couple of weeks later when I pulled into the driveway after grocery shopping, Peter was waiting for me on the porch with an eager, little boy “I’ve got a secret” look on his face. He helped unload the car without being asked and acted like he had to pee, which was a dead giveaway. For a while, I pretended I didn’t notice, but his tension was getting to me so I finally gave in.
“Okay, Peter. What is it?”
“Promise me you won’t be mad,” he said.
What kind of bargain is that? I wanted to ask but didn’t. He had been so disappointed with the jogging fiasco, and it had taken a while to smooth his ruffled feathers, so I just nodded and let him lead me into the living room.
There, taking pride of place in front of the TV, was a contraption straight out of a medieval torture chamber, metallic and menacing.
“I bought you a present—a rowing machine,” Peter said, holding tightly onto my hand as if he were worried I’d haul off and clobber him. I almost did. This “I bought you a present” line was completely transparent and not a little annoying. The running shoes had been okay, a mistake, maybe, but not a huge one. The rowing machine was another thing entirely. How would he have reacted if I had picked up an extension ladder and a couple of cans of paint for the upstairs windows at Canadian Tire and told him I’d bought him a present? Or if I’d bought him a present of nose-hair clippers or a bottle of that stuff men spray on their bald spots? Present—schmesent.
Still, being a loving and forgiving wife, I allowed Peter to strap me in and show me how the monster worked. I felt like I was at the gynecology clinic, my feet guided into stirrups and my private parts waving in the wind.
“You could do fifty reps on this while you’re watching that cooking show you like,” Peter said, a smug smile on his face. “You’ll hardly notice you’re doing it.” I rowed for a few minutes to make him happy, bellowing like a walrus for effect. “Gooood work,” he said. “Now let me get in there and show you how to make it burn.” I watched indulgently for a moment or two then went back to the kitchen to make lunch, salad for him and manicotti with cream sauce for me. He rowed through an entire afternoon of soap operas and eventually fell asleep strapped into the wretched thing, slumped over the fake oars like Silken Laumann after a race.
Over the next week or two, the machine acquired the status of a sort of secondary coffee table, a designation which I actively encouraged as I loaded it up with coffee cups, bowls of popcorn and magazines. Sometimes when we watched TV together, Peter would move all the stuff off it with a little sigh, clamber into the machine and row for a bit, which didn’t bother me very much, since it left more room for me on the couch. Then he’d stop and offer me a turn, but I’d always say, “maybe later,” which actually meant “I’d rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.”
I watched him like a hawk and finally, one evening, he put his empty coffee cup down on it and left it there. I knew I had won. The transformation was complete. The next morning I dragged the rowing machine into an obscure corner of the living room and returned the coffee table to its rightful place. I don’t think Peter noticed, or if he did, he knew better than to comment. When I was moving it, I found another receipt scotch taped to the underside of the seat. Fitness World again. Four hundred bucks. “Enjoy!” was scribbled on the back, along with “Lori” and the smiley face. I decided I would drop in at Fitness World some time and have a friendly little chat with Lori. The machine made a fairly decent rack for clean laundry, which I ironed while watching my favourite cooking show.
The rowing machine wasn’t the end of it, though. Peter kept on nagging me to get fit, lose some weight, “trim up”. Like a toddler, my reaction to the constant wave of exhortation was to do the opposite. I continued to cook rich, tempting meals, filling the house with the smell of fresh bread, cinnamon, roasting meat and savoury gravy. He continued to shun my offerings and started cooking for himself, putting together nasty looking, grey hued bean soups and drab green salads like mouldy lace, no dressing.
In bed one night, after he had turned his newly muscled back on me (I had put on my special nightie and some Eau de Hanky Panky, but it didn’t work), I grabbed his hand and played it over my belly. “You used to call these my love handles,” I said.
“I’ve got nothing against love handles,” Peter said. “I just care about your health, Pumpkin.” Pumpkin. Suddenly, I was reminded of that old nursery rhyme: Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater/ Had a wife and couldn’t keep her/ Put her in a pumpkin shell/ And there he kept her very well. I saw myself getting bigger and bigger, filling out the pumpkin shell that Peter had put me into with his fitness kick, and I just couldn’t stand it. I cried myself to sleep.
The next day, Peter came home with another present for me.
“Here’s a thing that we can do together that’ll be fun, I promise.” He handed over a bag with a large square box inside. Fitness World again. The receipt ($89.00 plus tax) was signed as usual by Lori, this time in purple ink. The smiley face looked vaguely erotic, and I noticed that Lori had dotted her “I” with a little heart.
“Remember how you used to figure skate?” my husband said.
“Peter, that was a long time ago. Anyway, it’s summer.”
“No, no. Open it.” I did. Nestled in the tissue was a brand new pair of in-line skates.
“I got some for me, too. We can take it easy, you know. Just skate around the neighbourhood. C’mon. Try them on.”
“We’re too old for roller-skates, Peter.”
“Oh, c’mon. Try them on.”
He was so enthusiastic, and the skates did look kind of alluring, purple plastic with sparkles, like grape-flavoured lollipops. I stroked them. They felt smooth and cool under my fingertips. I had a sudden image of myself skimming along the road, whippet-thin and graceful. I still had dreams about my figure skating days—dreams of freedom and power.
“We could go outside right now and try them out,” Peter said. He had already strapped his on. “It’ll be okay. There’s no traffic this late.”
I was tired. I’d spent a long day in the garden, and dinner was already in the oven—a succulent garden vegetable quiche that I’d taken some trouble over and a superior white wine that I was hoping to coax Peter into tasting.
“Okay,” I said. “Just a little turn in the driveway, then dinner.” I crammed the receipt from the box into my pocket for safekeeping and buckled up the skates. I decided I would take the skates back to Lori later with a thinly veiled threat attached. A threat that involved the words, “punch your lights out”, in a friendly kind of way.
It was wonderful at first. Roller-skating isn’t like ice-skating, though. For one thing, ice has some give to it, though you’d never think it. But the other different thing is that you can’t stop on asphalt the way you can on ice.
“Wait up,” Peter called. He was never much of a skater, and I was getting a little carried away, I’ll admit. I was just flying along the sidewalk, the wind in my hair. Pavement is a lot bumpier than arena ice, too, and the rumbling shudder of the hard rubber wheels was making my glasses dance on the bridge of my nose, so that I wasn’t seeing quite as clearly as I should have. I didn’t see the car backing out of the driveway until I slammed into it. I tried to stop, but little rubber wheels aren’t the same as metal blades, and when I fell, a whole bunch of my personal parts snapped at once. Peter may have bought a couple of pairs of in-line skates at Fitness World, but Lori, damn her eyes, hadn’t bothered to sell him the necessary wrist
