I thought that trying too hard was my natural state of being. That I’d never been and never would be a natural at anything except being a striver. I’d earned all I had from sweat equity – not an ounce of natural talent or beauty or charm. I was blonde because I spent $600 every six weeks to get my roots done. I was tan because of some vile smelling substance that came out from the bottle olive green and foamy. I was thin and strong because I ate less than I wanted and worked my ass off. Through effort, I could make myself perfect. As long as I could try too hard forever, all of this would continue to be true. I’d always tried too hard and I hadn’t stopped yet.
And besides, my job was stupid. It could never overwhelm me. Burnout was the kind of thing you got from squinting into the blue-light glow of a computer screen, checking your emails first thing when you woke up in the morning, balancing budgets and meeting strangers on Zoom. I watched my friend Havana have a full-on mental breakdown, the squiggly tendrils of her nerve endings exposed like the wires of a chewed-up phone charger, brought on by her graduate internship at the Academy Museum. Havana would come to happy hour on Wednesdays at the Cozy Inn and say nothing, gazing catatonic at the scruffy men playing pool as she drained tequila sodas one after another, drained them like her job had drained her. I would go home and thank God for a job that required only a quarter of my brain.
And maybe a fragment of my soul every once in a while, like coins fed into a parking meter, a slow drip death I didn’t notice until my pockets were empty.
Every day for work, I ride a bicycle to nowhere. I stand before a long hall of mirrors, back turned towards my own reflection, pedaling off into the ever receding distance. I hold court from my stationary throne, doling out hollow motivational sound bites.
My courtiers, my consorts, are a revolving door of women adorned in too much gold jewelry, lacking in some higher purpose besides that of maintaining the eminently fuckable condition of their bodies. Their eyes are hungry, empty, bewigged with spiderleg tendrils of lash extensions; their spray-tanned bodies slick and hairless, sealskin shiny; their highlights tasteful, whispering of currency held in offshore accounts – old money, money pieces, quiet luxury.
As a girl, glutted on waterstained Teen Vogue magazines my mother brought home from her job at a free clinic, I would make myself sick wishing for what this type of woman must have had. $400 prom dresses and monogrammed sweatshirts. Tennis lessons and bracelets and skirts – all the trappings of tennis, really, though I never wanted to play the game. I dreamed, with my thighs sweat-stuck to the plastic chair on the porch of our trailer, about a summer home in the Hamptons.
For a long time, I’d thought everything was going according to plan. I had the job.
My apartment in West Hollywood was all white, soft focus natural lighting, like heaven in the movies. And I had him.
Even just saying his name was effortless. Judah. It’s sexy, tossed off, the way you don’t even have to close your mouth at the end. Like one long groan of ecstasy. It feels good to say. Judah. I had begun to suspect, quietly, privately, that he was going to save me. Like the sigh of relief that was his name, his money, his social standing, the gorgeous blue snaking veins of his forearms, they were all going to be the end of some kind of lifelong suffering. As if being poor was a house on fire, and he was the fireman’s hose. He was going to put out the flame.
There was a tacit understanding between us, an unwritten casting call that described my part and the girl who would play it. All I had to do to earn my place next to him was to stay thin, stay desirable.
My mother drove a Ford Taurus that was born before I was, floorboards littered with empty cans of Slimfast. When I was young, I didn’t understand why she drank them. She’d always been thin – part genetics, part empty refrigerator. But now I am older, and I see it all too clearly. She wasn’t drinking a thin, watery meal replacement. She was drinking dreams, assurances. She had learned the same lesson as all American women, raised on a steady diet of Baywatch and Bowflex commercials – that in order to be loved, to be made worthy, you must address the issue of your body. Love, or the potential for it, lived in thinness, in the shadows and gaps around your waist, between your thighs. The best thing you could do, the most feminine, was to glamorously half-exist.
I’d internalized that lesson at my mother’s knee, or maybe in the corner of our tiny, carpeted living room, watching her follow a Jane Fonda tape, huffing and puffing without air conditioning, immediately walking to the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and encircling her waist with her hands, willing her flesh to shrink at her touch.
I thought I’d cracked the code when I got my job. I could earn money and the thing that truly mattered, a body worth coveting, all in just eight hours a day. And my body was my billboard, too. There was good reason to show it off. Every time I drew the attention of a woman in the Whole Foods on Lincoln Boulevard, I had a card in my wallet ready to hand out, a mantra ready to offer, a variation on the prayers I’d been hearing since childhood. For just one monthly payment of 899.95, you too can have this ass. Look good enough, and some man will come along and save you.
At first, it was so easy. You just spin your wheels.
And then one day, it becomes a crisis.
Another Wednesday at the Cozy Inn. Havana and I haven’t talked in a while. She is deep in the throes of a new relationship, nine months in and incapable of talking about anything else but him.
She walks in shrieking, holding out her left hand. A fat white diamond glitters from her finger, inches above ragged cuticles and unpainted nails.
I shriek too. Outwardly, it is a screech of joy. Inwardly, it is something else.
Havana is beautiful, special in her own way. She has wild curly hair and a brilliant mind.
She does not work out. For my one tequila soda, nursed over two hours until it is bitter, watery, nothing, she drinks three full sugar rum and cokes.
And yet, despite this apparent unworthiness, here she is flaunting the evidence that she has found love. I have defined obliques and lukewarm sentiments from a man I have dated for four years.
At work the next day, I am eager to pedal off this strange feeling, bubble guts and sweaty palms and a heart that is racing like I am being chased. Cardio has always been my cure all. Exercise will fix me, like it always has.
My mind, so often blissfully blank atop the bike to nowhere, fills with vast red questions. Isn’t spinning your wheels a bad thing? Isn’t spinning your wheels what happened when you were stuck in the mud, unmoving on some road you didn’t want to be on?
The next morning, Judah and I have our first ever fight.
Lying in bed on my all-white Egyptian cotton sheets, I see him stirring. I arrange my hair, fanning it out across the pillows in perfect tendrils, as if I just woke up looking like a woman in a Renaissance painting. Something I do every day. I am considering, in every moment, how to offer him the perfect picture. The ideal experience. I am struck by a pang of sadness, an ache like hunger in my heart. Does he do the same for me?
He rolls over, a slow, lazy smile spreading across his immaculate face.
“Would you still love me if I was fat?”
The smile evaporates instantly. “This is how we’re starting the day?”
“Would you?” I know that my role here is to sell him a fantasy. To be perfect and beautiful and patient and yet. Suddenly, I don’t care. The effort in me has evaporated overnight, the give-a-shit reservoir all dried up by the laser beam light of the diamond on Havana’s finger.
“Honestly?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I would have to see it first.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Judah?”
“Did you want me to lie?”
“No. I wanted it to be true that you would.”
I walk to work. I think about what Judah said. I think about the opposite side of the coin of all that my mother taught me. Without my body, I am nothing. Unlovable. I think about Sisyphus and the rock. How the bike to nowhere makes me no different. Sisyphus with a perfect ass.
I get on the bike to nowhere and begin to shout commands. My body enters a type of fugue state. I become a channel for a higher power – the great God of motivational posters. I imagine opening my mouth and speaking with the voice of a little kitten hanging from a tree branch. “Hang in there,” I yell, “just 90 more seconds in this climb.” My legs spin in pointless circles. I think of how people got exercise back in the pioneer days. Doing useful things with their hearty bodies, things that were necessary for their survival.
“Why are we doing this?” I think. And then I realize that the thought has come out of my mouth and through the little headset microphone that used to make me feel like Britney Spears.
“Because it makes us stronger!” yells a woman in the front row who is here once a day, her gold pendant bouncing in the slick space between her fake breasts.
Her reply spins in my head, filling me with fury, red rising like mercury on a thermometer. It was a rhetorical fucking question. It creeps up on me like a teakettle boiling. A scream that forces its way out through my mouth, into the microphone. A primal, throaty scream.
The women facing me, the Lycra-clad lithe bodies on the dozen or so stationary bicycles, begin to scream too. We all continue to scream until we run out of breath.
I am on the bike to nowhere, and I am quiet. We are in the midst of a brutal climb, the motivational phrases that spill from my lips like vomit forgotten.
An impulse flashes through my mind, a breaking news bulletin.
My phone is connected to the speakers in the room. All at once my relationship with Judah has become a wool turtleneck a size too small. Something I am desperate to get out of, choked and itchy and so, so angry.
I am still in the bike-to-nowhere induced fugue state, still sleep walking as I call him.
“Are you ready to kiss and make up?” he answers, the bass of his voice thundering through the speakers of the cycle studio.
“I deserve better than this,” I say. “Be out of my apartment before I get home. Take all your things.”
“But Summer I–” I hang up the phone. I turn on the cooldown song and stay silent. The room follows suit. When the legion of Lycra-clad women are exiting the studio, I hear them talking to each other. “She just doesn’t give a fuck, does she?”
“I can’t decide if I respect her or if I pity her.”
Me neither.
I go home and I do not shower for three days. I cry and my mascara leaks down in rivers of black. I leave it there. I look in the mirror at the greasy, multi-colored mess of my face, my filthy hair, the strange far away look in my eyes. It is the first time I can remember not finding something wrong with my reflection.
