High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [34]
I joined a health club.
I went downtown and sweated with the masses. I rode a bike that goes nowhere at the rate of five hundred calories per hour. I even pumped a little iron. I can’t deny the place was a lekking ground: guys stalking around the weight room like prairie chickens, nervously eying each other’s pectorals. Over by the abdominal machines I heard some of the frankest pickup lines since eighth grade (“You’ve got real defined deltoids for a girl”). A truck perpetually parked out front had vanity plates that read: LFT WTS. Another one, PRSS 250, I didn’t recognize as a vanity plate until I understood the prestige of bench pressing 250 pounds.
I personally couldn’t bench press a fully loaded steam iron. I didn’t join the health club to lose weight, or to meet the young Adonis who admired my (dubiously defined) deltoids. I am content with my lot in life, save for one irksome affliction: I am what’s known in comic-book jargon as the ninety-eight-pound weakling. I finally tipped the scales into three digits my last year of high school, but “weakling” I’ve remained, pretty much since birth. In polite terminology I’m cerebral; the muscles between my ears are what I get by on. The last great body in my family was my Grandfather Henry. He wore muscle shirts in the days when they were known as BVDs, under his cotton work shirt, and his bronze tan stopped midbiceps. He got those biceps by hauling floor joists and hammering up roof beams every day of his life, including his last. How he would have guffawed to see a roomful of nearly naked bankers and attorneys, pale as plucked geese, heads down, eyes fixed on a horizon beyond the water cooler, pedaling like bats out of hell on bolted-down bicycles. I expect he’d offer us all a job. If we’d pay our thirty dollars a month to him, we could come out to the construction site and run up and down ladders bringing him nails. That’s why I’m embarrassed about all this. I’m afraid I share his opinion of unproductive sweat.
Actually, he’d be more amazed than scornful. His idea of fun was watching Ed Sullivan or snoozing in a recliner, or ideally, both at once. Why work like a maniac on your day off? To keep your heart and lungs in shape. Of course. But I haven’t noticed any vanity plates that say GD LNGS. The operative word here is vanity.
Standards of beauty in every era are things that advertise, usually falsely: “I’m rich and I don’t have to work.” How could you be a useful farmhand, or even an efficient clerk-typist, if you have long, painted fingernails? Four-inch high heels, like the bound feet of Chinese aristocrats, suggest you don’t have to do anything efficiently, except maybe put up your tootsies on an ottoman and eat bonbons. (And I’ll point out here that aristocratic men wore the first high heels.) In my grandmother’s day, women of all classes lived in dread of getting a tan, since that betrayed a field worker’s station in life. But now that the field hand’s station is occupied by the office worker, a tan, I suppose, advertises that Florida and Maui are within your reach. Fat is another peculiar cultural flip-flop: in places where food is scarce, beauty is three inches of subcutaneous fat deep. But here and now, jobs are sedentary and calories are relatively cheap, while the luxury of time to work them off is very dear. It still gives me pause to see an ad for a weight-loss program that boldly enlists: “First ten pounds come off free!” But that is about the size of it, in this strange food-drenched land of ours. After those first ten, it gets expensive.
As a writer I could probably do my job fine with no deltoids at all, or biceps or triceps, so long as you left me those vermicelli-sized muscles that lift the fingers to the keyboard. (My vermicellis are very well defined.) So when I’ve writ my piece, off I should merrily go to build a body that says