Another Lobotomy, Please
Several months ago my wife and I joined our town’s newly constructed and family-oriented Y. We had become exasperated with our sedentary lifestyle, and the new facility lured us in with an impressive array of amenities—heated pools, spacious gymnasium, yoga classes, saunas, and most importantly, free childcare for our daughter. We marveled at the whirring ellipticals and treadmills, the stairmasters and rowing machines and stationary bikes, all lined up before a phalanx of televisions suspended above the wide windows, through which the afternoon light generously filtered, as if in benediction.
At first we went regularly, depositing Maddie in the brightly decorated children’s room before changing, arming ourselves with headphones, and racking our bodies against the machines. We would spend an hour or so on the ellipticals, watching, say, a TV-edited version of 12 Monkeys while ascending imaginary hills diagrammed in bright red blips on the console, which displayed an encouraging diagnostic of calories burned, miles traveled, time elapsed, and heart rates achieved. It was terrific—in the time it took for Bruce Willis to convince Madeleine Stowe that he was not, in fact, a psychotic lunatic but instead an addled time-traveler come to halt a viral apocalypse, I could burn several hundred calories. Occasionally we would arrive to find the televisions tuned exclusively to CNN and FOX news, and on those days exercise was burdensome—vapid political punditry is a poor motivator—but at last we seemed to have developed one consistently healthy habit in our lives.
Then Nicole hurt her back, and her physician prohibited all forms of exercise, and we both slipped back into a haze of lethargy—she was convalescing, and I … well, I prefer to think of my laziness as “sympathetic inactivity.” We watched hours of television and dined carelessly on greasy take-out dinners until finally, a couple of weeks ago, Nicole returned to the Y. “It was wonderful,” she said when she came home. “I sat on one of the recumbent bikes and read for an hour—burned almost five hundred calories and knocked off about a hundred pages!” Her face was flushed, and dark strands of hair clung to her neck; she grinned widely as she poked me in my fleshy, post-holiday paunch. “Your turn, buddy,” she said.
That Monday I made an appointment for afternoon childcare, and while Nicole barricaded herself in the study to draft outlines for her feminist research paper, I spent the morning with Maddie, whose masochistic idea of “play” finally led to an attempted lobotomy performed with the blunt knives of her Victorian tea set. This drastic neurological procedure was inspired by an alarming callous on my big toe—a podiatric symptom of some mental disorder, apparently—which Maddie poked and prodded with her fake stethoscope before declaring the need for immediate surgical intervention. “First, I will give you a shot,” she said, quickly adding, “It will hurt you a lot, and you will cry.” She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my foot and stabbed at my toe with her plastic needle. “Does that hurt you, Daddy?” she asked, hope ringing in her voice. “Well, I think you need an operation on your head now. Be still, and I will cut you.”
I wanted to be a good, indulgent father, but after hours of surgery, much of it conducted with the help of an unsterilized golden retriever, I was exhausted, and craved solitude. The prospect of working out at the Y held some relief, and I was anxious to leave. When it was time to go I packed the toddler bag, piled my workout clothes by the front door, found Maddie hiding behind the recliner, zipped her in her coat, realized her mittens were missing, frantically searched the house, found one behind a bookcase and other beneath a couch, realized Maddie had taken off all her clothes in the interim, redressed her, bolted halfway out the door as she declared her need for a potty, returned to accommodate her urinary distress, and finally, finally got her buckled in the car. As I drove I imagined a congregation of treadmills, beckoning with the promise of ninety toddler-free minutes.
A half hour later, after parking and unbuckling Maddie from the car seat, I discovered my mistake: my workout clothes, freshly washed and neatly folded after months of disuse, were back at home, still piled by the front door. I groaned, cursed, and called my wife, as if she could do anything about it. “Yes, they’re right here,” she said. “I’m looking at them right now.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I wailed. Maddie looked concerned.
“Well, you’re wearing your sneakers already, so why not work out in your regular clothes?” Nicole suggested. “No one will notice.”
“No way,” I said, and I meant it. There are many types of people who work out at the Y—the svelte, spandex-clad gods and goddesses who move lithely from machine to machine like gazelles grazing on the open plain; the bronze college girls who travel in pairs, chatting on adjacent ellipticals, sucking on water bottle spouts as their blonde ponytails spin like airplane propellers at the backs of their heads; the hirsute bodybuilders who squat and grunt, their sinewy biceps bulging with veins as they flex in front of the mirror; the overweight thirty-somethings who grimace hopefully as they make their wobbly tour of the strength training equipment; the harried parents who blankly gaze, slack-jawed and dreamy, as they glide themselves into a lather, basking in the TV chatter of cardio-theater, offsetting one vice with another virtue. I’m firmly in this last group, of course—but to exercise in pedestrian clothes was to descend the workout hierarchy and join the group I most disliked: the clueless dilettantes who wandered in from the street, clomping along in construction boots, running in tight denim pants, perspiring into lint-ridden sweaters.
“I’ll feel too conspicuous,” I told Nicole. “Forget it. I’m coming home.”
Maddie, sensing the change of itinerary, began to cry; she snatched the cell phone from my hands and pressed it against her face. “Mommy, Daddy says we are leaving, and I am not going to play at the gym with the kids, and if we leave we will be laaaaaaaaate!” Having been promised some time at the gym, she had a point.
So we went inside. I planned to deposit Maddie in the childcare room and read the latest New Yorker for an hour in the lobby, but it turned out that the Y sells athletic clothing. Fifteen dollars later I owned a pair of gray cotton shorts, one leg of which was emblazoned with the Y’s logo, and as I entered the men’s locker room I felt newly optimistic. That feeling evaporated when I removed my khakis and saw that I was wearing boxers. Spacious, breezy, unsupportive boxers. It’s not that I’m so prodigiously endowed that exercising in boxers is impossible, but the phallic flopping would be disconcerting—especially now, since my newly purchased shorts, with their clingy, thin fabric, were somewhat … tight. But my tee-shirt hung below my waist, and I decided to take it easy—I’d lie low, occupy one of the recumbent bikes, read my magazine, and pedal away the wearying madness of the day.
I confidently swaggered past a corpulent man wearing stonewashed jeans; he clutched the arms of the treadmill as the collar of his wrinkled polo shirt flapped against his neck, where a large gold chain glittered against his sweaty skin. Feeling smug, I ceremoniously settled into a vacant recumbent bike, adjusted the seat, selected the “terrain” I would ride, fiddled with the resistance, plugged in my headphones, and commenced pedaling as I watched some cable coverage of the Golden Globe Awards. Liam Neeson was standing awkwardly on the red carpet, talking to Star Jones about how nervous he was. “But you’ve won so many awards!” Jones gushed. “Aren’t you used to it by now?” Neeson leaned into the microphone and said, with his faint Irish lilt, that no, you never get used to it, no matter how many times you’ve been nominated. Jones asked him what it was like to play the famous sexologist, Alfred Kinsey, and Neeson said something polite about the opportunity to portray this unique character on film. Then Jones asked Neeson if the role helped him learn any new “moves” for the bedroom—nudge nudge, wink wink—and that’s when Natasha Richardson stepped in to say that Neeson was already a very proficient sexual partner, thank you very much.
I had been happily pedaling the whole time, but when I turned down the volume and opened the New Yorker to an article about a corrupt criminal defendant, I felt a sudden, peculiar sensation just below the elastic waistband of my new shorts—a slight twitch, a jumpy tingle, some friction between the cling of my shorts and the inside of my thigh, a throbbing tumescence. I began cycling more slowly, but this only exacerbated the situation—each rotation of my legs was like a genital massage. I looked around, caught my panic-stricken face reflected in the window, and stopped cycling altogether. What to do? I draped the magazine across my increasingly asymmetrical lap and pretended to read, but this was unacceptable—it must have looked like I was studying my crotch, and besides, I was just sitting there, not moving at all, which was more suspicious and conspicuous than the garishly dressed man behind me.
When I was thirteen I suffered from this sort of erectile embarrassment every day, particularly on the ride home from school. The bus would bounce and shake, start and stop, jostle back and forth, and no matter how assiduously I counted the houses we passed, or conjugated Spanish verbs in my head, or visualized the putrid corpses of squirrels and birds, I would always have to limp down the aisle with my backpack held firmly against my groin, which throbbed and ached for several blocks before finally subsiding. And here I was now, more than twice the age I was then, furtively glancing to see if anyone else had noticed this humiliating … engorgement. What had aroused me? Was it simply the odd clothing, or something else? Could it have been Star Jones, with all her kinky innuendo, or Natasha Richardson, with that proud boast of her husband’s virility? Was it the New Yorker, with its inscrutable cartoons and glossy pages, its shrewd wit and vivid writing?
Trying to appear casual, I held the magazine so it dangled below my waist while I wiped down the machine with a towel, and then I half-strolled, half-sprinted toward the locker room. I hastily changed back into my pants, trying to ignore the old, bloated man whose pale and wrinkled flesh kept sliding into my peripheral vision. Flaccid but flustered, I forget my new shorts, so eager was I to fetch my daughter and resume my earlier role of lobotomized father. I was rushing as I signed her out and gathered her up, and as I carried her through the vestibule I failed to notice the glass door, which I had pushed open so vigorously, swinging back towards us. It struck my daughter in the head, and the thwack of impact was loud and jolting. A crowd of parents in the lobby stared at me as I tried to sooth her; they stared as I cradled her head in my hand and felt for a bruise; they stared as I wiped her tears and apologized. “It’s not me,” I wanted to tell them. “It’s the lobotomy. The first one clearly didn’t work, and I need another, right away.”
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