La Granita Part 1: Me and My Wife By Merz Miranda rediscovers bodybuilding "I thought you liked my curves. You don't want me to lift the weights and get big muscles." "Oh, that's just a myth. Women don't bulk up like men do, they just tone their bodies when they exercise. We should get into better shape, and lifting weights is a good way to do it. We can have our own weights at home and lift at the club, too. You'll look great when you get a little definition - even more beautiful than you look now." "It isn't a myth. I will get bigger muscles if I start weight lifting again. I'm in good shape now because of my aerobics and because of staying active. But if that is how you want me to look, I will do it. But if my body is more muscular it will need much more attention." "I'll give you all the attention you want, just like now," I told my wife and rolled over to hug her close to me. If I knew then what I know now, I wonder if I would have pushed the point. We were on a spring vacation in Mexico. My wife is originally from Venezuela so she loves it when we get away someplace warm where she can speak Spanish again. To be honest, my pushing the exercise idea had more to do with my own reflection when I walked by a mirror in my swim trunks than any problem I had with her. Miranda is about five feet three, six inches shorter than me. My weight was up to about one-seventy and she said she kept hers around one-forty-five. She was sleek as a seal, with smooth skin and delicious, generous curves she enjoyed showing off in tiny suits on the beach. Somehow looking at the Fit for Life book I found in our room it seemed we'd both look better shedding a few pounds and adding some definition. And 145 pounds always sounded heavy for such a short person. "It won't be like now. If the body is built more, it must have more attention," she pouted. "I'm not one of the European greyhounds who can be made thin by exercise. My people were bred in the mountains to work hard. You will see, if I work hard I will grow. But I will do it because you asked. What about Isabel? Must she join us in this?" Isabel is her daughter by an earlier marriage. She was twelve then, finally old enough to stay with friends while we went off for a week and just starting to get interested in boys. She would grow up taller than her mother and more slender, I could tell. She would soon be quite a beauty although now she felt herself awkward and unattractive. "Let's let her make up her own mind. She's a good kid, and old enough that we shouldn't have to force this sort of thing on her. When she sees our results she'll choose whether to join us or not." "Okay. We start when we get back. In one year we will come here again and you will see what my body will look like, for life. I hope you will like it, but until I start you still have time to change what you ask. Afterwards, it will be too late to turn back." She sounded so certain, so passionate about what she expected from my request. At the time I passed it off as her Latin flair for the dramatic, but I learned that she was describing a road she had already traveled. Well, you've probably read enough of these stories to know what to expect. I wasn't as bad as some husbands I've read about. I did exercise more, especially at the beginning. Miranda was right that she had made a habit of stopping at our athletic club for aerobics on her way to work most mornings, so it started as a change in activity for her. I had a few surprises right off. Like after giving me a couple more chances to back out she offered to select equipment we could have at home to supplement workouts at the club. I figured a hundred pound weight set, tops. Instead she informed me she had spent over five hundred dollars equipping a small corner in our basement. Three hundred pounds of weights, two benches, three bars, and a chinning bar we suspended from the ceiling. I figured she ran into a salesman who had really done a snow job on her. But it was all good stuff including good prices on some used equipment so I swallowed hard and split the cost with her. Soon I could see some modest improvement in myself, but Miranda kept the same contours. I knew she was exercising, but her thick, smooth figure didn't show any difference. When I told her one evening over dinner that I'd lost five pounds, Isabel gave her mother an odd look. "Mama is five pounds heavier since you returned from Mexico," she solemnly informed me. Miranda didn't look embarrassed to have added weight. " I warned you," was her only comment. "Mama weighs even more, now," Isabel announced a month later when we sat down to eat. "We weighed ourselves and she weighs twice as much as me." Again Miranda didn't seem embarrassed and she didn't deny the fact. I hadn't really been looking for flesh to melt off her form or anything, and it didn't particularly bother me that she kept the same thick limbs and broad, flat abdomen. She had always been beautiful in my eyes but somehow I had a silly notion about ideal weight. I noticed slender women her height when we went out together and wondered how good she would look at a hundred and twenty pounds. I looked across at her. "No, I'm not pregnant," she informed me. I hadn't even considered that possibility because we had talked before about how our family of three seemed so perfect. Miranda is four years older than me. We met when I was just thirty and she was thirty-four. If we were going to have a child of our own we should have decided soon after marriage, but now Miranda was forty and I was happy to have Isabel as my adopted daughter. "It's like I told you before. In a few months you will see. I can't stop it now." "The office is cutting costs," she told me in October. "I agreed to work half time now. I will find work for the other hours." Miranda worked in marketing. I was only a little surprised to hear her news because her firm had had its ups and downs before. Those times she had expressed more concern over the cut backs, but now she sounded almost relieved. She told me two weeks later she found part time work at an athletic club. As the days got shorter I seemed to get busier. Miranda, too, judging by the fact she was leaving the house earlier than before and getting home later. She seemed preoccupied and frequently went to Isabel's room for private conversations with her daughter. It never occurred to me to work out together with her in our basement, but I went down there a few times and I knew she was doing the same. Especially on weekends while I was watching sports on TV. Life went along smoothly, from my perspective. We adjusted pretty well to Miranda's reduced income and I didn't dwell on the fact she was out even more than when she worked fulltime in marketing. Finally one Saturday in February she turned to Isabel. "It is time," she told her daughter simply. "You and I will prepare. My husband, I am going to change into exercise clothes, and then we must talk." They left the living room as I wondered what was up. In fifteen minutes they were back, Isabel looking at her mother with an unfamiliar expression of admiration and Miranda looking radiantly healthy in gym shorts and t-shirt. She stood in front of me, hands on her hips. "I told you how it would be. I would lift weights again, and my body would grow. You have to understand, this is what you asked of me. And you must understand that now there is you, there is me, and there is the body. The body needs attention, appreciation. In my country I played sports in school and loved it. I began lifting weights to help train me for sports. Then the weights took over and I only lifted, only built the body and quit all other sports. For ten years I had a body like you will see soon. I met and married a man who liked to see how strong and large my body was. So it was him and me and the body, happy together and sharing attention, sharing appreciation. I competed in body building contests in South America and here. Sometimes between contests I would wrestle men in the ring, mostly in Mexico, wearing a mask and calling myself La Granita. La Granita was powerful and cruel. She would use her strength to throw men around, to hurt them and humiliate them. Some of the men she would lift above her head and drop them hard to the floor. "When I became pregnant with Isabel it was my liberation. She demanded attention and appreciation. The body became less important, I no longer gave in to its demands because I gave so much to her. I quit the weights and became as you knew me, a mother with a daughter. My husband loved me for that body and left soon after. He abandoned and divorced me when my daughter took the place the body had held in my heart. "I knew if I started again to exercise it would be like this. Now Isabel has grown past the need for so much attention. You asked me to return to exercising, so the body is back now, begging my attention like an infant. I cannot ignore its demands. I lift the weights, and it grows and it wants more. Come to the basement in ten minutes and you see the attention the body needs. Ten minutes, not sooner." She and Isabel disappeared down the stairs. Soon I began to hear the clanging of weights and muffled voices. It was quiet down there for a couple minutes when it was time for me to follow them down. Clearly Miranda had been lifting and working out. Her arms and legs gleamed with sweat under the harsh basement lights. Isabel rubbed at her limbs with a towel, moving the cloth slowly up and down her mother's skin and hardly seeming to notice me as I came over to them. Miranda stroked her daughter's hair. "That is enough. Now your father must learn what has been our secret." She turned to me. "You still don't see it do you? You have been with me every night, but the change has come slowly and you have not looked closely." Now I looked closely at the familiar thick body, the round arms and broad shoulders. "You did not see this happening, did you?" And she raised her right arm in a biceps flex. My God, no I hadn't noticed the change. The thick arm was now expanding into sharply defined muscles, rounded biceps and thick triceps. She matched the right arm by flexing her left just as grand. "If I chose I could wear many of my same clothes, but you see that the body cannot. They would not show the body as it must be shown. The body and I are not the same." The sleeves of her t-shirt became strained by solid balls of muscle standing out sharply from her upper arms. She lowered her arms and expanded her chest and back, her lats spreading much wider than her relaxed form had suggested was possible, again taking her shirt to the breaking point. She pulled it off to stand in a sport bra, then turned first to one side and then the other to demonstrate the thickness was uniform. She pulled in her stomach to show a deep scoop below her imposing chest. Presenting a side pose she tensed her leg to show thick hamstrings, quads banded with broad cables, a calf that jutted out from her lower leg. She bent her knee, flexing the hamstrings and a muscle as big as a football threatened to rip the seams of her gym shorts. Isabel was squealing her pleasure at seeing her mother's display. "The way it looks, that is only one way the body must be appreciated. Feel. Feel the arm, feel the shoulder and the leg." I couldn't resist. I had to touch her arm as she extended it toward me. Firm the way I was familiar with. As I said, she had always exercised since we had been together so I knew she was firm. Then she began to flex and the firm flesh focused itself into that impossible bicep again, condensing into a chiseled ball that felt hard as wood under my pressing fingers. As she had instructed I felt up to a shoulder round as a melon, down the tree-like torso to the massive thigh. "Miranda, how is it possible?" "It is possible because I do this. I do this everyday, as you wished that I would." She motioned to the barbell on the bench rack. "I started and like before the body demanded I do more and more." She turned away from me and grabbed the barbell from its rack. Forty pounds for the bar, seventy pounds of weight, and she began to curl it. One hundred ten pounds rising and sinking in perfect form, her upper arms swelling massively, then stretching out to full extension, repetition after repetition. As her muscles strained and expanded under the weight it looked like another person was struggling to burst free from her skin. The weight came down and her flesh smoothed along her thick arms. Then she curled the barbell up again and the biceps threw themselves into the effort, straining against the skin that was pulled tight and gleaming. Isabel gave as little cry of delight and gripped Miranda's right bicep as it bulged so amazingly, then lengthened and relaxed only to again gather itself into a hard ball straining to break free. "God, mom, this is so totally cool! I would love to have muscles like this, bigger than the boys have." After about her fifth rep Miranda replaced the bar on its rack and put a thick arm around her daughter's slender shoulders. "You were born of the body. You have it in you to follow this path if your spirit is strong enough." Then she turned to me. "In a month we go back to Mexico, to the beach where you first suggested I reclaim the body. I will meet you there. There remains one final change before it is complete, and I will make that one alone. You thought I would weigh less if I began lifting weights again, but I am now one hundred seventy pounds. When I see you in Mexico, I will finally have lost weight, and then you will see what you and I have in our lives now. You will see the body as it is waiting to be seen."