High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [35]
Well, yes. But to tell the truth, the leisure body and even the GD LNGS are not really what I was after when I signed up at Pecs-R-Us. What I craved, and long for still, is to be strong. I’ve never been strong. In childhood, team sports were my most reliable source of humiliation. I’ve been knocked breathless to the ground by softballs, basketballs, volleyballs, and once, during a wildly out-of-hand game of Red Rover, a sneaker. In every case I knew my teammates were counting on me for a volley or a double play or anyhow something more than clutching my stomach and rolling upon the grass. By the time I reached junior high I wasn’t even the last one picked anymore. I’d slunk away long before they got to the bottom of the barrel.
Even now, the great mortification of my life is that visitors to my home sometimes screw the mustard and pickle jar lids back on so tightly I can’t get them open! (The visitors probably think they are just closing them enough to keep the bugs out.) Sure, I can use a pipe wrench, but it’s embarrassing. Once, my front gate stuck, and for several days I could only leave home by clambering furtively through the bougainvilleas and over the garden wall. When a young man knocked on my door to deliver flowers one sunny morning, I threw my arms around him. He thought that was pretty emotional, for florists’ mums. He had no idea he’d just casually pushed open the Berlin Wall.
My inspiration down at the health club was a woman firefighter who could have knocked down my garden gate with a karate chop. I still dream about her triceps. But I’ve mostly gotten over my brief fit of muscle envy. Oh, I still make my ongoing, creative stabs at body building: I do “girl pushups,” and some of the low-impact things from Jane Fonda’s pregnant-lady workout book, even if I’m not. I love to run, because it always seems like there’s a chance you might actually get somewhere, so I’ll sometimes cover a familiar mile or so of our country road after I see my daughter onto the school bus. (The driver confessed that for weeks he thought I was chasing him; he never stopped.) And finally, my friends have given me an official item of exercise equipment that looks like a glob of blue putty, which you’re supposed to squeeze a million times daily to improve your grip. That’s my current program. The so-called noncompetitive atmosphere of the health club whipped me, hands down. Realistically, I’ve always known I was born to be a “before” picture. So I won’t be seen driving around with plates that boast: PRSS 250.
Maybe: OPN JRS.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AT BREAKFAST
I have a child who was born with the gift of focus, inclined to excel at whatever she earnestly pursues. Soon after her second birthday she turned to the earnest pursuit of languor, and shot straight through the ranks to world-class dawdler. I thought it might be my death.
Like any working stiff of a mother keeping the family presentable and solvent, I lived in a flat-out rush. My daughter lived on Zen time. These doctrines cannot find peace under one roof. I tried everything I could think of to bring her onto my schedule: five-minute countdowns, patient explanations of our itinerary, frantic appeals, authoritarianism, the threat of taking her to preschool exactly however she was dressed when the clock hit seven. (She went in PJs, oh delight! Smug as Brer Rabbit in the briars.) The more I tried to hurry us along, the more meticulously unhurried her movements became.
My brother pointed out that this is how members of the Japanese Parliament carry out a filibuster—by shuffling up to the voting box so extremely slowly it can take one person an hour to get across the room, and a month or two to get the whole vote in. It’s called “cow walking,” he reported. Perfect, I said. At my house we are having a Cow Life.
And that’s how it was, as I sat at breakfast one morning watching my darling idle dangerously with her breakfast. I took a spectacularly deep breath and said, in a voice I imagined was