Tim Wendel: Downward Facing Dog (Fiction)

Her touch can be downright cold and I fear I’ve come to enjoy it so.

While I keep my eye out for her as best I can, she will find me at the most unexpected moments. That’s perhaps what I love the best. The touch of her fingertips on the thin skin atop my straining hands when I’m in the downward facing dog pose. Such a curious term, don’t you think?

That’s when she’ll often come to me.

“Like this,” she softly says, touching my hands or my shoulders or sometimes even tugging at my waist, bringing my body back to a position that I thought it had long lost the ability to reach.

There was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago about how men don’t cotton much to yoga. I don’t really understand why.

“Now cartwheel back down to the floor,” Hazel tells us. And we dutifully do.

The other dozen or so in the class are so much more fluid and graceful than I am at my age. But it doesn’t matter, I tell myself. I’m here and so is she.

When it comes to keeping up, maintaining the integrity of the exercise, it’s no use for me really. Compared with the others, and certainly compared with Hazel, I’m an old man. I’ll be seventy-one on my next birthday in November. Older than I often admit in mixed company.

When it comes to most yoga poses, especially a balancing one like the tree, I need to prop a hand against the side wall. That’s why my mat lies back here, at the far end of the YMCA Studio A, which overlooks the parking lot and the busy Sunset Hills Boulevard and the Target parking lot across the way. While the others—almost all of them married women with young children, trying to keep their bodies from falling apart as much as mine already has—rise and fall through the poses like breakers on the beach, I do the best I can. Sometimes I’ll just pause and admire them, dressed in their stretch tops and leotards, decked out in purple, teal and rose colors. What could pass for my grandson’s wet dream.

That’s how it is through the winter and spring and through the summer until the morning Hazel isn’t there. Another instructor, the Amazon with the short-cropped hairdo flicked with gray, is in charge and she runs us through the poses like a drill sergeant. No soft touches on the back of the hands. No whispered words of encouragement.

Afterward I go down to the front desk and ask where our regular instructor was.

The woman behind the counter doesn’t know what to tell me. I recognize that moment of hesitation before she breaks into the boilerplate about how “the schedule is in flux for fall.” How “all the classes will be under review.”

“But she’ll be back next week?” I ask.

“I think,” she replies, ready to be rid of me.

But Hazel isn’t back the next week and whispers have it she’s left, or been asked to leave. Others aren’t happy about her absence and some complain in the hallway outside Studio A after a different substitute leads our class.

“She’s not coming back,” says Kathy, the most flexible of all of us. She regularly puts her mat right up front and could easily lead the class herself.

“Where’d Hazel go?” somebody else asks.

“Lifetime Fitness,” someone else answers. “The new place near the highway. It’s supposed to beautiful.”

“She left us for a better deal?” I ask.

“That’s the way it looks, Barry.”

With a little research, I find the address for Lifetime Fitness and decide to drive over there. The parking lot is filled with newer, more expensive cars than my Subaru—BMWs, Volvos and the like. From the outside I don’t like the looks of the place and that trepidation only grows as I pull open the glass door and go inside. The foyer is spacious, like something from a museum.

In the end, they do their best to sell me a membership right then and there. A real hard sell but I insist I have to sleep on it. They probably think I need to run it by my wife at home. What they don’t know is I’ve been a widower for nearly a decade now.

The pile of paper, topped by the expensive contract, sits on my kitchen table until I notice the New Weekly Schedule. The whole regimen takes up both sheets of the green-colored paper and includes aerobics, spin and Pilates classes, as well as times for the pool. Dutifully, I look through the days all the way to Friday and there I find her, at the same time her class at our local YMCA had been. Vinyasa Flow Yoga, Hazel, 8:30-9:30.

           

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Dickson, our drop-in fees aren’t cheap,” the Lifetime woman tells me over the phone.

I expected that.

“We make them purposely so,” she continues, “because we think so much of our facility and staff that we know you’ll just love it. We’d like you to sign up for at least a year or more.”

“But I’d like to come back for just a day first.”

           

Eventually, we arrive at a deal. She’ll let me visit again if I promise to consider joining full-time. I lie and tell her I will.

“What time would you like to visit again, Mr. Dickson?” the Lifetime woman asks, making it sound like she’s doing me the biggest favor in the world.

“This Friday,” I say. “I’ll be there then.”

Of course, I’m one of the few guys in the class and the oldest by far. Most of the women dress in tight-fitting yoga pants in brown or black. I’ve heard about how such things can become transparent when stretched beyond the fabric capability in forward-facing bend or downward dog, but I’ve never witnessed such a wardrobe malfunction myself and I’ve decided it must be another example of urban legend. For my part I lay out my thick brown mat, which I bought at Modell’s several years ago, in the far corner. Mine doesn’t come with a carrying case as I never saw any reason for such accessories.

The music is Hazel’s music: new-age piano with the occasional chorus, spacey female voice not articulating any words that I can make out, riding like distant clouds on the composition’s far horizon.

Hazel enters at 8:30 a.m. sharp and directs the 55-minute class in her understated, precise manner. She stays entirely up front, with yoga mats stretched out everywhere. Several times, when we’re in the warrior I or II poses, I gaze directly at her. I almost wave. While I don’t, I like to think that a flicker of recognition crosses her face.

That night I take the stack of enrollment papers and the checkbook with me as I sit in front of the television, watching CNN as I eat my dinner off a tray. The difference in cost is substantial. Monthly dues to the Y are $85, with the discount I received years ago when Martha and I first joined. Lifetime requires a $200 initiation fee for a year-long contract that comes out to almost $125 a month. It’s a lot of money, especially for a guy like me, retired and on fixed income.

For a while I set the enrollment papers and schedule aside and try to watch what’s going on in the world. More drone strikes along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the latest survey ranks Mexico ahead of even the United States in population obesity and somewhere out West a local 10K run is waiving the entrance fee for anybody who owns a gun and promises to run with it in their event.

Then I think of Hazel. How she didn’t even know my name. But she must have recognized me in the corner of her new class. She just had to. I return to the papers, sign my name and write the check out to Lifetime Fitness.

The next Friday I’m dutifully back in class, setting up back in the far corner, again surrounded by so many of these confident women. It is all I can do to relax in their midst.

With my mind racing, I simply close my eyes and listen to Hazel’s direction. How soothing her voice can be at such times. All I have to do is follow.  

“Raise your right leg and now bring it forward. Every movement joined with the breath. That’s right. Now breathing out bring both feet to the forward and sweep up with both arms, rising up one vertebra at a time. Breathing in, pinwheel your arms back down and set yourself up for your first downward facing dog of the day.”

For a moment, I remind myself to be satisfied with this. I am back in Hazel’s yoga class, listening to her voice once again.

“In your downward facing dog, take several deep breaths,” she tells us and Hazel seems to be closer now, or is it my imagination. “Relax and just breathe. Just breathe”

Turned head over teacup in this confounded position—a resting pose, my ass—I cannot tell where she is now. But then I feel her fingertips on my left hand. She presses briefly down on the meaty section between the thumb and index finger, making sure my entire palm stays down upon the mat. I hold my breath as she deftly positions my other hand and I magically feel my arms move into better alignment and my shoulders rotate, becoming slightly more open. Everything from my tailbone up to my neck comes into alignment and I find myself in a better state than I have been for days.

With that Hazel tiptoes away, moving back toward the front of the class and I resist the temptation to crane my neck, trying to follow her. Instead I dutifully stay another breath in my downward facing dog, before we’re told to slide the left foot forward and rise up into warrior I. Surprisingly, I make the transition without any difficulty, no wobble at all. And when I raise my eyes, I see Hazel gazing back at me, only me, with a thin smile on her face.

 

Tim Wendel is the author of 11 books, including Summer of ’68, Castro’s Curveball, and High Heat, which was an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review. His latest book, Down to the Last Pitch, details the epic 1991 World Series between the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, GQ, and Esquire. He is a writer in residence at Johns Hopkins University. www.timwendel.com