I was attempting to go out for a power walk. I couldn’t do any running or sprinting because I had a bad back, but if I listened to enough speed metal while power walking, I could convince myself that I was actually running and that I looked crazy athletic while doing it. The reality was that I looked like an eighty-year-old person doing laps at 6:00 A.M. around an empty shopping mall to help prevent leg clots. Sometimes I even walked in place in front of the TV. I hope no one ever videotaped me doing this.
My wife was in the office on the computer. The kids were finished with lunch and now watching TV. They hadn’t started getting bored and kicking each other in the face just yet. There was an opening for me to go work out—a bare sliver of time for me to get my shit together and squeeze out the door without any loud objections. When you’re a single person, working out is a horrible thing. The idea of hauling your ass to a gym to labor on a treadmill for forty-five minutes is terrifying when you could be out drinking or trying to hook up with a blond paralegal. But when you’re married and have children, working out is ECSTASY. Running (or power walking) five miles is nothing when you have no children or grocery bags weighing you down. It’s like spending a week at Canyon Ranch. The kids themselves are inherently wonderful and lovely and made of honey rainbows and all that nonsense. But the work involved in feeding them and clothing them and making sure they don’t fingerbang the wall socket is what’s so draining.
Also, children make you very fat. I always hoped that the time I spent every day installing car seats and carrying unruly little fuckers up to the bath would help burn off all the calories I consumed, but that was never the case. There were too many birthday party sheet cakes, too many bowls of uneaten Kraft Mac that I despised throwing away and had to eat myself, too many pieces of Halloween candy. I couldn’t resist any of it, so parenting had become a six-year stint grazing at a corporate off-site buffet: an endless stretch of mindless eating. I hated myself when I ate that much birthday cake, but it wasn’t my fault that Safeway sprinkled crystal meth into every corner piece. So, so good.
Taking a power walk would probably burn off a whopping thirty calories, but at least it would make me feel like I was attempting to stem the tide. I got my shirt and shorts and socks and an iPod mini that I kept housed in an unwashed armband, a vile piece of nylon with sweat stains that were old enough to be carbon-dated—a garment that smelled so bad, it could wake smoke inhalation victims. This garment kept people away from me, which suited me just fine. Working out was my time to bask in the sanctuary of aloneness.
But my daughter saw me in my workout clothes and immediately jumped off the couch in alarm. Kids can tell when you’re about to ditch them.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m going for a walk.”
“Can I come?”
“This is a serious walk. I walk real fast. HARDCORE.”
“I can walk fast.”
“We’re gonna walk far. Like, five miles.”
“So what? Who cares? It’s easy.”
“You’ve never walked five miles before.”
“Sure I have. It’s EASY.”
Everything was easy to the girl. She was six now and eager to let everyone know that she could accomplish any task, even one she had never previously attempted, with minimal effort. Cartwheels? EASY. Jumping off a swing from eight feet in the air? EASY. Cold fusion? EASY-PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY. She had an impenetrable reality distortion field.
“You sure you don’t wanna watch TV or something?” I asked her.
“I wanna go with you.”
“All right. You can come. But just know that I don’t stop. You gotta keep up. And I’m gonna listen to awesome music the whole time. NO TALKIN’ WHILE I’M A-ROCKIN’.”
“It’s easy.”
She put on her sneakers and grabbed the little clip-on radio my wife had bought for her at Target. It was programmed to the only station she liked and it allowed her to listen to all the Flo Rida she wanted without me ever, ever having to hear it. She was not allowed to have an iPod, even though she was now old enough to be hired by one of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors to make one herself. I strapped on my noxious armband and we walked outside together. I got into full power-walking-dipshit mode: ass tight, chest out, arms a-pumpin’. I built up a head of steam and now I was in full “pretend Olympic sprinter” mode.
My daughter remained ten yards behind me, pausing every so often because her earbuds would fall out and she had to put them back in. It’s as if they designed earbuds specifically so that they fall out of your ears every third step. Eventually, she caught up to me.
“Can you not go so fast?” she asked.
I was pleased that she thought I was fast. I felt like I was leaving a trail of fire in my wake. “This is what I told you,” I said. “I go fast. You gotta keep up. Let’s go.”