Wellness, page 8
“And what are the three magic l’s?” she’d asked.
“Liberal, leafy, and loaded.”
It was a place of grand old country homes, most of which now featured rainbow flag signs in their big picture windows declaring that all people were welcome here. It was a place of tanklike SUVs with “Coexist” bumper stickers. Lawns as soft and thick as carpets, landscaped exclusively with native and noninvasive plants, maintained without the use of any chemicals that might be harmful to bees or bee colonies. There was a quaint downtown with cute shops and restaurants, an active weekend farmers market, an express train into the city, a compost program whereby the town’s collective yard clippings and leaf litter was dumped in the summer and autumn to become, in the spring, healthy nutritious loamy soil that could be used by local amateur gardeners, gratis. When Elizabeth heard about this, she thought that maybe, for the first time in her life, she might garden. Maybe she and Toby could build a little garden together, on the rooftop of the Shipworks. Maybe they could sprout seeds or something, grow tomatoes, pick herbs, all that, tend to real life—real efflorescent life—rather than the digital life that obsessed him on his screen, those pixelated plants and animals of Minecraft whose existence was purely instrumental (“Why would you explode a cow?” she had asked Toby. “To get meat and leather” was his simple answer).
What a surprise, after so much time in the city, to finally come out to the suburbs and find this: community, comfort, acceptance, ease, optimism.
She had begun to feel so crowded in Chicago, and not only physically crowded—bumped into on the sidewalk, jostled on the train—but also sort of mentally crowded. It had begun to feel like Jack and Toby’s presence in their inescapably small apartment was overwhelming. If they were in the same room with her, even when they were being perfectly still and quiet, it was as if they were playing bongos for how much Elizabeth could focus on anything else. She felt under constant benevolent surveillance at home, felt like Jack noticed everything—she couldn’t even bring home a new brand of pickles without undergoing a tedious cross-examination: Did she not enjoy the other brand of pickles? What specifically did she not like about those pickles? What was it about the new pickles that attracted her? Would she like to sample other kinds of pickles in order to figure out which pickles were in fact her favorite pickles? And on and on—it was all so incredibly, so excruciatingly boring.
Jack had been particularly, almost maniacally, ever-present as of late, following her around when she left the room, sitting at her hip when she was reading, asking her what she was looking at when she was looking at her phone, not proactively doing chores but swooping in to finish chores whenever he caught her doing them, telling her to go relax on the couch maybe, or in bed, or, perhaps, in a bubble bath that, of course, he would happily draw for her. Plus he’d been sending her these cheesy little love texts throughout the day, occasionally even hiding a real paper note in her purse that said “Just wanted to let you know how much I love you,” then asking her about it, later, after work (“Did you get my note?”), his face full of expectation and need. Or sometimes they’d be reading together in the living room and she’d look up from her book to discover him staring right at her and she’d say “What?” and he’d smile like a doomed lamb and say “Love you!” and it drove her completely bonkers. She supposed that in another context, these things might have been cute—early in their relationship, certainly, Jack’s big romantic gestures had struck her as spontaneous and grand—but now all his mighty efforts just smacked of desperation. Chill out, she wanted to tell him. Back off. But there was no way to say that without hurting her gentle husband’s big feelings, so instead she smiled and said “Thank you for the note,” and then changed the subject, meanwhile longing for space, for larger and more private space—the roomy condo at the Shipworks and her own separate bedroom and the trees and grassy vast openness of suburban Park Shore.
The story they’d always told themselves in their twenties was that suburban life was stifling and oppressive, but that’s not how it felt to her now. What it felt like now was liberation.
Elizabeth was walking back into the living room, eavesdropping on the other parents while also staring at her phone—per Step 2: Be Inconspicuous—idly skimming the headlines of the day, which were all variations on some kind of deep dread: There was an Ebola outbreak overseas…would it go global? There was civil war in the Middle East…would it spread? There was a dip in the stock market…would it lead to a recession? Elizabeth let her eyes go unfocused, stared past the headlines instead of at them, and she listened.
Step 3: Identify the Topic of Conversation
It was Brandie holding forth right now, effusively praising the kids’ lip-synched performance and asking them if they might enjoy making vision boards about their interest in music, insisting that the best way their song-and-dance dreams might one day become reality was for them to visualize those dreams via aspirational collages, adding that she just so happened to have a large collection of pop culture magazines she kept stashed away for exactly this purpose, plus, of course, enough markers and stickers and scissors and paste sticks to go around.
Brandie did this kind of thing a lot: she took any interest the kids showed in any subject and supercharged it. She was the one who organized these playdates, and held them at her own big house, and usually thought up amusing and inventive things for the kids to do together, and Elizabeth didn’t need to spend any time whatsoever on Step 4: Locate the Leader, for Brandie was undoubtedly it. Elizabeth had spotted it right away, how when the other parents spoke, even when they were all in a big group, they tended to speak to Brandie, at Brandie, for Brandie, glancing her way when they finished speaking, a little approval-seeking gesture that Elizabeth had long been trained to see. If Brandie happened to cross her arms, the others tended to cross their arms too, in unconscious mimicry. If Brandie smiled at something, the others smiled as well, and their smiles were those genuine smiles that recruited the muscles around the eyes, meaning that they weren’t producing fake mouth-smiles for Brandie’s benefit but actually sincerely taking on the same positive affect as their leader.
Brandie had been in corporate sales and marketing for many years but had given it up when her children were born so she could full-time parent. That’s how she said it. Not “I am a full-time parent,” but rather “I full-time parent.” Now she sat on every available school committee, organized every school fundraiser, attended every field trip, was the parents’ representative at every meeting of the board, and even led cleanup efforts at the local beaches. In the small world of suburban Park Shore, Brandie was like a compassionate and generous and bighearted Bond villain: her fingers were in everything.
She seemed religious but in an ill-defined and unassertive way, more like just in the way she was always talking about sending her good thoughts to people who needed them. Her house was early turn-of-the-century, designed by some historically important architect, the style an American take on a French château, large but not ostentatious, chic but not gaudy, elegant but also restrained, decorated in that particular neo-Nordic way that managed to be austere and cozy at the same time: lots of blond wood, muted neutral colors, fluffy hand-knitted blankets draped invitingly over the backs of couches and chairs. There was a wall devoted to the kids’ many arts-and-crafts projects. There was a big kitchen with long open shelves.
Brandie always seemed to be dressed in a manner that was, above all, appropriate: season-appropriate, occasion-appropriate, age-appropriate. Today she wore a summery white cotton T-shirt tucked into slim white jeans—clothes so virginally white they seemed to have somehow never been touched by the messy, smudgy tasks of child-rearing—accessorized via a small gold wristwatch and a straw tote bag. She always seemed to have a designer straw tote bag with her, and always a new one; the woman must have had a lavish collection of expensive straw tote bags, from which she pulled, like magic, whatever mom-thing was needed: wet wipes, Band-Aids, a sewing kit, tweezers, a stain remover pen, gauze. Elizabeth was listening to Brandie and the other parents converse, and pursuant to Step 5: Wait for a Pause in the Conversation, Elizabeth was poised to speak whenever a good opportunity presented itself, when Brandie glanced over at her and suddenly made it unnecessary.
“Oh, Elizabeth!” she said. “I have something for you.”
And then Brandie was striding her way and reaching into her tote and pulling out a small, carefully folded brown paper lunch bag with Toby’s name written, in calligraphy, on the front.
“What’s this?” Elizabeth said, taking the bag.
“Apple turnovers,” Brandie said triumphantly.
“Really?” Elizabeth said, opening the bag and looking at the triangular pastries inside, golden brown, dotted lightly with sugar.
“They’re for Toby,” Brandie said. “Consider it a welcome gift. I’m so sorry it’s taken us this long to get him one. It’s been a whole month already—that’s inexcusable!”
“You made apple turnovers?”
“We made apple turnovers,” she said, “the kids and I.”
“Wow. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome! It was fun. And anyway we absolutely had to use the apples before they went bad. Our garden is bursting.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“We thought it would be a nice thing, since Toby likes them so much.”
“He does?”
“Oh, sure! They’re his favorite.”
“They are?”
“His favorite dessert in the world!” Brandie said, directing this toward Toby in the kitchen. “Isn’t that right, kiddo?”
And Elizabeth turned around and saw that Toby was no longer staring at his screen but in fact was staring at them, nodding and staring at Elizabeth, or perhaps staring at what Elizabeth held in her hand, this bag heavy with apple turnovers, a food she was surprised her son even knew existed, much less liked, much less favored above all others.
“Of course,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “Turnovers, yeah.”
“Just warm them up in the oven,” Brandie said. “Five minutes at four hundred degrees ought to do it.”
And then all the kids were running back into the living room, announcing that they had another show to perform, that all the adults should soon gather around for this exciting second act. Brandie gave a little clap and said, “Oh, yay!” and Elizabeth remembered Step 6: Say Something Helpful, and so she said to Brandie, “I think Toby should join them,” and she walked toward her son, who, when he saw her coming, looked again at his computer and curled up a little tighter against the wall. She squatted down next to him and said, “Screen time is over now,” to no reaction whatsoever, then, “Toby, it’s time to play with the other kids,” to, again, no reaction, and so she reached out to take his tablet away from him, and she had barely grasped it and begun to pull it gently toward her when Toby suddenly, and without any warning or ramp-up, screamed.
It was the kind of scream she hated most, that high-pitched, ear-shredding noise that was always the leading edge of a large, unstoppable meltdown, a shriek that triggered instant panic, Elizabeth already saying, “No, no, no, no” almost involuntarily as Toby’s body went rigid and his face squished up and turned crimson and out came that other person Toby turned into during these episodes, that inconsolable not-Toby who disconnected from the world and lived entirely within his uproar. He’d been doing it since he was a toddler, and Elizabeth had long hoped that she might somehow find a way to parent him out of it, or, failing that, that he would simply grow out of it—but, so far, no luck. The tantrums persisted, and she understood by now that the best way to deal with such a meltdown was not to reward it or punish it but to simply show care and empathy and attend to him with loving patience, which Elizabeth could manage successfully in the privacy of their home, but when the tantrums happened in public, on trains or in grocery stores or, now, here, in front of other parents, Elizabeth felt all those eyes on her pressingly, staring at her with the kind of horror mixed with grim fascination that brought her right back to those lonely cafeterias of her youth, enduring the grotesque curiosity of a strange new student body, which, in its cruel gaze, was telling her: You do not belong here. She felt their stares as Toby’s scream silenced the room, and Elizabeth felt the urgent need to do something, to make it stop, to perform some kind of magical feat of motherhood, but of course there was no way to make it stop, nothing to do but plead with Toby—“It’s okay, it’s okay”—and hope this meltdown wouldn’t be a long one, hope it wouldn’t be one of those where Toby struggled to breathe through overpowering sobs.
Who knows how bad it might have gotten had Brandie not swooped in right at the moment Toby’s scream was about to crest, appearing suddenly at his side and saying with unexpected enthusiasm and gladness: “Who needs a brain break?”
Which somehow shut him right up.
“You need a little time to yourself there, kiddo?” Brandie asked him.
And Toby looked up at her, maybe startled at her quick appearance and unlikely cheer, and said, “Uh-huh,” his big eyes already glistening.
“There are some weighted blankets in the quiet room,” she said. “You go on in there and have yourself a brain break, okay?”
“Okay,” Toby said, standing, sniffling.
“That’s right,” Brandie said. “You squish those bad thoughts all the way down to your shoes!”
Which made Toby, unbelievably, giggle.
And then the boy was walking away, and Brandie picked up his computer, which he had left behind, and handed it to Elizabeth.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.
“What a sweetheart,” Brandie said as the two of them watched him go.
“How did you do that?”
Brandie shrugged. “I sent him my peaceful thoughts.”
“That’s it? You sent your thoughts?”
“Yes, that’s it. It’s really very simple. I said to myself: I am the peace amid the chaos. I thought that, and believed it, and then the universe made it true. You should try it. Say it out loud, and when you do, try to really, honestly believe it.”
And Elizabeth looked at her host like, Seriously? But then she saw Brandie’s big open guileless grin, and she recalled Step 7: Lie If Necessary, and so Elizabeth nodded and smiled.
“I am the peace amid the chaos,” she said, trying to smile genuinely, with both her mouth and her eyes.
NONE of the most authoritative-seeming sources on the World Wide Web could agree on something as simple as how to train a bicep. On the straightforward question of how to make one’s biceps bigger, it was, online, chaos. When Jack first googled this subject and clicked on the top result, he foolishly thought he had it all under control. It sounded pretty simple: you made a bicep bigger by lifting moderate weights many, many times—four sets, twelve reps, weight at 45 percent the muscle’s upper lifting limit, sixty seconds mindful resting between sets, done two to three times weekly—which was said to activate something called the sarcoplasmic fluid within the muscle, thereby making it bigger. And Jack tried this for about a month until he grew impatient with his lack of results and went back to the web to discover that, actually, he’d been doing everything all wrong. The secret to making a bicep bigger was not to lift moderate weights but rather enormous ones, and only a few times—just three sets, lift until you fail, a weight at 85 percent the muscle’s max, a two-and-one-half-minute rest between the sets, exactly twice a week—which allegedly shocked the muscle’s myofibril tissues into growing back larger. So Jack tried this for about a month, until he again grew impatient at his biceps’ complete lack of change or growth and went back to the web and learned that, once more, he’d been doing everything all wrong. The key to real muscle building, he discovered, was progressive weighting—where you start with the weights that are lightest and ramp to the weights that are heaviest, lifting them seven to twenty times each—which was supposed to work both the slow-twitch endurance-type muscle fibers and the fast-twitch power-type muscle fibers that were present in some ratio in every muscle. So, okay, Jack spent a month progressively weighting all his workouts, then went back to the web when, once more, there was no change in the size or shape of his biceps, nor triceps, delts, quads, or any of the other major muscle groups he’d been, as advised, “targeting,” and this was because, once again, he’d been doing everything all wrong, that according to a totally different website it didn’t really matter how heavy or light or progressive your weights were if you weren’t also supporting your weight lifting with the proper diet, that if you were restricting calories in an effort to shed pounds (which Jack was, naturally, doing), then you weren’t providing your energy-hungry muscles enough sustenance to build themselves up with, and so weight lifting at a caloric deficit meant that, perversely, the body burned muscle fiber to make up for the deficit that working the muscle fiber created in the first place, a sort of biologic Penelope paradox whereby Jack’s body would undo at night all the work he had done during the day. So Jack needed to follow a more weight-lifting-friendly diet, which required him first to establish the baseline metabolic rate for a person of his age and gender and height and weight and body fat percentage as determined by skinfold caliper measurements at his waist, neck, and back, but when he inputted all this data into four online “Basal Metabolic Rate Calculators” he was given four wildly divergent numbers, with a gap between the lowest and highest numbers being the caloric equivalent of a large daily pepperoni pizza, which seemed pretty odd, to get such inconsistent results from the same data, not to mention irritating, that the whole point of buying something like skinfold calipers in the first place was to make his weight-loss and muscle-building plan scientifically exact, which seemed necessary since too few calories would prevent muscle-building but too many calories would encourage gut-gaining, and so consuming the proper number of daily calories felt like threading an impossible needle, dietwise. He ultimately just took an average of the four separate numbers and used that result to extrapolate his daily macronutrient needs, the most important of which according to almost everyone was protein, which was necessary in monstrous quantities—when he calculated his alleged protein requirement he found that to satisfy it he’d basically have to eat three whole chickens a day, which seemed both unlikely and weird, which was why everyone online advocated for a daily protein powder smoothie or two, to supplement one’s normal protein consumption, which led him down yet another dizzying online labyrinth where proponents of protein powders made from whey or bone or soy or hemp or peas or rice or something ambiguously called “superfoods” all argued that their protein powder was the correct protein powder and that if you were using any other protein powder you were doing it all wrong.
