I explained the change in my eating habits by saying I’d started a protein powder diet on the recommendation of one of the customers at the store. I’d tried out a lot of fad diets before, so my husband seemed not to find anything amiss. I religiously followed the training plan that I’d developed with my young coach. Hidden from my husband, who’d be holed up in the study, I did push-ups, sit-ups, squats. My basic strength began to improve, so I started to go to the gym four times a week, where I did pull-ups, dumbbell presses, narrow-grip bench presses. Reverse crunches, to add muscle definition. Ball crunches. T-bar rows. Rack pulls. Plus protein powder every few hours, and double the daily calorie intake of the average adult male.
Sculpting beautiful bundles of muscle took a lot more commitment than I’d thought. You had to reach what felt like your absolute limit, and then keep going—another two, three steps. Alone, I might have given up, but I had my coach for a hundred free sessions. Bodybuilding workouts required a partner: if you overreached on lifting a dumbbell and dropped it on your neck, you could end up dead. Coach was always by my side, making sure that didn’t happen. “One last rep! You’re doing great. Yes!”
By the end of a workout, I was always foaming at the mouth from breathing hard through clenched jaws. But even that felt like an exciting new discovery. When I had first gotten married, I had a hard time managing the housekeeping accounts. My husband, who brought work home even on Sundays, saw the way I let receipts pile up without dealing with them, and said, “You just have no willpower.” He often berated me: “Have you ever in your life actually accomplished anything?”
The thickness of my neck was unmistakable. At the store, we demonstrate the moisturizing soaps to customers by lathering up a sample onto the backs of our hands, like whipped cream. But now all the customers were riveted by how my wrist was double the size of theirs, with well-defined tendons and veins. They pretended to pay attention to my description of jojoba oil while they looked at my neck, which was nearly as wide as my face. I could see in their eyes that they were trying to picture what they would find under my apron. It was like being stark naked.
Eventually, I got summoned by the owner of the store. “You seem a little different lately,” she said. “Is something going on, dear?”
“Yes, well.”
“I mean, haven’t you gotten bigger, a lot bigger, than you used to be? At first I thought you might be pregnant, but… perhaps you’re taking some kind of medication that doesn’t agree with you? Something for the menopause. Are you experiencing side effects?”
“I’m not.”
“But it’s clear your hormones are completely out of kilter!”
I confided in the owner about my training. At first she only nodded, looking doubtful, but when I told her that I’d never felt this committed to anything before, she looked at me and said she could see it in my eyes. She was a very self-assured woman who’d raised three children on her own and managed a chain of stores. She became wholeheartedly supportive, and—knowing the old, unremarkable, unassertive me—said she much preferred the way I was now.
My coworkers at the store said that they’d help me with my fresh start too. The next day, someone brought in a yoga mat they didn’t use anymore so that I could train as much as I liked behind the hair care products shelf while there were no customers around. No one batted an eyelid at me drinking raw eggs from a beer glass during breaks. Occasionally some kids would graffiti things like WARNING smiling muscle woman will strangle you to death on the wall of the parking lot, but almost all the customers responded positively, once they got used to it. A lot of single mothers, and women busy with careers or raising children, said they felt encouraged by my progress. I made sure I never let my smile slip, no matter how hard things got, because as a bodybuilder, I was cultivating muscle in pursuit of an ideal of beauty.
Only my husband seemed not to notice anything, even though my chest felt so solid it was as though there was a metal plate under my skin, my arms looked huge enough to snap a log in half, my waist sported a six-pack, and from a distance I looked like a big inverted triangle on legs. When I asked my coworkers for advice, they commiserated: “That’s just what men are like,” and “Mine doesn’t even notice when I get my hair cut.”
My hair was the one thing I hadn’t touched, because my husband preferred it long. I tanned as dark as I could and got my teeth whitened inexpensively by a dentist a customer had introduced me to, but my hair was the same as it had been before I became a bodybuilder.
Around the time that we’d completed eighty of my four-a-week sessions, my coach encouraged me to start doing some posing. “I know it feels good to be getting bigger, but you should compete and get some people to see you. It’ll be something to aim for,” he said.
The first few times he suggested it, I politely refused, saying big occasions like that weren’t my style, but my coach kept at it. “I really think we need to do something about your deep-seated lack of self-belief.”
“Lack of self-belief? Mine?”
“Yes. Maybe you don’t see it, but you’re always mumbling ‘anyway’ after everything you say, or talking about ‘the kind of person you are.’ I don’t know where that comes from, but I think you need to get your confidence back.”
I knew the reason. Living with my perfectionist husband had made me think that I was a person with no redeeming qualities. It hadn’t been like that before we were married, but gradually, as I constantly tried to compensate for his lack of confidence by listing all my own faults, I’d acquired the habit of dismissing myself.
“I can’t promise that I’ll compete,” I said, striking a pose for the first time in my life in front of the gym’s mirror. This was what being a bodybuilder was all about. Nervously I brought my arms up beside my face and held myself at the angle that made them look the most impressive.
“Make it look easy!” said my coach, so I lifted up the corners of my mouth and kept trying my best to flaunt my muscles.
My smile was still a little unsure. I dropped the pose without having been able to look my mirror self in the eye.
“There’s no rush. We’ll work on it together,” my coach said, and draped a towel over my shoulders.
One day, while I was giving out samples of jojoba oil near the store entrance, a fight broke out just outside between two of our customers’ dogs. The Yorkie’s collar broke off from its leash, and the little dog approached the much bigger dog, yapping loudly, which made the big dog pick him up by the neck. The big dog was a timid dog, the kind that would normally look around at a loss rather than get angry when another dog approached it sniffing and growling. The Yorkie’s owner tried to rescue her pet and, in desperation, hit the big dog with the Yorkie’s leash, which made the big dog even more confused and agitated, and it shook its head from side to side, still holding the little dog in its jaws. The Yorkie’s yapping got quieter and quieter, and by the time the big dog opened its jaws and unhooked its fangs, the unfortunate puppy had already breathed its last breath.
No one said a thing, but I knew what they were thinking: Why hadn’t I—who’d been the nearest to the scene—pulled the two dogs apart, using my log-like arms? Why should they continue to lend support to muscles that were useless when they were really needed?
A bodybuilder’s muscles are different from an athlete’s. They exist purely for aesthetic value. A proud bodybuilder never puts their power to practical use. Because I’d bought into these beliefs, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to stop the dogs from fighting. None of this needed to have happened if I’d stepped in and broken them up. The Yorkie had been a friendly, energetic puppy, popular at the store, and I’d held him in my arms a few times too.