“Peter,” I said one night, “are you having an affair?”
“Of course not, Pumpkin,” he said. He called me that, but my real name’s Phyllis. “I’m just trying to improve my lifestyle so I’ll live longer,” he said. “I wish you’d join me.” It was then that he cupped my belly with his hands, and he didn’t say he loved the way it pooched out. He jiggled it, but it wasn’t very friendly. “You could stand to lose some of this, you know,” he said. I smacked him with my pillow and started spending more time in my garden and less time with him.
Not long after that, he started trying to get me involved in his “improved lifestyle”. First, he volunteered to do the grocery shopping, a thing he had never done before. He totally ignored the list I sent him off with, and instead came back with organic vegetables, a fifty pound bag of rice, a bunch of dried peas, beans in bulk and a vegetarian cookbook.
“Give it a shot…for me,” he said.
Oh, I tried. I soaked and boiled legumes until the bed sheets billowed with his new found flatulence. I concocted salads and pilafs, soy cakes and falafels and did my level best to acquire a taste for them. But secretly, late at night, when Peter was snoring and farting and perhaps, losing weight in his sleep, I would sneak down to the kitchen, take my stash of farmer’s spiced sausages from the back of the freezer and fry ’em up. Sometimes I’d add some garlic glazed potatoes and top it off with a sticky homemade Chelsea bun.
I went jogging with him once, finally giving in after he promised to take me out to dinner afterwards.
“What’ll I wear?” I said. He was standing at the door stretching like an Olympic triathlete, bending this way and that and breathing through his nose. His newly minted hard body was already encased in skintight running gear, like a muscular sausage. He wore a tank top with “Just Do It!” screaming across the front of it, his chest hair bristling up out of the scooped neck, a patch of moss on a hunk of granite. He’d recently booked time on one of those tanning beds. and his skin had turned an interesting orangey-bronze colour that I guess he considered attractive. I yearned for the pale soft doughboy I’d married.
“I don’t know what you want to wear, for gosh sakes,” Peter said. “Something loose and comfortable, if you still have anything like that.” That was unkind, although it was true that I had gained a pound or two since Peter had started working out. It was almost as if every little lump of fat that Peter banished from his own body had hidden itself secretly in the walls of the house, leaped out suddenly when I wasn’t looking and fastened itself onto my thighs. Not many of my clothes fit any more, and there was no way I was going to try to squeeze into a pair of shorts, no matter what kind of activity I was letting myself in for. I eventually settled on a pair of Peter’s own pre-workout sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt.
“You look great,” he said, half-heartedly, but I knew I looked grotesque. I laced up the new running shoes he had bought me at Fitness World, and we moved out onto the front lawn.
“Now,” Peter said, “I’ll just guide you through a few basic stretching exercises, okay?” I grimaced. Suddenly, I was back in Grade Six, standing in front of Miss Featherstone, our gym teacher at Mumford Public School. Miss Featherstone had weighed us, measured us and put us through our paces like a drill sergeant, getting us ready to take the province-wide Participaction tests which would yield, for some, a handsome achievement badge in bronze, silver or gold. For the also-rans, there were mingy little plastic “Good Effort” pins. I had several of them rattling around in a cardboard box somewhere, relics of a thankfully denied past. I had hated Miss Featherstone with all my childish heart. As Peter went into fitness trainer mode, showing me how easy it was to flop over like a rag doll and touch his toes (I couldn’t quite see mine), I felt all those Featherstone feelings well up in my throat again.
“Come on, Phyllis, you’re hardly trying,” he said, annoyed because I was sort of rolling my eyes as he bent sideways like a piece of overcooked spaghetti, demonstrating a move that, for me, was a physical impossibility. “Think of your body as a set of steel cables. Strength though stretching. At least give it a shot.” I gave it a shot and felt something go sproing in my neck.
“Uh, Peter,” I said.
“What?”
“I think one of my steel cables just snapped.”
“Nonsense,” he said, coming over to me and vigorously kneading my shoulders. “You just need to loosen up is all.”
By the end of the warm-up session I was ready to call it quits. I was sweating like a racehorse and aching all over. Peter’s teaching technique, which he must have learned at that awful private school his parents sent him to, was horribly patronizing. Every time I managed to execute a bendy-thing, he was right in there with a “gooood work!” remark that made my hair stand on end.
“Okay, you seem to be limbered up enough now,” he said, finally. “We’ll just take it easy the first time out. Usually I go a couple of kilometres, up to the reservoir and back, but we’ll just go a little way—enough so that you get a chance to feel the runner’s high. I tell you, Pumpkin, there’s nothing like it!” He leaped away like a demented hare, turning around once and running backwards to encourage me to follow.
Remember that scene in Walt Disney’s Fantasia where the hippos do that ballet number? That was me, in my mind’s eye, not dressed in a tutu, but a dancing hippo nonetheless. I swear I saw the curtains twitch at neighbouring windows as I plodded past—people peeking out to see why the china in their cabinets was rattling.
I made it halfway around the block. By that time, he had pulled far ahead, perhaps forgetting about me, or perhaps made oblivious by his “runner’s high”. The only runner’s high I felt was the one I manufactured artificially back at the house with a couple of stale Tim Hortons donuts I found at the back of the fridge.
Peter returned, glistening with vibrant health and righteous indignation.
“What the hell happened to you?” he said.
I swiped at the sugar on my chin and smiled sweetly. “I don’t think running’s for me, my love,” I said. “Your body may be made of steel cables, but mine’s butter cake.” I thought I heard him mutter something like “lard-ass” as he stumped off to the shower, but I couldn’t be sure.
I put the running shoes back in their Fitness World box and took them back to the store for a refund. Luckily, Peter had kept the receipt. The shoes had cost $149.99, and there was a friendly note scrawled at the bottom of it, “Have a nice day. Lori,” with a little smiley face. Well, Lori, whoever she was, would just have to give back the commission and move on, that was all. I spent the cash at Foodland, splurging on prime rib, tender new potatoes, a carton of double cream and some California strawberries.
A couple of weeks later when I pulled into the driveway after grocery shopping, Peter was waiting for me on the porch with an eager, little boy “I’ve got a secret” look on his face. He helped unload the car without being asked and acted like he had to pee, which was a dead giveaway. For a while, I pretended I didn’t notice, but his tension was getting to me so I finally gave in.
“Okay, Peter. What is it?”
“Promise me you won’t be mad,” he said.
What kind of bargain is that? I wanted to ask but didn’t. He had been so disappointed with the jogging fiasco, and it had taken a while to smooth his ruffled feathers, so I just nodded and let him lead me into the living room.
There, taking pride of place in front of the TV, was a contraption straight out of a medieval torture chamber, metallic and menacing.
“I bought you a present—a rowing machine,” Peter said, holding tightly onto my hand as if he were worried I’d haul off and clobber him. I almost did. This “I bought you a present” line was completely transparent and not a little annoying. The running shoes had been okay, a mistake, maybe, but