I joined a gym together. The joint membership had been my idea: I’d wanted to take yoga, but I knew that she might not be thrilled with the idea of me signing up for one more class or hobby, so she could spend two more afternoons a week driving me there and back. So I’d pitched the yoga class as something we could do together. I didn’t just want to take yoga, I said. I wanted to take it with her!
My motives were not purely selfish. I really did think it would be good for her. Both of the grandmothers were still alive then, and my mother was spending a lot of time driving to the two different nursing homes, checking in on them and running their errands. She’d put on weight that year, not a lot, but enough to make her frown at herself when she passed the hallway mirror. Still, she would pick me up from driver’s ed and tell me that she was too tired to cook or even fix a salad, and more often than not we would go through a drive-thru, switching seats after we ordered so I could practice driving home. She usually got a chocolate sundae, and she would start in on it right there in the car, mumbling driving tips and stayed suprisingly calm as I carefully steered and shifted. I couldn’t wait until I had my license and I could drive by myself, but in the meantime, driving with my mother wasn’t so bad; I much preferred her company to my humorless driver’s ed teacher or my very excitable father. She let me choose the radio station, as long as I kept the volume low enough so I could hear her instructions and warnings.
And then one evening, as we were about to pull up our steep driveway, I asked her if we could keep going, if I could circle the neighborhood just one more time. She shrugged, digging her plastic spoon into her cup. “Fine with me,” she mumbled. “This is the best part of my day.”
That night, I looked up “depression” on the Internet. Experts suggested exercise, rest, and time with loved ones. I decided that yoga, and more time with me, might help.
But as it turned out, she wasn’t interested, at least not in yoga. She said she wanted something more intense—she’d recently had a dream about lifting something immense far over her head, and in the dream, she had been amazed both by how heavy the object was and also that she was able to lift it. And if the last two years had taught her anything, it was that she didn’t want osteoporosis. She looked at the schedule and saw that the gym offered a weight-lifting class called “STRENGTH CAMP” at the same time as the yoga class I wanted to take. What a coincidence, she said. What a sign. She said I was thoughtful to think of her. We could get some together time in in the car.
When she first started, she was miserable. She was too self-conscious to wear anything but baggy black sweats and a big shirt, and she came out of class red-faced and clammy with sweat. At home, she moved stiffly, wincing when she vacuumed, when she bent over to put on Bowzer’s leash. But then little bulges appeared in her arms. In the grocery store one day, without warning, she raised her hand, squeezed her fist, and made me feel her biceps. She started doing push-ups on the living room floor while my father watched the news. In late spring, she told my grandmothers and their attendants that she couldn’t help with any appointments before ten in the morning, and she signed up for a.m. Taebo. She modeled the punches and swipes for me in the kitchen, moving like a shadowboxer, sometimes laughing at herself, sometimes not. Her legs grew lean and muscular. She bought tank tops in different colors.
By June, it was too hot out to get in the car when we were still sweaty from class, and so we brought towels and shampoo and fresh clothes for the drive home. In the locker room, she did not exactly parade around naked. She wrapped a towel around her before she stepped out of the shower stall. But I would occasionally look up at the wrong time and catch a glimpse of her body, and it always made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know why. I had grown up seeing her naked,