task of passing other people on the sidewalk, deciding whether to weave right or left around another body, steps softening, momentarily, so as not to alarm anyone. On the stair climbers there are real stairs. On every machine, including the bastard elliptical, what’s replicated most closely, though, is yesterday’s stint on the same machine. Motivation turns muddy: If you’re not at the gym because you can’t be outside, moving in the real world, then why are you there?
On my way to the elliptical in the front left corner, five machines from the nearest exerciser, I see someone I know and consider exit strategies: the opposite direction, toward the upper deck of the pool, around the staircase, down the staircase, toward the stationary bikes, darting toward the weights and skipping the elliptical altogether—which I try for, but she does too, sees me, asks, What’s up? and I point to my iPod clipped to my T-shirt hem and mumble some nonsense, after pretending I hadn’t yet noticed her, about being in a Beyoncé zone. She smiles, as eager to end the conversation as I, zigzags past me, waves goodbye as she bounds down the steps, away.
Around me, around the elliptical I muscle into motion, drops of sweat gather on the floor, as if the rubber itself were perspiring. I can’t hear myself breathe over my music playing through noise-canceling headphones except when the seal between ear canal and earbud cracks open, loosened by moisture. I notice slowly, mostly by feel, then by sound: the creak of the machine every time my right foot comes forward, my breath on the downbeat, the foot-on-plastic of the overzealous runner who kicks the hollow front of the treadmill on each gazelle spring into the same place.
As exercisers multiplied, so did gyms and so did equipment: To barbells and dumbbells were added weightlifting machines, which narrowed each exercise down into a simple movement, the bench press becoming a seated push forward, the squat becoming recliner-based. By connecting the lifter to the weights with cables, and by seating the lifter in an apparatus that allowed only specific movements, a machine could keep the body controlled. It could hold the body in place. It was the modern gym itself, writ small.
Machines for cardiovascular exercise popped up too, bringing running indoors, to the treadmill, on which distance and time were complemented with new metrics: calories, METs, watts—metrics that grew more arbitrary the more of them there were.
Next came fitness classes. People lined up in rows and columns like aerobics machines, faced mirrors instead of windows, and formed, willingly, into a panopticon. At the spinning classes I used to go to, at six thirty in the morning, often I was one of only two or three participants. As the teacher barked commands and encouragement—Climb that hill! Come on, y’all!—I tried to ignore the room’s emptiness, the bass soaked up by just a few bodies, the bass that bounced off the hard walls and buzzed with the flicker of fluorescent lights beyond the door, the bass that beat against the sea of black light in the cycling studio that turned our bodies into rickety jellyfish. White towels draped on our handlebars gleamed in artificial brilliance.
I liked to choose a bike about three-quarters of the way back, on the side closest to the door. I’d stand next to the bike, lower the saddle until it was even with my hipbone, and turn the screeching bolt until nothing wobbled. The class always began with a “cadence check”: We’d spin our pedals into a chain-driven hum, adjusting resistance until we were moving without much effort at a certain number of revolutions per minute. Difficulty was relative to ability: There were no numbers on the bright red dials we turned to tighten or loosen the hold on the bike’s flywheel, only the feeling of the effort of spinning in place. Knowing yourself, per the quantified-self fantasy of knowledge through numbers, was as simple as listening to the teacher say, Eighty rotations a minute, please. All other variables, unnumbered, fell away. Gears didn’t matter, no one could pull ahead, no one could fall behind, and we all sweated together but individually, each moving according to personal tolerance for discomfort, or for “pushing yourself,” depending on your take on willpower: Is it the willingness to bear a burden, or is it the drive to succeed?
In the gym, it’s both. There is no endpoint. Once, after getting home from the gym and showering, while standing at the bathroom sink putting on mascara, five minutes to spare before leaving for work, a subway ride underwater during which I could have put on mascara like other women, entire polka-dotted makeup bags spilled out on their laps, I realized I would be standing there putting on mascara every morning forever with five or ten minutes to spare, a subway ride ahead or not—I would be doing this for the rest of my life. And when a clump glued together my eyelashes, and a piece of black flaked onto my cheek, I realized too that not only would I be doing this same thing forever, I’d be doing it imperfectly forever. Every morning a new mistake. Or every morning, more optimistically, a chance for improvement.
And so I found myself a few days later, walking back from the gym, about a half hour before daily mascara application, walking so automatically that I couldn’t even remember leaving the gym, trudging down its sticky indoor stairway and out onto the street, where bodegas offered ATMs and beer and the only people outside had dogs, that trudging the trudging of physical exhaustion early in the morning but also the trudging of daily repetition. Every day some kind of fitness—in the winter, indoors, the same walk there and back, a collection of similar exercises only occasionally shifted upward a notch, in more reps or weight. The improvements were for improvement’s sake—so I could see the numbers rising—a way to distinguish now from before, before from the future, when things would be the same and different because, while each machine moves only one way, there’s always a whole stack of weights waiting to be pinned to the cable.
Prancing on the elliptical, I happen to glance up from my magazine propped atop the machine, covering the nagging timer, to see the man on the ElliptiGO heading east in the right-hand lane of a six-lane street. Every day I spot him through the second-story window. The bright green tubes of the thing—a bicycle-like device driven by an elliptical movement, rather than by regular pedaling—catch my peripheral vision. I see him and I scoff. Why not ride a bike? He’s doing it backward: Instead of making the real-life transportation stationary and stabilizing in the gym, he’s turned an exercise machine into a vehicle, deliberately shedding the control the gym offers. He has a single metric—distance—to measure his progress, and he has the entire real world around him, not exercising, distracting from his pursuit of himself.
When his whole body lunges forward it actually does, whereas above, in the steel and glass of the gym, I lunge to stay in place, each push forward the backswing for the next but also a rewinding of movement, like each next step is a redo of the last. His progress is too literal.
From my stationary machine, I watch him imitate me, and I see in the window’s dim reflection me imitating him, and in this doubling I grow dizzy, which the machine warns in a very serious serif typeface is a sign I should stop exercising and see a doctor, rest until I can see straight, but I won’t stop and wait to climb back on because I’ve already climbed on, I’m already watching the man on the ElliptiGO and between us window washers on a crane one floor below, where they’re scrubbing away the film that gives me myself, bounced back in makeshift mirror, and in removing that film removing the veil between my leisure time working out and the non-leisure time of the workers outside, but only temporarily, because later it will rain and pollen and the dust from the construction site across the street will dry on the window, turning it opaque enough to hold me again and in that holding force me, because habit is repetition is habit, to come back the next day to verify I can still do exactly what I did the day before.
The clocks were set to central daylight time on the day I was born. The clock on the microwave next to the stove where my dad was boiling water for pasta read four and some minutes when, from the living room, my mom said, I think we need to go to the hospital. She and my dad got in the car with no bags, none of the Sunday newspapers they’d spent the afternoon reading, and drove east toward Lake Shore Drive, which they’d take south to Michael Reese Hospital.
