On either side of me, I feel how the other 7:00 a.m. time slot people are already minutes into their rowing and treading and cycling and ellipticaling. Mainly women of a certain age. I try not to look at them. If I look at their temple sweat, at their mouths half-open and panting, at their faces contorted with focus or thought annihilation or dreams of impossible future selves, at their eyes skimming pulp fiction or fashion magazines, at their leg cellulite, which is just as discernible through their gym shorts as it was when I first moved here two years ago, I’ll begin to feel like we’re all a bunch of sad, fat Rodentia upon whom a terrible, sick joke is being played. Like somewhere up there in the cheap stucco ceiling is a hidden camera and an audience laughing uproariously at our useless sweat beads, our mottled flesh, which these hours have done nothing to excise.
Instead, I keep my gaze fixed straight ahead into the floor-to-ceiling windows, which look right into the swimming pool, and I watch the arm flapping of the Aquafit women. They remind me of this bird I once saw in a nature film who was trying to escape an oil spill. It was awful to watch those wings flap uselessly, to witness the inevitable triumph of the dark oil. Yet I couldn’t help but bear witness, then and now. There is something about their department store swimwear, their grim sloshing, which is as hypnotic to me as undulating jellyfish. Some young unfortunate woman in denim shorts stands at the pool’s edge, doing the motions in the air that their iceberg-like bodies are all meant to parrot underwater. She must be their new teacher. In my many, albeit intermittent, sessions in the 7:00 a.m. time slot, I have witnessed the Aquafit women terrorize their way through three. No one looks especially pleased to be following this new girl either, except for one man, a Russian eccentric whom I often see in the evenings, sifting through the recycling bins looking for I’m not sure what. Because of his big enthusiastic splashes, the women give him a wide berth. I think they suspect him of mocking them and would try to have him banned, except that they also fear him slightly.
? ? ?
“It’s your time and you have to make that clear,” Ruth tells me later that night over Iron Maidens and Warrior Bowls at Zen, an eatery conveniently located within the Beyond the Sea complex. Ruth’s a divorce lawyer and Treadmill Three enthusiast who lives on the top floor in Phase Two. She didn’t handle my divorce, but she did give me lots of free advice. Being a treadmill user, she doesn’t have to deal with Char, though as a Malibu Club veteran, she’s well aware of her and is sympathetic to the time slot issue.
“You have to be firm,” Ruth says, pointing her chopsticks at me. It’s the kind of place that gives you chopsticks with your meal even though you’re eating salad. To make it fun. “It’s not as if you can reason with her. She won’t listen to reason.”
“Where is she getting these pens to write her name down is what I want to know,” I say. “I never see anything but pencils on that Cardio Booking Sheet podium.”
Ruth hunts through her baby kale for hidden hearts of palm. “Didn’t you know? She brings down her own.”
“You’re not serious.”
She nods, sips her Iron Maiden, and makes a face at the taste. It looks like black sludge but supposedly it’s good for the blood—for energy, which we need. “I’ve seen her do it. Tucks it in her bike shorts.”
“But that’s insane. Why would someone do that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? She’s terrified someone is going to erase her name.”
“But that’s ridiculous. Those podium pencils don’t even have erasers,” I point out.
“We’re not exactly dealing with a rational being here,” Ruth says, readjusting her black shrug, worn, on this hot day, presumably to conceal her upper arm flesh.
“How sad,” I say. “What a sad existence.”
“Of course it’s sad. It’s terribly sad.” As she digs into her greens with her chopsticks, I watch the flesh near her armpit, the part not covered by the shrug, swing slightly in her zeal.
“I guess I could just switch to Lifecycle Three,” I say. “Have done with her altogether.”
“Why should you have to make adjustments?” Ruth says. “Besides,” she adds, “you hate Lifecycle Three. Didn’t you tell me once being on it was like being in a nightmare?”
“Yeah,” I say. It really is. The handlebars aren’t quite in sync with the pedals. Ruth said she’d try to bring that up at the next condo board member meeting. Ruth’s on the board.
“So why even consider it? It’s like me with Treadmill Three. I don’t know why but it works for me. You have to go with what works for you, you know?”
I nod, looking through the glass-top table at Ruth’s stomach, which, despite her unwavering dedication to the Malibu Club and the fact that two of her dinners are delivered to her door each week by Hearthealth, has not diminished in all the time I’ve known her. In fact, Ruth basically looks like a slightly deflated version of the pretty seventeen-year-old fat girl she showed me a picture of when I went to her place once. This picture, displayed on the mantel of her fake fireplace, is meant to bolster her spirits, remind her how far she has come.
She asks me if I know Christine, from Phase Two.
“Christine?”
“She might have been before your time,” Ruth says with a dismissive wave of a hand. “Anyway, Christine had that 7:00 a.m. slot for ages. Had the same problem. With Char. The two of them even had it out in the gym once. Christine was firm with her, though. She told Char in no uncertain terms that she was impinging on her time slot.”