Up For Renewal

by Cathy Alter

  “Why don’t we take the bike?” I asked, genuinely confused. This was Karl’s favorite kind of weather to hop on a bike.

  “I thought it would be nicer to dress in normal clothes, in case we decide to stop for a late lunch.”

  I don’t remember what we talked about as we drove along the back roads of Virginia. I only remember looking up at the sky and watching the sun begin to set behind a bank of clouds. The effect of the pink rays coming through the haze and the clouds drifting toward their finger-tipped union reminded me of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

  Karl made a few turns, and all of a sudden, I recognized where we were.

  “The Inn at Little Washington is right around this corner,” I said helpfully. I had been out to the Inn a few years ago when I profiled the two owners for a feature in the Washingtonian magazine. At the time, I had asked Reinhardt and Patrick to adopt me, falling in love with them and their business of making guests feel, as Patrick had said, “like baby birds in a nest.”

  “Are you hungry?” asked Karl.

  “A little.” I hesitated.

  “Let’s see if we can grab a burger at the bar,” he said, pulling into the Inn’s small parking lot.

  “Are you crazy?” I looked at him like he was about to greet the Queen of England with a corncob pipe between his teeth. “First of all, it’s New Year’s Eve. You can’t just walk into the Inn without reservations. Second of all, the Inn doesn’t have bar food.”

  “Let’s just see.” I had learned not to argue with Karl. Instead, I just stood in the doorway of the restaurant so I could make a quick exit. “They’re going to laugh in your face,” I said to Karl as he brushed by me.

  Instead, a hostess appeared. “May I take your coat?” she asked warmly.

  “What in the world?” I said to Karl, who was doubled over in hysterics.

  “You should have seen your face!”

  When Karl declined to check his coat, I thought of what Missy said and checked his pockets for any bulges. In my research of the Inn, I had read that the restaurant averaged one proposal a night.

  “What do you have in your coat that’s so important?” I teased.

  “It’s still Hanukkah,” he answered, unrattled by my interrogation. “I still have to give you your surprise.”

  After that, I turned the what’s-going-to-happen-next part of my brain off. If that’s what it means to live in the moment, well, I was finally doing it.

  Our dinner talk was so obscenely romantic we should have been slapped with a fine. Karl told me he loved the way I swung my knees back and forth when I drank my coffee. “Sometimes I look at you,” he said, “and I see a little girl.”

  Karl asked if we could have our dessert outside in the garden, which was lit by hundreds of tiny lanterns. He had given me his coat to wear, and I absentmindedly put my hands in the pockets, which were both empty.

  We sat down at a small wrought-iron table with our wine and a plate of miniature pastries. “Would you like to come back here next year?” he asked quietly.

  I told him that if we came back, he’d have to let me pay. “This place is a fortune.”

  “If we come back,” he continued, “you couldn’t come back as my girlfriend.”

  For a fraction of a second, I had the delusional thought that he was breaking up with me. “What? I can’t what?”

  “You’d have to come back as my wife.”

  When we talked about that moment the next day, Karl had told me he had gotten down on one knee, but I hadn’t seen a thing. I think I must have developed hysterical blindness. My eyes were behind a wall of tears. I couldn’t make out the ring in the box, just a slight glitter coming out of a dark shape, like a tiny star from a million miles away. In the movie of my life, I saw Oprah as my bridesmaid, dressed in pale lilac and holding my bouquet under the chuppah. Next to her, my matron of honor, Helen Gurley Brown, was dab-bing her eyes.

  When I finally went to the bathroom, dragging my newly ringed hand down the blue suede wall to the inn’s spectacularly gilded powder room, I sat down on the toilet, dried my eyes, and finally had a good look at what was on my finger. It looked nothing like the photos from InStyle and felt better than anything I had ever put on my body.

  We called my parents from the restaurant. They were having their annual New Year’s Eve cocktail party, and when my father picked up the phone, he sounded like he was in the middle of a conversation.

  “Do you know whom you’re talking to?” I quizzed him. Mostly because I couldn’t be sure if he was actually paying attention to my phone call.

  “Of course I know,” he insisted.

  “Who is it?” I tested him.

  “It’s my daughter.”

  “No, it’s not,” I corrected. “It’s the soon-to-be Mrs. Karl Feldman.”

  It turned out that Karl had sent my father a letter, announcing his intentions in writing. He had hoped to sync the letter’s arrival with his proposal (so there would be no chance of my parents spoiling the surprise), but had mailed the letter to our home in West Hartford instead of to our weekend house in Stonington, where my parents were celebrating the long weekend.

  “Hey!” I heard my dad tell the crowd. “My daughter’s engaged!” The living room erupted in cheers and applause. I started crying all over again.

  My mother grabbed the phone, and my father’s laughter faded into the distance. “How do you feel about the backyard?” I knew that as she was talking to me, she was standing by the sliding door that led to the garden. “We could fit at least forty people back here.”

  “How about a congratulations first?” I laughed, lifting my chin to Karl in an it-figures look. “We can talk details tomorrow.”

  “I am so happy for you,” she said before getting distracted by someone’s request for more ice and hanging up.

  I remembered seeing my sister-in-law Abby right before her wedding. I had come to the bridal suite to watch her sign the ketubah, a sort of Jewish marriage certificate. “I’m so happy,” she had swooned. Even though I was married at the time, I remember thinking to myself, I don’t know what that feels like.

  But now I did. And it was a good thing I had my digital camera along to capture the moment.

  JANUARY

  Wrangle Your Wiggle

  i began the New Year the same way I had for the past ten years—walking with Jeanne. With most of Georgetown sleeping off the previous night, the path along the canal was deserted, except for pockets of rummaging turtledoves. We paused at our regular turnaround point, a portion of an old fence, where we stretched and looked out over the Potomac, which glittered like a sheet of mica.

  “It’s amazing,” said Jeanne, holding my hand and addressing my ring. “I remember you last winter. Two winters ago. Three winters ago.” She looked up at me and I saw that her eyes were brimming. “Cathy,” she said, “your ship has come in.”

  She was right, of course. I thought about where my ship was moored last year, nursing a serious hangover and trying to figure out how I had managed to wake up with a black eye. (Reliving the evening, I recalled my friend Sabrina performing an elaborate dance move and elbowing me in the face.)

  In less than a year, I had turned my life around—mentally, emotionally, and romantically.

  “I’m self-flagellating for everything I didn’t accomplish in the past year,” laughed Jeanne. “And you actually managed to make and keep a new set of resolutions every single month.”

  In all honesty, I felt like taking this month off. Not because I had finally reached my goal. Getting a man was never my endgame. Karl was just one part of my betterment plan (or perhaps he was the external reward for my internal ones).

  The truth was, I still had more months of ameliorative work to contract. But I just didn’t want to think anymore. Or read another word. I just wanted to ring in the New Year, to literally flash around my ring, without first checking to see if January had any articles about “The Rules of Engagement” or “How to Fast Track Him Down the Ais
le.”

  All of a sudden, I had an epiphany. These magazines were like good politicians. Packaged for mass appeal on the shelves, once off, they still needed to shake hands with the widest audience possible. Maybe it was time that I started reading the magazines the way the rest of the female constituents did. Instead of using them to take and retake my psychological picture, why couldn’t I enjoy the magazines for more trivial pursuits? I had spent entire months perfecting my insides—wasn’t it time for the rest of me to get in on the action? After all, I had a wedding dress in my not so distant future.

  This month, with the goal of being the hottest bride in history, I was turning my internal plight outward—on my jiggly upper arms and stomach pooch. For the first time in recent memory, I wanted to feel the burn of multiple fire hydrants.

  I have never owned any of the following: a yoga mat, dumbbells, an exercise ball, or any types of rubber bands, other than the kind that go in your hair. When I was in college, my friend and I famously worked out to Jane Fonda’s 1982 video masterpiece with an open bag of Doritos and a six-pack on the floor next to us.

  Which is not to say I never belonged to a gym or didn’t own a Thigh Master. I’m just extremely lazy and would prefer not to break a sweat while attaining a perfect body. My current fitness routine, walking around, fit the criteria perfectly.

  And that was why Glamour’s “The Year You’ll Get a Great Body” appealed to me. Instead of designing an intimidating, equipment-heavy routine, Glamour’s plan, which was adapted from Your Ultimate Pilates Body® Challenge, consisted of “a 15-minute workout you can do in your pajamas!” Besides not needing a supersized beach ball or a set of dumbbells to complete any of the ten exercises featured in the article, I didn’t even need to leave my bed for the first one, a move labeled “Footwork,” which, curiously, toned the abs and inner thighs. The instructions called for a modified sit-up, where the legs worked independently, bending and unbending with each sit-up or sit-down. The accompanying photo showed a pixie-haired model, smiling like a nut on a floral print bedspread, elbows at her ears and legs aimed toward a sheer-curtained window.

  I’ve always been pretty good at sit-ups. In sixth grade, I did more sit-ups in a minute than my entire gym class and won an iron-on patch as part of the President’s Fitness Campaign. This has been my only physical claim to fame, however.

  As I lifted up and down on my bed (on which rests a Tempur-Pedic mattress that is super cushy and probably not conducive to good sit-upping), my cat Raymond got in on the action. Purring madly (something I rarely heard), he rubbed his cheek on my bent elbow as I got in position, and persisted in circling around and under my raised legs like a maypole for the entire eight repetitions. Thinking Raymond was simply attracted to the newness of the activity, I repeated the exercise, hoping he would lose interest. This only further intrigued him, and he spent the next eight repetitions standing on my chest, staring hard at me.

  The rest of the nine exercises required getting on the floor. Here was where the cushy properties of a yoga mat would have proved beneficial. Before continuing, I had to take a break and hunt around for the ratty sheepskin throw that Karl had bought at Ikea so my coccyx didn’t bore into the floor. Once in place, I was ready for the second exercise, “Breathing,” which, as in “Footwork,” was a misnomer and had nothing to do with exercising the body part suggested. For this move, I had to squeeze my butt cheeks together as I lifted my hips off the floor and formed a slide with my body. “Hold for five counts, squeezing butt, keeping abs tight and pressing the backs of your arms into the floor.” The lady in the photo looked relaxed, and actually, so was I. I could see why Pilates was taking the country by storm.

  Next, I performed some sort of leg lift/scissor kick combo (although its official name is “Single Straight-Leg Stretch”). Despite the misleading names, the directions were clearly written, and the matching photos were easy to pattern. The model looked high on life—who wouldn’t want to give Pilates a whirl? (With all those high-achieving posers in their organic fold-top pants, yoga would always be a hard sell.)

  But then I got to exercise number four: “Rowing.” In one photo, the model reclined on a green square of carpet, in a Tutankhamen-rising-from-the-sarcophagus pose. Then, in a second photo, she had somehow left the carpet and was floating floorless in white space. She was now curled over her straightened legs with her arms thrust out behind her, palms up. How she went from one position to the next was a mystery, and the copy, instead of offering supplemental aid, just confused the situation even more:

  On the floor, sit tall with your legs extended, your feet in a V with heels together and toes slightly apart; place your hands in fists, and bend your elbows wide to the sides and bring your hands to your breastbone.

  This was the King Tut pose from the first picture; it was as far as I could go before everything disintegrated into a game of S&M Twister:

  Pull your belly button toward your spine, inhale and slowly roll your lower back toward the floor, as shown, squeezing your butt and inner thighs together to keep your lower body anchored to the ground. (Only go as far as you can without tipping backward.) From this position, open your arms wide to the sides, palms facing back. Exhale and fold forward over your legs as you circle your arms behind you with palms up and fingertips touching the floor, as shown. Holding this position with your upper body, inhale, circle your arms around and reach toward your toes. (Throughout the move, do not let your shoulders ride up toward your ears.)

  Also, do not let your fists rise up to God in unmitigated rage.

  I made it to the seventh exercise, “Chest Expansion”—which, surprise, surprise, toned the opposite and worked the back—before I was forced to quit. I just couldn’t face the “Mermaid,” a bizarre pose where the model appeared to be legless, like a beautiful sideshow attraction.

  Surprisingly, the next morning, although I couldn’t recall any exercise that actually targeted this area, my inner thighs felt like I had just gotten off a horse.

  “Why are you walking so funny?” asked Karl, banging his chest like a gorilla. Apparently he thought my gait had something to do with his sexual prowess.

  I was actually keeping Mission Hot Bod under wraps. My cat had continued to mock my attempts at Pilates, and I knew if Karl caught wind of my routine, he would have a field day teasing me. Even though he knew I was sensitive about my tummy bulge, he overjoyed in grabbing it and speaking to it like a separate organism, a symbiotic bird on a hippo. To ensure that he never witnessed a single sit-up, I used the hour between work and his arrival home to exercise, changing from my office uniform to workout wear like the jazzercise version of Mr. Rogers.

  Even though I never mastered “Rowing,” after the first week I was able to perform most of the exercises in Glamour without constantly referring back to the instructions or photos. I had tried to get a tape measure around certain body parts to track my progress, but it was too hard to accomplish without help. Glamour recommended adding thirty minutes of cardio to the routine “for even faster results,” so in addition to walking on weekends with Jeanne, I had invited Jane, one of my coworkers, to walk with me twice a week during lunch. When I swung by her office to pick her up that first day, I handed her a tape measure.

  “Can you help get this around my bicep?” I asked.

  “What bicep?” she answered without skipping a beat.

  We bundled up and headed through Georgetown, following the same towpath that Jeanne and I took on weekends. Our conversation, though, was markedly different.

  “I’m going to miss all of your crazy stories,” sighed Jane. She began listing all the whackos I had dated, starting with the guy who once entertained me for an entire evening in his apartment wearing a ratty old wig and false teeth. “Does Karl do anything funny?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not really,” I said, feeling like I had let her down. “Well, the other night,” I began hopefully. “I heard a lot of banging around in the kitchen and I thought, Oh, good, Karl is cookin
g. But when I walked in the room, he was hopped up on the sink, straddling the faucet, bolting our dish rack down to the windowsill in an effort to save counter space.”

  “I guess that’s funny,” Jane said, clearly crestfallen.

  She didn’t congratulate me on my engagement to a solid guy or admit that she was relieved that she wouldn’t be hearing any more stories about clearly imbalanced gentlemen, and I wondered why certain people who claimed to like me could be so endlessly, subtly cruel. And now that I thought about it, Jane still insisted on calling me Zymie, the nickname she had derived from my former married name, even though she was repeatedly reminded that I no longer went by it, and hadn’t since I was actually married.

  Which led me to an equally concerning fact: my checks, driver’s license, and email address all identified me by my former name. I hadn’t changed it legally, though, which suggested that I secretly knew I wouldn’t be staying married long enough to obtain a new social security card. Still, it had been more than three years since my divorce—what was taking me so long to perform what was clearly administrative busywork?

  Sitting in Dr. Oskar’s waiting room, I thought about why I hadn’t gotten around to altering my name. Was it just laziness, the same type of immobility that had led me to avoid all strenuous forms of exercise? Or was removing my old name from official documents tantamount to erasing part of my identity? It was like denying a significant part of my past. However sad and traumatic, a small part of me would be going away for good.

  While I sat pondering my name, I was also easily able to eavesdrop on The Loud Talker, whose appointment was still in session and who usually sounded like he was confessing all his inner turmoil through a megaphone.

  “So I said to her, ‘Boy, you have a beautiful body and I’d like to have some of it’”—he yelled, sounding super irritated. “And she looked at me with hatred and said, ‘Fuck you, you know I don’t fit into any of my jeans.’ And when I asked her if it explained the pile of jeans I had just found in the Dumpster, she yelled at me and said my therapy wasn’t working. So that’s when I called her a bitch because, I gotta say, I think this stuff is working.”