THE FAT LADY SWINGS

If I saw a woman my size saunter in to aerial yoga class, I’d think she was a total badass. I’d admire the way she lets her fat rolls hang out when she hangs upside down. I’d think her presence proved a fat girl can do anything. So why don’t I feel that way about me? I hate that I’m the fattest by far in this room full of yoga moms, so bronze and so shiny and so god damn… worthy. I'm pretty sure you could fit two of our perky instructor in each leg of my yoga pants if you tried hard enough.
Aerial yoga is kind of like regular yoga, but suspended three feet in the air in a big old hammock looking thing. Kind of Cirque du Soleil meets suburban strip mall.
I've been exercising daily for the past few months now, and I can feel strength returning to my muscles, even if I haven't lost an ounce. Usually after a few months’ near religious observation of an exercise routine, I get so bored I have to drag myself into the gym like a screaming toddler. Treadmills make me feel like I’m scrambling in a giant hamster wheel. Stationary bikes just make me think of all the interesting places I could be going if this stinking thing wasn’t bolted to a frame. I tell myself I can skip the gym this once – promise myself I’ll go for a walk outside later on. But later on it’s too cold or rainy or snowy, or there are too many bugs or too much ice. I promise myself I’ll put in a workout DVD as soon as the next episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is over. Or the next after that, or the next, until I fall asleep in bed with the tablet propped against my knees. So for the last couple of months I’ve just been hitting whatever fitness classes I can, whenever my schedule allows. Zumba at the Y on the way home from work, barre at the dance studio near my shrink’s office, yoga when the school by my grocery store offers a Groupon. I’m self-conscious most of the time, but then, that was true before.
“Are you sure that’s safe?” asks my mom when I tell her I’m planning to give aerial a try, “that doesn’t sound safe. Don’t you think it’s bad for your foot?”
“You spend most of your time in the air,” I say, “so I’d say it’s ideal for my foot.”
“I’d be worried about the thing ripping and crashing down,” she says. My mom’s five foot nothing and weighs about as much as a decent sized song bird, so I suspect it’s not really her we’re talking about.
“I checked about that,” I tell her. “They’re bolted to steel beams and can hold a thousand pounds,” I say. “Also, you’re like three feet off the ground. It’s all good.”
“I don’t know,” she says, as if I’m a teenager asking permission to stay out past curfew or watch a PG-13 movie. It bugs Mom how fat I am. She and my dad are kale salad and bean sprout people, aggressively thin and healthy even though they’re in their mid-seventies. Having a daughter whose hobbies include laying on the couch for entire weekends at a time and eating like a lumberjack can’t be easy. So it’s sweet that, much as she wishes I were healthier, she fusses over whether I’m safe. I like it that she still believes she gets a say in what her nearly forty year old daughter does with her time.
I’d intended to wait until I was a little farther along in the whole fitness quest before I tried to hoist my body up into one of these yoga hammocks, but it’s pouring rain and I’ve got energy to burn. My fears about hoisting turn out to be well-founded. I scramble pitifully for several minutes before the instructor guides me to a lower hammock.
The instructor is Tina. She’s young and has her blonde hair piled up on her head in a messy bun. She has a dancer’s body – long and lean in the middle, but with heavy thighs that spring to life with muscle as soon as she goes up on her toes. She pulls her body easily up into her hammock, perching there like a bird on a swing and gives the standard yoga spiel while the rest of us climb less gracefully into our perches and listen.
She shows us how to pull the material up behind us, how to inch it out until we’re laying on our backs in it, how to pull in our heads and then our feet, so that eventually we’re spread out on our backs, a suspended take on corpse pose. Here, shrouded by the hammock on all sides, we call it cocoon pose.
To a caterpillar, a cocoon is not so much a growing chamber as it is a burial shroud. Once snug inside the confines of its silk, the caterpillar does not grow wings. Rather, it digests itself entirely, over time, turns itself into an amorphous soup of cells, liquid and formless. Cell by cell it rebuilds itself, a new life from what seemed like no life at all. And somehow, it would seem, the butterfly remembers the caterpillar it once was. Scientists have found that if they ring a bell and then shock a caterpillar, the sound of the bell makes the butterfly flinch.
My body never forgets what it felt like to be thin. Buried deep inside my body are the memories of a woman who could run for miles. Who thought fruit was dessert. Who lived for the feeling of sweat pooling at the small of her back. Kalfka said “Without falling, no bridge, once spanned, can cease to be a bridge.” I emerge from my hammock cocoon the same me who climbed inside. Too weak, too lumpy, too fat, too old.
But then the next biggest girl to me flops out of her hammock with a theatrical grunt and the friend who came with her, two halves of a whole Groupon, giggles. “I can’t believe we did this,” she says, grinning, before asking Tina to take a picture of she and her friend with their hammocks. An athlete-thin woman wearing an activewear ensemble so perfectly matched that she looks like a mannequin escaped from a Lulumon display window touches me lightly on the arm. “You did awesome,” she says. “I sucked so bad my first time. It’s really hard.” She manages to not sound the least bit condescending, and it occurs to me that if a gorgeous woman with the skill of an acrobat can find something nice to say to me, I could probably find something nice to say to me too.
"I felt like one of those dancing hippos from Fantasia," I reply. I'm not quite there yet.