Prose by Janice Colman

Saddle Bags

I was never a gym rat. Actually, I never knew the term until I was thirty-two, grabbing a hasty exit one Saturday morning, and leaving my husband, Abie, to make breakfast for the girls.

“You’re becoming a gym rat, you know that?” Abie says, puffing up his chest.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Look it up,” he says.

I knew about rats from our rented century-old Forest Hill house where I had killed a wayward mouse, spraying, and then in a flying panic, flattening it with a cast iron frying pan.  A year later, possibly because of and thanks to the rodent, we moved to this Toronto suburb called Willowdale, into a four-bedroom custom built house which my father paid in full, with cash. My parents were “comfortable,” my father used to say as I was growing up, my mother for good measure adding, “we still have to budget.” They were rich, which I didn’t know until I met and married Abie, the son of a Jewish poultry butcher, a schochet.

But a gym rat, well, a gym rat is something else. It has to do with passion and commitment, dedication, also love which defines my life: how I manoeuvre, my why’s and wherefore’s.

The beginning: Standing in front of the wall-to-wall dressing room mirror, I twist sideways, then straight full-on. I am wearing a high-cut black cotton leotard with spaghetti straps, something a dancer might wear. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

Abie is in bed with one of the magazines he reads: Scientific American, Playboy (which he reads for the articles), Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness. His reasons for subscribing to men’s magazine with a six-pack torso parading on its cover eludes me. Abie is no poster boy. Not by a long shot.

 

–     I have pouches! I scream from the adjoining master bathroom. On the sides of my legs! Full pockets of fat, like a kid’s jeans full of marbles or maybe frogs. What the hell is this!

–     Will you talk English for god’s sake?

–     Saddlebags! Thirty-six years old and I have saddlebags!

–     So, join a gym. There’s one in the plaza.

–     Why didn’t you tell me? I mean, my god!

 

Which is when he tells me about the practice of rolfing: “You grab flesh and then you knead it, and what you’re doing, what you’re doing is drawing heat into cellulite, liquefying it.”

Abie first read about rolfing in Men’s Health, although he says he’s known about it for years and it makes absolute sense, because Europeans know about rolfing. Abie adores Europe.

“Liquify and absorb. It’s that simple.”

Every night Abie massages the fat adjoining the outsides of my thighs. I join Superfitness Women’s Gym at Laureleaf Plaza, in a Toronto suburb with four-bedroom houses, all custom-made: roof colour, tiles, shag or not, parquet or barnboard, ravine lot or street facing. A suburb, although I swore I would never move to one of those city outskirts, but here I am in Willowdale with my saddlebags.

At the gym, I wear black tights, a black spaghetti-strapped leotard and pink leg warmers. Two rounds of Nautilus circuit, weights stacked to the hilt, and after the machines, I indulge in one aerobics class and then another. I figure if I can score one high-intensity class, I’m a shoo-in for two. Abie buys me Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book Weight Training for Women and books with bodybuilding champion Rachael McLish posing like a beauty queen, flashing teeth and painted nails, also Georgia Fudge who died in a car crash five years later. In his way, Abie supports me. He says I am going to be a famous artist. A writer like Erica Jong. And now he’s at this Women’s Superfitness Gym, cheering me on.

Abie knows stuff and when he doesn’t, you are still sure he does. He can build you up—or drag you down and almost drown you.

Books stacked beside me, I strap on my five-pound red metal sandals over running shoes, I kick out front, side and back while standing, lying on one side, then the other, on all fours.  The manager, a tan-bed freak in a purple Lycra leotard and matching tights passing by says “You think you’re such a maven,” which Abie later translates— smart aleck, know it all, he says, and I grin.

I feed on small talk in the sauna at Laureleaf. Dialogue intrigues me. I lie purposefully flat, sweating on the top bench while two yentas douse the coals with water beneath the sign “dry sauna, do not throw water.”

 

–  Lou moved into his new condo yesterday.

–  Oh really?

–  Yeah, we took the kids out and later I went over.

–  You went there?

–  And I stayed for breakfast the next morning! So, there’s Lou and me having breakfast, and his girlfriend comes in and he says, ‘I brought Edie over to show her the apartment and I invited her to join us for breakfast.’

–  You got a weird relationship, Edie. So, is she pretty?

–  Nah. She’s kind of plain, but young. It would have been our twenty-ninth today. We’ve got a history behind us. Twenty-seven years and two kids. I didn’t ask for money, so we’re friends. We feel relaxed together, you know what I mean? Like we go to a movie and he farts. Whose husband doesn’t fart in front of her? And you know what he says? ‘You know, Edie, you’re still the only one I fart in front of.’

 

Edie pours water from the bucket onto the coals and tucks the corner of her white gym towel under her armpit. Her legs are a map of veins: dark blue lines blur under the sepia wash of her Miami Beach tan. It’s scorching hot on the third bench. My memory is like those self-closing doors that keep out cold and heat. I consciously keep them propped open. I’m thinking Jewish yentas would flesh out the book I am writing, a book like a monster plant without true direction that just grows and invades, and I can’t wait to tell Abie, so I swoop down on the sauna dialogue.

 

Edie:  Myra, so tell me, you coming to Vegas with the girls?

Myra: Who’s to know? I didn’t talk to Saul about it yet.

Edie: What you mean, talk to Saul? You’re a big girl, Myra. Look at that behind you got! You need Saul’s blessing before you wipe your tuchas?

Myra: And who’s going to pay for the hotel and shopping? It’s like this¾Saul unbuckles his belt after dinner and he goes into the family room to watch the news, I finish off the dishes, have a cup of tea, maybe a little nosh, and when I go up, he’s in bed reading the newspaper, with his pillow and mine behind him. A man needs two pillows, he says, a woman can use her own head, it’s so soft. When he says that, I start adding extra schmaltz in his food whenever he complains about his weight. Nothing too fatty, you know, just a little extra olive oil.

 

I snort since lately I have taken to anointing Abie’s salads with an excess of Bartolini’s Olive Oil. The women look up at me. “The heat,” I say, leaning back and covering my grin with a wet washcloth.

 

(Edie turns and squarely faces her friend)

Edie: Myra, do like I do, give him a job.

Myra: Job?

Edie: A blowjob, you yutz, offer him a job.

Myra: Gonif! You do that?

Edie: Every time. I want something real bad, I offer Mort a job. Depends what  I want. A dress, one job. A dress and shoes, two.

Myra: How much for a trip to Vegas?

 

They’re laughing and nudging each other like crazed schoolgirls. They are talking about my life, these sauna yentas. Abie sits in his beige office comforted by his push-button phone with its two lines, an IBM printer and matching IBM Selectric typewriter with automatic white out. He takes calls. “Quiet,” he warns when I knock, “I am talking to France—to England—Germany.” He makes the cash, Abie does or, does not.

My heart is not in it, this marriage. There’s no cash in the house and our cupboard is bare. Still, I am practicing with an eye on the future. It’s important to cultivate talents.

The Contest

We buy books on Sunday mornings. The girls and I and Abie pile in our second-hand navy blue Benz and we’re off to Lichtman’s in Bayview Mall or downtown to the World’s Biggest Bookstore.

Abie beelines to the magazine section. He buys the Sunday New York Times for two dollars and fifty cents.

The girls and I navigate to the children’s section against the back wall or on the second floor. Sometimes I slip over to the athlete’s section and grab Joe Weider’s Bodybuilder’s magazine. I ask Abie to watch the girls on World’s biggest main floor, since the budget section is nearby with more children’s books and in front of that, and to the side, lives the anthology section with the best selection in the city as far as I can see—Pushcart Prizes, O’Henry Award, Best American, The Showa Anthology.

I read about Growth Hormone (GH to close friends) during one of these bookstore excursions. Muscle mags thrill me. I am up-yours and hardcore. I want to know how the Australian lifter Bev Francis piled on her mass. I am always hungry.

*
On the blue Nautilus leg extension my legs tremble & Coach places his hands on my thighs. He ties up the laces on my running shoes / says I am the strongest woman at the gym and no one coming cardio-close. I won’t let him weigh me anymore. At least not on Mondays.

It takes three days, maybe four, to return to a post-binging weight.
The [body]builders at the gym love Friday. The first time I heard “thank god it’s Friday” I was at Wingfield. “TGIF,” said the silver-spandex guy.

At supper that night, I ask Abie, “what does it mean this TGIF?” Abie is my go-to.
“It’s because they piss beer all weekend,” he says.
“But what does it mean?”

What does it mean “no will”? I am not and I am. I am the weight, a builder astride the machine, a jockey pressing on. “I told you it’s better than sex,” Coach says as I struggle with an obstinate weight. “Four more reps and don’t you get off before. Don’t you dare.”

There is nothing like obsession.

*
“What the hell is this!” Coach says, pinching my underarms and legs. The contest is in November. On July 1, I weigh one hundred and thirteen, daily vitamins mounting behind my eyes: vitamin C, A, D, E, beta carotene, desiccated liver, chromium picolinate, bioflavonoids from the inner skin of citrus fruits, vitamin B complex.

At one hundred and thirteen pounds, I am lean but no living x-ray.
When a bodybuilder walks onstage, you gotta see veins and origins of muscles, where they begin where they end, an anatomy class you feast on and root for, stand up and yell from your seat: Great abs, number 4, Look at those glutes, Glutes 3!

My weight, one hundred and three, eyes on a one with two zeroes crashing through that zero-zero barrier, such a marathon and I, thirty-eight years old, powering through, shedding.

On the first of August, my bathroom scale with mustard padding registers one hundred.
Even on the third try, one hundred pounds. Sans hips, sans breasts, even my soul less robust, thin veering on two-dimensional. Two zeroes shining clear and bright like a perfect summer day,

“Ha!” I say, congratulating myself. Then stepping off the scale, I march downstairs into the kitchen, give the fridge a once over, and climb in.

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