Beyond Measure. Rachel Z. Arndt
bodies, the bass that bounced off the hard walls and buzzed with the flicker of fluorescent lights beyond the door, the bass that beat against the sea of black light in the cycling studio that turned our bodies into rickety jellyfish. White towels draped on our handlebars gleamed in artificial brilliance.
I liked to choose a bike about three-quarters of the way back, on the side closest to the door. I’d stand next to the bike, lower the saddle until it was even with my hipbone, and turn the screeching bolt until nothing wobbled. The class always began with a “cadence check”: We’d spin our pedals into a chain-driven hum, adjusting resistance until we were moving without much effort at a certain number of revolutions per minute. Difficulty was relative to ability: There were no numbers on the bright red dials we turned to tighten or loosen the hold on the bike’s flywheel, only the feeling of the effort of spinning in place. Knowing yourself, per the quantified-self fantasy of knowledge through numbers, was as simple as listening to the teacher say, Eighty rotations a minute, please. All other variables, unnumbered, fell away. Gears didn’t matter, no one could pull ahead, no one could fall behind, and we all sweated together but individually, each moving according to personal tolerance for discomfort, or for “pushing yourself,” depending on your take on willpower: Is it the willingness to bear a burden, or is it the drive to succeed?
In the gym, it’s both. There is no endpoint. Once, after getting home from the gym and showering, while standing at the bathroom sink putting on mascara, five minutes to spare before leaving for work, a subway ride underwater during which I could have put on mascara like other women, entire polka-dotted makeup bags spilled out on their laps, I realized I would be standing there putting on mascara every morning forever with five or ten minutes to spare, a subway ride ahead or not—I would be doing this for the rest of my life. And when a clump glued together my eyelashes, and a piece of black flaked onto my cheek, I realized too that not only would I be doing this same thing forever, I’d be doing it imperfectly forever. Every morning a new mistake. Or every morning, more optimistically, a chance for improvement.
And so I found myself a few days later, walking back from the gym, about a half hour before daily mascara application, walking so automatically that I couldn’t even remember leaving the gym, trudging down its sticky indoor stairway and out onto the street, where bodegas offered ATMs and beer and the only people outside had dogs, that trudging the trudging of physical exhaustion early in the morning but also the trudging of daily repetition. Every day some kind of fitness—in the winter, indoors, the same walk there and back, a collection of similar exercises only occasionally shifted upward a notch, in more reps or weight. The improvements were for improvement’s sake—so I could see the numbers rising—a way to distinguish now from before, before from the future, when things would be the same and different because, while each machine moves only one way, there’s always a whole stack of weights waiting to be pinned to the cable.
Prancing on the elliptical, I happen to glance up from my magazine propped atop the machine, covering the nagging timer, to see the man on the ElliptiGO heading east in the right-hand lane of a six-lane street. Every day I spot him through the second-story window. The bright green tubes of the thing—a bicycle-like device driven by an elliptical movement, rather than by regular pedaling—catch my peripheral vision. I see him and I scoff. Why not ride a bike? He’s doing it backward: Instead of making the real-life transportation stationary and stabilizing in the gym, he’s turned an exercise machine into a vehicle, deliberately shedding the control the gym offers. He has a single metric—distance—to measure his progress, and he has the entire real world around him, not exercising, distracting from his pursuit of himself.
When his whole body lunges forward it actually does, whereas above, in the steel and glass of the gym, I lunge to stay in place, each push forward the backswing for the next but also a rewinding of movement, like each next step is a redo of the last. His progress is too literal.
From my stationary machine, I watch him imitate me, and I see in the window’s dim reflection me imitating him, and in this doubling I grow dizzy, which the machine warns in a very serious serif typeface is a sign I should stop exercising and see a doctor, rest until I can see straight, but I won’t stop and wait to climb back on because I’ve already climbed on, I’m already watching the man on the ElliptiGO and between us window washers on a crane one floor below, where they’re scrubbing away the film that gives me myself, bounced back in makeshift mirror, and in removing that film removing the veil between my leisure time working out and the non-leisure time of the workers outside, but only temporarily, because later it will rain and pollen and the dust from the construction site across the street will dry on the window, turning it opaque enough to hold me again and in that holding force me, because habit is repetition is habit, to come back the next day to verify I can still do exactly what I did the day before.
The clocks were set to central daylight time on the day I was born. The clock on the microwave next to the stove where my dad was boiling water for pasta read four and some minutes when, from the living room, my mom said, I think we need to go to the hospital. She and my dad got in the car with no bags, none of the Sunday newspapers they’d spent the afternoon reading, and drove east toward Lake Shore Drive, which they’d take south to Michael Reese Hospital.
There are seven clocks in my one-bedroom apartment, two that tick loudly, two that don’t tick, and three digital ones, all set to slightly different times not on purpose but because achieving such widespread accuracy is tough when you’re twisting hands on faces with no numbers and constantly resetting the one digital clock that runs slow because it’s meant to be connected to DC power.
I was born on Memorial Day weekend, a Sunday. Chicago was clear and warm, perfect for barbecues.
I started wearing a watch as soon as I could tell time. My first watch’s hands had tiny blue faces and names and a story from Swatch: Flik goes quick and Flak stays back. More than two decades later, I worry about time both near and far: how long it’ll take me to walk to my afternoon meeting, how long it’ll take me to fall in love with a yet-unmet man, how long it’ll be before I and this man who doesn’t exist get married. Every time another friend posts a photo on Facebook with her fiancé, her hand on his shoulder so you can see the diamond in iPhone flash, the panic bubbles. My current boyfriend, whom I don’t suspect I’ll marry, tells me I misuse “jealousy” and “envy.”
Sun fell through the windows of the maroon Volkswagen Golf onto my mom, reclined as far as her seat would allow. She was upright enough to see, just before the entrance to the Drive, that traffic was nearly stopped until at least Navy Pier, and upright enough to also see, in the sideview mirror, a canine-unit police cruiser a few cars away. My dad got out to talk to the police. My wife is in labor, he said to the canine-unit man. Follow me closely, the man said. They weaved through the dense traffic all the way south, where they exited, headed briefly west, and reached the hospital, two months early. My mom found the nearest wheelchair and sat in it.
If being late is a sign of self-involvement, then being early should be a sign of selflessness. But it’s not. It too is a kind of self-involvement, a deliberate refusal to measure accurately—and show up on time—because of the egotistical notion that your presence—you being somewhere—is so important that it’s best to err on the side of early.
I used to set my watches early, not to trick myself into being on time, as the chronically late may do, but to have the feeling, any time I looked at my wrist, that I was already early.
Taped in my dad’s baby book are a lock of brown hair, the first tooth he lost. In it are Wisconsin-cursive lists of birthday presents and friends and milestones: walking, talking, adding, bike-riding—each with a date, and every year with a set of height and weight numbers, an upward trajectory that ended at thirteen years old. How much can time hold? How much can data tell us? I do not know how large thirteen-year-old boys should be, so my dad’s 63 inches and 103 pounds are unremarkable—or, rather, remarkable not for their content but for their specificity, for the fact that they exist at all.
In the hospital my mom told the nurse she hadn’t yet gone to Lamaze classes, she didn’t