Mercy (94 page)

decrepitude, and it’s dominion she’s after, tormenting the

likes o f me. But she don’t get o ff on it so I keep m oving even

though I’m barely m oving and you reach a point where if you

shudder you feel the muscles move and a tremor is distance

covered; if you shake, the muscles move; and helplessly you

do shake. Sensei learned to count to a hundred in a school

pioneered by Stalin; she don’t allow for human flaws, which is

mental, as he would have agreed; she fixes defects in the mind

that are expressed as incapacities in the body; it’s right

thinking that makes the abdomen strong enough to shatter a

normal man’s fist should he deliver a punch at the top o f his

form; you can punch Sensei in the gut with everything you got

and she stands still, straight, tall, she don’t feel nothing in her

gut but the hitter is hurt. Push-ups is different because women

can’t do them, because all we get to do in life is carry our

breasts and shopping, and from childhood they make us stay

weak in the shoulders but we don’t even know it; and so

push-ups take forever to learn; and even the best students take

forever to learn them; to do one is an achievement, and you

burn with fury that they incapacitated you so much. Sensei can

do butterfly push-ups, a hundred or a hundred and fifty; it’s

push-ups but you do them on your fingertips instead o f using

your whole hand; your hands don’t hit the ground, only the

tops o f your fingers. I never seen anything like it in m y life. It’s

an unreal as flapping your wings and actually flying. Y et I seen

Sensei do it; a hundred times; she says she can do fifty more. I

can barely breathe thinking about what it would feel like to do

it or to be so strong or so agile or so fucking brave, because I’d

be afraid o f falling; o f breaking m y fingers; o f slipping; o f pain.

I love it; I live for her to do it; up and down, with the tips o f her

fingers taking all the weight o f her body going down, then

lifting her up. I can raise just the top half o f m y body, about

five times, which is pretty usual and she says that’s how to

build the muscles and we have to have patience to undo the

damage o f being made weak; and I see it ain’t just the penis

they nail you with, they pin you down at both ends, and all the

strength you could have in the upper part o f your body is

atrophied as if you was paralyzed your whole life; except you

w asn’t. I tell m yself that whatever I can take from him,

w hom ever, I can take for me; me; now; and when I get weak

and fall back to m y bad old w ays because I never had a me and

still don’t except by forcing m yself to think so I say I’m doing

it for her; this me is pretty tenuous but I can take anything for

him and a fair amount for her and I play with it in m y mind,

that it’s for her, and I watch m yself with interest, how physical

pain changes when it is in the guise o f sex or love or infatuation

or even just seduction, I will get her attention by m oving,

m oving, ju st a little more, just a little bit more; I pretend this is

sex but I still never get past sixty and it is because I have wrong

thinking and a girl’s stupid life. B y sixty I mean sixty o f barely

m oving; I never got past seventeen actual whole sit-ups and I

never got to one whole push-up; and I still don’t know w hy

her fingers don’t break from the butterfly push-ups; and she

teaches us to make a fist and we practice and m y fingers are too

stupid and weak even to do that right, I try to fold them under

so every joint is folded under every other joint so it’s solid and

hard and not filled with air the w ay girls make fists but my

fingers w o n ’t m ove right and I can’t make the sections tight

enough. The part I like is breathing. Y ou take all the air in you,

inert stuff, and you exhale like you is threatening God

face-to-face; you push like the air itself could kill. All the air

you took in during fucking, all that Goddamn spastic inhaling,

all that panting like some desperate dog, you shoot out, like

it’s bullets; I got a lot o f air to push out. Then there’s the horse

position, where you take a stance, your legs spread far apart so

your thigh muscles are tearing from the weight o f your whole

body resting on them; your feet are pointed out and your legs

are spread far apart and your knees are bent and pointing out

and the rest o f you is on your thighs, absolutely still, at perfect

silence; and after about five minutes your calf muscles begin to

bear the weight o f your thighs which time makes heavier and

somehow you feel the weight o f your soul and your life in the

muscles in the insides o f your thighs, because if you ’re a girl

you lived there and m em ory’s stored there and the world

banged up against you there, so you undertake to bear the

burden o f it with conscious knowledge, a physical self-

consciousness, a remorseless, aching cognition; and the

history in your body comes alive as the muscles in your thighs

strain under the weight o f your life; the life o f the cell; a

brilliant physical solitude with all o f the self spread out along

the fault line o f the thighs, a bridge o f muscle; and you are

absolutely still, contemplative, in pain, yes, a located pain, a

fierce ache o f recognition and identity; you are still; until

Sensei orders you to relax, which is only slightly less

burdensome but feels like deliverance; and I think to m yself

that everything these thighs took they will get strong enough

to give back; it is a promise I make m yself in horse position to

be able to bear it; it is a promise I make every time over and

over; it is a promise my thighs will remember even if I forget.

Sensei says women got an advantage with the thighs, more

strength than we might expect, because o f the high heels they

make us wear; I got strong thighs because o f the reason under

the reason; I been in horse position on m y back most o f my

life; I like it alone and standing up. Sensei says eat steak but I

can only afford potatoes, or sometimes frozen squash, or

sometimes cheese, or the free bar food, but the men are

unbearable so I don’t do that unless I am ravenous; sometimes

I’m hungry too much. I take double classes twice a week

because I want to be strong; I am dying to be strong; all my

money goes to Sensei and I fail at sit-ups twice in a night and I

fail to do one whole push-up twice in a night, two times a

week; and I have to come up with a stupendous amount o f

money, because it is fifteen dollars a class, so that is fifteen

times four, and Sensei berates me when I say I will have to take

a single class twice a week for a month or two or even three