High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver Page B

my family was my Grandfather Henry. He wore muscle shirts in the days when they were known as BVDs, under his cotton work shirt, and his bronze tan stopped midbiceps. He got those biceps by hauling floor joists and hammering up roof beams every day of his life, including his last. How he would have guffawed to see a roomful of nearly naked bankers and attorneys, pale as plucked geese, heads down, eyes fixed on a horizon beyond the water cooler, pedaling like bats out of hell on bolted-down bicycles. I expect he’d offer us all a job. If we’d pay our thirty dollars a month to him , we could come out to the construction site and run up and down ladders bringing him nails. That’s why I’m embarrassed about all this. I’m afraid I share his opinion of unproductive sweat.
    Actually, he’d be more amazed than scornful. His idea of fun was watching Ed Sullivan or snoozing in a recliner, or ideally, both at once. Why work like a maniac on your day off? To keep your heart and lungs in shape. Of course. But I haven’t noticed any vanity plates that say GD LNGS . The operative word here is vanity.
    Standards of beauty in every era are things that advertise, usually falsely: “I’m rich and I don’t have to work.” How could you be a useful farmhand, or even an efficient clerk-typist, if you have long, painted fingernails? Four-inch high heels, like the bound feet of Chinese aristocrats, suggest you don’t have to do anything efficiently, except maybe put up your tootsies on an ottoman and eat bonbons. (And I’ll point out here that aristocratic men wore the first high heels.) In my grandmother’s day, women of all classes lived in dread of getting a tan, since that betrayed a field worker’s station in life. But now that the field hand’s station is occupied by the office worker, a tan, I suppose, advertises that Florida and Maui are within your reach. Fat is another peculiar cultural flip-flop: in places where food is scarce, beauty is three inches of subcutaneous fat deep. But here and now, jobs are sedentary and calories are relatively cheap, while the luxury of time to work them off is very dear. It still gives me pause to see an ad for a weight-loss program that boldly enlists: “First ten pounds come off free!” But that is about the size of it, in this strange food-drenched land of ours. After those first ten, it gets expensive.
    As a writer I could probably do my job fine with no deltoids at all, or biceps or triceps, so long as you left me those vermicelli-sized muscles that lift the fingers to the keyboard. (My vermicellis are very well defined.) So when I’ve writ my piece, off I should merrily go to build a body that says I don’t really have a financial obligation to sit here in video-terminal bondage.
    Well, yes. But to tell the truth, the leisure body and even the GD LNGS are not really what I was after when I signed up at Pecs-R-Us. What I craved, and long for still, is to be strong . I’ve never been strong. In childhood, team sports were my most reliable source of humiliation. I’ve been knocked breathless to theground by softballs, basketballs, volleyballs, and once, during a wildly out-of-hand game of Red Rover, a sneaker. In every case I knew my teammates were counting on me for a volley or a double play or anyhow something more than clutching my stomach and rolling upon the grass. By the time I reached junior high I wasn’t even the last one picked anymore. I’d slunk away long before they got to the bottom of the barrel.
    Even now, the great mortification of my life is that visitors to my home sometimes screw the mustard and pickle jar lids back on so tightly I can’t get them open! (The visitors probably think they are just closing them enough to keep the bugs out.) Sure, I can use a pipe wrench, but it’s embarrassing. Once, my front gate stuck, and for several days I could only leave home by clambering