“Ano, talaga bang hindi ka na babalik sa gym?” my husband throws down the gauntlet, so to speak.

 

“It’s been only a few months, which does not forever make,” I shoot back in a voice whose quiver, I’m afraid, betrays a bull’s-eye nerve hit. He’s insensitively accurate on purpose. His tennis opponents can attest to it: he gives you the balls you hate, and takes no prisoners.

 

I’m hurting enough as it is. For one thing, I’ve had to throw away three pairs of walking shoes and two pairs of exercise sneakers, all looking new but rendered useless by disuse, worn out unworn, their synthetic soles disintegrated and divorced from their soft tops. Some still slept in their boxes.

 

My heart goes out especially to the sleek black hundred-dollar pair I had bought for and worn on my three-week trip to Europe five years ago and hardly ever wore again. It didn’t even make it to the trip we plan for next year.

 

“The common denominator is poor workmanship,” I explained to Vergel for all cases. “Bad glue; it turned powdery in the dry, dark heat of the closet.”

 

“The common denominator is,” he retorted, “they went unused!” This must be what male nagging sounds like.

 

“Oo nga pala,” he persists rubbing salt into my wounds, “whatever happened to all those exercise outfits you bought? The least you could do, for some redemption, is wear them to sleep.”

 

I refuse to bite the bait, and, pretending to suddenly remember to do something, I walk briskly past him and into the bedroom in my abaca slippers, which have outlived all those signature footwear. In a matter of minutes, amazingly insensitively, he presumes we’re still friends and asks me to listen to a couple of runs on his guitar and choose which progression of chords I like better.

 

“Huh,” I ask not more in revenge than out of ignorance, “those were different chords? They sound the same to me.” Dismissing the sarcasm, he replays both runs with some exaggeration, and, eeny-meeny-mynee-mo, I choose one in wise surrender. Still, I can’t believe he has forgotten so soon how mean he was to me just moments ago!

 

Adversarial

 

But honestly, I myself wonder why I seem to have an adversarial attitude toward exercise or diet of any form, despite their well-proven promise of youthfulness and health. I was never into any sports or exercise when I was younger, and now it has become a matter of life preservation that I do it—while I still can, at my age.

 

I might prefer ballroom dancing, but he frowns upon it, in spite of evidence that it has worked for friends, who do it with dance instructors, where precisely lies his problem, I think. He seems to have forgotten all the years I stayed slim.

 

But I do make the effort. I try to eat less at meals, which he doesn’t notice, unlike the few times I refill my rice bowl, which he commits to memory.

 

On my self-imposed small-meal regimen, I snack on nuts to tide me over until the next meal, so you can imagine how crushed I feel when he discovers we’re out of nuts again—“Inubos mo na naman!”—as if he were not complicit in the plunder; but, of course, he can afford it, which makes me feel even worse.

 

He forces exercise on me by dragging me around Greenbelt for a half-hour of walking, and sends the driver off early to force me further to walk home. He himself hardly needs any more exercise than his regular tennis.

 

Our trips, two weeks apart, to Palawan and Hidden Valley, were no help either: I never ate so much meat. Being on medication might have even emboldened me, made me feel less vulnerable. Oh, how close I was to tears to see my test results to get not the slightest sympathy from him.

 

“Talaga naman, you’ve been eating too much.”

 

“Stop nagging me!” I plead.

 

“But you need nagging! You live from test to test!” I can tell he’s furious, but I can’t, in the self-absorption with my hateful condition, quite sense this was tough love. “Eating cakes and halo-halo—what did you expect? Go back to the gym!”

 

Well, I hate to admit it: I’m beat, and out of excuses. I remember a cousin who became a nagger after her husband had his first heart attack. She watched him like a hawk, and it drove them apart. He died in his second relationship. Well, we’re definitely not going to go there.

 

Last night at a Chinese restaurant, after practically starving myself, I began to reach out for the buchi platter, but only to pass it on, when he sprang at me, “Hey!

 

“Not for me,” I said, finding an opportunity to go on the offensive. “I have been watching myself, all night, don’t you notice?”

 

And irrepressibly, he pounced back, “Eh, bakit ganyan ang test mo?”

 

“Genes!” I said, blaming Mom. I hate it when I do that.

 

Of course, my nagger is absolutely right and, no doubt, means well. I think a hardheaded filosofa in denial spurs him to nag in desperation. I still wish he weren’t so dedicated.

 

But seriously, the test results scare me and should be enough to set me straight. I’ve seen it work for me: losing weight through diet and exercise, and stopping the nagger of, admittedly, my own creation.