The Paris Review's Blog, page 14

The Image of the Doll: Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn-Out Language

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattractive traits, that which is me but is not me. Those I love but don’t love. What I ought to do and be, but neither do nor am.

Reading these poems, which were written between 1939 and 1976, I realized that Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry is always about the discrepancy between who I ought to be and who I am (which leads to the inevitable awkward moment in so many of Ditlevsen’s poems).

Take, for instance, “The Eternal Three,” where love is not the exalted union of two souls; rather, one is always in love with the wrong person. Or “Self-Portrait 1,” where Ditlevsen lists what she can and cannot do: “I cannot: cook / pull off a hat / entertain company … I can: be alone / do the dishes / read books.” Or “Warning”: where the heart “can only dream, not yearn / for what exists in light of day.” In these poems there is so often a longing for something that is not, something that was, something that could be.

Or, in “There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die”: “You had a girl’s dream of a husband and baby, / and you got what you wanted but were still alone.” Fulfilling the dream of family doesn’t bring an end to loneliness, it doesn’t lead to what you thought it would. Instead, you’re split in two—you are now the girl from before, the girl who still lives and cannot die—and the woman who is “left roaming a world of stone.”

While I write this, the nursery schoolteacher gathers my son up into her arms; soon they’ll hand out apple slices to the children. While I write this, our wages trickle into our accounts, silent as snow; and while I write this, my husband cycles to his office; and while I write this, the hours race by, and I need to buy groceries, and I need to clean the fridge.

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 into a working-class family in Vesterbro, Copenhagen. She attended school until the age of sixteen, after which she did various odd jobs and finally, in 1940, at the age of twenty-two, married the fifty-two-year-old Viggo F. Møller, editor of the poetry journal Vild hvede, who had published her first poem in 1937. “It probably wasn’t necessary to marry him to move up in the world, but no one had ever told me that a girl could make something of herself on her own,” Ditlevsen later said. She had debuted in 1939 with the lauded poetry collection A Girl’s Mind, and from there her body of work grew steadily. She produced about a book a year or every other year—a staggering output—publishing thirty books and countless articles and agony columns. Meanwhile she had children and got divorced, then remarried, first to Ebbe Munk in 1942, then to the doctor Carl T. Ryberg in 1945. In the following years she became addicted to prescription drugs. In 1949 she was committed for the first time to a psychiatric ward (she would return several times throughout her life), and in 1951 she fell head over heels in love with Victor Andreasen, an editor of the tabloid newspaper Ekstra bladet, to whom she was married for twenty-two years before their bitter divorce, which figures into several poems in this book. In 1955 the collection A Woman’s Mind was published, cementing Ditlevsen’s acclaim and earning her De Gyldne Laurbær (the Golden Laurels), a once-in-a-lifetime prize awarded by booksellers. Her magnum opus, the memoir Dependency, was published in 1971 and describes her drug addiction and many husbands. The book’s Danish title, Gift, is a homonym that means both poison and married; in this way, Ditlevsen pointed to the thin line between love and addiction, between marriage and abuse.

Victor Andreasen and Ditlevsen’s relationship was turbulent and the subject of much gossip, not least in the press. Shortly after their divorce, Ditlevsen published an anonymous personal ad in her ex-husband’s newspaper that read:

Having escaped a long, unhappy marriage, I feel lonely in this world where everyone is coupled up. I am 52 years old, 172 centimeters tall, slender and blonde. I have an eight-room apartment in Copenhagen and a lovely summerhouse. I have no lack of money, only love. I’ve made a name for myself in literature, but what good is that when I am missing a loyal and loving companion of a suitable age, preferably a motorist. Interests: literature, theater, people and domestic bliss. Please supply a photograph and details of personal circumstances.

I have always thought that the ad was such a good example of how Ditlevsen, in demeaning herself, in fact gains the upper hand. It’s a tactic she uses often in her poems. The literary critic and author Niels Barfoed has described it as follows (italics mine):

There is something unguarded and accessible about Tove Ditlevsen’s person, at times even a certain do-what-you-will-with-me attitude, which can be shocking if you don’t understand that this defenselessness is her own particular form of resilience. She’s tough as nails, this woman. Accessible? Certainly. Behind her accessibility, you sense secret areas, concealed regions not a soul can access. Not even her. And it is naturally these places we encounter in her poetry, which is to a great extent poetry about darkness and fear of the dark, about something that lives its own life inside you, inside reality.

I can’t say whether Barfoed’s quote captures Tove Ditlevsen’s person, but it’s a good description of one of her literary strategies: using defenselessness as resilience. Behind the defenselessness there is something you cannot reach or lay claim to do what you will, but there are parts of me you will never conquer.

Everyone knew right away who had written the ad. Ditlevsen was incredibly famous. From the outset of her career, she appeared almost weekly in magazines and newspapers, on television and radio, in articles, photo shoots, and her popular agony column in Familie journalen.

Many of Ditlevsen’s contemporaries looked down on her for appearing in lifestyle features, giving interviews, often posing for photographs, in the kitchen, at her desk, with her children, almost always in the home.

Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most photographed writers. Her fame helped keep her financially afloat, because even though she was very popular among readers, she was always short of money (what she writes in the personal ad isn’t true, or at least she contradicts herself repeatedly elsewhere). Or perhaps she feared running out. Her upbringing in a working-class family where money was always scarce had a lasting impact.

Tove Ditlevsen was not only a working-class writer but a worker’s writer. She describes the conditions of workers in Vesterbro, the daily lives of women and children in working-class neighborhoods, the poor, the marginalized, the oddballs, the sex workers on Istedgade. In her poems, there are also echoes of working women’s schlagers (catchy pop songs with often sentimental lyrics), poetry, and lullabies.

Housework, child-minding, care work, and so forth are important features of her authorship. Her writing has not previously been considered proletarian literature, but I would like to explore this further.

The revolutionary subject, the worker, has always been presumed to be a man at the factory. But when women bring children into the world, children who grow up to go to the factory, work is being done. All the work that goes into reproducing the labor force, not only growing them from your own flesh and blood, birthing and nourishing them, but also keeping them clean and capable, keeping the hearth warm, caring for the elderly—all this is work, is production, reproductive work, and should be considered as such.

If it is the woman’s job to bear children and keep house, to produce new workers for the state, feed them, keep them clean and healthy, the woman’s relationship to her own body can be compared to that of the worker’s to the factory. Hence, women’s literature about their own bodies and housework is workplace literature. Tove Ditlevsen was a worker’s writer.

It was with good reason that feminists of the seventies (a group Ditlevsen never identified with; she remained in every way possible an outsider until the end) said that “women never retire” and “holidays and weekends are overtime.” In her 1959 essay collection Flugten fra opvasken (Fleeing the washing-up), Ditlevsen describes how a woman can escape the household only by having a cause greater than herself—doing charity work, becoming a nun, or perhaps obeying the call to write.

In many of Ditlevsen’s poems, we find this reproductive work described—the work of housekeeping and childrearing, of waiting on men, and her aversion to it. While her early poems are written in formal verse and, in the original Danish, rhyme, her later work is narrow on the page and pithy in style. The ultimate shift occurs in The Adults (1969), which is characterized by the exhaustion and audacity that hallmark the rest of her authorship. Gone is the “girl’s dream of a husband and baby”; now is the time of divorce, of alcoholism, and no matter how experienced and accomplished Ditlevsen becomes—as a writer, a mother, a woman—she will never feel at ease with domesticity.

Her poems increasingly revolve around this feeling of unease. From her debut until A Woman’s Mind in 1955, her poems uphold the dream of a future happiness only possible in the bosom of family, but her later poems harbor no such illusions of any possible familial harmony and instead center on seeking brief respite: in writing, in alcohol, in childhood dreams, in death.

Ditlevsen died by suicide in 1976, at the age of fifty-eight. Photographs of her funeral procession show a sea of working-class women trailing behind her coffin through the streets of Copenhagen.

Since her debut in 1939 aged twenty-one, Ditlevsen’s poetry has been dogged by the question of whether or not it was old-fashioned. Tove Ditlevsen continued to write in rhyming verse after World War II and well into the sixties, and this was, understandably, provocative to many, not least her fellow poets who were waging the modernist battle to challenge readers’ conception of what a poem should be.

This critique of Ditlevsen was common and is perhaps best encapsulated by the author Klaus Rifbjerg’s comment in a 2005 TV program about Ditlevsen: “She wrote rhyming poems, which were well crafted and well formulated, but wore a kind of corset she had squeezed herself into … She followed a tradition that goes back not only to the previous century, but the one before that, a continuation of that sort of romantic poetry where ‘pain’ rhymes with “rain” and so on … Quite old-fashioned!”

Here too lurks a discrepancy between how people believed Tove Ditlevsen ought to write, and how she actually wrote.

Let’s talk about Rifbjerg’s corset. It’s an apt image: comparing fixed verse with the restrictive and constrictive garments women have been stuffed into throughout history. In this case, it’s clear that Ditlevsen has squeezed herself into the corset of her own volition. She has chosen this fixed form, these old-fashioned rhymes, a form of misogynist poetic control.

But perhaps Ditlevsen didn’t have the same opportunities to be free as Rifbjerg when he indirectly championed free verse as the superior antithesis of the literary corset. And one might ask whether the experiences Ditlevsen writes of have anything at all to do with freedom. Are they not precisely about a lack of freedom? About lost girlish dreams, about pain inflicted in a distant childhood, about husbands who walk out and children who look up at you strangely, and you remember once again that you are their mother?

While I write this, the nursery school children are strutting hand in hand down the path at Vestre Cemetery where Tove Ditlevsen is buried, the workers are slipping out into the sunshine after lunch, it smells of coffee, and I wonder whether the time in my life when a man will love me intensely, with no regard for children and little dogs, is definitively over.

What I’m trying to say is that some of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems work deliberately with worn-out language, with sentimental language. With the corset. With the cliché. It’s the voice of Eve in “Eve,” who says: “That’s why my mouth has wilted, it has kissed too many men, / it has sung too many songs, it will never sing again.”

For me, this has always been a model of how you could write as a woman. Not the only way, but an important way. To embrace the image of the doll and speak from that position, cast aside like Eve in the poem, with nothing but old, worn songs on your fading lips.

It isn’t easy to explain, but I understood it intuitively the moment I met Tove Ditlevsen for the first time, at the age of twelve, on a daybed in my grandfather’s study after everyone else had gone to sleep, after I found a green book on his bookshelf and began to read.

I envisioned how she, the poet, wanders through a forest of pop songs, picking shiny, bright-red plastic apples for her poems.

These are the poems that take a form that doesn’t seek originality, doesn’t want to make it new. What do the poems want? They want to revive what has been cast off by tradition, the poetic scraps on the garbage heap. Why do they want to do that? Because using an archaic register is a working-class poet’s middle finger to the hoity-toity modernists and, at the same time, a way of resurrecting discarded language. With this discarded language, it’s possible to express an experience that cannot be articulated in the prevailing forms.

The preoccupation with rediscovering Ditlevsen’s work has been considered, by some modern critics, as a feminist pursuit: not literary, but solely political. This is an attempt to relegate Ditlevsen’s work to the field of “women’s writing.” It’s interesting to see how this is linked to capitalist ideas of sales and branding, as if the reemerging interest for Ditlevsen is an unholy marriage between women’s lib and some dirty capitalist spiel, where young girls, vain creatures that they are, are sold pocket mirrors in the forms of novels, poems, selfies. The devaluation of female-coded poetry is palpable.

Which leads me to this idea of the woman—particularly in Ditlevsen’s lifetime—as an anachronism in society. Of society being organized in such a way that the woman must play a role she has stopped playing (housewife, beloved, beauty).

I’m reminded of a quote from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook about women’s love lives: “Women’s emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don’t live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly … I am always coming to the conclusion that my real emotions are foolish. I am always having, as it were, to cancel myself out.”

To cancel oneself out, to wear a corset.

If we read Ditlevsen’s poems through the lens of Lessing, you could say that Ditlevsen’s so-called sentimentality is a poetic anachronism that functions as a subversive tool, an anachronism on a par with a woman’s emotional life.

There live girls in us who will not die.

And while I write this, all my kitchen appliances hum and spin, soon I’ll have to pick up my son, and soon the chicken will need to be put in the oven, and soon I’ll need to find the strength among my emotions to support my husband in his much too stressful life, and I have to condition my hair, yet again sleep for only two or three hours tonight, and maybe our kid has asthma, and I write, “Sorry for not responding sooner,” “Apologies for the late reply,” “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” I don’t understand how it’s possible to be a mother and a partner and a worker at the same time in this society without breaking down. Let me be your canary in the coal mine, I’m about to pass out from lack of air. I am too hard to love, I am ripe for hospitalization. I cannot: arrive on time / remember names / make my body available at all times of day. I can: read poems / fold clothes / soothe my child.

 

From the foreword to There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Olga Ravn is a prize-winning Danish novelist and poet. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, the Ursula K.Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. It was published in 26 territories. MY WORK was published in English in 2023 to great critical acclaim. Her most recent novel, THE WAX CHILD, will be published by New Directions in November 2025.

Room, Moon, Moon, Balloon: Reading and Breathing

Berthe Morisot, Le berceau (detail), 1872, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

I have read Goodnight Moon to my daughter over and over since she was an infant. Its long, drawn-out goodnight to everything in that surreal green room for a little rabbit in blue striped pajamas. Margaret Wise Brown is a special children’s book writer, psychoanalytically inspired, educated at the revolutionary Bank Street School in New York City where apparently she went too far for even their sensibilities. A New Yorker profile notes her tendency toward extremes going all the way back. “She was a tomboy with a terrible temper … [W]hen Brown became angry she some-times held her breath until she turned blue, prompting a nanny to plunge her head into a tub of ice-cold water.” Brown’s fantastical, wild, and brief life befits the modernist poetics of her writing, hidden in the simplest of stories. She changed children’s literature, and, like a good psychoanalyst, she claims she was mere “eye and ear” for the children who were the real writers of her stories.

“Goodnight room, goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light and the red balloon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.” At face value, a simple set of rhymes and repetitions: room, moon, moon, balloon, and night, night, night, light, night. However, Brown manages to evoke the transition from object to sound and image, because who would fail to hear the moo of the cow jumping over the moon, or the transition of night as goodnight light. And who would not think of the balloon in the room, rising in the air, like the moon in the sky outside. The moon outside is shown in the window in the room, while the cow jumping over the moon is a picture in the pictured room.

This is a subtle didactic lesson, to be sure. It speaks the way a child navigates reality as space, air, breath, object, sound, words, jumping from images that are real to imaginary ones in picture books. Also, how these qualities permeate one another, forming a world of associations. All that is seen and named and heard, we must say goodnight to—a version of goodbye—when going to sleep. How does the child know what will be there when it wakes up? The book reassures continuation. Reading the book, night after night, is an enactment of that continuation. Continue reading, continue saying goodnight, continue finding the world still there after your brief absence from it.

The book first lists what there is in the bunny’s room, and then takes a second moment to say goodnight to all of it. The clocks only appear in the second round, along with its rhyming partner “socks,” which failed to be mentioned in the first half, though they were visually included in the picture. The missing object comes forward to be said goodnight to along with the mention of time. Everything’s time will come. In time, everything can be counted.

Brown, whose books only came to be appreciated after her early death at the age of forty-two, was following a new tradition of children’s writing that attended to “the here and now” of life rather than fantastical fairy tales. Children find the everyday world magical. They don’t need more magic than that. Brown brought her love of language and avant-garde sensibilities to the task of writing children’s stories. She says she loves the Oedipal child right before repression sets in. The New Yorker profile quotes words from her notebook: “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again” while noting that she else-where claimed that children of this age enjoy a “keenness and awareness” that will likely become dampened by life.

Above all I love her love of children’s language to the extent of dare—try if you can. She seems to have lived her life this way. The most fantastical addition to the goodnights takes place towards the end of the book. “Goodnight comb, goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.” It’s still a revelation to read this page where nobody and mush appear and stand firm—worth a goodnight. While mush is certainly food, it is also the dematerialized object, the food eaten, or the food left uneaten. The remnant, there next to nobody and nothing. We are close to the ending: “Goodnight to the old lady whispering hush. Goodnight stars, goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”

We have the final appearance of the only other person next to the little rabbit going to sleep—the old lady and her strange whispers of hush, maybe gentle, maybe harsh. It’s hard to tell. And then we zoom out beyond her to the stars, the air, the noise. Every night we say goodnight to all the others. Goodnight to the noises that fill our days with one another, that keep us bound together as humans. Goodnight to the air that carries these sounds, and the stars that mark the outer limits of this world, just like the moon and edges of my room.

It is as if she understands the magical and slightly uncanny journey that a child takes nightly in allowing themselves to go to sleep and wake up again, this rhythmicity like breathing that begins to mark time and time away from other humans. Thinking about this book, about Margaret Wise Brown, I started to see how many children’s books reference air, speech, noise, sound. Of course, these books—themselves always read aloud—are the material medium for beginning to learn speech. An induction into another type of breathing, teeming with significance. A space for closeness with words, pictures, sounds, repetitions, at points of transition in the difficult life of a child.

When my daughter is finally left in her crib alone, either at naptime or at night, she speaks and sings. “Crib speech,” as it is called: she repeats fragments of songs and books, sometimes interspersed with bits of conversation from the day, close to what Freud, speaking of dream matter, called the day residue, like a fantastical mash-up mix tape. All the phonemic distortions and creative analogizing and agglutinizing of words that attack the stability of language is on full display. It really is an early form of free association.

I listen to her follow her mind from the pop of the caterpillar from its egg in the beginning of The Hungry Caterpillar, to the pop of bubbles in her favorite fish song, to pop pop papa. She rewrites song lyrics when she reaches a part she doesn’t know, and these distortions find their way back when we sing it the next day. “Now I know my ABCs, Mama mama mama me.” Language is the place we find ourselves together and then separate.

I try to preserve these inventions rather than remind her of the correct lyrics. We can sing those again later. Years earlier I tried too hard to preserve some of my son’s phonetic neologisms, like his substitution of benge for beige; he said it with such gusto, like Stone Benge. I asked everyone around him to leave it be. He later figured out it wasn’t the right word and was furious with me. A mother shouldn’t willfully tamper with the symbolic … I suppose.

A slightly hysterical distress about these lawful codes could turn into full-blown disgust at the books that were explicitly teaching language to my daughter. They acted like an index of correct transfer from speech to reality. “Besides, they fail to even differentiate what they think they are indicating!” I yelled. Like the word red and a picture of a red apple. How am I supposed to know you don’t mean apple? Don’t we learn about language so much better with Margaret Wise Brown, with her gentle free play of associations, than with these didactic monstrosities?

I know better now the chorus of language that can be kept alive both within the constraints of language and by making room for what is so painfully and wonderfully open in it. No poetry is written without a deep sense for the rules, grammar, and structure of language. Willy-nilly invention is cheap. Margaret Wise Brown took a year to write one of her children’s books. Apparently, the year was spent refining what was, at first, a furiously scribbled draft on an envelope or napkin.

In All the World, which reads like a secular prayer, the author Liz Garton Scanlon also does the work of explaining the turning of day into night, giving its small reader—or listener—a glimpse of a vast world that vanishes in sleep. Of course the “all” of the book is amusing, given the tiny fragment of the world that children know. But it is the word, idea, rhyme, that carry the prayer: the “all,” then, is in fact the “all” of language which we can’t see in its totality, but that we take in all at once, and without consent—which is why Lacan said that language was akin to a trauma, and why, throughout the lives that follow this enormous intake of breath, we forever dream of this “all.”

In All the World, as the day becomes noon, a storm comes in. “Nest, bird, feather, fly. All the world has got its sky.” We see the air and clouds rushing in, birds taking flight on a torrent of wind. It starts the rain: “Slip, trip, stumble, fall. Tip the bucket, spill it all. Better luck another day. All the world goes round this way.” This is the page that most will remember, where the skies, filled with rain, gather into a puddle. Time and space collide in the image of weather and the day that goes awry, that stumbles in the same way as children with their little bodies and new instrument of speech.

A little fear and hesitation visit these images which seem to push us inside, away from the weather. Dinner is being prepared. Day turns to night. “Spreading shadows, setting sun. Crickets, curtains, day is done. A fire takes away the chill. All the world can hold quite still.” The clearing sky as dusk falls is the image of stillness from which a light turns on inside a home. The idea of waiting, holding, stillness, foreshadows sleep. Sleep is coming after the turns and tumbles of time and weather and bodies throughout a day.

But not yet! The home erupts with people and sounds. “Nanas, papas, cousins, kin. Piano, harp and violin. Babies passed from neck to knee. All the world is you and me. Everything you hear, smell, see.” It’s an almost manic moment following the sullen stillness that was atmospheric. The feeling of the baby being passed, the feeling of being close to the neck, or bounced on the knee, the difference in these positions of what you can smell or see.

The rhythm of the book is foretold by the “all” that must be evoked and navigated, from the world and weather to the feelings and smells and sounds at home. This “all” emerges as a kind of joyous human uproar before the ending of the book, which sounds its only false note: “Hope and peace and love and trust. All the world is all of us.” If we must, we must.

I thought of these books, the way they interpolate their readers and listeners into the atmosphere of language, while reading Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose, the last book she published during her lifetime—her last word. This short fictional work is about her baby twin granddaughters, reading more like a children’s story than adult fiction. The twins think about stories and memories and memories of stories they’ve heard. “She had loved long, long ago (being a twin, she liked things that happened twice) but she had become aware of another way to begin, a way Mother and Father both used when they read stories at bedtime. Once upon a time: that is what the stories said.” But there was a sticking point—upon. They didn’t know what it meant, and it only seemed to be used when reading stories.

“Up, he said, and on. He picked up each twin in turn and held her up (saying the word) and then put her on (usually Mother and Father’s bed),” writes Glück. But the twins still can’t get a grip on this word. Once felt better because Marigold heard the one in it, which always began the counting lessons. “And time was the difference between waking up and going to sleep … Once must mean that time doesn’t happen again.” Like when you fall, you only fall and hurt yourself once in that one way.

Marigold decides she wants to write a book and settles for once time as the way to start, leaving out the confusing upon. “She was trying to hear what the book wanted. Then she listened and waited. But the book was completely silent in that way of nonexistent things … When the book is ready to talk it will talk. Like us, Marigold thought.” Once time is like long, long ago. And the twins were beginning to remember things even though there wasn’t much behind them.

In not long at all, they had gone from not breathing and living in the water like tadpoles, to being able to breathe and even hold a cup of water and drink by themselves. That’s a lot! Marigold wants to learn to remember before she must remember—this is what gives her the idea of writing a book. “But actually it was Rose who remembered farther back, being the older twin. I will have to breathe first, Rose thought (it was her first memory). I will have to teach her.”

At the end of Glück’s book, they must go to sleep after a party. This is no way to end a book, thinks Marigold. This ending is too soon! Marigold, watching Rose sleep, tries to conjure her long, long ago, trying to make it real. And then once time, as if this could change the ending. But everyone was sleeping. Later, “deep, deep in the night,” Rose awakens to see Marigold sleeping. She thinks to herself how she must be having a wonderful dream about her book: “In the dream, Marigold was writing her book, a real book that people who could read would read … The end was the morning. I think I must have read that somewhere, Marigold thought, later the next day. But of course she couldn’t have since she couldn’t read.”

I love that Glück turns some of her last moments of writerly attention to a children’s story, that her last words return us to first words. Or better, the meta-story of children listening to stories—ones that destine us to become speakers, and maybe writers. Reading aloud is a magical exposure to words that speak to the enduring mystery of life, breath, language, sleep, and time.

In Goodnight Moon and in All the World, we end with air and the sounds that travel through them as the thread connecting us to our loved ones. The child, I think, must be consoled at sleep. Helped to believe the parent, and everything else in their room and beyond, will still be there in the morning to welcome them to a new day. The incantation of the children’s story is the rhythm of bodies and language connected to the rhythm of the day dramatized as the changes in the sky, from light to temperature to weather to seasons. To the stilling of the body after a day’s work and play.

Air is so palpably visible in the life of a child: at once written into the most indelible children’s stories, and the medium through which they’re received. How have we forgotten the air? The air is there, all around us, everywhere, and it is gathered into speaking to help the child feel the extension and continuation of all the world. It is a first intimation of time where night is the moment when the sounds stop. Air is part of the sensation of a body in space, and speaking gives meaning as the space children take on in the mind of adults who repeatedly babble with them, read, sing. This means that at one point we were so close to the air. From this vantage point, doesn’t it seem like we would have done anything to protect it? Where did this feeling go?

 

From On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, to be published by Catapult in March.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of Disorganization and Sex and Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis. She is also the cowriter, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine. She teaches at the New School for Social Research.

New Theater, New York, January 2025

Dead as a Dodo. Photograph by Erato Tzavara.

For two weeks at the beginning of January in New York, a cluster of theater festivals—including Under the Radar, Prototype, the Exponential Festival, and PhysFestNYC—stage a confetti cannon’s worth of experimental shows. This year, the first two festivals ended January 19, though some works have been extended into February. Past years have taught me to set modest expectations about intake. I wouldn’t be able to see every show, but many are short enough that you could, if you really wanted to, play calendar Tetris and squeeze two or even five into one day, as I did one Saturday. (Ticket prices also tend to be less prohibitively expensive than shows on Broadway or even sometimes Off Broadway.)

The back-to-back scheduling made for a brutal schlep, but it was worth it: During my first week in New York, I saw, among other things, a group of Russian refugee children proclaiming their love for Sarah Jessica Parker in SpaceBridge, a loose confederation of young radicals plotting yes-man-like acts of subterfuge against corporate juggernauts in Eat the Document, and a small sphere lingering ectoplasmically above a group of harmonizing humanoid rats.

This last show, Symphony of Rats, was produced by the Wooster Group and can be considered an honorary rather than official part of the festival circuit. The late Richard Foreman, who conceived the show, hovers like that electric-blue ball over much avant-garde theater. (Witness the use of voice-over or television clips or fourth-wall-pulverizing techniques currently in theatrical vogue.)

As with previous festivals, there were hits and misses … and more than a few shows “under construction” and therefore closed to review. Not everything was to my taste: Ann Liv Young’s Marie Antoinette, in which the artist berates two mentally ill collaborators and plays punitively loud music quickly wore out its provocative welcome. Another show about a man in Tehran and his imprisoned political-prisoner wife was more soporific than its subject matter seemed to promise. I also managed to be turned away by a few shows (in one case, twice by the same show!) for showing up ten minutes late, on the heels of another performance. So much for my Icarian itinerary.

The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy. Photograph by Maria Baranova.

One of the first shows I saw was a redux that caused me to quarrel with my own four-years-earlier interpretation of it. The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, staged at New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre, is adapted from Stanisław Lem’s time-looping tale of the same name, and originated as a filmed in its actor’s modestly sized home closet. Its premise: Egon Tichy, a hapless cosmonaut, finds himself stranded in a malfunctioning spaceship after being struck off course by “a meteor the size of a lima bean.” As his ship’s computer informs him, realigning the craft’s rudder requires two people—a cruel cosmic joke on the solitary spaceman. Happily, some of Egon’s future selves are soon manifested via a “time vortex” and take up residence in the bathroom, library, sleeping quarter, and other modular areas. Unhappily, these selves (who take their names from different days of the week) quickly turn on each other as each one attempts to assert the primacy of his own identity and keep a fingerhold on reality. The variant Egons are projected on large screens, and Joshua William Gelb, the actor who plays all versions of the cosmonaut, delivers a memorable Chaplinesque performance as he engages with his alternates through timed videography. Frying pan duels aside, the Egons’ arguments about selfhood are eminently relatable. Watching Gelb inchworm across his cramped quarters and bicker with other Egons, I relished the panache with which the show fully commits to the contingency of identity.

 

The Black Lodge. Photograph by Maria Baranova.

Michael Joseph McQuilken and David T. Little’s “goth industrial rock opera” Black Lodge, commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Allen R. and Judy Brick Freedman Venture Fund for Opera, steers us through a series of haunting mindscapes. In one, a man plays a deadly game of Russian roulette with his lover. In another, the same man is slowly mummified in clay and skewered by the woman (now dressed in a doctor’s uniform) with ethereal twigs. An unsettling scene of black-lipped, bandaged men in a desert repeats, turning up like an unlucky penny. The vignettes, which unfold on a cinema screen behind a group of live performers (the band Timur and the Dime Museum along with the Isaura String Quartet), all seem to orbit the man’s abiding regret over killing his beloved. The performance artist Timur, who plays the nameless man, wears a passport expression throughout much of the show, as if in a trance or daymare. McQuilken, the director, has said that he sought to “movie a score” instead of scoring a movie, and it works: the visual montages power the opera’s music, which wheels from berceuse to nu-metal fury to the hypnotic. Earplugs are provided.

When Raymond Chandler wrote, in The Big Sleep, that “the world was a wet emptiness,” he could have been describing the atmosphere of Dead as a Dodo, a dazzlingly inventive puppet show produced by the theater company Wakka Wakka. The eighty-minute show conjures an allegory from the depths of a shadowy void, where every sound seems to echo into an infinite abyss. The only sources of light are the glowing orbs of two pairs of eyes, belonging to a skeletal boy and a dodo. We follow this boy and his avian companion as they traverse a desolate realm in search of replacement bones for the boy, who is missing a leg and preemptively lamenting his own imminent “disappearance.” They encounter red spaghettilike scavengers, a hungry iridescent whale, a giant purple worm, and the Bone King, a cigar-chomping figure—half washed-up rock star, half mobster—who presides over the Bone Realm along with his eerie daughter. The production excels in its visual storytelling, blending intricate puppetry with the skillful use of light and shadow. One standout sequence immerses the audience in the River Styx: undulating sheets of plastic become waves, drawing viewers into an otherworldly underwater pursuit. It manages to be subtle and even, maybe, hopeful: as the boy and the dodo struggle to escape their nemeses, the bird begins sprouting feathers.

 

Rhoda Feng is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, The Times Literary Supplement, frieze, The Nation, and The New York Times.

We Are Meek and We Shall Inherit No Earth

Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

 

From Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket):

Chimpanzee societies wage war against each other. Crows make and use tools. Dolphins talk to each other and talk about us. They have different dialects and various synonyms for “human” (some of them are slurs). Language, as such, is not what distinguishes us from other creatures that roam the earth. Nor is it intelligence. Sentiments—complex, sophisticated sentiment—it is said, are what make humans unique. How we refine or distort our emotions, codify them into structures, how we systematize our layered and recursive interior lives, how we immortalize our fleeting expressions into art, policy, or poison is what makes us stand out. Or so we tell ourselves.

In the framework of humanization, Palestinians are not entirely deprived of “uniquely human emotions,” however, the Palestinian’s affective allowance—the range of sentiments one is permitted to express openly—is extremely restricted and shrinks with every perceived “wrongdoing.” We are allowed to be hospitable (Yosef Weitz, the “Architect of Transfer,” wrote in his diary about the unsuspecting Palestinians who served him food and welcomed him in homes he later stole). We are implored to be peaceful (or submissive) and forbearing, and we are tolerated when we are. We are meek and we shall inherit no earth. What we are not allowed is the future: we cannot be ambitious or cunning; we cannot aspire to sovereignty or revenge. We are robbed of the right to complexity, to contradictory feelings, the right to “contain multitudes.” Our sadness is without teeth. Perhaps we can be bitter (see: “Palestinian Rejectionism”), but belligerence and hostility—foreign concepts to our oppressors, apparently—exile us outside of humanity once more. The only thing we are permitted to look forward to is the day’s end.

From Tove Jansson’s novel Sun City (NYRB Classics), translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal:

There are more hairdressers in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in the country, and they are specialists at creating airy little puffs of thin white hair. Hundreds of old ladies stroll between the palm trees with white curls covering their heads. There are fewer gentlemen, however. In the guesthouses, they all have their own rooms, or they share with another person—some of them for only a short time in the even, healthful climate, but most of them for as long as they have left. No one is sick, that is, not in the normal sense of sick in bed. Such matters are attended to incredibly swiftly by ambulances that never sound their sirens. There are lots of squirrels in the trees, not to mention the birds, and all these animals are tame to the point of impudence. A lot of stores carry hearing aids and other therapeutic devices. Signs in clear, bright colors announce immediate blood pressure checks on every block and offer all sorts of information about such things as pensions, cremation, and legal problems. In addition, the shops have put a lot of thought into offering a wide selection of knitting patterns, yarns, games, crafts materials, and the like, and their customers can be sure of a friendly and helpful reception. Those who wander down the avenue toward the bay or up toward the City Park and the church meet no children and no hippies and no dogs. Only on the weekends are the pier and the bay front filled with people, who have come to this attractive city to look at the movie ship, Bounty. Then the beaches are lively and colorful, and only at dusk do the last cars drive away.

From Rachel Hope Cleves’s Lustful Appetites (Polity), a history of good food and immoral sex:

The English-born demimondaine Cora Pearl, who became famous in Paris for her marvelous equestrianism as she rode out mornings in the Bois de Boulogne, rivaled Marie Duplessis in her love for fine food. Pearl could frequently be found in the private rooms of restaurants. Auguste Escoffier, the most celebrated French chef of the nineteenth century, cooked for her at Le Petit Moulin Rouge, the first restaurant he worked at in Paris. He invented a dish that he called Noisettes d’Agneau Cora, which was lamb served within artichoke hearts, a pun on the term coeur d’artichaut used for men who fell in love with every woman they met. On another occasion, Escoffier created a menu for Pearl and a young lover that included a dish of pigeon en cocotte, another French pun: a pigeon was a word for a sucker, and a cocotte meant a courtesan. Escoffier described Pearl as “particularly talented in the art of plucking these little birds.” Sometimes the little birds took offense. In 1872, the grandson of the proprietor of France’s first restaurant chain, the Bouillons Duval, accidentally shot himself at Pearl’s apartment (he meant to shoot her), leading to her temporary exile from Paris. This incident did little to temper her extravagance. According to a famous story, Cora Pearl once had herself served up naked, garnished with a few sprigs of parsley, on an enormous silver platter in the Grand Seize room at the Café Anglais.

From a story about the last days of Oscar Wilde in Rupert Everett’s first short-story collection, The American No (Atria Books):

“You know,” he says finally, “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life.”

“Oh, yes?”

“In this room. At this moment. The light from the street!”

“What light?” The young god has finished his ablutions, dries his hands on his trousers, and sets to work tipping granules of cocaine from a small envelope into two wads of cotton wool.

“What light? It carves you in marble, dear boy. We are lost in our own world. Shrouded in a symphony of adjacent copulation.”

He sits up with a sigh and reaches for the pocketbook inside his coat, and extracts money.

“I know you love me, Johnny. Even though our purple moments are sullied by green notes.” 

From Jade Scott’s Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots (Pegasus Books), a description of sixteenth-century data protection strategies:

Different processes of letter-locking were employed, with letters being sewn shut, or slices of paper taken from the page and used to pierce the folded letter, almost like a key in a lock. Wax seals were then placed over the slits or holes to offer further security. Mary was known to use some of the most secure ways of folding and sealing her letters, reflecting her awareness of Walsingham’s surveillance and interception. She often used a system called the spiral lock, where a slice of paper from the centre of the page was threaded through multiple slits. If the letter was opened by someone before it reached the intended recipient, then it would be impossible to close it again without the damage showing. These features of the letters are easily overlooked by modern readers because once the letter was opened, the piece of paper that made up the lock was often discarded. We know that Mary used the spiral lock on one of her final letters prepared the night before her execution.

A Journey Through Four Gyms

Public gym in Taipei. Photograph courtesy of Vivian Hu.

It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.

 

The Instagram Trainer

I met him online, at a vulnerable moment, during one of the worst winters of my life. It was a year into the pandemic and I had just moved to Upstate New York for graduate school, which was being held over Zoom, and I was going through a breakup. A friend of a friend had been working out with him IRL and had reposted a few of his stories. Out of curiosity, I’d clicked on his profile—@bootiesbyarthur. “NJ’s PERSONAL TRAINER, Hour glass specialist ,” his bio read. His profile was full of videos of ample-buttocked women doing jump squats and hip thrusts.

“TRANSFORMATION WEDNESDAYS ,” one post read, featuring before-and-after photos of a young, ethnically ambiguous woman in a bikini.

Men lie, Women lie, RESULTS DON’T LIE. Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending

#tranformationwednesday #fitnessmotivation #personaltrainer #girlsthatlift #slimthickfit #gymmotivation

Arthur worked primarily out of a shared gym space in New Jersey where he trained dozens of people regularly, but he also did online and in-home coaching around the tristate area. Because I was not local, he recommended I sign up for his online program. For $200 a month, I received a weekly workout plan (“DAY 1: LEGS, DAY 2: UPPER-BODY DAY, 1 DAY OFF,” et cetera), diet plan, and one thirty-minute combined check-in and workout session over FaceTime per month. I could purchase additional workout sessions at a cost of thirty dollars per meeting.

In Arthur’s workout plan, “LEG DAY” meant goblet squats, reverse lunges, jump squats, leg extensions (via a leg-extension machine), and hamstring curls. “UPPER-BODY DAY” included dumbbell shoulder presses, dumbbell bicep curls, single-arm dumbbell low rows, planks, and leg lifts, and each exercise was customizable. I ordered a set of dumbbells, and when I told Arthur that the university gym was still shut down, he gave me substitute exercises—Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells instead of the leg extensions and step-ups instead of the hamstring curls—that I could do at home instead.

Arthur told me to text him anytime with questions—“Legit 24/7 at your service : )”—and to let him know each time I completed a workout. Before my first session, I sent him my “before” photos, as instructed. Using the self-timer on my phone, I photographed myself in my underwear from the back, side, and front—and in response he emailed me a motivational message. “First day today ! Video your workouts and tag meeee i wanna see how you’re form and tempo kill it .”

I was a relative newbie to this kind of strength training, and although I had looked up each exercise on YouTube, the first workouts made me feel ashamed and annoyed with myself. I could barely get through the first set of goblet squats, not to mention do three more ten-rep sets, as Arthur wanted. I couldn’t do even a single push-up. It’s clear to me now that I had no idea what I was doing. “we have to fix your form and positioning don’t worry it’s better than most when they first start LOL,” Arthur texted after my first workout, during which I’d recorded a video of myself doing each exercise. “Keep the dumbbells closer to your legs and slow the tempo down.” After a few exchanges like this, though, and especially after our FaceTime meetings, I began to gain confidence and strength.

Arthur was a kind and knowledgeable trainer. During our FaceTime sessions—which he often held from his car, parked outside his next client’s house—he would correct my form and yell motivating things like, “You got it, girl!” In between sets, he explained the rationale behind the exercises we were doing (“The swing motion activates the entire backside, aka the largest muscles in our bodies for maximum engagement,” I remember him telling me) and gossiped about his other clients. “I trained Tyga last week,” he told me once. “At his New Jersey pad.”

“OMG, was Kylie there?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “There were a lot of people at the house.”

“Actually, I think they broke up.”

“I see.”

That night, I did a Google image search for Tyga. His arms, though well defined, looked smaller than mine. I wondered how much Tyga could bench. I imagined Arthur yelling at him to do fifty sumo squats.

I decided to add some additional one-on-one sessions each week. I loved the idea of Arthur yelling at me from his car. Somehow it made receiving personal training—which I thought of as a bourgeois luxury—feel like a good deal. Thirty dollars per session seemed extraordinarily cheap, especially for access to someone who was training a celebrity.

Although we only met once per week, Arthur and I were in touch a lot. “I just did the whole workout T_T except the core LOL,” I texted him one afternoon. “I’m gonna do the core tonight. And some yoga too. I imagined ur voice in my head yelling at me. I didn’t give up.”

“Lmfaooo aye,” Arthur texted back. “You’re gunna love the sessions when you actually meet me Lmfaoo. Or you’ll hate me. Or both LOLLL.”

“Hate and love are very connected,” I replied.

I had vaguely mentioned that receiving a meal plan might be “triggering” for me, and so at first Arthur didn’t send one. But then I decided, what the hell, why not embrace the process? The plan consisted of four meals per day, one of which was a smoothie. The directions for the others went something like this: “Meal 1: 4 egg whites with ½ cup any mixed green vegetables; 1 cup blueberries or strawberries, 2 PCs turkey bacon =  26 G protein, 20 g carbs, 8 g fat.” Or: “Meal 4: 8 oz whitefish, 1 cup broccoli, 1 cup spinach, ¼ cup white rice = 27 G protein, 22 g carbs, 4 g fat.” The plan included one “cheat meal” per week (“so you can have a normal date night,” Arthur explained).

But trying to plan out my food in that way made me want to die, so I mostly ate Chipotle. I had a routine. I would order three double-chicken burrito bowls on Uber Eats, then get a giant grocery-store container of salad, and eat a big scoop of burrito bowl dumped on top of a pile of salad for every meal. Each order lasted me about a week. I thought it was the closest I could get to following Arthur’s meal plan without actually having to think about what I was eating. In this way, I survived a winter upstate without a car.

Whenever Arthur checked in on my diet or asked about my weight, I lied. “I’ll weigh myself tomorrow at the gym,” I told him, more than a few times. “I’m bloated now, but I’ll take a pic next week.”

As we continued working out, we fell into a nice rhythm, and I did see myself growing stronger and leaner as time went on. But I also wasn’t taking very good care of myself, and I started getting careless: During one workout, I was feeling guilty about spending the week in bed avoiding Zoom school, so I tried pushing myself and doubled the weight I used for dead-lift rows. I’d been working out for several weeks and figured my body should be able to handle it.

There was no sound, but I remember the feeling—a sharp slipping out of place, at the base of my spine—and then a knowing, familiar dread spread throughout my body. “I wanna do legs w u, but I kind of hurt my back yesterday LOL,” I texted Arthur the next day. Then, the day after: “Tbh my back is rly bad LOL I think I need to rest it for like a week. I can barely move. I’m going to a PT tomorrow. Lmao.”

“Omgg. Whattttt”

I did not know it yet, but I had triggered an old back injury, making it hard to even stand up straight, much less lift a dumbbell. I spent the rest of the summer trying, but mostly failing, to ignore the pain that extended down my legs. Bed rest and acupuncture and massage therapy helped, but the smallest things could trigger a flare-up—lifting a bag of laundry, or sitting on a backless stool for too long, or climbing a steep set of stairs. For the next few years, my life would be oriented around managing this pain, instead of actually doing anything about it, like seeing a doctor or going to physical therapy. I accepted it as simply another layer of my life.

That fall, Arthur opened his own studio—the BBA (Booties by Arthur) training facility. He announced it on Instagram, posting a video of himself cutting a red ribbon under an archway of black and gold balloons. I hearted the post. It would be years before I tried lifting again.

Equinox. Photograph by Vivian Hu.

The Luxury Health Club: Equinox Hudson Yards

“It’s not fitness. It’s life.” That was the Equinox slogan. For years, I had been alternately annoyed by and drawn to the chain of luxury health clubs, which I imagined as being full of private equity analysts and, for a brief moment, Gawker Media employees, who used to receive a membership as part of their benefits package. I had been there as a guest a few times over the years, but I wanted more. It was summer of 2021, everyone was vaccinated, and I’d just received my $1,400 stimulus check. I was going to do as Rilke said and change my life.

I was lucky, said the membership adviser, a duck-lipped woman, because the company was running a promo. If I signed up before it was over, I wouldn’t have to pay an initiation fee and I’d get a free $150 credit at the Equinox store. For $325 per month, I could have access to almost any Equinox facility in the nation—even the NYC Printing House and Hudson Yards locations, which I coveted for their outdoor pools—and, though the sign-up offer required a twelve-month commitment, the membership adviser assured me I could cancel anytime by lying. “Just say you’re moving for school and email me your course schedule, or send a note from a doctor saying you sprained an ankle or something,” she said. “It won’t be a problem.”

My sister was away from the city, and I was living in her apartment in Hudson Yards. I decided to splurge. I figured I would go to the gym every day, and in this way I would get my money’s worth. Right away, I fell in love with the Hudson Yards Equinox. It had new steam rooms, an extra-spacious sauna, rainfall showerheads. I would wake up early and head immediately to the gym to take a long, hot shower and drench myself in Kiehl’s amino acid shampoo, then go in the hot tub for a bit, then head up to the roof-deck to work on my novel. I was one of many people typing away at their computers by the pool. I tried other locations—the Printing House location, with its rooftop pool and sundeck; the indoor pool at one of the Upper East Side locations—but nothing compared to Hudson Yards, with its airy café—EAT PRETTY, a pink neon sign read at the entrance—located in between the pool deck and indoor hot tub. Whenever I got hungry or bored, I could get a fourteen-dollar ginger tuna poke bowl, or an eight-dollar smoothie called “sleepy beauty” (with turmeric, collagen powder, spiced almond milk, and valerian root), or an eight-dollar coconut water, which was served in a real coconut.

There were always several people taking business calls from the roof-deck, and I liked to eavesdrop, listening to people talk about KPIs or ad spend or, once, what I believe was a man either firing or breaking up with someone. (“It’s just not a good fit. This will be better for both of us in the long run,” I remember him intoning). Of course, there were a lot of annoying people there, too. It was easy to look at the man arguing with the attendant managing the pool wait list (due to demand, there was often a wait of up to several hours for the outdoor pool in the afternoons and on weekends), or the person complaining that there wasn’t any last-minute availability for the Pilates class she wanted, and wonder: Didn’t these people have jobs? But of course I was there, too, racing in early on a weekday to claim a lounge chair, using up all the eucalyptus-infused towels, signing in to my Zoom pedagogy class—I was still in grad school—from the cafe, sheepishly unmuting myself when we were put into breakout rooms. I was there, filling my water bottle with spa water, tapping the digital kiosk in the women’s locker room throughout the day like a rat in a Skinner box to dispense a tiny plastic comb, a spiral hair tie, Ursa Major face wipes. I’d later pass these out to friends, which made me feel like a beautiful Robin Hood Oprah. (You get a comb, you get an organic tampon, you get a disposable razor!),

In the end, I didn’t do very much “working out” at Equinox. I was still recovering from my back injury, but it was more than that. I would sign up for fitness classes, then cancel right before the three-hour cancellation window. I would sign up for barre, or Pilates, or hot yoga, and then the class time would approach and I’d be filled with dread. Even when I did make it to class, I often bailed. Once, I got through ten minutes of a yoga class before I convinced myself I had left the stove on and needed to return home immediately. I hadn’t. Another time, I made it to a barre class, but after I checked in with the attendant, I decided I needed to go back down to the locker room to pee, and then that I needed to shower before I could return to the class, and by the time I was done, the class was over, which was maybe what I had wanted to happen all along.

Something about the idea of actually exercising at Equinox made me feel deeply anxious and inadequate. That summer, using my promotional sign-up store credit, I bought and then returned three different workout sets—usually some kind of high-tech sports bra and leggings, in coordinated, color-blocked patterns—from the Equinox boutique. I thought that if I could only buy the right pair of $200 leggings, or the perfect $80 sports bra, I would finally become a person who could work out at the gym. But I never found the right set.

Still, the beauty of the all-access membership was that I could go into any Equinox essentially anywhere, anytime. Whenever I had time to kill—if I needed to use the bathroom or if I had been at a particularly heavy lunch or happy hour—I could slip inside the nearest Equinox and take a shower and steam, buy a green juice, or slather myself in body butter. The morning after a date, I could look up the closest Equinox in Harlem or SoHo or Midtown East or Williamsburg or wherever I’d woken up, be greeted by name at the check-in counter, take an insanely hot shower, then steam out whatever poisons had seeped into my body. Each time, I felt a little closer to becoming the person I was meant to be.

The Equinox Pool. Photograph by Vivian Hu.

The Public Government Gym: Taipei City Zhongzheng Sports Center ( 臺北市中正運動中心)

Summer 2023: I was spending the summer with my mom visiting family in Thailand and Taiwan—our first time seeing them since before COVID—and we were in Taipei for the final month of our trip. I hadn’t hung out with anyone my own age in weeks.

I started going to the Taipei City Zhongzheng Sports Center—a public gym near Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall—because it was both cheap and a twelve-minute walk from our apartment. For fifty Taiwan dollars (about $1.50), I got an hour in the fitness center—a giant room with a large selection of pretty standard, though slightly rusty, workout machines, including four squat racks, a row of treadmills, and stationary bikes. For an additional fee (usually around 50–500 TWD per hour), I could access a table tennis area, a dance studio, a billiards room, a golf room, an air-gun shooting range, a badminton court, an archery field, and even an indoor swimming pool. I availed myself of very few of these options.

I liked to go on weekday afternoons, when the gym was relatively empty, and do a Stronglifts workout—a barbell workout which I’d learned about on the Reddit forum r/Fitness—for about an hour. Occasionally, the gym ran a promo: in exchange for paying up front for a two-hour pass to the fitness center, you’d get a free bottle of Pocari Sweat—basically Japanese Gatorade. I always took advantage of this deal. On those days, I would add in a thirtyish-minute treadmill session at the end of my workout, then stretch. To take advantage of the promo, I had to check in and pay for my time in the lobby downstairs and then I received a receipt with a QR code, which I scanned to enter and exit the fitness center area. We were required to bring a towel—I don’t know why, though I suspect it had to do with keeping sweat off the equipment—but anyone who forgot theirs could buy a bright pink hand towel at the FamilyMart next door for a hundred Taiwan dollars (three U.S. dollars). I accumulated several of these towels.

I loved the Tapei public gym. I could go there, do a workout, then leave without lingering—the opposite of Equinox. It was pure, functional gym. The equipment wasn’t particularly nice, and the bathrooms (which thankfully featured both squat and Western-style sit-down toilets) were humid and smelled especially bad in the summer months, but the gym was centrally located and had all the basics. It was almost never crowded, since most people went to one of the newer, nicer public gyms nearby. Usually, the other people there consisted of a group of older dad types who lifted together with a trainer instructing them, and skinny high schoolers similarly lifting in groups. There was the occasional foreigner, usually working out solo, like I was, but I only saw a few of them the entire summer. It was communal: When I wanted to use a foam roller, which was located behind the fitness center desk, the attendant explained that it was one of the personal trainer’s own foam rollers from home, but that I could use it if I promised to be very careful with it. I started to recognize the regulars and the desk attendants, and we’d smile and nod at one another knowingly, occasionally making small talk at the water fountains.

This specific public gym was older and thus bigger than a lot of the city’s newer gyms, which were built in a more densely populated Taipei, when real estate was sparse. It lived in the shadow of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, an imposing white monument whose vast scale and height surprised me each time I walked past it, no matter how many times I’d seen it, as if evoking the grand incomprehensibility of the past, of history. Most mornings and evenings, my mom and I did our daily walks through the gardens surrounding the monument—we’d get a vending machine milk tea or coffee, then people watch, observing tourists take photos in front of the cherry blossoms, or seniors doing Qigong, or high school dance groups practice their breakdancing routines on the pavement outside the National Concert Hall. My mother hadn’t lived in Taiwan in over three decades, more than half her life, but seeing these daily rituals made me feel close to her. I felt like I was glimpsing parts of her life from before she had me, when she was just a girl trying to decide what kind of person she should be.

The Boutique Health Club: ONE Health & Wellness (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania)

I found the space on Google Maps a day after moving to central Pennsylvania, where I was a writer in residence at a nearby liberal arts college for the fall semester. “It feels like a Zen garden,” one Google review said. ONE Health & Wellness advertised itself as a health studio offering infrared sauna therapy, cold plunge tubs, “functional strength training,” and jujitsu. “A cracked teapot serves no tea…” began its “Who We Are” page. “A stressed out, in pain, restless person cannot become the best version of themselves. Only a person who feels completely in control, who is pain-free and highly energetic, can achieve their dreams. This is the philosophy that drives us at ONE.”

The studio was located in a nondescript brick building on Market Street, and the owner-trainer, Ben, told me to come in for a free consultation. When I arrived at the studio, Ben was sitting barefoot in the lobby, doing work on his laptop. There was a check-in counter in front of a glass refrigerator filled with seltzers and kombuchas alongside a tub of Fage yogurt (Ben’s personal stash). There was a counter with a teakettle and several kinds of tea, as well as a few shelves along the wall, stocked with items like beef-tallow moisturizers (“It mimics the skin’s natural oils and composition,” Ben told me, which he said made it more effective than traditional lotions) and something called Jocko protein powder (which I did end up purchasing for forty dollars, though I found its monk-fruit-sweetened flavor a bit too cloying).

Ben asked me about my fitness goals, and I told him that I wanted to build strength and work on my foundations, even though that wasn’t totally true: I really just wanted to become as small as possible. I didn’t voice this, but right away he said, “People think being healthy means having a six-pack, or looking like what people in bikini competitions look like. But what they don’t know is that those guys are actually insanely unhealthy a lot of the time. People have no idea what it actually takes to get down to that level of leanness.”

He taught, instead, what he called “functional fitness.” The only equipment inside the studio consisted of a huge area of mats, where we worked out barefoot, and an array of maces, clubs, and kettlebells. “All the movements we do in here are designed to replicate the movements we do out in the real world,” he told me during our first session. Mace swings, kettlebell swings, overhead presses—all of them were focused on building the dynamic strength required to, say, lift a suitcase into an overhead bin or carry around a tote bag full of books without having debilitating shoulder pain the next day. “What do you want to be able to do in your life?” he’d often ask me. “Focus on that—on what you can do, rather than what your body looks like, and the looks part will naturally follow.”

He also discouraged dieting. Unlike the Instagram trainer, Ben told me to focus on getting enough protein—at least one hundred grams per day—and to make sure I was eating enough to build muscle. “You have to have enough lumber to build the house,” he said.

Our workouts were hard at first—whenever I swung a kettlebell between my legs, or tried to swing a mace around my entire body, I envisioned accidentally hitting myself with a steel weight or dropping the mace on my face. I also constantly worried that I might antagonize my back injury. When we did a particularly hard leg day, my back would seize up, and I worried I’d be in for another year of rehab before I could lift again. But Ben encouraged me to move through the pain. “The worst thing you can do for your body when it’s seizing up like that is not move it,” he told me when I came in the next day. We moved through it, taking it a little easier that day, and eventually the pain did go away. After several weeks of training, about halfway into the semester, I realized that my back pain had not returned—it was, in fact, the first time I’d been pain-free in nearly a decade.

Ben’s gym space had no mirrors save for a dirty, warped rectangle at the back, behind where the kettlebells were stored, whose warping made things appear wider than they were. I don’t know if that was intentional, but eventually I learned not to look—that it wasn’t the point. Between strength training and eating enough consistently for the first time in my life, I gained muscle and strength—toward the end of the semester, I could see the outline of my triceps when I flexed, and even the beginnings of my abs, which I’d always assumed didn’t exist. I hadn’t lost any weight, and in fact some of my clothes no longer fit, but I had learned to view myself and my body not as something inefficient that I needed to optimize, but as a living organism. Ben had a much longer-term approach to fitness than I’d been conditioned to expect. He emphasized that if I continued what we were doing, strength training two to three times per week and eating enough, I would lean out over three or four years. This was the opposite of the dieting and weight-loss messaging I’d received growing up—the cabbage soup diet taped to my childhood fridge that claimed to shed ten pounds in seven days; the apple cider vinegar “cleanses” and three- or five- or ten-day “juice fasts” that I’d been encouraged to try throughout my teens and twenties. “Your body is an amalgamation of everything you put into it, and everything you do with it,” Ben told me. “If you spend all your time hiking, your body will be the body of someone who hikes. If you spend all your time on the couch, your body will be the body of someone who spends all day on the couch. If you’re constantly worrying about dieting, your body will be the body of someone who is constantly worried about dieting. It’s that simple.”

At the end of the semester, I was sad to leave Pennsylvania—and Ben’s gym—behind. But I was looking ahead. Already, I was on Google Maps, searching for gym spaces in Oakland, where I was moving for the spring. There was a CrossFit studio, a yoga space that offered healing sound baths, a family-owned boutique gym operated out of an old warehouse; a local chain with indoor golf simulators and an Olympic-size pool. There were dance studios and barre studios and running clubs and cryotherapy spas and local YMCA chapters and kickboxing classes and MMA classes and climbing gyms and pole-dancing workshops and even a studio, run by ex-cons, that offered “prison-style boot camps.” All I had to do was pick one, and then become a person who went there.

 

Vivian Hu is a writer from Texas. 

At the Sauna: Dispatch from Eternity (Age Thirty-Two)

Infrared reflectogram detail of Christ’s Descent into Hell, a painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.

It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.

 

As a teen, the distance between the present and future was mysterious and unbreachable. Parental appeals to the future didn’t work. “Think of the future,” they said. But I couldn’t. I could picture a red bird. I could picture a lampstand. But the future? It was a phenomenological impossibility. Once the prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction in the brain have developed, it’s easier to imagine the mental states of others, or to imagine what your perspective, as a fictional Other, might be like one day. But in young teens, this capacity is still developing, so the future is a rush of action and anxiety—the future is the present moment—always unfolding as it’s being lived out, experienced in hazy and semi-articulate ways. When you are thirteen, you are not thirty-two. But when you’re thirty-two, you’re also not thirteen. And this is similarly hard to understand.

It’s hard to understand because it’s not something you typically think about. You never think, I’m not thirteen!

But then one day I thought it. I understood it. I understood it in the vibrating around my eyes; in the way my shoulders retracted against my spine. I was twenty-seven at the time. I had known that I was twenty-seven—I had celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday just one month prior, for example—and I had known that I was getting older, but I had not known about the terrifying, gurgling stuff of time that would soon enter me.

I was visiting Ohio, where I grew up, over the holidays. I’d been living in Maryland. Some of my friends and my brother invited me to play basketball at the local recreation center. The Solon rec center had a small climbing wall in the center; the locker room behind it smelled like chlorine, which leaked out across the lobby. When we arrived, I felt a chilly premonition. The basketball court shrank into a point in the distance, and my perspective seemed to detach and then zoom out, like a traffic camera. It was swarming with kids who appeared to be thirteen.

“Let’s leave,” I said. “The court’s full.”

“We can just wait,” my friend Ziggy said. He was, I noticed with horror, visibly twenty-seven.

Among the squeaking sneakers and balls, I felt time crumple into me. I felt the rush of years behind my cheeks. As a teenager, I knew about teenagers and I knew about grown-ups. But I didn’t know about the space between, the period of technically being an adult but not having any of the markers of adulthood: normal career, kids, and, most importantly, a place to be on a weekday afternoon, any place to be, other than the basketball court at the rec center in the town where I grew up.

“It’s fine,” my brother said, “let’s take one of the side hoops and just shoot around.”

We put our belongings on the floor, against the wall, and started shooting. I felt self-conscious. As far as writing novels went, I was young—literature was generally a second-half-of-life game. But many of the most famous NBA players were my age or younger. Every time I missed a shot, I felt the impassable stretch of years between us and the teens. I felt the heat of many made-up eyes. On the court at the rec center, it was fine to be young, and it was fine to be old. But it was not fine to be twenty-seven.

I asked again if we could leave.

Then, I heard a voice.

The voice came from behind me. I couldn’t place it. Ziggy? My brother? The voice called out again.

“Fours?”

A teenage boy was gesturing with his hand at three more teens, all standing and staring expectantly.

“Fours?”

I stood frozen. I wished that I had shaved. I remembered Goober, an alcoholic, mentally disabled, semi-mythical figure who would wander around my town when I was in middle school, and was rumored to have been hit by a car in his youth. I felt like Goober.

“Yeah,” my brother said, before I knew what was happening. “Let’s do it.”

I took my position at the top of the key. A lanky boy, who couldn’t have been older than fourteen, approached. He looked me up and down slowly—then looked away. “I got this guy,” he shouted to his friends. He was tall, and wore a smug expression that disintegrated me.

The game began.

We scored; they scored; we scored; they scored.

I shot and missed. My friend Evan shot and missed. My friend Zach shot and missed. But the teens kept scoring. Their bodies twisted balletically around me and my friends—who lurched like dry leaves, whose bodies were creakier, less fluid.

“Hell yeah, fuck them up,” one of the boys congratulated his teammate. “They got nothin’.”

I could feel my ears, which were attached to my head. But how were they attached to my head? Were my ears … weird? They felt warm.

“Guy’s a chump,” one teen said when Ziggy passed me the ball. “He’s gonna try and shoot a three.”

I tried to shoot a three. I missed.

The teens high-fived. They appeared menacing. They were kids. But they weren’t kids. Just like I was an adult, but I wasn’t an adult.

“Give it to me,” the teen I was guarding said. “He can’t guard me.” He looked at me. “You can’t guard shit.”

I couldn’t guard shit, but I also couldn’t talk shit because of the age difference. I imagined responding in kind and getting pulled aside by one of their parents. I imagined saying something too aggressive and accidentally breaking the imaginative play-space of the game, making it real. Trying hard to win felt inappropriate—they were kids—but taking it easy felt wrong too. The teenagers’ bodies were lithe and more capable than mine, their minds more elastically confident; there was a violence underneath their movements that I simply couldn’t contend with. They could kick my ass, I thought, horrified.

We lost. Then we played again and lost again. I thought of Shakespeare:

Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short;
Youth is nimble, age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold;
Youth is wild, and age is tame.

But it wasn’t youth that I encountered on the court. My first thought, upon later reflection, was that age jumped around in faces and made you think of your ears. That age bounced back and forth between the voices of young shit-talking boys, then shot your own voice down into the back of your throat when you wanted to talk shit in return. But I was wrong. It wasn’t age, or time, but eternity that confronted me on the basketball court. In situations that dislocate you, that defamiliarize your experience of time so that its true nature is revealed, eternity can manifest in subjective experience. When you’re a thirteen-year-old talking shit to a twenty-seven-year-old, despite your inability to really imagine it, time is linear. But when you’re a twenty-seven-year-old getting beat by a shit-talking thirteen-year-old, you are stuck in eternity.

“There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen,” Vladimir Lenin is alleged to have said. But Lenin never played basketball with young teens. If he had, he would have added: There are moments when decades and weeks melt away, and all that remains is eternity.

And this is the truth about eternity: There is no eternal chronological time, but there is a kind of dark eternity hidden in the faces of shit-talking teen boys. The teen boys were not an image of youth but a horrifying portal to hell.

***

I didn’t encounter any more teens until two years later, when I moved to Westchester County. My wife and I lived in a small cottage at the back of a rich widow’s property, butting up directly against hundreds of acres of woods. It was eerily idyllic, like the setting of a horror movie. The area was wealthy in a looming way I couldn’t comprehend. There was a law, an Uber driver told me, that no weight-lifting gyms were allowed in Mount Kisco—only “health clubs.”

Compared to Powerhouse Gym in New Haven, where I went for two years and where more than half of the guys were thirty-plus and on steroids and the speakers blasted Eminem and System of a Down, my gym in Mount Kisco—Saw Mill Club East—felt geriatric. Bright, tinny pop music played quietly from the speakers. There were massage tables out in the open on the gym floor. Elderly people walked around with medicine balls. But there were also teens.

The gym had a sauna. Many have extolled the benefits of the sauna in recent years. Lifespan, cardiovascular health, cellular regeneration, etc. But one underdiscussed aspect of the sauna is its strange, semi-anonymous intimacy. Near nakedness, dark wood, close quarters, heat. The sauna is a space outside time where heat causes you to be radically present.

It was the sauna in Saw Mill Club East that put me in proximity to Mount Kisco’s teens. Unlike the basketball court, the sauna allowed me to play a more comfortable role, one that didn’t force me to directly interact, or strike the paralyzing sensation of subjective eternity into my consciousness: The sauna allowed me to disappear into the heat and pay attention, like an invisible narrator. I was there but not there. I could watch and not participate—a disembodied consciousness suspended in heat.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I sat alone with three white teenage boys as they discussed their plans for the night. The sauna was small and we all sat on the top row. One of their shoulders was nearly touching my shoulder. Sometimes they did touch. When they did, I inevitably glanced over and shifted a bit. His skin was somehow both pimplier and smoother than mine.

“Come scoop me when my parents go to sleep,” the blond one said. “They go to bed early.” The blond’s voice squeaked like a sneaker.

“Then Becky’s?” another asked.

“Yeah. I’m going to take half an addy and some of that edible before I come out … Or maybe the full …”

“Don’t get too fucked up, bro”—laughter—“you need to make it up to Becky after last time.”

“Brooo,” the blond said, voice cracking, “I was—fff—man, come on, I know, I know, gahah.”

I focused my eyes on the brown wall in front of me; my skin tingled from heat. I felt aware of my tattoos, and though I was strong, I was also aware of my smallness relative to them.

“I got unresistible rizz,” the blond said, perking up. They were learning how to communicate with each other in front of me: Take the jokes; respond with bravado; maybe put someone else down. “You know how it is. Ahaaa.”

“Don’t tweak off the addy,” one of them warned the blond. “I remember last time you were tweaking.” He made a strange guttural noise, then paused. “And I think Sarah and Jessica are going to be there. So that should be interesting.”

“Did you hook up with Sarah at Jason’s?”

“Bro”—laughter.

I felt cozy, like my whole body had been dropped into noise-canceling headphones. But the white noise was in my body. The teens continued to discuss the most important parts of adolescence—doing drugs, lying to one’s parents, having sex—and I intuitively felt a deep sympathy with them. When the cruel light of winter morning descended on January first, I thought, they would feel lonely.

In the sauna, there was no dark eternity. Just the present in the heat, and a new year the next day.

 

***

A few months ago, we moved back to Maryland for a job I got in D.C., back into a house we had already lived in years prior. Time was swimming backward and forward and I wasn’t sure what it all meant. I couldn’t feel time in any meaningful sense. Even when I entered the house I used to live in, I didn’t feel a rush of memory. I experienced time in the present, but my memory of the house—like all memory—was static: It was impossible to relive lost duration, or to remember time. The familiar surroundings had a numbing, mildly comforting effect. I went and got a membership at Gold’s Gym.

In the sauna at Gold’s, which was a combination of Powerhouse and Saw Mill Club East—a real gym, but bright and silvery, a little too clean—college students talked about school, girls, lifting; jacked Ethiopian immigrants who became police officers disparaged the behavior of other African immigrant groups; elderly men lay down with towels on their faces; white middle-aged men listened to rap music loudly on headphones. My friend Pat came to visit, and after work one day we lifted and then went into the sauna. As we opened the door, an Asian teen, about fifteen, with long hair, was in the middle of saying “—kill myself, man. I was suicidal. I couldn’t see a way out.”

We sat down next to the Asian teen.

“Man,” a Black teen said. He was the only other person in the sauna, sitting on the far wall, on the lower bench. “I feel you.” A pause.

“I was heartbroken,” the Asian teen said. He adjusted his position on the bench. The teens were sitting far apart; they didn’t seem to know each other.

I exchanged glances with Pat.

“I’m good now, though,” he said. “Ever since I found Jesus.” He shook his head, and his hair, slick with sweat, glistened. “I wanted to die, bro. I literally had no reason to live. I didn’t want to. But then a family friend invited me to church and Jesus spoke to me. It was crazy, bro. I started crying. When they called for people to come up to the front to accept Jesus, I don’t know what happened. I just got up and I went. Jesus saved my life.”

Like the teens at Saw Mill Club East, his voice cracked when he spoke. However, he spoke with a kind of confidence that those teens didn’t have. His eyes had a brightness I associated with the Christians who scared me when I used to go to Protestant churches. His eyes cut through the dark sauna.

Pat and I looked at each other.

“I tried to kill myself too,” the Black kid said, looking down. “Three times.” The heat had started forming beads on my skin. “And after the third time, God saved me too. Shit.” He used a rolled-up shirt to wipe his face, then sat back against the wall. “I was living wrong. On drugs, doing all kinds of shit. I was raised Catholic, my mom was Catholic, but I never fucked with that shit. I was like, This is weird, bro, you know?” He laughed. “But I relate.” He paused. This was not like any other conversation I’d heard in gym saunas. I tried to think of what it was like, but I couldn’t. I had never experienced it before. I had had a dark year—death, mistakes, my in-laws’ house consumed by fire—and moved back to an old place for a new job. I had been to this sauna many times, but the strangeness of the conversation illuminated it: Had the sauna somehow gotten wider? Were the cracks in the wood floor new, or was I noticing them now for the first time? Augustine said there were three times: “the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future.” But there was also a fourth time, one in which all three were present at once. On the basketball court, when a sliver of time was raised up out of the demoralizing parade of chronology, out of the voices of fourteen-year-old shit-talking boys and jammed into my head—puncturing the trudge of minutes, suspended there in panic—this dark kind of fourth time paralyzed me in unfamiliar fear. There was another kind of fourth time—the heavenly kind—but it was harder for me to understand. I sought it out, and the teens here tried to talk about it, but it was impossible to talk about—language easily killed it—so I oscillated between feeling awed and suspicious. Occasionally, I could feel this fourth time just outside of my sensorial ability, like I needed to develop a new sense organ in order to glimpse it, this other-dimensional reality that was always there, if only I could break through and encounter it fully. Chronological time degraded perception through habit. Language degraded perception through abstract categorization. But on the basketball court with the teens, I had no language or preconceived set of symbols to organize my experience and so was touched by a terrifying time-suspension—an encounter immune from the numbing effects of habit and symbol—pure, self-centered, throttling fear. Here, in the Gold’s sauna, the teens talked about their suicide attempts—their attempts to escape the misery of moment-to-moment succession in favor of some far unknown—but they had both encountered something else instead, which seemed to reach into their lives from beyond time to alter their experience of time, so that now they wanted more of it.

“God is good, man. Really …”

I looked at his eyes. They glowed too.

The teens went back and forth, and Pat and I stayed silent, sometimes nodding.

Then all at once the Asian kid sprung up. “I gotta go,” he said. “Time to get out of here.”

He made a peace sign with his hand and left.

A few weeks later, I encountered one of them again in the sauna, telling an even younger pudgy preteen that he had to keep a “roster” of women, so that “if your main acts up, you can threaten to replace her”—he was imitating the tone of certain podcast clips I’d heard—and that the point of life was trying to get money, to get jacked, and to get girls. Sitting next to him in the sauna this time, I discerned no touch of what had been present in the sauna weeks prior, only the world of accumulation in chronological time—the dry heat of the sauna pressing in—whatever outside-of-time experience that had been the subject of the prior conversation, which I’d felt moved by in the subsequent weeks, having withdrawn itself or been rejected in favor of the inevitably decaying stuff of this world.

 

Jordan Castro is the author of the novels Muscle Man, forthcoming from Catapult this September, and The Novelist. He is the editor in chief of Cluny Journal and is on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation of Literature and the Arts.

The Equinox on Orchard Street

I’m on my hands and knees in the stretching corner of the Equinox on Orchard Street, doing a fifteen-minute full-body low-impact workout from goop’s YouTube channel, posted in the spring of 2020, which is when G. Sport collaborated with Proenza Schouler to make chafe-proof leggings, so, at the end of the video, after the instructor says “Namaste,” she adds, “and I just want to point out this cute set that I’m wearing.” But first, at the beginning, she says:

“Everyone look down at your fingers. Press the floor away.”

I’m in dolphin shorts and a front-closure sports bra with a ruched design that’s hard to explain: a gathering—a pinching—of fabric, not exactly in the interval between my breasts but on the verge of it. This is happening on each breast, separately, so there are two gatherings of fabric pinching at this near-interstitial point, radiating away from the sternum toward the nipple—each gathering going toward its own nipple—so the gatherings are mirror images moving in polar directions from the foot of their respective breast, so the effect of each pinched part, the severity of its folds, dissipates over the course of the cup. Think of a seashell. Don’t think of a conch. In fact, forget, for now, about univalve mollusks entirely. Think of Shell, the oil company, and The Birth of Venus, how incremental calcium deposits create a ribbed surface to stabilize the scallop on shifting sand with radial undulations progressively tightening in a quickened up-down pattern until its downward dips disappear, the ridges becoming a briefly singular swollen point as the shell folds into its umbo.

“Soft bend in the elbow.”

My shorts are by the brand Umbro, the Girls Classic Gym Short in Blue Jewel / Ice Moon, and my bra is Fruit of the Loom’s discontinued Comfort Cotton Blend Front Closure Sports Bra in Heather Grey.

“Fingers are long. Thumbs are long.”

Though they do tend to ride up when I, for example, donkey kick, I have a romantic idea about wearing so-called short shorts because of a childhood experience of/on a drawbridge in southern Ontario.

“Inhale. Roll through the spine.”

There is a river in Canada called Rideau, French for curtain, named for the way water is curtain-like when it falls, as it indeed does at the end of this particular waterbody, but not before cutting a canal through Ottawa, where I grew up, and where, because of said stream, the downtown core is marked by various bridges, including one called Pretoria, a drawbridge with a deck that can vertically lift should a large boat appear.

“Float that right leg high.”

In fifth grade, one of my friends was a competitive gymnast. One day, she wore her gymnastic shorts to P.E. class, which, in our school district, was, up until seventh grade, coed. My friend’s shorts were spandex with an inseam of maybe two inches, max. The boys, having never before seen this pair of my friend’s shorts, responded by repeating “short shorts” in a chanting manner.

“Ten tiny pulses.”

Then, at recess, the boy who was the main boy who all the girls had crushes on that year (myself included) wrote my friend (the competitive gymnast) a poem (a love poem). My friend freaked out. I think, frankly, she was just so stressed about gymnastics all the time. She told me to tell the boy to meet her after school on the bridge. My friend was quite religious. The reason she wanted to address the poem on Pretoria is because she was praying to God for this after-school meeting to coincide with the bridge’s deck’s periodic ascension, so that, after saying she didn’t feel ready for a relationship, she could run over the bridge right before its deck split skyward, leaving the boy unable to cross the canal in turn.

“Squeeze inner thighs. Hug those elbows in.”

On my iPhone 14, the instructor demonstrates plank position. Her leggings are high-rise. Her cropped tank top has four spaghetti straps—two per armhole—as well as a mesh element and a cutout exposing the vulnerable epigastric region where, it’s alleged, Harry Houdini, the Hungarian American illusionist, was fatally punched in the solar plexus.

“Breathe into it.”

My phone is propped against the window. Outside, Ankara #3, a Turkish restaurant with a big mural of hot-air balloons, loops footage of shawarma. Thomas, the English-muffin company, parks its truck in front of Uni K Wax, where, a couple summers ago, an employee waxing my bikini area said I remind her of Barbra Streisand.

“Plug that belly in. Drop down into your child’s pose.”

The audio is paired to my “nearphones,” which are like earphones, but instead of going in the ear, they hook around the helix, hovering over the concha to direct sound toward the ear’s canal without completely plugging the cavity. Meanwhile, “What’s My Name? (feat. Drake)” by Rihanna plays on Equinox’s PA system.

Oh na na, what’s my name?

The point of nearphones is that they do not “noise-cancel.” They are meant for, like, outdoor runners. It’s important for outdoor runners to be able to hear surround sounds, for safety. I don’t run. I just want to hear everything at once. Isolated input makes me lonely. I have attention-deficit issues.

I heard you good with them soft lips
“Tip forward an inch in your toes.”
The square root of sixty-nine is eight somethin’, right?
“Feel that beautiful stretch.”
Good weed, white wine, uh
“Drop the pubic bone toward the mat.”
I come alive in the nighttime
“Press into downward dog. Puddle it out.”

Having hyperhidrosis on the palms of my hands makes it hard to hold certain positions on the Reslite Double-Coated RSP600 Classic Mat. Sometimes my hands are randomly soaking wet, and I have to intermittently pause my workout to wipe them on my bra, that being the most absorptive material at hand (95 percent cotton versus my shorts’ 66 percent).

“Thread that right leg through the left side body.”

I pause goop to take a sip of PerfectAminos dissolved in JUST Water and check Quora.com’s contributors’ answers to the question “What does Rihanna mean when she was asking ‘what’s my name’ in her hit song featuring Drake?”:

– “She is saying ooh Nanna what’s my name referring to a mythical goddess or Goddess Inanna.”
– “she is wondering whether or not she belong in this society.”
– “The rain (as it usually does) stands for hard times. … She repeatedly uses her umbrella as a symbol for shelter.”

What I “do” at the gym is mostly follow videos from a roster of online women with names like Tracy, Bailey, Sami, and Maddie. It’s not exactly Pilates. Sometimes weights are involved, three to five pounds, rarely more than ten.

Once, as I was reaching for hand weights, a man doing barbell squats offered this adage: “Keep it simple.” He went on to explain that he is Miami-based but has a Destination membership ($395/month), granting him access to every Equinox in the world except any of the E by Equinox clubs and the flagship in Hudson Yards. He also said he is a breath work instructor and that he trained under Wim Hof—a Dutch man famous for extreme feats of athleticism such as running a half marathon on ice, barefoot—and wanted me to understand how deep breathing feels, “like really good sushi,” he said. Sometimes, like when I’m about to bicep curl a handful of pounds, I’ll think of him in his foam trucker hat, saying (about deep breathing): “You put it in your mouth and you’re like, Oh, this is really good.”

There are two brands of dumbbell here. On vertically stacked racks, by Hampton, are a handsome hand weight with a chrome finish and black “beauty grip” that retails around $54 for a 2.5-pound pair and up to $582 for fifty pounds, and then, horizontally stowed, a heavier range with bigger black urethane heads and a knurled steel neck by the brand Iron Grip, a phrase that always reminds me of the way I once heard someone on a podcast describe anorexia, as “an iron grip on thin air.”

One of my two Tracys does interesting moves with her hips. While waving around three pounds, she does an Elvis Presley type of sway to work the obliques in unexpected ways. According to Tracy, unless I want “big ol’ arms,” I have to “surprise my muscles.” It’s important for women, Tracy says, to “differentiate the bicep from the tricep.” I do “Best of Bat Wings” and “Love Your Arms and Abs.”

Historically, my foci have been shoulders and butt, though recently YouTube recommended I watch “ROUND LIFTED BREASTS 3 WEEK CHALLENGE,” which got me interested in pecs. I also worry about having forward neck syndrome, so I also “do” things like this move I saw on Instagram where you put your forehead against a wall.

Sometimes, like now, I have an intrusive thought about, for example, oatmeal.

Le Petit Prince, famously, opens with a drawing of a boa swallowing an elephant (whole), which, the narrator explains, gets mistaken for a drawing of a hat. So the narrator has to make a second drawing, which is a cross-sectional illustration of the same situation, this time showing the outline of the snake’s body wrapping around the elephant. When I eat right before the gym—and this is a personal problem—I picture the food cartoonishly intact, like a collage cutout of oatmeal. Not just the oats. It’s a mental picture of the oatmeal as it would be served, spoon poised in the bowl, steam coming off it, et cetera, whole thing, in my digestive tract, which is crazily stretching to accommodate the silhouette of the spoon handle, whole thing, bowl, in a tight contour.

I take a quick break for a bite of a beef tallow–based bar I bought on TikTok after watching a video by a content creator wearing a crochet Minions hat, captioned “tiktok is pissed at this guy’s protein bar.” It’s blueberry flavor. Also in my gym bag: Bomb Pop popsicle-flavor electrolytes; a purple sweet-potato-and-pear fruit bar by Dino Bars; orange creamsicle Oomph! Chews; Calm Mood lozenges made with California poppy extract; mastic nuggets hand-harvested near the Aegean Sea; and black cherry SNØ.

Before returning to “the floor,” I tuck an Oomph! Chew into my underwear, as I don’t have pockets. I don’t want the chew right now, but I’m anxious that I might, once I get going.

Depending on one’s goals, it’s generally best to strength train before cardio (lest one’s glycogen become depleted before getting to build muscle). I always think about that and then about a girl from college who played tuba and taught me the rhyme about drinking beer before liquor (“never been sicker”)—a saying with little scientific evidence until a few years ago, when researchers at Helios University Hospital Wuppertal in Germany, with support from the brewing company Carlsberg, investigated the related claim: “wine before beer and you’ll feel queer” (Köchling, Jöran, et al. “Grape or Grain but Never the Twain?” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2019).

In terms of “resistance training equipment,” I’m pretty intuitive. If I feel called to use something, I’ll do a few “sets.” I like the inner-thigh machines, the hip abductor and adductor, because they let you really sit up straight and be on your phone. Lat pull-downs I’ll do if the mood strikes, but only during daylight. The way the recessed light falls upon the lat tower makes me feel like I’m in a police procedural. I don’t like to be lit from above. Also problematically placed is the pectoral fly machine vis-à-vis the crossover pulley machine. Basically, two summers ago, I wore a strapless bridesmaid dress. A few months later, I had a short stint with a trainer whose name starts with, I want to say, M. Well, whenever we had our consult session was around the time I got the link for the wedding photos. When I looked at the photos of myself straplessly posing in a field, my traps, I thought, looked huge. In my defense, keep in mind, this also coincided with Kim Kardashian’s post of a particularly photoshopped poolside picture people say propagated ideas about unrealistically small trapezius muscles. So, when M. asked about “areas of concern,” I couldn’t stop talking about my trapezii. M. then made a plan for me that focused on the crossover pulley machine and, specifically, a move meant to target my teres major. You want to really feel it in your armpit. The thing is, because of how everything is situated at the Equinox on Orchard Street, in order to get requisite rope tension during my straight-arm lateral pulldowns, I have to stand about five feet away from the pulley’s frame, which places me practically nose-to-nose with whoever happens to be doing pectoral flies. I never know where to look. It feels unnatural to look away from the face of the person doing the flies. So I try my best to have a blank stare.

“When pure, awake, open awareness becomes confident of a wave of experience, there’s a natural tenderness.”

I’m listening now to the Science of Happiness podcast.

Behind the pectoral fly machine, the window looks out onto Peretz Square, a triangular traffic island in the middle of East Houston Street. The median is named after a Yiddish writer famous for stories such as one about a man with no friends or accomplishments who dies, goes to heaven, asks for butter, and gets laughed at by angels.

As I move around the gym, I rest my phone on various windowsills. The Equinox on Orchard Street occupies the first three floors of a mixed-use commercial-condo building which was built in a neo-industrial style characterized by big deep-set grid-like windows. If I go too far from my phone, a female voice in my nearphones steadily repeats, “QV202, lost,” every five or so seconds until I return to Bluetooth’s range.

When I turn on the treadmill, there’s a quick still image of a man running on a beach at sunset before cutting to aerial drone footage of various scenes that are supposed to feel like a first-person perspective to simulate, for example, incline walking in Zion National Park, in Utah, or sprinting around a fjord. It’s supposed to be an immersive experience. Today the treadmill has me in New Zealand. The way the drone flies, at a low altitude with a wide lens, makes it feel like the drone is going to crash into a gay couple near Auckland’s war memorial. But it whizzes over their heads at the last minute.

Sometimes I wedge my iPad into the lip of plastic in front of the treadmill monitor and “work.” It’s good for morale to do a little speed-walk while copywriting launch teasers for a Sicilian face exfoliant made with olive pits and wild-foraged botanicals extracted by SoundbathTM. I have to blast Sigur Rós (an ethereal post-rock band led by Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson, whom I learned of in high school via this raw strawberry pie tutorial) or any soundscape with non-English / nonlinguistic vocalizations / no words at all. I’ll do 3.0 miles per hour, incline 11.0, to ambient techno like “Fine Pink Mist (Low Flung version)” or “Butterfly Jam (xphresh Good Girl No Infringement dub),” revising taglines for a Lunar New Year–themed antistatic volumizing spray with amino acids and edelweiss.

Also there’s a Spotify playlist called “528 hertz” that I was turned on to by a woman who has given at least one facial to Bella Hadid. It’s a frequency, she said, that raises your vibration to make you prettier, smarter, and calmer; reduce toxic effects of alcohol; and increase cell life. She also pointed to studies showing that 96 hertz eliminates feelings such as fear and guilt. So sometimes I play “Cloud Pillow 528 Hz,” by Aerial Lakes, “Gust of Joy Alpha 169-178 hz,” by places we go, etc.

For proper running form, hands should be relaxed, fingers barely touching. A running coach on an app I paid for said: “It’s like you’re holding imaginary pennies between your middle finger and thumb.” In “Moving from Matter to Light,” a new workshop on the My Human Design app, Jenna Zoe, an expert on our innate energies and how to live a fulfilling and centered life, says: “When we talk about being able to handle things, we think we have to hold on to things.” This, Jenna says, is not right. Jenna says, in general, we have to let go. That said, she says we do need some “holding patterns” lest we “become formless.” What we don’t want, Jenna says, is “all of the sudden I could be you and you could be me,” or, even, “I could become an animal.”

On the screen, a little girl scooters past me in, I want to say, Yosemite.

I do not stretch as much as one should. It’s just so, whatever. I like, like, check marks, for example. But I’m working on liking liminal space. I like to do the supine spinal twist. It’s a nice way to end because you can imagine a camera shooting you from overhead and zooming out slowly. I’ll also do some “puppy pose,” or “melting heart pose,” beginning on all fours, wrists under shoulders, knees under hips, walking my hands forward until I’m almost kissing the mat, big arch in the back, not like a rainbow, like a U.

I love locker rooms. I like to sit on the bench after a workout and think about what to do next. In the 2019 Business Insider article “I worked out at all 34 Equinox locations in New York City. Here’s how they all compare,” Benjamin Goggin notes Orchard Street’s “huge benches creating gridlock near lockers.” He also says he “spotted two prominent digital journalists.”

If you look closely, the doors to the lockers are fake burlap, covered in a photorealistic jute lattice printed laminate. I gravitate to lockers 490–498, in the middle of the upper row of the eastern wall of the central bay, perpendicular to the hair blow-dryers. Sometimes I do 476–482 if I feel I need a change of scenery.

The lockers are keyless with four-digit create-your-own combinations. I wish I could tell everyone the combination I always create—it’s good.

*Tink.* You might imagine the hair-tie jar (glass) making that sound when you close its silver lid, holding the bobble knob. The Q-tips are similarly housed, standing upright in a jar that calls to mind an old-timey candy shoppe. A cubic acrylic container by the sinks is filled with shot-size paper cups alongside a dispenser of mouthwash. In another cube are organic tampons made by August, a Gen Z–focused company whose press person once emailed me—unrelated to Equinox—asking for my address and sweatshirt size to send me a “BTS-themed period kit.” I thought August was doing a tampon collaboration with the Korean boy band BTS (this was before the band members enlisted in the military). An email later, I learned it stood for “back to school.”

Every so often I think about gas chambers when I’m in the steam room, but mostly I think about men I like or have liked. I try to focus on my breath, but I usually go back to men. If I think of something I have to remember to buy or do, I silently repeat key words until I can get to my phone: “spirulina, SKIMS, eyebrows, sponge,” over and over, as if in unceasing prayer.

It used to be that I could purchase, on my way out of the Equinox on Orchard Street, a pack of Juice Press’s SIN O BUNs, dense bite-size balls of ground buckwheat with sea moss icing and a raisin on top. But the self-service snack bar has recently switched suppliers. So, instead of LesserEvil popcorn made with butter-flavor coconut oil, pistachios by Wonderful, Mango Madness by JUST PLANTS, and ZenWTR, now there’s FIJI water, Legendary Foods keto pop-tarts, teriyaki ostrich jerky by Ostrim, earthbar’s chicken meatballs as well as their cold-pressed juices in the flavors Pixie and Pipe Cleaner, and a carbonated BCAA beverage by NOCCO in the flavor Apple.

There is only one book, to my knowledge, housed at Equinox’s Orchard Street location. In the middle of a gold drum-style coffee table in the corner of the lobby is The Rolling Stones by TASCHEN. The foreword, by Bill Clinton, begins, “Being President was the best …”

The time is now 8 p.m. , and the gym is closed.

They always say it like that—that the time is now the time it is.

Though most people might think the façade of the Equinox on Orchard Street is brown, it is actually 24-karat gold-dusted. The bricks were imported from Cadaqués, a village in Spain known for its anchovies and Salvador Dalí. To my eye, the building looks vaguely purple or like a slightly iridescent eggplant. Picture, maybe, gasoline in a puddle. Or smoky-eye eyeshadow.

 

PerfectAmino by BodyHealth is a blend of amino and nucleic acids that Tracy Anderson, celebrity fitness trainer to Shakira, Jake Gyllenhaal, Courteney Cox, and others, says she drinks.

JUST Water is a B Corp–certified bottled water company founded by Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. The Founder’s Story: “While learning to surf, a ten-year-old Jaden Smith saw a plastic bottle floating next to him in the water. Unable to shake the image of plastic polluting the Pacific, he decided to do something.”

 

Cara Schacter is a writer with Select Access membership to Equinox Orchard St.

Running Diaries

Photograph courtesy of Kim Beil.

My running diary is a stack of 8 ½ x 11” papers printed with a calendar grid. The small boxes demand brevity. Cryptic penciled notes represent dates, times, distances, elevations, routes, and sometimes strangers’ names and course records. There are codes for heart rate (HR), physical-therapy exercises (yoga and single-leg squat: YSS), and personal records (PR). There’s space for an occasional comment: “Hard!” or “OK!” I would schedule my workouts weeks in advance, only infrequently crossing them out and altering the plan.

I created this calendar when I started running, and kept it through my late thirties. After a few months of exhausted frustration, I learned that I was anemic and probably had been for years. As supplements pumped iron into my blood, I found that I could run faster and farther. I felt like I was getting younger; it was like alchemy. The calendar helped me look forward to my fortieth birthday, a milestone I’d been taught to fear. The data prove that I love going over hills.

A few months into 2020, half a year after my birthday, the diary changes. In place of record times and podium finishes, there are notes about pain, walks, pills. I stopped labeling the years. But somehow the diary kept going, even when I had to stop running. These excerpts map my route through pain. Initially, I liked that the codes made the diary look like a scientific dataset. Keeping track of the numbers seemed like an objective measurement of myself, a way to gain a little distance from what it feels like to run—and to be unable to run. Later, I stopped keeping the diary, in order to collapse that distance again.

January–February 2018

January 1

3 miles easy; 8:28 pace

Not a New Year’s resolution, but a training plan. Working backward from a trail race, I blocked out a fifty-six-day month, irregular as a Roman January.

January 3

3 miles @ race pace; 7:23 pace (hard!)

This wasn’t the first time I’d trained for a race, but it was the first time I thought about more than finishing. I thought about winning.

January 5

7.25 miles @ Montara Mountain, 1,686’ elevation

This was the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, but I didn’t mark that on the calendar. It felt like a bad omen. My fear of aging had started in middle school. I was Peter Pan-sad when I was told that my body would change. Before my dad’s fortieth birthday his doctor told him to quit running: “If it hurts, don’t do it.” At my first job after college, a coworker watched me eat a maple doughnut and chided, “You won’t be able to do that when you turn thirty.”

January 22

4 miles easy; 8:32 pace

January 23

Cross-train; spinning 40 min.

high hamstring better

(no green chair for 4 days)

My writing chair: friend or foe? Usually I think that running helps my writing, but now it hurt to sit. I blamed it on the chair.

January 26

7 x 400 meters @ 7:30 pace

Bad sleep, tiny shin splints

Yoga (no single-leg squats)

January 28

Waterfront race

10 miles @ 7:38 pace, 4th woman

A warm-up race on hard, flat pavement along San Francisco Bay. Not at all like the trail race, except that I was nervous the night before and I was nervous at the starting line. I gave myself the night off from physical-therapy exercises.

February 21

30 min. tempo; 10 min @ 7:19 pace

felt good

February 25

Whistle Punk Half Marathon

13.1 miles; 10:18 pace / 2:14:39, 2984’ elevation

#1 woman

There’s little fanfare in this box, except the #1 and the story the numbers tell: There’s my 2016 time on the same course (2:54:06), my goal time (2:30:00), and my stretch goal (2:15:00, which was always my actual goal). I passed a man on the first climb who said something stupid and predictable about getting beaten by a girl. I ran faster after this. I got home and printed out another fifty-six-day calendar. I didn’t have much time left, I thought, before I got old and soft and slow.

 

October–November 2018

Photograph by Kim Beil.

October 14

Wunderlich Park, 20 miles

11:53 pace / 139 HR

I was running farther now, training for the Vista Verde Trail Marathon. It took a long time for me to run twenty miles in the mountains, but all the while I was entranced by the sunlight and fog in the redwoods and the feeling that, as Haruki Murakami wrote in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “there were still some possibilities left for me and my body.”

October 16

cross-train, swim

October 19

8 miles tempo @ race pace

10:01 pace / 143 HR

Hard!

November 3

Woodside 35K Race

22 miles / 3000’ elevation

3:41:01

10:06 / 151 HR

#1 woman

November 7

4 miles – easy

Back out!

I don’t know what having your back “go out” really means, but that’s what I say because it makes others understand the invisible pain. I lay flat on the floor and stared at the ceiling.

 

January 2020–January 2022

Photograph by Kim Beil.

January 2

Bike 12

Massage

At the end of 2018, my back had gotten better. I placed third woman in the Vista Verde Trail marathon, then I raced a 50K. But I tore a muscle in my quad on a muddy downhill during the race, and weeks in the calendar went blank. I came back, then got injured again later in the year. In 2020, the start of a new decade, I got myself a sports massage as an early birthday present. I was trying to stretch and fold my body back into a shape I recognized.

January 6

Swim

My fortieth birthday passed. No comment in the calendar.

January 8

2 @ Junipero Serra Park

10:15 pace / 147 HR

TRAIL!!

Slower than usual, but my all-caps exclamation and my heart-rate monitor seem to have recorded the effort and excitement of being back on the dirt, even if for only two miles.

February 1

8.5 @ Wunderlich Park

12:07 pace / 128 HR

New Nikes, no foot pain

The trail through the redwoods was soft and finally, instead of pain, I felt powerful on the long climb. I let myself rejoice in the fact that I’d moved up an age group.

February 22

Mt. Umunhum 14K

9:11 / 159 HR

#3 age group / 9th woman overall

I joined a running club and signed up for a team race. Against former college athletes, I felt like the amateur I was. The trail around an abandoned quicksilver mine was steep, loose, and rocky. Here I couldn’t win outright, except against myself. It was a personal record for this distance on a trail with almost two thousand feet of elevation gain.

February 26

6.8 @ Sweeney Ridge

9:50 / 148 HR

On my favorite trail, I ran into a friend of a friend. He was faster than me, but I stretched out my strides, trying not to lose speed on the downhills, though I’m usually cautious. We could see the airport, where midmorning long-haul flights from Asia were landing as usual. The novel coronavirus was in the news.

March 13

X

last day on campus

I drew an X through this day and the next; I didn’t have time to run. The university moved classes online due to COVID-19, and I had to attend meetings in which administrators advised us on how to transform our teaching for Zoom. “Sit in front of a clean background in a well-lit space” and “wear a plain, unpatterned top,” they said.

April 3

3 @ Junipero Serra Park closed, on road

9:26 / 144 HR

Local parks are closed.

May 5

13.6 @ Wunderlich Park

10:48 / 152 HR

I ran hard in the morning, then sat for hours in front of my clean background.

May 23

Swim

Back weird

July 5

4 @ San Andreas Trail

Shooting, electric pain down left leg while lying down

July 6

Swim

No sleep, leg pain

I was ejected from my chair by sudden pain. I grabbed my leg with both hands and walked in furious, frightened circles, trying to shake it off.

July 7

Express care

Slept with codeine

Piriformis syndrome?

Over Zoom, my doctor guessed that the pain was the result of my glutes impinging a nerve. (Should’ve done my physical therapy, I thought.) She told me to wait and see, and to stop running. It wasn’t life-and-death.

August 19

Bike 30 min.

FIRES

Dr. Levin!

The pain continued. I was awake all night. All day I paced indoors because there was wildfire smoke outside. Finally, the spinal specialist ordered an MRI and saw a herniated disc rubbing my sciatic nerve. I learned that the spinal column can be compressed by long hours of sitting. A Zoom injury.

September 6

Sweeney Ridge

5.5 mile hike

Bad pain @ p.m.

Codeine didn’t help

Two days after an epidural steroid injection and the pain was worse than ever. I’d started scrawling ugly notes about sleep and pills, so many pills, on the lines between each calendar day. I was still on a waiting list to see a physical therapist.

December 7

2 miles

5.5 miles

2 miles

1 mile

I started tallying my daily walks instead of runs. Only being in smooth, slow motion soothed the pain. I tried putting a treadmill under my standing desk, but walking on it nauseated me. Every morning, between classes, after lunch and dinner, and then again before bed, I took myself out for a walk. I was offered medical leave, but it would mean I’d lose my health insurance, and I’d finally gotten into physical therapy.

January 6

2

5.5

3

Bad sleep

It was my birthday. I wondered how much longer I could live like this. I was crying all the time.

January 25

3

2

2

Bad sleep

I was prescribed sleeping pills, but for months the calendar recorded “bad sleep.”

March 15

2

Swim

2

Good sleep

4 gabapentin

I got a COVID vaccine on March 5. Relief ran through me. At the physical therapist’s recommendation, I started listening to a podcast about pain science. Pain, the researchers said, is the body’s interpretation of sensation. Fear and anxiety amplify pain. Was it possible that my fears of COVID and chronic pain were creating more pain, even after my injury had healed? Understanding this helped me sleep. I could recover. I tapered the meds, like tapering workouts before a race.

March 31

2

5.5

1mile – run! (mtn. lion)

Good sleep

On a walk after dinner, I saw what I thought was a stray dog crossing the street in front of me. I put out my hand as it breathed by just six feet away. Its heavy tail nearly swept the ground. My body gathered itself into thought: mountain lion! This was no hypothetical lion, like the ones researchers use to explain the evolution of our human stress response. Unlike job stress and COVID fears, I could either fight or flee this lion. I backed away slowly, then jogged the mile home down the middle of the street.

April 13

1-run

3-walk

3-walk

Good sleep

I started running one mile per day, then more. I ran all summer. I raced again and came in second overall, beating all the men. I moved up another age group. I left the calendar behind.

 

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford.

The Last Day of His Life

Photograph by Santeri Viinamäki, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.

 

My father wanted to be a gym teacher before his life drove him down another path. The ghost of his ambition has played a part in how much the gym and my gym teachers have meant to me.

Two examples:

One. Have you read J. G. Ballard’s 1968 short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”? When Ronald Reagan, whom I would actually prefer not to fuck, revived the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, the chin-up requirement was an intimidating challenge for the kids at my elementary school.

But my father had been the pull-up champion of his Air Force unit and I’d always had a bar and brackets in my bedroom doorway, not for exercise but as something to play on and have fun with. Fat Geoff and Tall Jeff and Eric and Dena and Tony and Jenny and Jamie and Matt and Amy and Ryan and Janelle (who was as tall as a giraffe, hence her nickname “Girelle”) and Little Brad and Sara and Big Peaky and Little Peaky and Chad and Brooke would come over, and when we weren’t playing Atari we would do skin-the-cats or Tarzan swings on a sturdy yellow tie strap my father had brought home from the dealership. I was not intimidated by the bar.

I was, however, hesitant to stand out, to excel, to draw attention to myself, to be the nail that sticks up and gets hammered down, and I started to sweat when it turned out almost no one in my gym class could do a chin-up. Freckle-faced little Potts managed one, shaking and straining, and he got a round of applause.

Now it was my turn. One, two, three, four, five. No applause.

“Show-off,” Potts snarled, and Coach Cunningham said, “Take off running, Potts. I’ll tell you when to quit. Go on, Daniels. Show them how it’s done.”

I had plenty more in me, but I was about to let go and drop off the bar. And then Coach Cunningham spoke quietly, close to my ear. He is still standing there, speaking to me. This is what he says: “Listen to me, Daniels. If you do less than your best to try to get these weasels to like you, I promise you this is the last day of your life. I will make you run until you die.”

My mother’s favorite D. H. Lawrence story was 1926’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” It’s about a boy who can see the future, if he rides his horse until he dies. The crucial scene:

“It’s Malabar!” he screamed in a powerful, strange voice. “It’s Malabar!”

His eyes blazed at her for one strange and senseless second, as he ceased urging his wooden horse. Then he fell with a crash to the ground, and she, all her tormented motherhood flooding upon her, rushed to gather him up. …

“What does he mean by Malabar?” she asked her brother Oscar.

“It’s one of the horses running for the Derby,” was the answer. …

“I never told you, mother, that if I can ride my horse, and get there, then I’m absolutely sure—oh, absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky!”

“No, you never did,” said his mother.

But the boy died in the night.

And Aeschylus, in Seven against Thebes, has Eteocles tell the chorus: “The gods, I am sure, have already ceased to think of us. The offering they desire from us is that we die.”

It would not be accurate to say that I remember my gym teacher whispering to me. I am still there. I am still wearing my blue-and-gold gym uniform, blue of staunchest friendship’s color / with thy golden hue will glow / to lead us on to goals more high / and on us joy bestow. I am still hanging from that bar by the bleachers in the sudden sweat-stink of my fear of God the gym teacher, of God the Father. I am hanging from the past, staring at the burning future, riding my horse until I die. Don’t forgive them, Father, they know exactly what they are doing.

***

Two. Our gym teacher Coach Williams rushed through the door of Mr. Tatum’s science class and looked around and saw me and pointed and said, “Daniels, stand up and tell me who threw that book out the window,” and I had to say that I had done it.

He stared at me. I stared back at his bristly blond mustache. Then he said, “I knew you wouldn’t lie to me, Daniels. Get yourself out in this hall.”

“Daniels, you skillet-head,” he said. “I was having the boys do jumping jacks under the window. That book could have hurt somebody. What good could possibly come from throwing a book out a window? Why would you do something like that?”

I told the truth. “A girl dared me. I was trying to impress a girl.”

“What girl?”

“I don’t throw and tell, Coach.”

He smirked. “All right, you G.E. lightbulb-head, I hope you impressed her. Now I have to write you up.” He gave me detention.

But detention is not a punishment, it is a reward. Detention was my favorite part of school.

Please, Coach, don’t make me sit quietly in the cafeteria after school, so I’m not at home listening to my parents yell at each other, and all the bad girls are making eyes at me, and I don’t have to talk to anyone and no one is allowed to talk to me, and I can read anything I want for hours.

I loved getting detention. I wish I were in detention right now.

 

J.D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

Naval Support Basketball

Basketball gym, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.

 

The main problem with Philadelphia, the city where I was born—after the shootings and the homelessness, the racial segregation and social neglect, beyond Roosevelt Boulevard and that SEPTA station at Bridge and Pratt, past all the crack and heroin and percs, the mad-cute pigeons disrespected at every angle, and that ludicrously antihuman attempt to build a new Sixers stadium on top of Chinatown—is the simple fact that, were you a wayward youth in Philly sometime in the dead of winter, you’d be hard-pressed to find a holding place, least of all one where you could participate in that so-called bedrock of black-boy sociality, a simple game of pickup basketball. All summer, every summer, my friends and I would camp out at the courts up and down Northeast Philly but once our fingers started to freeze within the first sixty seconds, it was curtains for the idea that ball is, was, or would ever be life.

That is, until we joined the army. I say “we” because of the few years before and after graduating from high school or dropping out for a GED, during which it felt like everyone I knew had given up on that false promise of attaining the good life by working harder or more often at horrible jobs. You would get shot at or yelled at or beaten up for the crime of going outside, anyway, even if you were minding your own business. And all jobs were the same, would always be the same, but at least this one had a Tricare health plan and $400,000 in life insurance; you could ensure that your whole-ass family had access to nine-minute passive-aggressive meetings with a physician for $201.00 a month with little, if any, co-pay. By comparison, I now pay a $700 monthly insurance premium, and, even when I find a doctor who accepts it, another $4,000 a year in co-pays. The benefits of enlistment were like many other forms of coercion under the guise of choice.

With a military ID, we gained access to the naval base off Tabor Road. That’s what we called it, “the naval base off Tabor Road,” though if you google this location, you’ll find it listed as “Naval Support Activity” at 700 Robbins Street. No one knows who coined the faulty name first, but perhaps we liked the sound of it. It was marked for us by the ShopRite across the street where we’d gather to buy Gatorade and Gushers, Twizzlers and plain Herr’s potato chips, “food” that only a young body could tolerate to such a degree. Even in the dead of winter, rather than, you know, rob liquor stores, we could huddle up in access to each other. Because, let’s be real, where else was there to go with perpetually empty pockets? Especially if you were trying to escape the threat of alcoholism that haunted the bars, or frisking by those nosy-ass cops on South Street, or that young boul who, after witnessing the softest of soft dunks “on me” by a rival, lifted his waistband to flash one of those cute little Glock 42s and insisted he right the wrongdoing against my person immediately.

And while yes, some of us still drowned in the tax-free liquor that comes with access to any military installation, others forgot about this altogether, lusting only after the base’s pristinely maintained full court with glass backboards and breakaway rims. Oh, those sweet, sweet breakaway rims. They were the first I’d ever dunked on as an adult; never would I go back to those nightmare bucket rims at Whitehall, across from Harding Middle School, licking blood from dirty, cut-up fingers.

Everybody had to have some kind of ID to get in, but you only needed one military card per car. We packed busted Grand Prix and Nissan Altimas, beige Crown Vics and black Kias with illegally dark window tint and sky-high car notes full of niggas from around this way and that and sat in line at the front gate, proof of our personhood in hand, always with a little trepidation about the minor encounter with power. Did some dickhead bring their gun again and forget to mention it at the threshold, so instead of missing a game we’d have big-boy problems? Who forgot their ID altogether or decided just now to say they didn’t even have one? Was the car registration even valid? Then we were rolling down the windows and faking smiles, making sure we all had the same logic as to where we were going and why if asked. The gym, where else?

Once, or however many times, who can recall exactly, my registration was expired, and the guard—who, to his credit, didn’t even point his M16 at me for this particular infraction—made us park elsewhere and get out to walk the half mile to the gym. It was brick outside, but we were all just glad they let us in. Trotting through the lot, we whined to each other just a bit about our actual lives, between the gray sky and black asphalt, watching the government plates glide by, and sometimes another homie would scoop us up halfway to the threshold and squeeze us into their Honda Civic, like, “Damn, you niggas look cold.”

Naval Support Activity offered up a series of brief respites for my favorite kind of person, the “domesticated hood nigga,” as my friend Tasia might say, coining the term at a crowded cookout: “I love y’all domesticated hood niggas.” She meant those folks who’ve absorbed and recapitulated the kind of terror too offensive for dinner parties, but who, after some coincidental and laborious breakthrough, can now dwell just within the periphery of our sick society as nearly legible subjects. It’s not that nobody never had beef at the naval base; quite the contrary. But there were no guns, so who gave a fuck? I don’t think it makes sense for a grown man to engage in fist fighting; it’s just bad practice. You look immature, dumb even; exhausted just a few swings in, over there hugging each other and huffing to death with your old ass. But it happened. There were always old heads there to squash most confrontations though: some E-7 like Rome, who could make or break your long-term contracting orders later, fuck with your pockets; someone who we respected as one of the few honest men in our mostly fatherless lives.

The naval base was the last refuge for hooping before nobody’s body could really handle it anymore. Clarence and Chic and Rome and Josh, the Flood brothers, light-skin Dan and them worked up a communion of squeaking sneakers and overconfident alley-oops and missed midrange jumpers and sprained ankles and popped knees and, on occasion, a clean block here and there, a “stop playin and stick that nigga” yelled across the court or a last layup we were all too tired to follow, and all the better for it.

Maybe ten years later, when my old car finally broke down and I decided on a Toyota SUV because supposedly they last a bit longer, I ran into a familiar face at the dealership that I couldn’t place, till she asked outta nowhere, “You know Chic?”

It all came flooding back. “Yeah,” I said. “We used to play ball together back in the day.” I could recall only warmth from him, something about the way I saw him with his girl and kids, and this was back when I could barely speak a kind word to another man that Clarence hadn’t vouched for.

I didn’t get a discount but the exchange eased that trepidation I normally have at a dealership. And when she said, “Oh word, Imma take care of you then,” I actually believed her. And that was enough.

 

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer who lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.