I push the toes first, then heels. Press so hard until it feels like I might fall, like the bike pedals could crack beneath my weight. That’s when the cleats click. After the first foot, the second has more confidence. Locked in. I start to pedal, slowly, as I tap my index finger against the screen, choose which workout, decide how much sweat will fall out of my pores, dampening my tight clothes, the backs of my knees, the round of my wrists. Clicking in is what binds me. It keeps me here.
Then, I begin.
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At my five-year old’s virtual Valentines party, she gets a note from a boy in her class. You are very pretty, it reads, typed by the teacher on a Powerpoint shared through a laptop screen. She looks left and right from her pink plastic chair, beaming. A glue stick, uncapped, sits on her makeshift desk by the window.
My eight-year old daughter laughs from beside her. “Alexander is your new boyfriend.”
All day long, the five-year-old’s shoulders sway as she walks throughout the apartment. She put on her leopard-print boots with a long dress, takes a costume necklace from my jewelry box. “Could you put this on?” she asks, the clasp too tiny for her fingers.
She holds up her hair as I clip it behind her neck, the pink gems spread along the middle of her chest like a fan. Then she runs to the mirror and turns, boots and heels shifting, ponytail flipping side to side.
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The black limbs of the bike curve, strong like a root—nothing loose, nothing extra. It’s a model of what I pedal towards: long, lean limbs, taught lines and shine. The bike takes all the pedaling, the pain and exhaustion, the weight and the wear. And still, it stands strong.
Only a 2 by 4 footprint, the website read. It hardly takes up space.
Everything conforms to the build of the bike—the grip of my palms, the alternating lengths of my legs as they spin, the soft of my ass against the hard, pointed seat. Sometimes, a single bead of sweat will fall off my chin onto the floor below in a silent drip.
Just wipe it down with a baby wipe every so often, the delivery guy told me, his rough hands running along the black of the handles. It doesn’t need much.
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I follow Girl with a Gut on Instagram. She posts pictures of her dinner plates: Mac and cheese and plantains and red-velvet chicken wings. She stands in the bare bathroom of her office with her phone propped on the toilet. She stands in her bedroom with a red shirt on a hanger leaning against a desk behind her, CARS decals on the wall. She wears her scrubs, she wears a crop top, a black and white bikini with three strings around each hip. Put it on! she yells at me through the screen, eyes glaring. Put it the fuck on. She shakes her hips and belly and breasts and grabs the folds of her skin like they are cotton candy, like they are golden coins. Your body good. Body good! As she swivels and shakes, her body plows into the air, pushes it out of the way, belongs, put it the fuck on, like the world was made for her hips and belly to swirl, to take up space.
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My favorite instructor’s name is Ally Love. She shares a first name with my smallest girl, along with her complexion and the coiled texture of her hair. I want my daughter to grow to be this sure and strong.
You are enough, she says, not breaking gaze, while both of our legs spin in tandem. Her soft eyes twinkle when her face collapses into smile. I smile back, but there’s a distance between us. It’s not just because of the screen, or because she has no idea I exist. It’s in all of the lines her body makes—the shadows along her obliques and deltoids, the skin that curves taught along the small of her shoulders. Her sports bra and loose crop top tank with its camouflage pattern. Elastic that sits, a body that behaves. Her eyes stay on mine as my knees follow hers up and down, up and down. You are enough, she says again, as if she knows I don’t believe her. I try to suck my stomach in, the loose skin that hangs on its own accord, separate from me. Crimps and crinkles and rolls. Up and down, up and down, sweat crawling down my forehead and turning in its creases along the sides of my eyes. Enough woman, enough mother, enough girl. Up down up down up down, eyes closed, picturing the small measuring cup that sits on the bottom shelf of my kitchen cabinet, pouring myself in as my body surges above the red lines, or falls below.
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One afternoon, my eight-year-old tells me she’s fat, holding her stomach and standing on the bedroom rug. I’m staring at her body type, small, strong, looking for clues that she may inherit mine. Her roundish belly, her small behind. I search for the parts of her that have made it beyond the parts of me. Her thickened lips, her tiny nose, the silk of her curls. A small, misshapen birthmark on her chin as a marker that she’s her own.
My throat feels tight as she says these words for the first time. I sit cross-legged on the ground beside her, pull her down with me, racking my brain. I’ve worked so hard not to speak about my body in front of her. Has she seen the way I turn in the mirror, the way I suck in beneath my shirt? Has she noticed the way I step onto the scale each morning? I put my hands on her shoulders and fake a chuckle. “Everything about our bodies is strong and beautiful.”
I hold onto my not-so-secret secret: I don’t want her growing into this body I have. But mostly, I worry about her mind. I want it to be different than mine, but I can already see her meanest critics hide behind her almond eyes, beyond my reach. They don’t listen to anyone. They are strong and laughing, jumping up and down.
We grow up believing there will be peace and pride in seeing ourselves in our children. But really, we are hoping to save our children from becoming who we are.
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You’re a boss.
The bike faces the bathroom door, a mirror hanging over its back, and when it’s cracked just the right way, I can see my reflection. Hunched forward as I pedal, unable to suck in.
Cadence—the speed of the pedals—at 88, the beat of the song. Post Malone, Rick Ross, Diplo, Nicki Minaj. Keep your legs with the pace, up down, up down. Keep going, you’re a boss, Ally says, with that familiar smile. I smile back, reaching over the space between the shapes of our bodies, reaching out towards the tip of a longing that won’t leave, no matter how fast I pedal or hard and deep I breathe. Minutes become long, hard, thirty second sprints that stretch as seconds seem to inhale and wait before they tick on. I race between the feeling of my body’s bulk and my mind’s desperation. Pedal faster, deeper breaths, up down up down until the beat pulls my focus from the billows of my stomach and spins me somewhere into a place of freedom, of bearable pain.
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In the car, I look at my five-year-old’s face in the rearview, the way it collects light from the window as she peers toward the roadside. I try not to notice the way her skin softens into perfection, the yellow of her brown eyes.
“You know, you are beautiful whether Alexander says it or not,” I tell her.
She looks at my reflection in the mirror. “I know.”
“And beauty is more than what you look like. Do you know that?”
She pauses. “I know that,” she decides. A green light yellows ahead and I slow the car to a stop, turn back to face her.
“There is only one person who always has to believe you’re beautiful. You know who that is?”
She pauses. “Me.” The light turns green.
As we drive, I tell her a story. I keep a real protagonist, a real antagonist, but change part of the plot. As we merge onto the highway, I tell her about Kevin Kelly, and how he pointed to my stomach as I sat at my locker in ninth grade eating lunch. How he told me I had a potbelly, a gut. The boys on the baseball team said it, and now he’d noticed too. I don’t tell her I let my body fold, didn’t stand up straight with shoulders back and a stomach sucked in.
I tell her I knew I was beautiful, and it didn’t matter what Kevin Kelly or the boys with stained knees out on that baseball team or any guy or girl or squirrel on the sidewalk said about me. Because I understood my own worth. I check her in the rearview to see if she believes me., and fora moment, I believe myself. I forget it’s been twenty-five years since that day, twenty-five years since I put my mushed peanut butter sandwich back in the brown bag, crinkled it up and threw it in the trash, twenty-five years that I’ve felt the weight of a belly fallen out of place, that seemed to laugh in my face every time I exhaled.
“What’s a potbelly?” she asks.
“A mean word for a big, fat stomach.”
She’s quiet, maybe deciding if she believes me, maybe noticing the bark on the trees and how it bends beneath the sunlight, maybe thinking of Alexander and what it would feel like to hold his little hand.
“Your stomach is sort of big-fat,” she says.
I keep my eyes on the road ahead, the car in front with its blinker on. She only half-knows what she’s done.
“Beauty is on the inside,” I tell her, my voice monotone , my mind already gone.
“Blood is on the inside, Mommy.” She laughs. “Blood is not beautiful.”
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I’m still under the covers when I scroll through the Go Tuck Yourself Tummy Tuck support group posts. Soon the girls will come in, “I’m so hungry,” they will say, holding their bellies and begging for a frozen waffle or a bowl of Lucky Charms. I clench and unclench my hamstrings trying to loosen the tightness from yesterday’s ride.
Ladies, do it for yourself, the comments read.
I browse through the pictures of women just out of surgery, white bandages around their heads and medical tape along their waists. Standing in their bathroom mirrors, smiling at their swollen midsections, counters covered in bottles of pills. Frankenstein-like scars stretching from hip to hip, bellybuttons like newborns that have just been clipped, black and bleeding.
Dr. Zuckerman changed my life. He gave me the best gift, made me comfortable in my own body.
How long until your drains come out? someone writes, the picture of tubing leading to two empty plastic bottles collecting fluid by the ounce. Drip, Drip.
Do it for yourself.
I picture the numbers written in the cover page to my tax returns, add up the state and federal refunds, multiply it by years.
I feel free.
My gift to me, this secret present I deserve. To stand in front of a mirror after thirty years and bend my thumb and index fingers into two semicircles and wrap them around a narrow stomach, clench the taut skin, have them touch each other along the tapered circumference of a waist. Suck into bones. Do it for myself, because no one else has to wake up each day feeling trapped inside their own body, avoiding mirrors and zooming into candid pictures, the belly skin that rises above the bath bubbles or hangs in uneven lumps during a plank. Do it for yourself, do it for her—no one lives here but me.
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The resistance of the pedals rises, 35, 40, 45, 46, 50. Keep going, Ally says, give it all you have. I breathe in taking inventory of what’s there. What’s left? Both my girls sit on the bed next to me, watch my arms clench the handlebars, my knees come up and down.
I thought I was a feminist. I stared back at the men on the street who cat-called me and asked them what they wanted. I’ve been called “crazy” by my guy friends when I refused to sit quiet and let them talk about women like they were steaks on a bed of ice behind glass planks. I petitioned my elementary school principal until I was allowed to play touch football with the boys at recess, outrunning John C. as my legs burned towards the end zone, not complaining about the heat of his hands when he two-hand touched me in a resentful slap.
I thought I was teaching my daughters they can and will become anything.
But still, I pedal, I curse what’s loose and hanging, I hold back tears. Beauty will win, so I’ll chase it and chase it, even as I lose sight of the lead as the finish line moves farther away.
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My husband sends me a picture he took out back, through the white of the window grates, the kitchen light shining on my daughter and me. It’s right after a ride, and I’m wearing a sports bra, the flanks of my back rolling, folded one atop the other, the curve of bad posture. Wide, I think. Fat. It doesn’t fit with the image I have of myself as I walk bra-topped throughout my apartment, almost forty but still thirty, small and fit. Dried sweat from a workout and hair in curls around my ears. Endorphins spinning round and round.
“The way she’s looking at you,” he says later, when I asked why he snapped the picture. I open it again and realize I hadn’t seen her face. I hadn’t noticed the way her eyes tilt up towards me, her mouth in a semi-circle, smiling. She was telling me something—I don’t remember what—maybe a story about a game, or a toy, or a snack she’s never tried. I’d looked at the picture and I missed her. Her tiny face. Her baby teeth. Her gaze telling me: you are enough.
And in the dark, under the light of reality tv, I lay side-by-side with the man who found me when he was just a boy and grabbed me and held on, who listened to my thoughts as they spun themselves around and around and never made me wonder if I knew what it meant to be loved, who has put his hand on my belly day in and day out and told me there’s nothing about my body he would change, and I decide to ask him, just because it’s been years, and just because I can never really be sure of anything because everything I’ve told my daughters is a lie.
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” The B-roll flickers from the screen onto the bed spread.
“I know you’re beautiful,” he tells me, looking so hard into my eyes that I almost look away. “I just wish you did too.
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I unclick my heels from the bike. I use all my hip strength to twist them out one ankle at a time. My legs feel jelly-like, small tremors. The cleats clack on the hard wood of the floor. I keep my clothes on, turn to the side like my five-year old did when she was checking herself out for Alexander. There is strength in the curves that my arms make. In the round of my hamstrings. With the buzz of the workout, I’m able to focus on my eyes. They are green, and I can see inside them.
I undress, bike shoes first, then leggings, peeling wet down my legs. Shirt, bra. I make sure the mirror is out of view, to avoid seeing an outline of what is supposed to be, with all the skin and all of me not within the lines, a half-ass coloring job spilling out the sides. I picture the eyes. The way they hold on to everything I’ve seen in this lifetime, the tongue kisses and lovemaking and infant birthing and angry sobs and screams of joy they’ve witnessed. They are the center of me, iris, cornea, pupil, the anchors, and for this moment, they are enough.
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I will not pay for someone to cut my body open and sew it back together for it to lay a certain way in the mirror. I will not pay all of this so I can put on a bikini or shop the crop top section of the department store. I will not pay to be bedridden with fluids leaking and dripping from my body, unable to stand, unable to wash myself, a rented chair inside the shower, my two young girls peering at my bedside as I moan. Bringing me saltines and ginger ale. Holding my hand, staring at the bandages on my belly, and wondering if they shouldn’t have poked it so many times and asked me why it was so droopy, so soft. I will not pay to make them hope each day for my pain to fade, as the dishes pile up in the sink, red sauce unrinsed inside the bowls. Waiting for my footsteps to become fast again around the house, for my body to be able to bend again and pick up their toys and their tiny snips of paper from their project, ask me to come back into the bath with them so they could poke through the bubbles at the soft of my belly that rises above.
I will not pay for them to stand staring at me laying down, waiting to have me back and looking around the world until they find exactly what it is that made me leave.
I won’t. I will. I can’t.
I pick up the phone. My consultation is next Thursday.
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After I’ve paid, and after I’ve cried, written in purple pen on the calendar date square and waited as it came closer and closer, and the bike has been moved aside to make room for the power recliner chair, and I’m in a small teal room, four days post-operative, clean towel laid on a surgical massage bed, my shoulders hunched, unable to stand straight, drains clogged with blood clots coming out from my groin, and the walls are spinning and I’m trying not to faint, “¡Abre los ojos! Emily! Abre los ojos!” She yells, Ingrid, my masseuse, but my eyes just won’t focus, not on the box of disposable paper underpants, the plastic hook on the wall where my faja and purse hangs, a small bottle of water with a cap barely screwed on, the canvas print behind her brown bun that says Do what you love, “¡Abre los ojos, Emily, mírame!” She yells, and all I can do is fall into the folds of her chest, the soft of her round stomach and skin, hold on tighter, it melts into my cheeks, my ribs, the bones of my arms.
It’s her body that saves me, the only thing that feels so full, that feels so good, that opens my eyes and brings me back to life.