Every month we followed Dad to the driveway and watched the delivery man haul another machine into the living room. There was a rowing machine and a stationary bicycle and an elliptical. Dad named them after women I didn’t recognize, always from the first half of the alphabet. One evening Anna and I squeezed onto the sofa and tried to watch Cheers, but the whirring was too loud. In February, he added a bed-like frame with long straps and resistance springs underneath. In March, a curved leather barrel on wheels, attached to a tall wooden ladder. Dad shrieked when he saw Anna balancing on the top rung, pretending to be a flagpole. In April, he added a trapeze contraption with six-foot steel poles extending upward, chains dangling from the top. 

At some point Dad stopped leaving for work. The machines whirred incessantly. We only heard his panting when he moved from one to the next. One morning I found Dad fast asleep, slumped across the bed-like machine with his hand loose around a strap. He kept an industrial-sized bag of quinoa in the garage and cooked it in vats; he’d read that it prevented stroke. We silently prepared his electrolyte water and heart-healthy smoothies. He thrust supplements into our hands each morning to improve our cholesterol. In May, we pooled our savings to buy Dad a new elliptical for his birthday. He gazed at it, then began running his hands along its frame and adjusting its knobs with scrupulous care. We suggested the name Rebecca as an homage to Mom, but he shook his head fiercely and named it Beth. The first date I brought home asked “what are those things?” and I pointed: Beth, Diana, Felicity.

I left for college and savored the open space. When I returned for Thanksgiving, machines crowded every inch of the living room. Blender bottles lined the windowsill, blood pressure monitors were strewn across the floor. The machines themselves had become a shrine. Mom’s dresses were looped into the rungs of the trapeze machine. Her pink robe was draped over the barrel device. Her running shoes were placed by the feet of the elliptical. Long vertical scratches lined the polished wood floor. Two months later Anna called, frantic. Dad was dangling from the trapeze machine by his bare foot, caught in a strap. His skin was colorless, his body emaciated. His skull was so caked with blood we hardly saw it’d been split open. The whirring had stopped. We watched over the next few days as the moving man came and hauled the machines into trucks.