothes in the world that, the moment you put them on, make you feel so miserable you just want to smash the mirror in front of you as your reflection looks on in surprise. The kind of clothes that make you think, You’ve got to be kidding, and wonder if perhaps you’ve always looked like a clown, whether your entire life up until that point has been an embarrassing mistake.

  At first, I thought that must be it. The shop where I work mainly sells slightly quirky pieces from high-fashion labels that the owner purchases overseas, so it’s not uncommon for a customer to try something on but then feel hesitant about coming out of the booth to look at herself in the large mirror. Our clothes are by no means inexpensive either, so when that happens, we tend to leave the customer be and give her plenty of time to make up her mind in private. So I was ringing up other customers, and organizing the stock room, and generally trying to fill some time before checking up on the customer again.

  When I couldn’t wait any longer, I called through the curtain, “Is there anything I can help you with at all?”

  “There’s nothing. I’m fine,” said the customer, sounding a little annoyed. “But haven’t you got a dress that’s more casual than this one? This one is too much of a party dress. I couldn’t just wear it anywhere.”

  “In that case,” I said, and brought her a light silk dress with a subtle, almost translucent print. “This one’s from a Paris label. They do a lot of printed styles—lovely, sophisticated colors.”

  The customer reached a hand out from behind the curtain and grabbed the clothes hanger, pulling the dress into the fitting room. There was lengthy rustling as she got changed. I wondered whether I should go do something else, but I decided to wait. Store policy is that the same member of staff stays with a customer for the duration of their visit. Many of our clothes can be somewhat challenging to work into a look, so we pride ourselves on helping customers find the style that works best for them.

  To do this, you really have to start by knowing what your customer is like. What age are they? How tall? What about their personality? As it was, this customer had come in just as I was serving one of our regulars a cup of English tea, so all I’d seen was her hand as she pulled the curtain closed, saying, “I’m trying this on.”

  “What sort of size would you normally take in a dress, madam?”

  “I forget. Hard to keep track.”

  Perhaps she was extremely shy, and it had taken all her courage to come in to our boutique after seeing us featured in some magazine. And then maybe she still couldn’t bear for us to see her, because of her insecurities about her height or her weight, and had missed her opportunity to safely leave the booth.

  “Do you tend to choose a trouser look, madam, or would you more often wear a skirt?”

  “Sometimes I more often wear a skirt, and sometimes I tend toward a trouser.”

  Another possibility was that she’d recently had plastic surgery, and her face had collapsed while she was getting changed. She might be desperately adjusting silicone at this very moment. When I was younger, I heard about a woman who’d disappeared from a fitting room while on vacation overseas. There was a trapdoor in the floor of the booth, and she’d
been sold straight to people smugglers. Maybe I could scare my customer into leaving the fitting room by telling her that story. That might actually be good customer service—less likely to cause offense than saying, “Please do feel free to step out and look in this larger mirror here!”

  “Are you on your way home from work today?”

  “Does that have anything to do with finding something to wear?”

  Or what if it was a woman who’d once been humiliated in a fitting room, trying to take revenge on retail staff by haunting us? I nearly freeze whenever I’m walking down a street at night and hear the sound of high heels behind me. It must be the guilt from constantly telling customers, “Lovely!” or, “Oh, that suits you so well,” regardless of what they try on.

  She was still in there at 8:00 p.m.—closing time. I checked in with her several times, to no avail. I could hardly draw the curtains myself, so I had no choice but to say, “There’s no rush, madam,” and settle in. The customer kept making rustling sounds inside the booth, and once in a while I’d hear her murmur, “Oh, my!” or “Hrm-mm.” She requested each piece in every size and color, one after the other. Barreling around our storeroom to gather all the items she asked for, I wondered what her story was, what important occasion she might be shopping for with such thoroughness. I asked my manager for the keys to the store. I’d made up my mind to stay after everyone else went home, to help my customer find what she was looking for. Our regulars could count on their favorite member of staff to be at their service at any time with just a phone call, so we often stayed open after hours for a single customer.

  By the time the clock rounded midnight, my customer had finished trying on every piece of clothing in the shop. Which would she choose? I made a cup of tea and set it by the sofas for when she finally emerged. But it wasn’t to be—she didn’t come out of the fitting room, dressed in the clothes she’d arrived in. Instead, she called out that she wanted to go back to the very first thing she’d tried on. Then, she wanted to do the same with every single piece in the shop. My stamina finally gave out around 3:00 a.m.