Everyone Is Beautiful: A Novel by Katherine Center

Author:Katherine Center [Center, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 1 7

On the night I had my free personal training session, I lost my wedding ring.

It was a plain gold band, half of a his-and-hers matched pair that we ‘d bought from an estate jeweler for two hundred dollars. My ring was inscribed with the name “Herbert” and Peter's was inscribed with “Geneva.” I had insisted to Peter that I didn't mind having a pre-owned ring, that I liked the idea of its history, which was true. We'd had our own initials engraved in the rings to put our own stamp on them, but sometimes we called each other by those other names when we were feeling ornery.

“Herb,” I'd say to Peter, “can you bring me a glass of water?”

I'd squeezed my training session into the last hour before the gym closed. Only a few other people were there, including the couple I loved so much and Ted Koppel. I was a little embarrassed to have my ass kicked in front of Ted Koppel for some reason, and I kept wishing he would go home. The last thing I needed was someone taking note of how out of shape I was. Though that's exactly what the trainer was doing—on a clipboard. And not just any trainer. The ass-slapping trainer.

He had turned out to be just as much of a flirt as Ted Koppel had promised that first night. I'd kept an eye on him. He flirted with absolutely everybody. His hand had been on every single ass in the room. His flirtatiousness was so broad, it was meaningless.

But not when he was working. Now we were in training mode. Now he was a hard-ass turning me into a hard-body—in fifty-five minutes or less. He put me through a series of tests—how many push-ups I could do (five), how many times I could go up and down the stairs in two minutes (three), and how many times I could jump rope without tripping (forty-six)—marking everything off on a clipboard. It was deeply humiliating. I knew I was out of shape, but I had never quantified it in this manner. If I'd known he was going to be measuring me like this, I'd probably have declined the session. After a while, he put me back on the treadmill, tilted it as high as it would go, and had me walk on it until I thought my lungs might collapse.

The next test was sit-ups. The trainer pulled out a mat and said, “Let's see how many you can do. Three minutes. Go.”

First, let me say that I know how to do a sit-up. Everybody knows how to do a sit-up. It's a simple motion. But even though I knew exactly what to do, and even though I commanded my body to do it, I couldn't. It was a strange kind of paralysis. My brain was giving the command it always gave, but my body just didn't follow.

“Go,” the trainer said again.

“I can't,” I said.

I'm sure the trainer, by virtue of his job,

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