The pace of the gumball is slow. Intended to evoke the purity of unspoiled origins, it is white and winds leisurely down a long, transparent, spiral tunnel like an egg descending through the fallopian tubes.

At 9 AM on a Tuesday morning, the pace of people passing the Origins gumball machine is quick–swish of pleated slacks and brief cases, rustle of the Business Section, rhythmic click of heels over concrete. But if one steps outside the sidewalk rhythm and reads the faces, the pace shifts.

The spinning slows, tunnels into a slow-rolling space of private association. That man isn’t really reading the business section. Notice the sly smile parting his lips, the pleased raise of his eyebrows, quick lick of his lips and then the smile again; he is remembering last night, rewinding, replaying, rewinding… And the 20-something girl in the cashmere turtleneck and A-line skirt, watch how she tilts her head from side to side, her lips moving slightly, the gruff, furrowed brow to one side, the poised, confident smile on the other. She is a legal assistant, enacting the witty dialogue she will not have with the daunting attorney she works for. In actuality, he will call her into his office to point out the errors in the email she sent to 50 employees; her cashmere turtleneck will feel itchy, constrictive, her face will turn tomato-red, but for now, she has the perfect insightful, humorous observation, her ill-tempered boss irresistibly lured into laughter, into looking at her as more than the origin of irritating mistakes.

Once the egg is released, it travels down the fallopian tubes for a period of about 7 days. Sometimes, in the midst of this slow, winding journey, fertilization occurs: A middle-aged woman with black running tights and Nikes sticking out of her overcoat, walks briskly, shivering and guzzling Starbucks coffee. Suddenly, her blank look bends into a crooked smile and she laughs out loud, remembering something funny someone said this morning at the gym, a quick, unconscious laugh that surprises her. And at her laugh, the man smiling slyly at the business section looks up from his paper, opens his eyes wide, and smiles at this woman, chuckles at the fact that they are walking side by side in two separate reveries. For a moment, inside and outside have merged, winked at one another as if to say choosing is not necessary, not now, before separating again, descending into the subway, sinking from the bodies pressed side-upon-side in the crowded car.

The tug between inside and out, the inner world relieving the chaos of the outer world, the outer world relieving the turmoil of the inner, the missing letters we hardly notice are missing anymore.  

I live in Columbia graduate student housing, so my roommates are randomly assigned by the Housing Department. This year I was assigned two roommates from the School of Social Work-Amanda, a 24-year-old Jewish girl from Tucson, Arizona, and Natalie, a 24-year-old Mormon girl from Salt Lake City. Amanda was pretty uptight about cleanliness. Second semester, she pinned an abrasive note on the fridge chastising Natalie and me for occasionally leaving dishes in the sink or letting the garbage pile up. And she was unpredictably moody, chatty one minute and sullen the next.

Natalie, on the other hand, was friendly and laid back and easy to talk to. We’d chat in the kitchen about nothing out of the ordinary-work, classes, dating. Natalie was always going out on dates with guys she said she’d met through her church. She had the same complaints that I did and we could pretty much finish each other’s sentences until she started talking about marriage, which is where I stopped relating. But there was plenty that Natalie and I saw eye to eye on, enough to make small talk while my pasta boiled anyway.

So I didn’t think much of the Mormon thing until there were 40 of them singing hymns in my living room. Natalie frequently had groups of people over for dinner unannounced. Granted, these dinner parties were sometimes loud and inconvenient, and it was a little strange how her guests made themselves at home in our mini-kitchen, seemingly oblivious to Amanda’s and my attempts to squeeze through their casserole commotion for a bowl of cereal. But Natalie was so sweet and accommodating in other ways that I was willing to overlook it.

Until there were 40. Unable to work with all the singing, praying, and lively analysis of recent individual testimonies in Church, I found myself cowering in Amanda’s room, which was adjacent to the living room.

“Natalie knows I have to get up at 6 to go work in the Bronx tomorrow morning,” she said. “Jeez, with all the Jews in New York, you’d think I’d wind up with at least one of them for a roommate. Instead, I get a Mormon. What are the chances?”

“At least they don’t try to recruit you,” I said. (Early on, I made the mistake of mentioning to Natalie that I am a lapsed Presbyterian, and now she never failed to invite me to join her gatherings.) The night of the invasion, she’d nonchalantly popped into the kitchen, commented on my “interesting” scramble of spinach and Morning Star soy meat, and invited me to play Trivial Pursuit.

I saw that it would be necessary to state the obvious: “Natalie, there are about 40 people in our living room. It’s a little loud.”

Her sweet moon look vanished. She frowned and said it wouldn’t happen again. I felt bad. I almost ran after her and said, “Okay, just one quick round of Trivial Pursuit.”

It wasn’t until after the worship service Natalie held in our living room that I began to think this was no ordinary religion. I did a little research on Mormonism and it soon became clear why most of Natalie’s social life seemed to take place at church and inside our apartment. Mormonism prohibits the consumption of coffee, tea, and alcohol and warns members against exposing themselves to “the gross evils that are so prevalent in societies today” (Elder Alexander B. Morrison, “No More Strangers”). Beyond bars and coffee houses, dance clubs also present a danger. Hinckley proclaims: “When dancing, avoid full body contact with your partner. Do not use positions or moves suggestive of sexual behavior. Plan and attend dances where dress, grooming, lighting, lyrics, and music contribute to a wholesome atmosphere where the Spirit of the Lord may be present.”

It also became clear to me how much power this extremely conservative religion with its history of racism and sexism, was gaining. It is the fastest growing religion in the nation and wields considerable political authority. In 1976, LDS Church launched a 5-year campaign against the equal rights amendment and is now conducting a similar campaign against same sex marriages. Time calculated its net worth in 1997 at a minimum of 30 billion dollars and its annual income at about 6 billion dollars, which, if it were a corporation, would place it in the middle of the Fortune 500 List. Wanting to keep the peace with my roommate, but now thoroughly intrigued and terrified by the Mormon Church, I sought out Tom Johnson, a third year nonfiction writing student in Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program. Tom was just completing his thesis, a personal narrative on the Mormon missionary journey.

Tom had Natalie’s gentle demeanor and spoke in the same calm, almost-whisper, which made many of his statements all the more alarming. I mentioned to him that before I knew anything about Mormonism, I’d naively invited Natalie to go dancing with several friends of mine who happened to be gay men. Tom explained that, “going to gay bars is not something that would appeal to your roommate seeking to find an LDS husband. But even more, asking a Mormon to go to a gay bar is something like asking a Hindu out to a beef festival, or a Jew over to dinner and then serving pork.” Tom told me that he had written some about the non-practicing homosexual who accompanied him on his missionary journey in Venezuela, so we talked some more about his views on homosexuality. Tom said the Mormon Church did not deny the fact that some people had strong homosexual inclinations, but believed that acting on these feelings was a sin. He sighted Kant, saying that an action was only moral if the whole of a population could take that action and continue to exist. He said that this was not the reasoning of the Church, but his own, which was considerably “more reflective” than the Church’s logic. The Church condemned homosexuality primarily because it undermined the family structure.

“But don’t you think this guy you did missions with deserves to be in a relationship with someone he’s attracted to?” I asked.

Tom hesitated. “I could tell that when I wrote about it, my workshop wanted me to say that the Church’s position is wrong, but ultimately, it’s not for me to say. I can’t know what God’s feelings are on the matter.”

“But can’t you receive direct revelation from God through prayer?”

“Well, yes, but not on issues that affect the Church as a whole.”

That’s as far as we got on homosexuality. That’s as far as we got on any issue. Still, Tom seemed concerned that he had not represented the Church’s position well. He emailed me a couple of days after we talked:

“I would re-clarify myself on my position on gays. I said I don’t presume to know what God’s feelings are on the matter-what I meant is that I myself don’t presume to be able to interpret God’s definitive position on homosexuality. We believe God reveals his will through his current prophet, so basically if the prophet says gay relationships are immoral, we assume that God feels the same. It would be wrong for me to override the prophet and tell him that he is wrong, because I don’t have access to that kind of Godly knowledge.

What you won’t find on the net are figures of how much the Church has spent in its campaign against the legalization of gay marriages. Clearly the Church sees this institution as one force that will unravel the family structure of society, and therefore directly relevant to the lives of church members who live in that society. It’s an interesting twist considering the heavy persecution the government made against polygamy in the 19th century-you’d think the LDS Church would want the government to leave moral issues totally alone, but the Church doesn’t see it that way at all: “Polygamy strengthened families; gay relationships don’t.”

A couple of weeks after she’d started the petition, Ellen walked into the Sunday morning step class noticeably shaken. She paced behind her step with clenched fists, shaking her head at the floor.

“Hi, Ellen,” I smiled.

“I gave Andrew the petition,” she said, her voice cracked and edgy. “You’re not going to believe what that bastard said to me. He completely belittled me. He said it was completely absurd. He said it was like a revolution. He said he’d talked to people who signed the petition and none of them had any idea what they were signing. He’s such a fucking tyrant!”

I hated to see Ellen, a tough metropolitan mom with a nose ring and battered Nikes, reduced to this. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You explained to everyone what the petition was for. They probably just didn’t want to confront Andrew,” I suggested then glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

That was Ellen’s last class at Body Strength. I never saw her again, though her membership wasn’t up for a month. Checking in with Andrew, the manager of Body Strength, was, no doubt, too much of a disgrace for our fallen captain to bear.

Step originated in 1994, and some say it’s simply outmoded. Some say it’s dying out because it’s hard on your knees, ankles, feet, bones and joints. People like Ellen and I didn’t care. We didn’t have any delusions about step being good for us; we did it because it felt good. We were there for the free-flowing adrenalin, the surging endorphins. Ellen was a 53-year-old mother of two who lived a block from Body Strength and liked to squeeze in a step class after she got off work, before going home to have dinner with her daughters. “I just want to keep doing this until I can’t do it anymore,” she told me once.

After Ellen left, Body Strength started replacing more of the step aerobics and body sculpting courses with tranquil, low-impact courses like pilates and NIA (Neuromuscular Integrative Action, pronounced nee-a). Pilates emphasizes breathing, form, and posture through a series of floor exercises. NIA is described as “a creative non-impact aerobic movement blending principals of modern dance, martial arts, and alignment into a fun and freeing aerobic workout.”

“Step is out and NIA is in,” Andrew told us disgruntled members. “It’s the new thing at all the big gyms and we have to keep up.”

We found out who the serious steppers were when they moved Shirlina’s class to Friday nights from 6 to 7. Shirlina was a tall, muscular black woman who looked to be in her late twenties with long dreadlocks and the most amazing arms I have ever seen on a woman. She offered a high-paced, non-stop rhythmic workout to African tribal music. When everyone else was getting ready to flee Columbia-ville, there were five of us in Shirlina’s class. There was Jim, a middle-aged Latin teacher at Horace Mann with sagging chipmunk jowls, a balding head, and a Tennessee drawl, who could kick it better than anyone else at Body Strength. Shirlina would maneuver over to his step in the middle of class, and they’d play elaborate moves off each other on either end. There was Winetta, a middle-aged, mahogany skinned woman who would do a step class, and then go downstairs and ride the bike for an hour. Winetta was incredibly calm, persuasive, and diplomatic. She was quickly appointed as the representative for everyone’s grievances toward Tony, a queeny instructor with an excess of attitude. There was Carla, who pulled back her Reba-Macintyre mane with an elastic headband and wore black tights with giant fluorescent flowers all over them that had a re-energizing effect; if you stared at them long enough, you could channel into that neon and recharge yourself like a battery. Carla was from the Midwest. The tights were from Hong Kong. And there was Kerrie, a journalism student with the unfortunate habit of boasting loudly about her thesis in the locker room. Nonetheless, she was one of us. We were The Diehard Five.

Some people blamed Jerry, who had recently become Andrew’s partner, for the cancellation of step classes. “That man is a pilates Nazi!” said a vocal Jewish woman in her fifties who sported a bleached pixie cut with hot pink tips. I had often seen Jerry emerging from pilates classes. He was a tall, thin man with long limbs and a long, drawn face, all cheekbones and angles, right up to his sharply sculpted hair, which maintained its triangular architecture through any number of pilates exercises. Perhaps Jerry feared that even his super-potent sculpting gel could not withstand the vigorous sweating and bouncing that goes on in a step class, but personally, I feared that Jerry was overdoing it with the pilates classes, the way one can spend too much time under a tanning lamp and come out looking like Magda in Something About Mary. Pilates claims to elongate the limbs without building bulk muscle through full-body stretches. Jerry looks like he’s spent time on a stretching rack.

It’s not that I’m opposed to trying new things. I tried pilates, but felt that I could nap more comfortably at home. I tried a class called Body Logos, described as a “mind/body/spirit approach to health and fitness.” Tammy, a tiny woman with a flame of Titian hair and a large tattoo of a cat with fangs and a dragon’s tail that wrapped around her ankle, lead the class. She put on new age instrumental music and sang the instructions in an operatic voice so that even the simple, “brEEEEATHE in, breath OUT!!!” took on all the heartrending drama of Le Mis lyrics. I was too busy stifling laughter to follow Tammy’s instructions, which were a little abstruse to begin with. “Spend some time with the abdominals; spend some time with you. It’s like cradling or nurturing yourself. Come into the inner essence of your being. Allow an awareness of body to expand to an awareness of mind. Be your own mother.” Tammy kept having to come over and mother me. She’d kneel at my feet, stare intensely into my eyes, and lay her hands on my abdomen like a spiritual healer, singing, “Belly-button inTO SPINE!!” I was tempted to stare back with the same intensity, and belt with tears in my eyes, “But it’s HARD, so VERY HARD!!!”

And just the other day, I went to a NIA class. I arrived a few minutes late but it didn’t seem like much was happening. An extremely pale, skinny, Shaggy-resembling character with a shock of white hair was lecturing to 5 women who definitely qualified for senior citizen discounts. He wore a wife beater, white, elastic-waistband cargo jams, and lace-up black combat boots. He was emphasizing in this very surferly voice that, “We have to, like, pay attention to our body’s inner needs and voices.” I was willing to let the alternative athletic gear go, but 10 minutes into class, he was still rambling. What was this? Were we going to work out or just talk about it for an hour? I announced that my inner child had changed its mind, and fled NIA for a run in Central Park.

In step class the next Sunday, I overheard a middle-aged woman talking about NIA. “It’s not much of a workout but it’s pretty freeing. I mean at one point we were actually skipping around the room. You really get in touch with your inner child,” she said and giggled in a way that made me sort of uncomfortable. I pictured myself skipping around the room with a bunch of old women in ill-fitting tights, Albino Shaggy leading us like a pied piper, playing Hot Cross Buns over and over on a recorder. A few weeks ago, four of us rushed upstairs (Kerrie was still missing) with our customary end-of-the-week, keyed-up buzz to find some bouffant-haired blonde imposter in Shirlina’s place. The imposter informed us that Friday night step was now Friday night NIA. We ran downstairs to the front desk and demanded to know what happened to Shirlina.

“Shirlina’s gone,” Andrew informed us.

“So am I!” Carla declared, seconded by the rest of us.

We caught Kerrie rushing in the door. “Shirlina’s gone,” Jim glumly broke the news.

“What? No! This was my anchor–you know, the end of the week and everything.”

“I know,” we said, and walked dejectedly uptown, emanating a dust-cloud of depression. We talked about protesting, but it was no use; we all knew what happened to Ellen. We talked about organizing a class with Shirlina in a church basement or something, but none of us really wanted to put in the extra effort and expense. “I checked out New York Sports,” Jim said before he turned off at 112th Street. “They don’t have any step classes either.”