“And it’s like, all that time, all that energy, you know? When we could have been . . .”
“When we could have been . . .” Ruth prompts me, impatient.
I have an image of something like Paris. Some woman walking for the sake of walking. With actual friends. She’s happy.
“I don’t know. Something.”
She shrugs.
“I don’t know what you’re driving at, exactly, but I will say this: On the days that I don’t work out? I, for one, definitely feel a difference. Yes. Without a doubt.”
She takes a sip of her stevia-sweetened skim milk cappuccino as if to seal this statement. Then consults her watch. She says speaking of which, she’s only ten hours away from her next time slot. We’d better get the check.
I want to grab her by her shrug lapels and confess that I’m an unbeliever. That being on that machine makes me feel like I’m running in some sucking substance worse than mud. I can find no foothold, no traction. That I feel out of control, inches from the lip of the abyss. That while we’ve been sitting here, there’s this angry, hungry maw in me that is fathoms deep. But even though Ruth’s only a hair thinner than I am, she’s way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction.
So I say, “I know what you mean. Me too. Absolutely.”
As we leave Zen, making our way to our respective Phases, I call out to her, “Hey. So whatever happened to Christine? The woman with the 7:00 a.m. time slot? She move?”
“No, she’s still here. Moved to Phase Three now, I think. But she doesn’t come to the Club anymore. Sort of fell off the wagon. See you tomorrow?” she calls out to me, with her key fob already out.
“I’ll be there with bells on,” I say.
On the elevator ride back up to my apartment, I can already feel the cupcake half doing its worst and I think of how many Lifecycle minutes it will take to atone. More minutes than she will ever be willing to part with.
When the elevator door opens on my floor, I see a striped British shorthair, one of Char’s, dart past me. She’ll do this. Let them roam the corridors in the evening. She calls it “airing” them.
I’ve learned a bit about her cats via clipped conversations in the elevator, though we’ll always avoid a ride together if we can help it. I know one is asthmatic and one is prone to seizures, but I forget which requires needles and which needs a pill that Char has to crush and mix in with its food. I’m sympathetic, having recently parted with an injection-dependent cat of my own, Mr. Benchley. When I adopted him, shortly after I left Tom, he was already sick and old.
In the corridor, I crouch down beside the cat, hold out my hand for her to sniff. She sniffs but keeps her distance. Behind me I feel the door to Char’s apartment open. I know she’s standing in the doorframe watching me but I don’t look at her. Instead, I ask the cat, “What’s your name?”
“Toffee,” Char says behind me. “After her coat.”
“Well, Toffee,” I say. “You’re beautiful. You are. You are you are you are.”
Then I get up, swaying a bit before I catch my balance, and stagger toward my front door without once looking back, without saying good night.
When I stumble into my own apartment, I am stabbed in the thigh by the sharp edge of my mother’s glass credenza, which, after she died, I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.
? ? ?
I do not like to think, as I lie here, already dreading tomorrow morning’s rigors, feeling myself swell from Zen and hating Ruth for it, about how Char and I share a bedroom wall. I lean against the eggshell primer I know she is likely leaning on the other side of. Is she consuming fermented sea kelp from an eyedropper? Gloating over the protrusion of her spine nodules? Tallying up her visible ribs with an abacus? Sometimes I’ll lean there and listen in for evidence of a secret life. How I would love for her to have a secret life. What I hear is disappointing. What I hear is silence. A sitcom with a laugh track. Could be Frasier. The opening and closing of a closet door.