I can run more easily and quickly, and my feet don’t hurt.
Jennifer is in the locker room today when I go in, and I show her my shoes. “Hey, wow,” she says. She reaches into her locker. “Look!” she says, holding out to me an identical pair.
Winter
I see Ellen today, and before she gets a chance to ask what I’m up to, I tell her that I’m running a lot lately. She is delighted to hear it. It seems that she, too, after getting home from the office, reading to the kids, clearing up after the dinner guests, studying for her orals, and knocking off an article or two for some little journal, likes to get in a few miles.
Yesterday I asked the woman in the laundry around the corner why I always get less underwear back than I put in. It has taken me years to ask this question. The woman tells me that naturally I always get the same amount of underwear back that I put in and turns back to her work, looking both insulted and smug. I stand and stare at her, unable to think of anything to say, while tears of hatred run off my face.
I spend the rest of the day walking in short bursts and stopping in phone booths, where I stand for five or ten minutes. There is no one I can bear to call. I think the woman in the laundry may be right. Even if she is wrong, it is unlikely to be her fault, really, that my underwear is disappearing. Even if she takes pleasure in depleting my raggy stock of underwear for some reason, it hardly matters. But then, why am I so angry?
In the locker room I overhear a woman telling some friends that she has picked a fight with her boyfriend this morning, saying brutal and humiliating things to him and getting him to say brutal and humiliating things to her. After she throws him out of the apartment, she slashes every one of her paintings.
At this her friends gasp. “Oh, no!” they say, with a horror that to me is obviously utterly formal and hollow. “How terrible!”
“No it isn’t,” the woman says. “They were bad paintings. They were all shallow and vain and cowardly.”
Oh, how I wish I could paint! My paintings, too, would be shallow and vain and cowardly, and I would go home right now and slash them to ribbons.
The locker room is full of ex-smokers, doing prodigious amounts of exercise, talking torrentially at uncontrolled volume, gaining weight at a fantastic clip, lying in the sauna till they’re faint, crying, drinking quantities of carrot juice, and bearing in, over the weeks, a bright rainbow of shoes.
Kathy is back in town after months away, and I get to take her to the Y on my guest pass, and we use my locker. “Hi,” “Hi, Kath,” “Howrya doin’?” people say, glad to see her but not at all surprised, because everyone comes and goes. Kathy has returned to find me a good person to go running with.
Running
Sometimes it’s quite easy to run. I step out on the track, and I run around and around and around, and once in a while, a spring is released in my body after a mile or so, and I am flooded with power. Sweat springs to my surface, and I speed along with no effort, as in a dream of flying. I try to forget these episodes as soon as they’re over; I feel that running on the basis of hoping for another one would be like believing in God in order to pray for a Mercedes.
Sometimes it’s very difficult to run, and boring, too. Each lap seems endless, and my legs feel stiff and weighted. It’s even difficult on these days to remember how many laps I’ve done. On these bad days, I sometimes feel so tired that just going home is a major endeavor. People in the street seem to sense my fatigue and say wounding things about me. These people should be more careful. People look so solid, I look so solid, walking along; but hit suddenly with something heavy, people could just topple over or gust into the air like old, empty cardboard boxes.
On extremely good days, I step smartly out the door to go home, and people in the street move over to include me in their numbers, or even nod approvingly as I walk along exhibiting human health. On such days the winter seems mild and pleasant.
An Unpleasant Encounter
Today I get to the Y much later than I’ve ever been there, and everything is completely different. The basketball court below the track is thronging with tiny little girls in bright leotards shimmering on balance beams and bouncing into the air on trampolines, like bright kernels of popcorn. The track is very crowded, and the people on it look serious and fast. A lawyer I know is among those running, and I feel self-conscious. There is an implicit pressure in the growing dark at the windows, so unlike the pale, tranquil wash I am used to there.
After I run a mile, I take a breather by the side of the track, and a man standing near me says, “You weren’t out there very long.” I can’t tell what this man is up to, but I can tell it’s not right. “How much did you do?” he asks.
“’Bout a mile,” I tell him.
“That’s not very much,” he says, in the whining, punitive tone of an adult bent on forcing a child to admit to a wrong-doing. “How long have you been running?”
When I was about thirteen, a man sitting next to me on a train put his hand more or less up my skirt. He just sat there then, perfectly happy, and I just sat there, afraid of hurting his feelings in case he hadn’t noticed where his hand was, or had a good reason for having put it there, or something, until the stop before mine, when I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I have to get out soon.” Ever since then I have made an effort to evaluate dispassionately my rights and needs against those of others; but it’s not so easy, as we all know, and I often err to the advantage of one party or the other.
I decide to give the man next to me the benefit of the doubt, and I tell him how long I’ve been running. “Oh?” he says. “That’s funny. You should be used to it by now.” And he steps out on the track again.
I step out, too, to run, but I find that I can’t, and lock into a standstill at the inside of the track, although stopping on the track is, for good reason, absolutely forbidden. My visual field—a wheel of thundering men encircling a space through which little red and blue and green girls are flying—tilts and spins, as in a film.
The man passes me once, twice, three times. He knows that I am there, but he won’t look at me. The fourth time he goes by, my hand shoots out and grabs his arm. I glimpse the lawyer I know looking surprised, but not surprised enough for me. “What did you mean, I should be used to it?” I ask the man in my grasp. My hands are shaking. “Oh, not really anything,” he says. His tone is careful. “You must have meant something”—I speak slowly, with admirable self-control—“and I wonder what it was you did mean.”
“I’ll tell you,” he says. “I want to finish running first, and then I’ll talk to you.” He breaks away. I wait. I keep waiting, and the man keeps running. He’s obviously quite tired, but he’s too alarmed to stop. When he gets a bit blue around the edges, I thread my way off the track, stand for a minute out of sight on the stairwell, and then peek back out, catching the eye of my man, who is now walking, to show him that he need not think I’m gone. He starts to run again. Satisfied, I go down to the locker room.
At a locker near mine, a blond woman with a nice atmosphere whom I have often seen on the track is changing her clothes. I tell her what has just happened to me.
“What a drip,” she says. “Most people here aren’t like that at all. I bet you felt like picking him up by his feet and smashing his head on the track,” she says in her pleasant voice, pulling up her socks.
“Gee, I feel awful,” I say, and sniffle.
“Me too,” she says. “I think I’m coming down with a cold.” We go downstairs together and out into the benign evening.
My Dream
This is a dream I frequently have: I glance down at my hand. The posture I have denied it for so long, the gesture it has so often hopelessly initiated, is suddenly deliciously completed. I am holding a lit cigarette! I am now able, I reason in my dream, to display the scope of my will. I can either inhale from this cigarette in my hand or not, as I freely choose. I freely choose to inhale, and the fantasy instantly collapses; the entire mendacious simulacrum shivers and falls
at my feet, leaving me—a slave who will have to smoke now, forever—in the barren waking world where it is easy to recognize the dreadful thing I had briefly mistaken for choice. Then I wake truly, empty-handed in the merciful morning.
Spring
I do three miles! At the end of my second mile, and then at the end of my second and a half, rather than feeling I am at the end of my capacity, I feel as though I have established a new relationship with my legs, and I don’t want to stop, ever. But I do at the end of three miles, anyhow, because I don’t want to hurt myself or to become a different sort of person without giving the matter proper thought.
I call up Kathy and tell her. “Hey, Kath, I ran three miles!” “Hey, wow, that’s really great!” she tells me. I try to describe the sensation I had of sudden ease and endless availability of energy. “I think that’s what they mean by a second wind,” Kathy says. “That’s why it’s possible for a person like you or me to run three or six or twenty-six miles, because you can get it over and over again.”
“Sometime I’d like to try for five miles,” I tell Kathy. “Why not?” she says, excited by the idea. “They say the first three miles are the hardest.”
The days are becoming brighter and longer. The air and the city have expanded in the warmth, and there is room to walk around. In different parts of the city, clusters of silvery buildings gleam, their surfaces reflecting clear sky and sailing clouds, and men and women stride among them, their clothing billowing like pennants. In the bright sunshine, stores spring up, windows full of gaudy running shoes. What a bore.
Tuesday
On my way to the Y I notice how hot it is. Far too hot to run. I turn around and go home, where I have things to do.
Wednesday
It is even hotter today.
Thursday
I run today, but after a mile I am ready to die of boredom and exhaustion.
During the past few weeks I’ve felt so impatient at the Y. I find that somehow I can hardly run, it is too hot to sauna, the conversations I overhear are dull and trivial, and the exercise apparatuses look dingy and foolish.
The man who gave me a hard time on the track has established residency in my mind. I discover that just as he exercises power over me, I can exercise power over him. This man in my mind may have a low opinion of me, but I can have a low opinion of him, too, if I so choose. I can have a low opinion of his low opinion of me as well. Also, I notice, I can have a high opinion of his low opinion of me, an opinion that according to this very schema is worthless. I amuse myself by raising and lowering him in my estimation and by combining in various ways, and then distinguishing between, him, his opinion of me, me, and my opinion of him.
It seems that an opinion of someone is not a serious matter.
The sun penetrates through the sky to my skin, and I blink in the light like a bear coming out of hibernation. I feel that I have been dreaming watchfully in this hibernation, my sleeping brain accounting for many passing years, and that I have awakened suddenly, shedding the strain of my dreams, to find that less time has elapsed than has been mourned in my sleep.
Years have passed, it is true, but not many, many years.
Halfway to the Y I remember that I haven’t brought my towel. I turn around and go back to the apartment. After I lock the door again, go downstairs, and proceed three or four blocks toward the Y, I remember that once again I have forgotten my towel. I can rent one at the Y, but the one I rent would not be my towel, which had figured (in its own small way, to be sure) in my plans for the day. I turn around, go home, hang up some clothes I had left on a chair, make the bed so I won’t get in it, and leave, locking the door and heading for the Y, forgetting, it occurs to me some few blocks later, my towel.
Clearly I am not supposed to go to the Y today. But then, what am I supposed to do? I stop to think, causing a pileup on the corner.
Back at home I sit down on the neatly made bed. I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes to clear my mental field. A little directive asserts itself. It is appearing as neatly as if it were being typed out on a fortune-cookie slip. i am hungry, it tells me, and, by gum, I am hungry. Today, instead of going to the Y, I will take myself out to lunch.
I allow my new skills to lead me to a restaurant. I notice with some surprise that the restaurant I have chosen is a pretentious vegetarian restaurant, crowded and uncomfortable. I consult myself and reveal that I would like soup du jour and a house salad. The soup, which I already know to be overpriced, turns out to be terrible as well. I eat it with great relish. My salad arrives, a wilting pile of vegetable parings garnished with American cheese.
“Chopsticks?” asks the waitress. I do a quick internal scan. “Yes, please.” I top off my lunch with a cup of lukewarm coffee, pay the shocking check, and ease myself out of my small torture chair, sighing with satisfaction.
At home I again ask myself what I would like to do, and again my answer arrives. I want, it appears, to write letters. Perhaps there’s been some mistake, I think. But I decide to try, and I find it is true: I do want to write letters.
It is amazing to be able to find out what I want to do at any given moment, out of what seems to be nothing, out of not knowing at all. It is secretly and individually thrilling, like being able to open my fist and release into the air a flock of white doves.
My new insight has stood the test of time. Three days have passed, and it has not faded. I call Kathy and tell her that I’ve discovered the point of life.
“Gosh!” she says. “What is it?” Kathy is always up for something new.
I tell Kathy about the point of life being to have a good time. “Gee,” says Kathy, rolling this around on her brain. “That’s very interesting. But you know,” she adds gently, “I’m not really sure that I really like having a good time, exactly.”
Naturally I have anticipated this objection. No one likes to have a good time, but this is due to a misconception as to what a good time is, or faux fun, I explain grandly. “The thing is,” I tell Kathy, “you’re the only person who can tell what it is to have a good time, and since you’re the only person who can have your own good time, whatever it is that a good time is, is what a good time is! So you can just know what it is and have it!”
“Gosh,” says Kathy. “Maybe so. I’m going to think about that.” She is feeling pretty good herself, having landed a terrific new job, which she tells me all about.
I keep expecting to wear out my new divinatory gift with gluttony, like someone who catches an enchanted fish and makes more than the allotted number of wishes, winding up with a pudding on his or her nose, or living in the pigsty, or whatnot; but it seems, on the contrary, to grow more and more reliable, and with ever-increasing frequency and rapidity I think of what I would like to do and I do it.
The days just clutter up with things I feel like doing and then do. One after another, I fill up and dispatch dayfuls of things.
Summer
I haven’t been to the Y for months, and I almost forgot about it, but this evening I pass it by on my way to dinner. It is fairly late, and many people are leaving the building, walking down the front steps alone or in twos and threes, unchaining their bicycles from the racks in front, and dispersing into the evening. I am quite a distance away, but I feel as though I can see them clearly. Their faces are calm, and they seem invigorated, as if they have been running. The evening sky is domed above the large, lit building, and more and more men and women stream through the doors, radiating outward toward the next thing they are to do, each headed, it looks from where I stand, dead on target.
Transactions in a Foreign Currency
I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I’d poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan’s voice, and when I glanced back at the man on my sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, o
r a single rubber band—a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one’s consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away.
“Still in Montreal?” I said into the phone.
“Yeah,” Ivan said. “I’m going to stay for a while.”
“What’s it like?” I said.
“Cold,” he said.
“It’s cold in New York, too,” I was able to answer.
“Well, when can you get here?” he said. “We’ll warm each other up.”
I’d begun to think that this time there would be no end to the waiting, but here he was, here was Ivan, dropping down into my life again and severing the fine threads I’d spun out toward the rest of the world.
“I can’t just leave,” I said. “I have a job, you know.”
“They’ll give you a few weeks, won’t they?” he said. “Over Christmas?”
“A few weeks,” I said, but when he was silent I was sorry I’d said it.
“We’ll talk it all over when you get up here,” he said finally. “I know it’s hard. It’s hard for me, too.”
I turned slightly, to face the window. The little plant that sat on the sill was almost leafless, I noticed, and paint was peeling slightly from the ceiling above it. How had I made myself believe this apartment was my home? This apartment was nothing.
“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll come.”
I replaced the receiver, but the man on the sofa just sat and moved his spoon back and forth in his cup of coffee with a little chiming sound.
“An old friend,” I said.
“So I assumed,” he said.
“Well,” I said, but then I couldn’t even remember why that man was there. “I think I’d better say good night.”
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 14
