Category: Lately

Having extorted the last out of the free trial offers at every fitness center in my neighborhood, I finally became a card-holding member of the Prospect Park YMCA on the first of this month. My roommate has been working out there for most of this year while I flitted between fitness centers and dance studios in two boroughs. I was a harlot in yoga pants. And all along, the gym of my dreams was just two and a half blocks away.

There is a TV screen at every single cardio machine. And baskets full of abrasive, threadbare towels under a sign that says Towel Service. There is no juice bar, nor is there any pretension at the juice bar. Sometimes, white-haired men wearing sweatbands and heart monitors hold the door for me.

The week before I registered at the Y, I rubbed the fuzzy lining of my sneakers down through to the rubber underneath the ball of my left foot. I was visiting home for the weekend, so I considered going to this store on Route 7 where this guy, a sage of sneakers, apparently, will watch you run back and forth in front of the building, analyze your gait, and recommend running shoes based on the arch of your foot and the pressure points of your natural stride.

I drove right by the store when I imagined this shoe guru making me hoof it across the parking lot and then asking about my history with athletic footwear.

“How have you chosen your sneakers in the past?”

“Usually I go to Kohl’s and find the ones that are marked down to like, $32.99. And then I pick based on which one they have in my size, which is Pretty Big, Like, Double-Digits.”

“I see. Try this one on. It provides excellent arch support.”

“Eek, uh-uh, not those. I don’t like the yellow stripes. What do you have in pink?”

Instead, I drove to Kohl’s and found the aisle of markdowns. Just $28.99 put me in a pair of darling sneakers with lilac trim and that cushion-y bubble in the heel.

When I was a kid, I played softball for at least six years mostly because I kept hoping that my team’s t-shirts would be a better color the next season. Now that I get to pick all the colors, cute fitness apparel is totally an incentive to get to the gym. My rule is that I can’t skip two days in a row. I’ve come a long way from picking dandelions in the very far corner of the soccer field.

And when pink gym shorts aren’t enough, I fall back on peer pressure from my roommate and a touch of passive aggression. I can’t let those guys in the sweatbands outrun me.

Last night I slept with my nose jammed in Isabellephant’s armpit.

When I woke up this morning, I was cautious about removing it from that nook. The synthetic fur in my nostrils served as an air filter. Since Monday, a bulldozer has been puffing motor oil exhaust through my window while it digs up the street outside. I lifted my stuffed elephant’s limb and sniffed a couple of times. For the first time all week, it seemed that toxic fumes had not permeated my bedroom.

I had not been spared in the way of toxic sounds, however. A different machine has woken me up every morning. A four-foot circular blade attached to a pushcart sliced through the pavement. A jackhammer, ridden like a pogo stick by a short man wearing orange from head to toe, pulverized a strip of concrete to create a messy channel straight through the intersection. A bulldozer pawed at huge scraps of gravel, nudging them into piles and then scooping them into a dump truck.

In a dream, that sound manifested as a dinosaur chomping on concrete and then digesting its meal—amplified.

This morning, I thought I heard my roommate loading or emptying the dishwasher, but given the early hour and our mutual aversion to kitchen-based chores, I knew that was unlikely. I got out of bed and, relieved that diesel fumes hadn’t gone to my head and made me woozy, I went to the window. One of the orange men was using a sledgehammer to clank stakes around the perimeter of a road plate. It covered up one segment of the channel and allowed a path for pedestrians along one side of the street, though traffic was blocked off in all directions.

Across the street and a few doors down from the corner, two women stood talking, one on the inside of the gate and one on the outside. They were both dressed in dark cotton pants and button-down shirts in light denim. They both had an elbow propped on the railing. Their blue jean shoulders nudged against each other and they chatted as they watched the commotion of mechanics and demolition.

“Goodness, my word, all that noise!” their faces seemed to say. “My word!”

A boy with a red book bag and red Chucks ran down the sidewalk in front of them, swinging his arms straight forward and back. At the corner, he nearly knocked over the blockade before he managed to stop. He gaped into the trench before him.

“Uhhhmm, Mom!” he called, and then spun around to yell, “the sidewalk’s closed!”

“Just go around; you are going to school!” The patriarch of the orange men held up a florescent flag on a stick to indicate the pathway on the other side of the street. The boy kept big eyes on the bulldozer over his shoulder as he passed. His mother plugged both ears with her thumbs.

A runner with a Vizsla on a leash tried to hurry past the noise, but the dog shied before stepping on the metal plank. The owner tugged on the leash and jogged forward for encouragement. The dog jumped up, lifting all four paws off the ground at once. She scrambled about a pace and a half in midair and landed again at a full gallop, now tugging her human companion along.

“Did you see that? My word!”

The guy with the sledgehammer had an audience. Two of his own crew members gathered to watch him drive the last few stakes. One of them stepped forward and stomped his feet on a few as if to make sure that their heads were flush with the surface. This amused the other guy; he imitated the dance with a sort of sideways running man.

“My word!”

This is the kind of stuff I usually miss because I’m looking at old J.Crew catalogs or exfoliating or emptying the dishwasher or sleeping with my nose jammed in Isabellephant’s armpit.

I can’t say I won’t be happy to have that extra five minutes of sleep back when the noisy project on the street is finished.

I grew up in the sort of town where front yards are decorated quite unironically with hay bales in the fall. Where faithful locals will rebuild and restore the landmark fountain no matter how many drunken drivers crash into it. Where Nina Levy’s Big Baby was exhibited, and vandalized, on the lawn of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum just a quarter of a mile down the road from the Keeler Tavern, with a Revolutionary War cannonball still lodged in its side. Where high school football games are sponsored by four family owned and operated since businesses, and also: Pepsi-Cola. Where the change in the seasons makes the front page four times a year and the recent bank robbery will make the front page every week for a whole season.

I remember hearing one of my mother’s friends comment about the higher-and-higher cost of living in Ridgefield and the surrounding towns and villages. “It’s a shame,” she said to me, “that you kids might not be able to buy a home in the town where you grew up. If that’s what you might want. You should be able to do it.” I thought immediately of my friend Melissa. Ambitious, competitive, fierce Melissa. She works hard, she plays hard. She worries about raising kids in a conservative community like Ridgefield. I thought about her buying a house in our home town, but not me. I’ve never thought that far ahead.

I have the same dream on the first night of almost every visit home. I’m in my bed, in my room, in my house. All the furniture is facing the right direction and the rooms are arranged properly and the house is actually my own, even though I almost always dream about puzzling fusions of different places and times. The hallway light is on and I’m watching the crack where the light shines through, waiting for that negative space to blink dark as my mom or my dad walks across the hall.

I dream that I’m too hot and I don’t know what time it is. I’m so preoccupied with these discomforts that I don’t notice my dog in bed with me until she starts growing. She is curled up in the narrow space between my body and the edge of the bed with her back against my stomach and her front paws folded against her belly. I dream her expanding, inflating, multiplying in size to cover me and then the whole bed, eventually filling the room with puppy ears as big as blankets, a tail the size of a tree, pieces of fur the length of my arm.

When I wake up, I discover that Maggie is, indeed, in my bed with me, curled up a little too close in her happiness to have me at home again. I’m too hot and I don’t know what time it is. I know she’ll jump off the bed and relocate to my parents’ floor if I move at all. Her warmth is nearly suffocating, but I kind of like the company. I lie still, hot and thirsty and somewhat disoriented, willing her to move, hoping she won’t.

A few weeks ago, at some point before the autumn weather preview that we had in late August, I was standing in the First-Aid aisle of a CVS pharmacy on the Upper East Side. While I searched for non-slip, extra-sticky, waterproof, shoe leather resistant bandages to protect my heels from another round of blisters, a family of three entered the store.

They struck me as the archetypal UES clan. All three were engaged in a conversation, but one so fragmented that they might not have been talking to one other. They spoke in turns, without ever interrupting each other, and they moved about the store as a unit, but when the mother mentioned something that she needed to grab, the father would reply with a completely unrelated sentence, even as he held out the shopping basket to let his wife deposit an item in with the rest of their purchases.

The son, a nine- or ten-year-old boy, trailed closely behind his parents but dodged out of the way when either one of them changed paths. He had developed a talent for keeping up with mom and dad and keeping out from under foot at the same time. He carried a hand-held video game console, but it was powered-off and dangling from his bony arm by a woven wrist strap. His defeated shoulders sagged so low that the game nearly dragged on the floor. As his parents blurted out their individual shopping lists, their trains of thought darting every which way, the boy’s high-pitched oration followed one coherent thread.

“Why is it that I sweat at camp but never at home?”

“What, honey? Not that brand.”

“At camp I was sweating all the time and here I don’t.”

“Do you have to get the gel kind? I don’t like the gel kind. Buddy, what happens at camp?”

“I’m just as hot here. But I don’t sweat at all.”

“Honey, you just don’t run around as much when you’re in the city. Pick out your own then. I still need moisturizer.”

“I know, but everyone else here sweats and I don’t. I’m hot now. I should be sweating and you can’t even see it on my shirt.”

“Buy one get one for fifty percent . . . Buddy, you should be happy that you don’t sweat that much. Equal or lesser value . . . What happened to your mother?”

Of course, I can only speculate, but I got the clear impression that the kid, who appeared to be a little on the prissy side, had recently returned to the city from summer camp, where he had discovered that sweating lowered his body temperature and made him feel cooler. I could just picture a bunch of tweenaged boys jabbing at one another, measuring each other’s machismo by the surface area of sweat prints on their pint sized LaCoste polos and Crew Cuts t-shirts.

I guess kids really will pick on each other over anything. Poor little guy.

Meanwhile, just standing in CVS had cast a glistening sheen over my skin. Yes, I’m just a sweaty person.  I grabbed a box of Band-Aids and headed for the deodorant section, hoping to discover a new anti-perspirant formula. I’m seriously ready to try anything to dry up the tributaries that run from my pores. The extract of a recently discovered rain forest flora. Moon rock flakes. Hops. Seriously, anything. Listen to your dad, kid. You should be happy.