I wake at 5:00 AM, probably because I wrote a bit yesterday and had conversations with people that turned into a whole new screenplay idea — so this morning my eager writer-brain clearly thinks we are back on our drug of choice. (Side note to writer-brain: we are nearly there, just hang on a little longer…).
6:02 AM. I am driving to the gym. It’s dark and for the first time truly cold, but the trees still have their leaves and so in spite of the chill, everything feels lush and mysterious. I have a clear, sharp memory of being about 12 — my parents owned a restaurant, and sometimes my father would wake me at 4:30 or 5:00 and take me with him to the Farmers Market. It was always dark, and often cold, and we would drive silent together through empty streets. And then around a dark corner into the light of trucks and stalls and ceiling heaters, voices yelling, the smell of coffee and diesel fumes, baskets of berries, enormous oranges, mountains of potatoes put into careful piles by the hard hands of men whose easy laughter made their hard faces beautiful. Those mornings made me realize that there were other worlds beside the one I lived in, and that I could go to them. All I had to do was get up early and drive.
That was a long time ago, but I still love the memory. When I was in my 20’s and often drove between Chicago and Florida, I would set off at 3:30 or so, drive through the dark and then the dawn, and by the time day came I already felt free, as if being out of sync with the regular schedule of the world somehow made lighter whatever baggage I might be carrying. I am sure that came in part from those few mornings with my dad.
6:05 AM. Curves is a women-only gym and the workout is based on resistance training, so anyone at any fitness level can go to their own personal max and get something out of it. And so we are not glamor girls at Curves. We are in our 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we are fat and lean, we are mostly white and straight, married or divorced. And as is so often true of women in the absence of men, we are still nice, but not particularly careful or shy. When I walk in today, the place is full of us.
6:06 AM. I join the circle of machines and start my workout to an aerobicized cover of “Dark Lady” by Cher.
6:09 AM. The woman across the circle is talking cheerfully about anal leakage from eating too much olestra. The rest of us are laughing ourselves sick.
6:15 AM. The discussion has moved on to sports bras and breast bounce during exercise. All the large-breasted women in the room are holding up their boobs with their hands and making funny faces. The rest of us are laughing ourselves sick.
6:23 AM. The anal leakage woman is talking about dating (men) again after 28 years. She met a man recently who gets four days’ use out of a single pair of underwear by wearing them (consecutively) right side out facing front, inside out facing front, right side out backwards, inside out backwards. This same woman is bemoaning the lack of nice men to date in Seattle. She says that since few men have the courage to ask her out, she feels like she has to go out with anyone who asks. She is re-thinking this strategy after Underwear Man. Someone suggests that she should ask men out instead of waiting for them to make the first move. She responds, completely sincerely, that men don’t like to be asked out, it makes them uncomfortable, and so the only ones who would say yes are the ones who are really needy, and she doesn’t want to deal with that.
6:36 AM. As I finish my second circuit, there are several conversations going on, but one voice rises over the top: “Oh, men don’t want women to talk!” This is met by a shriek of general laughter as everyone gets the brief mental picture of what men would prefer women do with their mouths. Everyone, from the very quiet 30-something who just came in, to the woman in her 70’s who has done more than a thousand of these workouts, is pretty much helpless with the kind of cackling laughter that I imagine sometimes renders women absolutely alien to men.
6:45 AM. I have stretched and done pushups and crunches while the talk around me has moved to other things: jobs, grandkids, the election (That debate just made me want to puke! someone says), how long it takes to drive to Tacoma in the morning commute. I leave. I feel good.
I grew up Southern. I learned early how to get along with men, and I saw how the women of my culture managed the men around them. I know what a lady is, and I know how to be one. I’m pretty good at it when I must be. But I have to say, I much prefer the company of women, and the company of men who like them. I’m glad there are no ladies at my gym.
I wonder about that at my gym—which is co-ed and a 24/7 key club. There are usually more women present than men when I go in to work out (like you, at six in the morning). I am not particularly social at the gym. While I like the results, I have always resented (less so over time) what I have to do to get them (which I suppose is true of just about everything with me—I have always been impatience with process) and all I want to do is get in and get out.
Almost all the conversations I’ve ever had while attending a gym have been with women. Most of the men seem to want to talk nothing but sports (which I loathe) or their last date or….
Once, just once I got into a conversation with one of the trainers, long ago, and discovered that he was a history major who had just landed a teaching job in the Virgin Islands. For half an hour we talked about Tuchman and McCullough, Schlesinger and Furnas, favorite periods, etc. And then noticed several of the men giving us odd looks. Never found out quite why—we were talking at normal voice levels, we were easy to hear.
But I returned to my workout and two women came over to me, both long-time members, and, smiling, one said softly “It’s nice to know someone here has both balls and brains.”
I read with fascination your experience in the thick of those voices and Mark’s time at the gym intrigues me, too. Let me make a small report from the Land of the Introverts. Last week a friend who is walking across Arizona, 700 plus miles on the Arizona Trail, came to my door smiling and pleased to have a shower and fresh veggies stir-fried in olive oil. As we are ancient friends, and happy enough to thrust interesting books under each other’s noses, we didn’t talk endlessly about anything in particular. Not even about her hike, which she did once before ten years ago. A couple of days after she sauntered away down Cherry Street back into the woods, I thought I might like to bump into her on the trail, so I guestimated the miles and hours since she’d been by and picked a section of trail I hadn’t met myself yet. It felt like quite a rich conversation with her just to be out there where the flowers have gone winter dry creating a carpet of brown. I didn’t see her (except in my head where I could imagine her leaning against a juniper tree eating an energy bar) but I did run into another backpacker doing the Trail in sections. “Oh yeah, I passed her an hour ago. She’s making good time she says.” On day 15 of sixty or so days of walking.
Planting feet on the same trail the same bright afternoon is the kind of conversation I manage best.
Oh, I don’t know, Jean, I am guessing that most any kind of conversation with you is lovely. I certainly enjoy the ones we have here.
Thanks for this story, which made me feel good for you and your friend, and also good for myself in a way that I can’t quite explain. It has something to do with hoping that I too am the kind of person who would go down the trail just to surprise a friend and know that the doing of it was more important than the result. Or something like that.
That’s kind of how I feel about my gym. Often it’s very quiet, with few people in the place, and no real engagement. And then sometimes it’s like a playground. When I first started there, I resented being interrupted by chatter. I felt, I don’t know, invaded or something. And now I just feel talked to. That’s a nicer feeling.
Mark, this is the primary reason I don’t work out at a co-ed gym. I like men very much, but given the genderedness of our culture, there’s no way to put us in a room together and not have there be some basic assumptions about what “the other” will or won’t do, will or won’t respond. And then for some reason we feel the need to reward each other for rising above the lowest common denominator. I don’t know how you felt about what that woman said: if a man had made a remark to me about his delight at having breasts and brains in the same package, I’d have wanted to deck him.
And I just don’t want to live in that space when I’m working out. Nor do many women, which is why Curves is so successful.
Kelley,
Granted. It’s been several years. I recall having mixed reactions—on the one hand, I understood where she was coming from, but on the other I wondered why no one else, including them, knew about the trainer’s “other” career. (Of course, in my case I’ve had dismayed responses in reaction to my brains and educational level as well, which I find largely offensive—more so, I think, than that one anatomical reference.)
For my own part, I’m pretty much open to any sort of conversation, but I’m just as happy to simply get in there, get it done, and go home. That said, I’ve worked out in all male gyms and the atmosphere, to me, is just oppressive. It may sound like a cliche, but something happens of a “civilizing” nature when women show up.
People who like to read and think — bookworms / intellectuals — are the real “third sex.” The pop culture stereotype of such a person looks pretty much the same whether male or female: thick glasses, lean and dark-haired, “sexless.” And whether by coincidence or not, males of this type have always attracted me intensely.