“Big body movement,” says Stacy. “Aerobics. Running.” And so I run. I run around the indoor track at the West Side Y. It’s on the second floor, built right over the gym; a kind of circular deck, covered with some rubberized material, that is supported by columns anchored in the gym below. Overhead a bank of fluorescent bulbs sizzles, throwing a chalky light down. Usually the only sounds are our footsteps, tapping against the surface of the track. If it’s really quiet, the rasp of breath. My footsteps are more of a thump. Young as I am—well, young at least compared with most of the other runners—I’m awkward. I’ve never exercised—more the type to sit on the couch, feet curled under me, reading—what is it lately?—Andre Breton and art history–and writing in my diary. I’ve always stayed thin anyway. It’s only now, coming to the Y, that I realize how out of shape I am. It only takes two loops around the track before I’m out of breath completely. The only other runner is an old man with wisps of gray hair streaming from his head, his jowls swinging with the steps he takes, and I can hardly keep up. Generally the track is the loneliest part of the Y, which is why I like it. There are those metal beams above us, holding up an ancient roof. Below us the gym, generally empty, echoing with the rhythmic tapping of our sneakered feet against the track. Today, though, it’s noisy. Today there’s a basketball game going on down there. As I swing out over the gym, I glance down and try to catch glimpses, see who’s down there. When I can’t see, I listen; the hard beat of the ball against the floor; the muffled shouts “over here.” Are they homeboys? Some kids from a local high school? The third pass around I run close to the edge, look down and see them: grown men, all white except for a lone African American, in gym shorts and tee shirts. Businessmen, I realize. Wall Street yuppies, throwing off their Brooks Brothers suits and Prada shoes for a chance to join the Universal Fraternity of Boys. It’s my third loop around and my lungs have begun to ache, but with men around, I have a new awareness. I start to wonder if any of them will look up and if they do, how I will appear to them. Me in my denim cut off shorts, my breasts snapping up and down in my tee shirt, short brown hair swishing behind me as I run. I imagine someone looking up, catching a glimpse of me up here. Liking what they see. At thirty three, I like to think I still have it—a body that can catch a man’s eyes and keep them; a face that gazes linger on; the women, envious, the men entranced. “You’re a good looking Chiquita, “ Seth used to say to me when he was feeling generous. He got mad when I didn’t thank him for the compliment. “Why should I?” I used to say breezily. “It’s not like it’s something I did.” The truth is, I’m a real narcissus. I can gaze at my own face for hours and I frequently do. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and trace, with fascination, the ski-jump line of my nose, the proud knobs of the cheekbones, the mauve ovals that sweep under my eyes. My face is a kind of assurance, an anchor. It’s something that I can come back to and lately, I need that. I need to know that everything is still rescuable, still the same. People run for a lot of reasons. There are the old people—men, mostly—who run for their hearts, bellies sagging and breasts shaking as they grind forward on spindly legs. In the winter the yuppies come in from running in the streets: they glide by like greyhounds in their rippling nylon suits, leaving the rest of us behind. Then there are the overweight– men and women both. They jog along with their elbows bent, their fists in front of them, punching the air. I run for a different reason entirely: to get my period back. Or rather, to get it. I first menstruated at the age of fifteen, and after that my period arrived haphazardly, once, maybe twice a year. An androgen disorder, I’m told. Or, alternatively, polycystic ovaries. There have been different diagnoses by different doctors. Over the years, I’ve pursued it lazily, checkups annually, the obligatory discussion of “treatment.” Then, a few years ago, I decided to do something, to get to the bottom of it all. I found Stacy. Stacy, my acupuncturist. I got Stacy’s name through Roy at the East West bookstore on 13th Street and 5th Avenue, the place where I go, almost weekly, to check out the new books he recommends for me. Roy, with his concave body and his tight jeans with the cuffs on the bottom. Roy who always has a new book on Buddhism for me, a new idea. Who I couldn’t live without. He likes to tease me “So did you get there yet, did you find enlightenment? There’s nothing to find, you know. Nothing to find.” When he gives me advice, I usually follow it. “Acupuncture,” he’d said. I know just the one for you.” I remember the first visit to Stacy. Her apartment is down on East 23rd: a ground floor in a brownstone. I rang the outer bell and a voice with a mid-West accent answered. She rang me in to the apartment, full of stacks of magazines. Stick thin with black hair cut precisely at the chin line; pointy, art deco glasses, a severe mouth outlined in magenta lipstick, Stacy stood in stretch pants and loafers beneath an enormous white, glass-paneled cupboard full to bursting with jars of herbs. She gazed at me. “Is that always the way you stand?” she asked. I gazed back at her, taken off guard, not liking it. “I guess so. I guess it is. Why?” “Come here. I want to see something,” she’d said. I came and stood beside her. She placed a cold, thin hand on my belly and pushed it back. “Now walk,” she said. I walked to the end of the room and turned. “I didn’t come for my back, though, “ I said apologetically. “I came for my period.” Stacy held up a forefinger. “Um,” she said meaningfully. “Anatomy is where we start. Actual body structure. Posture is key. Before I began to work as an acupuncturist, I studied with Master Tang. I had a bad back—very bad back. Master Tang had me wear a small brick tied to the small of my back for three hours a day. I did this for a year, and at the end of the year I was cured.” She held up her forefinger again. “Posture is key to everything.” I thought then of leaving—immediately. I had expected some woman with long flowing hair and hoop earrings who would talk in a soft voice about my energies, and instead I was getting this. But I stayed, let her interview me about my diet and symptoms, check my pulse. At the end of the hour, something had happened. I wanted Stacy to be my healer, my caretaker. I wanted her to take charge of me, to tell me what to eat, how to live. It was the severity I liked—I realize that now. She was a person who didn’t budge, and that was what I needed. When I met her, it had just begun. I spent at least an hour a day crying, either at work locked in a bathroom stall on the second floor, or at home with my face buried in the white loveseat, the cats circling around me. I liked Stacy, her briskness, her rigidity. I thought it might brace me. I remember Dr. Finn, my first gynecologist ever. I remember the crinkles around his eyes, his nervous laugh, the big deal he made of my new, red glasses. “Wow, I like them!” he almost shouted. “As red as my tie!” When we discussed my period he had bent kindly over his desk to explain: my eggs weren’t releasing. “Do you know why?” I had asked. “Could be lots of reasons,” he had said heartily. “Hormone imbalance. Polycystic ovaries…Doesn’t really matter; we treat them all the same way. Birth control pills.” He held them up. “Get you right back on track.” That first day I saw Stacy, when we’d finally gotten to the treatment, I asked Stacy the same question—why. I lay on her black leather table in bra and underpants. Stacy stood above me, a needle in her hand, a few strands of black hair hanging down and hiding her face. “So why…would I have this?” I asked hesitantly. Stacy didn’t answer at first. “Stagnation,” she said finally. “Stuck energy. Does that mean anything to you?” “Yeah it does actually.” “What?” “It’s like my whole life right now. My job….my love life…Stuck energy. That’s pretty much it.” “So it resonates.” I could tell she was pleased. At that moment, I was too: we had found something, she and I: a kind of answer. “Inhale,” said Stacy. I did. I felt the point of the needle against a rib, heard the tapping sound as Stacy pushed it out of its holder. Just as I was leaving, I asked her about the cure. “So what do I have to do?” I said, “to cure myself? How do I “unstick” myself?” “Exercise helps,” said Stacy. “Do you belong to a health club?” “Not really,” I said, picturing myself on my couch, immersed in Proust. “Well you need to,” she said firmly. “Something vigorous. Running. Do you like to run?” “I could start,” I said. I was willing to do anything, then. Whatever it took to be a new me. I think of that conversation as I reach Lap Eight. Sixteen laps in a mile; number eight, halfway through, is one of the hardest, the one when I most feel like stopping. By that time the lack of oxygen has gone to my head; a metal band seems to encircle it, pulling tighter and tighter. A voice keeps telling me that it’s enough now, halfway through is good enough. That’s when I need an icon, and instead of thinking of Gandhi or the Buddha, I think of Stacy, with her pointy librarian’s glasses, the severe line of her bangs, her lipsticked mouth open as if she is just about to say something. Something like “you need to run, Eleanor. Get that chi moving. Get some flow.” And it’s now, when I think of Stacy, that I’m not just running in a circle anymore. I’m not just exercising. I’m running toward something. Toward Cure. Toward the New Has-it- Together Ellie who doesn’t cry everyday and has a date book and gets phone messages and menstruates like other women. The army of women out there whose bodies work. When I run now, it’s toward Deliverance. Estrogen and happiness. In my mind they go together, and if I can just get hold of one of them, I’ll have the other one too. Of course I would rather think about the past—that is my nature. The grades I got; the praises of my teachers. When I got older and grew the body of a woman, the other kinds of praises. “Lovely,” breathed the slit-eyed artist in the Village for whom I posed nude. “Are you familiar with Modigliani? You look like a Modigliani.” We were in his loft—he stood at a distance from me and his voice boomed across the space. Light streamed in from the row of windows that looked down on West Broadway, below us. A dribble of sweat slid from my armpit down the side of my ribcage. “Thank you,” I said. I liked to think I came for the money, but the truth was, I liked his gaze on me; I enjoyed the memory, from the last time I’d been there, of sitting beside him on his bed while he watched me with those catlike eyes, saying “If you weren’t so young, I’d take you to bed with me.” That day, I hadn’t moved. I hadn’t said yes or no; I had merely smiled. If he had touched me, I did not know what I was going to do. A different kind of narcissism I suppose—being mesmerized by other people’s fascination with you. I was twenty three, then; used to men looking at me that way, used to the admiration in their voices, and I still couldn’t turn away. That was what I liked about Seth, I suppose: How irreverent he was, right from the beginning. How he refused to admire me. “So who are you trying to be–Emily Dickinson?” he said one time when he came across me in the library, reading Milton. “Sylvia Plath?” Maybe then go back to the Buddhism class. Seth and I met at a small state college in a town called Amesbury where I’d gone because it was affordable and Seth had been sent because his grades hadn’t gotten him into the University of Chicago, where he’d wanted to go. The first time I saw him was when he came over to our campus apartment to borrow a spatula. There was a knock on the door and there he was, in tight jeans and what looked like a pink bed jacket. Shag haircut. Beaky nose. Seth had diverticulitis—the Jewish disease, he called it—but I didn’t know that then, so all I saw was someone who was freakishly thin, emaciated even, in tight pants and a bed jacket. Looking back I realize that the outfit–the tight pants, the blousy top—accentuated his skinniness, and that he did it on purpose. His skinniness was his vulnerable point, so he made an icon out of it, put it in your face. Just like Seth to do that. That day, I stared, not sure what I was staring at. “Um, do you have a spatula?” said Seth. “I don’t think so,” I said, still staring. Then I realized I was being rude. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ll go look. What do you need it for?” “Scrambled eggs,” Seth said. I rummaged through the silverware drawer, noisily. “It’s 3:00,” I called back. “A little late for breakfast.” “Scrambled eggs are good anytime,” said Seth confidently. “Thanks,” he said when I handed it to him. He put it in the pocket of his bed jacket where it stuck out like a garden tool. “I’m Seth by the way.” His voice was nasal, a tenor. “You knew we were neighbors, right?” He raised a pink-jacketed arm, pointed at the door across the way. “We live over there.”  “We?” “Me, my roommates. Dan Shohan, you know him?” I shook my head. “Artie Markowitz?” I shook my head again. “I don’t know people,” I said, to stop the tide of names. “I’m not—I don’t go out much.” “You’d know Artie,” Seth grinned. “Hair stuck up straight in the air, never bathes, never eats a hot meal…We call him the barnyard animal.” I smiled faintly—this seemed like a boy’s joke to me, beneath my notice. “Did you meet them here, your roommates?” “No, they’re friends from the City. Every upper West Side Jew knows every other West Side Jew.” He grinned, shifting his weight. “Sadie Brinowitz” his voice went all high and whiny as he imitated one of his City neighbors, “What are you doing here, buying gefilte fish? I didn’t know you shopped here!” He stopped. “They’re a bunch of whiners,” said Seth apologetically. “But that’s my race.” I gazed at him, remembering my mother’s careful sentence “Jewish people don’t believe in Jesus.” As if it was a kind of disease you had to be nice about. “I’m a self-hating Jew,” Seth said. He raised his hand, coughed into it politely, a single dry “hack.” I blinked. “Self-hating. That seems a little radical.” I looked him over again. “So why did you come to school up here if you live in the City? There are so many good schools there.” “Oh, well, I wanted to get out of the City. I was kind of sick of it. And I wanted to go to the African Studies department.” “There’s an African Studies Department?” I said, surprised. “You didn’t know about it? It has a great reputation. Elisa Stark, world expert on South Africa. I’m pretty interested in what’s going on there right now. I think Africa is the most likely place for the revolution to take place.” He raised his hand, coughed into it again, and I wondered what I could possibly say, knowing nothing about Africa. “I’m thinking of going there, “ he continued. “To see for myself.” This time when he coughed he looked straight at me. “You’re going to go to South Africa?” I said, incredulous. “If I can,” Seth shrugged. Later it turned out that Seth was not as interested in South Africa as he had said he was. Our second year, Seth announced to me that he’d decided what he wanted to do—he wanted to be a musician. He took up classical guitar and started giving me lectures about music theory. The next year it was creative writing. Seth took creative writing courses with Elias Stack, the teacher with the scraggly beard and black teeth. He talked about how he never used adverbs in his writing—never—and wrote a series of short stories based on his life. He gave a reading of one, called “White Trees,” in which one of the main characters, named Grace, was based on me. In the story, he went on and on about how beautiful Grace’s hands were; how it wasn’t her face, her breasts, her body but her hands. During the reading I felt people leaning over, trying to get a look at my hands. Seth read on, but people around me got more and more distracted, more and more interested in looking at my hands. After awhile someone noticed this and laughed; Seth looked up, grinning, flushed with success. He was like that, Seth—full of confidence, full of adventure. Clownish, I sometimes thought, in the way he just jumped in to a thing, not caring how good he was, not caring how he looked. If you were like me the way I was back then–undecided, uncertain—he was the kind of person you could crawl inside, get a little lost in, and that’s what I did. Telling it this way I make it sound as if Seth and I were love-at-first-sight, one of those couples whose eyes meet and history is made. We weren’t. For the first two months, I courted him, inviting him over for Swedish meatballs, a family specialty. I plied him with questions— about Africa, about his childhood in the City. Next to my own adolescent adventures in suburbia—hitchhiking, drinking wine in the middle of the woods—Seth’s adventures, which included shoplifting spray paint to write graffiti on subway trains and running through bad neighborhoods to escape angry gangs, seemed a lot more exciting, a lot more alive. Seth always told his stories nonchalantly, chucking affectionately at the most violent parts. Back then we didn’t talk about me too much, and when we did it was all intellectual. At times I talked about a paper I was writing or a book I was reading. I was taking the 19th Century English Novel. One night I told Seth how much I liked Jane Eyre. “So feminist but with that gothic cover,” I told him. “So subversive. I love it.” I thought this would impress him, but he just said “You’re wasting your time with that stuff, you know. You should read Henry James.” “I’ve read James,” I said, irritated. We were in my territory now—literature—and I was annoyed. “Have you read ‘The Portrait of a Lady’?” “Not recently.” “You should. You should reread it. You should be more like Isabel Archer.” “Oh really.” “You know what she says, right?” I paused. “What?” “You can’t be happy if you separate yourself from life.” “I don’t separate myself from life.” I said primly. I was at the sink by now, washing dishes, and was a little hurt. Seth was standing next to me. “Yes you do.” “No I don’t. How do you know?” “Take a risk!” said Seth. “I do take risks.” “Take a big risk.” “Don’t tell me how to live, dear,” I said picking up a plate, holding it under the water. “When it comes to literature, you’re way out of your league, talking to me.” “Is that so,” Seth teased. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s so.” “But I need to give you advice, “ he said. “On how to live. You don’t know how.” “Very funny.” I was still trying to think of a come back when Seth stepped behind me, put his arms around my waist. The blood rose to my face. My breath caught. Seth slipped his hand under my shirt and ran his hand up my back. A little moan escaped me: I hadn’t known how long I’d been waiting for this. “Turn around,” he said. I did. I was too afraid to look: I put my face in his shoulder. And then it started. Looking back, I realize that college was one of my best times—a time when I was on top of things, had some momentum going. Speed, I’ve realized, is a source of glamour. You are moving; you don’t stop to think and because you don’t stop to think you can keep going. Seth gave me the illusion of movement. I was moving going somewhere. I was part of the world. Now of course it’s the opposite—stagnation. I don’t move because I don’t know where to go. The more I think about it, the less certain I feel. There’s a quote I remember from a book I read back in high school: A man needs only to be turned around once in this world to be lost.