She sets her left foot slightly in front of her right and tries to keep them a shoulders’ width apart, whatever that means, and counts her punches as they leave her shoulder instead of listening for them like her brother does. They don’t sound much but remind her others might be listening, listening and watching.
“How many rounds you got left on the bag?” a guy in a yellow Under Armour shirt asks, and he looks away as she answers.
“Two?” she says, and he walks away. “Coach said I could –”
“Whatever, it’s cool,” he says. “That’s the lucky bag. There are others. As you were.”
Impersonal questions feel like achievements and feel good to answer as nobody. Hers is a morbid futility, more than her other morbidity, because nothing about her new regimen is hopeful to anyone but her, or perhaps not her either, and certainly to no one who does not know what fuel she finds in betrayal, timeless betrayal, and the timelessness of betrayal’s catalyzing force.
It was fuel enough to fuel her intake of fuel till she weighed quite nearly 400 pounds or maybe more had there been a scale available to mark her, but there wasn’t, so her brother, moved back to mom’s by a disgruntled ex, used their mechanical scale and marked how far beneath the dial’s last score, 290 in bold black, she spun the red metal needle, and it was probably 103 but as he knew his sister was unable to see beneath herself, and as he wanted her to find momentum during the first month when anything done with her body might shrink it, he told her it was 110, which weighed her a symmetrical 400 pounds. It invested her first week with the hope of a 10-pound loss, one miraculous enough to return anyone for a month to the lunglike haze of the city gym where an amateur program thrives even as the city’s retired champion gets the kids when they turn pro.
She knows the guys at the gym who didn’t know her family thought her younger brother, born in 1996 and only three years her junior, was actually her son, so different were their appearances, so ageing was the flesh that made the distinguishing contours of her brown face float between her forehead and chin like the yolk of a fried egg, she was too aware, but she appreciated their treating her like nobody after the first shocked glances and customary leers. No cruelty, despite their cruel ages. That was a gentle surprise till her brother explained the code of truthtelling required once a person slipped beneath the delimiting bungee cord that separated the gym’s spectators from boxers: “Be honest, if you’re going to fight anyway.”
A year of eating after the guy nobody believed was interested in her was interested in her for a week, long enough to get it, and then uninterested as everyone imagined him, what few people knew they were together at all – and those few included her mother, who surely knew the tally when he came to retrieve her daughter for their date but didn’t caution her daughter because she wanted experience and that had to begin with an experience.
Now her mother wonders at the silence she showed the events of that week, and the 51 that followed as she sat on their sofa and said only cursorily encouraging things, as she sits in the spectator area and sees her daughter’s want of coordination and oxygen, exerting on the heavybag in an awful impression of the gym’s better athletes, brokenwrist slaps beneath an uneven face of coffee grounds sprinkled on sandpaper and splotched now with a fire-engine red, angry as her new gloves, ones her mother bought at the secondhand store as a reward for her daughter’s initiative in losing a miraculous 11 pounds that first week in the gym when her daughter wore the same black sweatpants and black cotton shirt from Wal-Mart, where they stocked XXXXL in the men’s section, five days in a row, walking each night to the laundry room of the small Southtown apartment complex with a roll of quarters her mother bought on her lunchbreak that Monday to ensure no foreseeable obstacle lay on her daughter’s path.
She swats the bag with hapless hooks, knocking on a door hung sideways, and fixates on her hunger, on the enormously empty sensation and impossibility of what one reward could reliably compensate for the acid now in her shoulders and wrists, and the cramps on the bottoms of her feet caused by tennis sneakers, from a smaller time and biting mad about it. She tries to count her breaths like she heard an old guy say to one of the pros, something about getting him with a hook on the inhale, whatever that could mean.
Her brother helps pull the stiff gloves off her small hands, and she replaces them, squeaking, in their black mesh packaging then unwinds her stretchy pink wraps and drops them in a small gearbag from her brother. She turns three quarters of the way from the bench and sidles to her mother, her ride, in the spectator area, careful not to face the enormous shadowboxing mirror opposite the bench where her brother put the gearbag. Her mother shows stoicism instead of bubbly encouragement, as her son exhorted, but still quietly tells her daughter at this rate she can’t imagine where she’ll be in a month, and the thought stops there because neither is sure she’ll return tomorrow.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
