The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (14 page)

For days I have not been able to get out of the apartment. About the point at which it is borne in on me that it is going to be impossible to leave, I begin to get angry. I feel as if years of rage have condensed around the sides of my brain and are dripping down into it, forming pools in which all its other contents are becoming sodden and useless.

Today I go to the Y and I change and shower and swim and shower and ride a bicycle that doesn’t move in the Mini-Gym, and shower and sauna and shower and change, and now I have done all these things alone.

Oh, I see how Kathy can tell whether the elevator is going up or down. There is a little arrow that lights up when the door opens, either red, pointing down, or green, pointing up.

Today was my sixth time at the Y. I know Kathy so well, but I didn’t know this about her: she has a whole life at the Y that she shares with scores and scores of people who don’t know her at all. I like to come to the Y with Kathy and be part of things, but I like to come alone, too. I feel that I am cultivating a silent area of my life.

I think I’m swimming a bit better. I can do five lengths now, and I can swim on my back and on each of my sides. I still can’t quite put my head in the water, though. The water is always cold at first, but I think about how short half a length is, and then I can do it.

Ellen calls again, to see if I am feeling O.K., which I am until she calls. I tell her that I’m swimming a lot these days. She says, “I didn’t know you could swim. How much do you do?”

People will go so far to make each other feel bad. But I don’t feel bad. After all, I do go swimming.

The Y is a secret that everybody knows! I see people there that I know from all sorts of other places, and I see people from the Y all over the neighborhood. Sometimes in a store I will see that a person behind the counter or one shopping in the next aisle is really a pleasant seal from the pool.

In the locker room today I run into Jennifer, a woman I know a bit from somewhere else. She tells me that swimming is the best exercise there is! What a nice person.

The pool is so cold today I can’t even do my half a length to get warm. I stand there and stand there in the shallow end, but I just can’t do it.

Downstairs I tell Bess, “Just couldn’t swim today. Just too cold.”

“Ummmm hmmmm,” she says equably.

I get to the Y again today, but I just can’t face the idea of getting into, or failing to get into, the pool. I can’t face going back home, though, either, so I settle on the Mini-Gym, which is very soothing. It has the ghostly atmosphere of a schoolroom during vacation.

Today a man does sit-ups facing the windows. A woman, also facing the windows, bends in half exactly as the man’s fingers reach his toes. Another woman opposite the first stretches her arms in an arc above her head. I choose a central latitude, perpendicular to the others. I lie on my side and begin to raise a leg to the silent count.

I have just realized something really terrifying—
I don’t swim!
I feel sick. What did I think I was doing, going swimming? I wasn’t going swimming! I can’t swim! I can’t even put my head in the water!

This can’t go on, my just coming to the Y to do exercises. It is a
known fact
that no one can do exercises regularly. Every single magazine article about it says they’re just too boring to do regularly. Also, it only takes half an hour. One change of clothes, one shower, and then I have to go home.

Late at night I think of the terrible things I’ve put my friends through in the past months. I begin to think of the things I’ve always put my parents through, and I know this means big trouble. I get out of bed in a sweat of fear and call my friends, crying stormily, and cry more because I’ve awakened them.

Thursday

At the Y today, chunks of a conversation that had been going on around me in the shower suddenly reassemble—feet, minutes, miles, and pacing—to reveal, whole in my auditory memory, a conversation about running.

Also Thursday

That I cannot Swim does not Necessarily mean I cannot run. This thought breaks over me with repeating fresh force, like peals of hallucinatorily echoing thunder.

Friday

Now that I have been sensitized, I realize that for months I have been surrounded by a continuous susurrus about running.

Saturday

Not only is running not cold, but I won’t drown if I should stop suddenly. I think on Monday I’ll just give it a whirl.

Monday

I can’t get out of the apartment. The hours stretch and telescope. I find myself standing over the kitchen table, which I had approached for some reason earlier. I break out of position only to find that some minutes have elapsed during which I have been staring into the mirror. At what, I wonder. I remember that I had meant to get something from the table, but I seem to be sitting in the other room, where a dull awareness of things to be done impinges on me. Outside the window, the day, in nervous jumps, dies.

Tuesday

This morning I am propelled to the Y. I don’t know exactly how I am going to pitch into my goal of running once I get there, but it can’t be all that impossible. I clearly remember the track that Kathy showed me the first day she brought me, and what it was was a track, is all, with people running around it.

Besides, I could always sound out the friendly guard, whose name, I have learned, is Surf—or Serf, it could be. Oh—it could be Cerf, come to think of it. I change into my gym clothes and a pair of socks borrowed from a sock-wearing friend and my old but unloved blue sneakers and wander out into the hall, where I do in fact find Surf.

Am I going to grab him by the shoulders, cover his hands with kisses, and implore him to tell me what I should do? No. I casually mention that I am going to do some running today.

“Have you ever run before?” he asks. I look at him closely, but the face that looks back is a neutral one. I tell him that I haven’t. “Well, don’t do too much,” he says. “About four laps today. You’ve got to go easy at first.”

Good. Without having aroused his suspicion (what do I mean? suspicion of what?) I have gotten the information I need, which is that, despite the supercharged atmosphere of conversations about it, there is no particular trick to running, unless, of course, there is something so obvious that Surf wouldn’t have thought to tell me, or so embarrassing that he couldn’t bring himself to tell me, or so ineffable that he wasn’t able to tell me.

I take the elevator to the eighth floor, which is where the track is, I know, even though I haven’t seen it since my first day.

The Track

Now that I am about to set foot on it, I find the track a great deal more interesting than I did when I last saw it. There is a tiny, enticing stairway on the far side of the track. A sign pointing down to it says,
TO THE PHYSICAL OFFICE
. What sort of office could that be?

On the track are some people I have seen in the locker room, the pool, or the Mini-Gym, and some entirely new people, including a few leathery men who look too old even to walk. All of these people are running slowly around the track, and I study them to see if there’s anything I can pick up about what they’re doing, but the basic move seems to be just what one would think—one foot down, then the other in front of it, the first again in front, and so on.

Then suddenly I myself step out onto the track, easing myself into the light traffic. It becomes almost instantly clear that the slowness with which the others had appeared to run is illusory. They are running fast, very fast indeed. My legs are moving as fast as I can move them, I lean out ahead of my feet, my mind empty of everything except the sounds of feet and breath, but everyone on the track is streaking by me. The track itself, which only minutes earlier appeared to be a tiny oval, now seems immense. It takes a long, long time to round the ends, and the straight goes on forever. I notice also that there is a bunchy, horizontal cast to my forward progress in comparison to that of my trackmates.

It occurs to me that the four laps suggested by Surf are an unrealistic goal, and I downward revise to three.

Downstairs Jennifer is at her locker, and while I’m working up the energy to open mine, I tell her that I’m running now, instead of swimming.

“Terrific,” she says warmly. “How much do you do?”

“Three laps,” I tell her. We look at each other in consternation. Then I think to add that today was my first day, and we are less embarrassed.

Wednesday

My legs hurt incredibly. I lie in bed while the hours parade by me, icy and knowing, like competitors in a beauty contest.

Thursday

At the Y I run three laps, I walk five laps, and then I run two more laps!

On the way home, I treat myself, on impulse, to a pair of socks, all my own, and appropriate in appearance. I just go into a store and ask for tube socks.

I have always wondered, up until this moment, whenever I have heard them mentioned, what tube socks are. Now I realize that not only do I, like everyone else, know exactly what tube socks are but also that they are exactly what I want. (How could I ever have pretended to myself that I don’t know what tube socks are?! Nobody can’t know what tube socks are! They’re
SOCK TUBES
, and they are the only sort of socks that make any sense, because you just stick your foot into one any old way and leave it there, and the sock, not your foot, has to adjust. The feelings of confusion produced by the term “tube sock” are not, I realize, due to the nature of the tube sock itself but rather to the term’s implication that all socks are not tube socks and the attendant question of why they are not.) The pair I pick out has elegant bands of navy and dark red near the tops.

It seems that my commitment to my socks was warranted. It is now several weeks since I bought them, and I have still been going to the track. Not every day, of course, but what I would call several times a week. I only fear that my impulses to run are a mistake, like my impulses, for instance, to sew, which, upon examination, invariably turn out to be impulses of some other kind—impulses, perhaps, to own a certain garment, or impulses to be
able
to sew, or impulses to be the sort of person who likes to sew, or whatever, but not primary sewing impulses.

In an attempt to eliminate possible hypocrisy from my approach, I have taken to testing myself as I stand at the edge of the track. I say to myself in a voice of profound compassion, a voice that it would be rude to ignore and one that it is difficult not to answer in the way it obviously hopes to be answered, “Well. That certainly does look difficult. If we don’t want to do it today, we truly needn’t. We can just come back tomorrow! We don’t always have to feel like running—sometimes we’re just too tired, or too busy, or too weak. It doesn’t mean we won’t run again ever; it just means we won’t run today.” But I recognize behind the seductive insinuations a familiar enemy who wishes to swindle me out of my little bit of fun.

On the track my mind fills to the top with running.

Fall

Today I walk into the Y shivering. The guards at the elevator, who always greet me now, say, “What’sa matter? You cold?” I nod yes. They look at each other and giggle. “You need a man,” one of them ventures. “That’s right!” the other chimes in. “You need a man!” They roar with laughter and punch each other on the arm. “You need”—they lean on each other, weak with hilarity—“you need a man like
us
!” they shout as the elevator door closes, shutting me in with five men whose grim gazes never waver from the truncated scene.

People have stopped giving me advice right on the track, so I must look more comfortable. People often ask me how long I’ve been running and how far I can run and tell me that the first two miles are the hardest, but that’s different. I can run fifteen laps now, sometimes, which is a far cry from three, and I can almost keep up with the slowest of the tiny, ancient men who scuttle along the inside railing of the track.

What hasn’t stopped is something far more humiliating than unsolicited advice. When I finish my exercises, I walk, instead of taking the elevator, up the many flights to the track. This is seriously difficult, and I do it largely for the beneficial effect it must therefore have on my willpower. Almost every third time I make this journey (thus, about once a week) some huge bozo thunders by and says something like: “Think you’re going to make it? Haw, haw” or “What have
you
been up to? Haw, haw.” I used to just nod and smile weakly. “Haw, haw,” I would agree as each bozo would thud off, but now I feel that I have matured beyond this exchange.