“Okay,” I repeated.
Anna ended up taking me to Foot Locker, making me try on five different pairs of shoes (we settled on cross-trainers) and four versions of sweatpants and tops (Nike). Then we bought food and drinks for the party Anna wanted to throw for MDash. She said my house was the only place for such a bash.
Around noon, MDash was one of sixteen hundred soon-to-be Americans standing on the floor of the Sports Arena, right hands raised as they swore allegiance to America—new citizens who would preserve, protect, and defend what was now their Constitution as much as it was for the President of the United States. Steve Wong, Anna, and I were in the bleachers, witnessing the naturalization of a sea of immigrants, their skins all the different colors of human nature. The sight was glorious and made the three of us emotional—Anna the most. She wept, her face pressed into my chest.
“It’s… so… beautiful,” she kept sobbing. “God… I love… this country.”
MDash’s Home Depot co-workers who could get the time off showed up at my place with a lot of cheap American flags, purchased with their employee discounts. Steve Wong set up a karaoke machine and we made MDash sing songs with “America” in the lyrics. “American Woman.” “American Girl.” “Spirit of America” by the Beach Boys is actually about a car, but we made him sing it anyway. We used the Radio Flyer wagon as an ice chest and six of us planted the forty-eight-star flag like we were the Marines on Iwo Jima, MDash being the guy in the very front.
The party went long, until only the four of us were left watching the moonrise, listening to Old Glory flitter and flap on its pole. I had just opened another beer from the slosh of ice in the wagon when Anna took the can out of my hands.
“Easy, baby,” she said. “You’re going to need all your capabilities, just as soon as those two go home.”
An hour later, Steve Wong and MDash headed out, the new American citizen singing “A Horse with No Name” (by the band America). As soon as Steve’s car was out of the driveway, Anna took my hand, leading me to the backyard. She put cushions down on the soft grass and we lay there, kissing, then, well, you know, putting my capabilities to the test.
Anna runs whenever she can jam a few miles into forty minutes, a habit she was going to force upon me. She took me to one of her routes, an uphill path that loops around Vista Point and back, and told me to get going. She would zip along ahead of me and meet me coming back down, knowing I’d never keep up with her.
My exercise is an option-only affair. Occasionally, I’ll ride my old three-speed to Starbucks or play a few rounds of Frisbee golf (I used to belong to a league). This morning I was chuffing up the dirt road, Anna so far ahead I didn’t see her, my feet breaking in my new cross-trainers (note to self: move up a half size). My blood was surging up and down my body in unfamiliar fury, so my shoulders and neck tensed up and my head pounded. When Anna came charging down from Vista Point, she was clapping her hands.
“Atta baby!” she called out, passing me. “Good first effort!”
I spun around to follow her. “My thighs are on fire!”
“They are rebelling,” she called back over her shoulder. “In time they will submit!”
Anna reorganized my kitchen when I was in the shower. She thought I kept my pans and lids in the wrong cupboards, and why was my flatware drawer so far from the dishwasher? I had no answer. “Let’s get going. Can’t be late for our first scuba lesson.”
The Scuba School smelled of rubber wet suits and the chlorinated pool. We filled out papers and were given workbooks to study, along with the schedule for our classroom sessions, as well as options for the date of our open water certification. Anna pointed to a Sunday four weeks away and reserved our berths on the boat on the spot.
We went to the Viva Verde Salad Cafe for a lunch of salads made of salads with salad on the side, after which I wanted to go home for a nap. But Anna said she needed my help moving some stuff around her house, a chore she had been putting off. This was barely true, almost a lie. She actually wanted me to help her rewallpaper her hallway and home office, which meant I had to move her computer, printer, scanners, and graphic equipment, then do her bidding all afternoon.
I never made it home that evening. We had dinner in—vegetarian lasagna with vegetables on the side—and watched a movie on Netflix about smart women with idiot boyfriends.
“Look, baby,” Anna said. “This is about us!” Then she cackled and reached into my pants without so much as kissing me. I either was the luckiest man in the world or was being played for a sucker. After Anna let me reach into her pants as well I still wasn’t sure which.
Anna had to work at her office. She employs four no-nonsense women and an intern who is an at-risk girl from high school. Last year she landed a contract for doing the graphics for a textbook publisher, steady work but as boring as wallpapering for a living. I told her I was going home.
“Why?” she asked. “You’ve got nothing to do today.”
“I’m going to get a run in,” I said, making that up on the spur of the moment.
“Atta baby,” she told me.
I went home and did put on the cross-trainers, then jogged around the neighborhood. Mr. Moore, a retired cop whose house shares my back fence, saw me running by and hollered out, “What the fuck got into you?”
“A woman!” I yelled back, and not only was that true, but I felt good saying it. When a man thinks of a lady and looks forward to telling her that he ran forty minutes, well, partner, he’s living in Girlfriend Territory.
Yes. I had a girlfriend. A girlfriend changes a man from the shoes he exercises in right up to how he cuts his hair (which Anna did the very next day, in front of my barber)—alterations I was due. Fooled by the adrenaline of romance, I ran farther than my body could stand.
Anna called just as I had given up on a nap because my calves were as tight as beer cans. She told me to get over to her acupuncturist; she’d call to arrange an immediate treatment.
The East Valley Wellness Oasis is in a minimall/professional building with underground parking. Driving my VW Bus, which has no power steering, around and around those descending circular ramps took physical effort. Figuring out the multiple elevators of the facility taxed my brain. When I finally found office 606-W, I filled in five pages of a Wellness questionnaire, sitting beside a fountain that made more noise from its electric pump than from its cascading water element.
Do you accept the practice of Visualization? Sure, why not? Are you open to Guided Meditation? I don’t see how it could hurt. Explain your reasons for seeking treatment. Please be specific. My girlfriend told me to bring you my tired, my poor, my balled-up leg muscles yearning to be freed.
I handed in my answers and waited. Eventually, a guy in a white lab coat called my name and took me into a treatment room. As I stripped down to my skivvies he read over my paperwork.
“Anna says your legs are bothering you?” he asked. He’d been working on Anna for the last three years.
“Yep,” I said. “My calves, among other muscles in revolt.”
“According to this,” he said, tapping my paperwork, “Anna’s your girlfriend.”
“A new development,” I told him.
“Good luck with that. Lay on your stomach.” When he put the needles in me, my whole body tingled and my calves twitched uncontrollably. Before leaving the room, he hit play on an old CD boom box for my guided meditation. I heard a woman’s voice tell me to clear my mind and think of a river. I sort of did that for half an hour, wanting to fall asleep, but couldn’t because I had needles sticking in me.