The Ladies of the Gym

Her name is Joy, and, oh baby, does she earn it. Steps right in beside me at Brenda's Zumba class and works that floor (works it, works it). It would be preposterous to guess her age (there are grandchildren involved and perhaps great-grandchildren), but she's got all the glamour of a movie star and a running stream of Joan Rivers humor, though Joy is elegant, perpetually, in her witticisms delivery.

I've written of her here before. Written of Sarah, Betsy, Julia, of Brenda and (on other mornings) my remarkable teacher, Andrea. They are my gym friends, my smack-the-air-down-with-me babes, my little bit of lift when I need lift, my salsa sweethearts, and I saw them today because I returned to Monday Zumba after a few too many weeks of worrying about the state of this house, this garden.

I belong here, I thought, when I was dancing with them. I belong beside Sarah, a former model, mind you, a knock out, who doesn't care one bit how her hair is flying or whether or not she's singing along in tune (though she is in tune, I swear it:  whooo hoooo). I belong beside Betsy (the beauty queen from my high school and still so gorgeous, a woman with whom time has not interfered and a woman who still, after all these years, seems unaware of her own beauty) and I belong beside Joy, who basically split my ribs before I even started dancing with some story she was telling. I am far from the beauty these women are, but they have let me in, and I am standing proud beside them.

You want to know who I actually am? You come find me at the club. Being crazy and doing silly with the ladies of the gym.

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What are you working for?

I didn't have time for Zumba today, of course I didn't.  Stay at your desk, I told myself.  Just keep working.  Get that project done, make that call, return that email, write that story, do not stop because if you stop you'll be behind again. 

On the one hand, the chance to draw a thin blue line through another four to do's.

On the other, my friends, a little morning laughter, sweat.

What are you working for? I asked myself.

So that I can live, I answered me.

I was out the door.  I was at the gym.  Standing beside Sarah.

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Zumba (before the storm that is us)

The other day, I snuck into the Zumba room early with my raspberry camera.  Ten minutes later the room was rocking.  It's relatively easy, I think, to capture a Before and a Big Right Now.  It's much harder—on film and in story—to convey those transitional almost-but-not-yet moments that constitute so much of life.

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Zumba Joy

She's clear-eyed and blonde, a starlet's face and a body that a dancer of any age would love to have, and on Mondays she joins us for Zumba.  She's lived enough years to have great-grandchildren (she tells us this; we don't believe her; she seems, to us, infinitely young) and you can find her now, before the salsa and hip hop starts, reading a reliably fine book on her Kindle.  I dance beside her and she laughs at me, reminding me, however politely, that I'm just a nudge to the other side of zany.  When the swing goes on, we give it up to her; swing is most definitely her thing.

Yesterday I asked her to tell me about her life, and oh, what a storied life it's been—eight times to Africa, several to Antartica, big restaurant ownership/management in her past, even the running of bookstores.  But she's just one of us when the music goes on, and that's another thing that dance is or does:  it democratizes living.

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Rocking the Zumba with Sarah, Brenda, and Peggy

Sarah started it in Zumba today. It was her fault, I know that it was. Walking in late looking like a movie star, then saying her honey southern hello, then collecting her rivers of hair, then smiling with her eyes, both so blue. She's just too cute, and what could I do, there beside her, and there behind Brenda, and there, nearby, Peggy, newly home from Guatemala.

So we kicked the samba merry. So we went full pivot with our hips. So I bounced my head and Sarah bounced hers harder, and when the cha cha came on we were all knees and angles, and when Bollywood blared we knocked the air off of our thighs. When Sarah went big, I went bigger, and when we both went big, Brenda noticed and Peggy laughed. "You two are rocking and rolling, aren't you?" Brenda said forgivingly, and I wanted to behave, but I couldn't.

I've had a hard couple of weeks, and for many days there I could barely breathe, and you know how it is when things seem hopeful once again, when the knots loosen, when you can see past and maybe push through. Zumba might be exercise most days of the week. Today it was an hallelujiah.

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Into the Tangle of Friendship (at Zumba)

I returned to the gym today with a more functional toe and with the energy I always have when finding my way back to something that I love. My friends were there—yes, I will call them my friends—and we took that one side of the Zumba room that we've come to think of as ours, and we danced—Brenda leading the way. It doesn't matter what I look like when I dance Zumba. No one in that room stands as judge. No woman has to wait for a man to say, Will you dance with me?

When it was over, one of my Zumba friends mentioned that she'd been reading Into the Tangle of Friendship, my second book, a memoir, published what seems years ago. She spoke of the book as if it had just been written yesterday, as if it were brand new, and in that way she gave it back to me. Driving home, I felt enormous melancholy—for the books I've written, for the books I haven't written, for the words I haven't found yet.

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Living the Zumba

Last week, I was at the gym doing Zumba when my son walked in for his own brand of workout (which involves lifting far more than he weighs, several times in a row, in several different positions, without complaining—not a talent he got from me).

"Then Mrs. G., stopped me", he told me later, "and told me to come watch you in the Zumba class."

"She did?" I said. (Oh dear, I thought.)

"Yes," my son continued. "She said that some people do Zumba and other people live it, and that you are the living kind."

I think this must mean that I don't act my age. But whatever it is, I'm keen on living.

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And then when it isn't white, it's sky

I don't remember when this day began. Was it with the midnight text message from my son, or the one he sent at 1:08 AM? Was it when I heard him come him an hour later, or when I finally gave up on the possibility of sleep and got up to get client work done? Perhaps we'll call the beginning of this day Zumba at 5:45 AM (or the cha-cha Zumba around 6:10, or the Charleston jive twenty minutes on).

Or let us say, instead, that this day had no beginning.

But look: Just look at its spectacular end.

As if someone were painting the sky just for me.

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Zumba Joy on Thanksgiving Morning

For many of us (and I am most assuredly part of that us), these past many months have changed the way we go about our business. With less to spend, we think harder when we spend. With fewer options, we "shop" in our own closets. We light candles at our meals, as if ambiance were itself a savory something. We find great joy in the simple things—in dreams shared over tea, in walks among the falling leaves, in books long in our possession.

This morning, at Club La Maison, I found that joy, again, in Brenda's Zumba class—in how the so many of us made room for the so many more, for those sisters and friends who had come from out of town and took the dancing risk. Sometimes we are gypsies in Zumba. Sometimes we are Mexican cowgirls. Sometimes we are dancing Bollywood, and sometimes African rhythms, and sometimes, yes, we wear boas around our necks, and heaven help anyone who has not joined in, but is only standing there watching. The thing about Brenda and Zumba is that it locks nobody out. The door is always open to this essential, simple joy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Howl

The winds howl here, fierce and fearsome. The mind hunts for words that do not wish to be found. There is Zumba in the morning, Brenda dancing the ache out of our souls. There is my son sending a text: He has gotten a haircut; just the same, but shorter. There is Reiko in Brooklyn and me here, and our long, we-take-it-everywhere conversation by phone; when I punch the end key, I think (like I always think) about how much I love Reiko, how much her friendship means to me. She'll read a book you wrote, to choose a single example, and take the time to find the extra that's and the's.

I said that I wanted to write a poem.

I lived one instead.

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How We Live Our Lives Expecting

It's dark when I leave for Wednesday morning Zumba, and for a few deluded minutes I think of myself as the only one about. But when I arrive at the gym, the lights are on and the doors are open and the guy behind the desk is indeed there behind the desk, reliably amiable, asking: "You awake, yet? You ready?"

In the group exercise room, we are 20 or so rumple-haired, sleepy-eyed women only half-prepared to dance tango, flamenco, salsa, samba, Bollywood. We are women unknown to one another, save for the 75 minutes that we spend here each week, and though I do not know my companions' names, I know how they dance, I know how they laugh with all of us at all of us, I know that I am aware, week to week, when one among us has gone missing. There are so many people in our lives—the grocery-store cashier, the bank teller, the man in the barber shop who waves hello—who are known to us by their gestures, not their names, and on whom we rely, nonetheless.

This morning while we danced cha-cha under the brassy lights at the gym (and under the powerful guidance of Brenda), I looked at the women all around me and thought of Annie Le, the 24-year-old Yale graduate student and bride-to-be who was murdered just days before her wedding. I thought of how we live our lives expecting the next day to come, and the next, and of how, sometimes, we take for granted the people who people our lives. I don't want to take others for granted. I want them to know that I don't.

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Finding Muscular Possibility and Radiant Energy at the Gym

It's been about five weeks now since I left my house in the dark one morning and drove to the gym down the road. It wasn't that exercise was new to me; it was that I was used to doing it alone in my house. Dance and ball exercises in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. Enough cleaning each day to count for something.

But at the gym I have, as I have said before, encountered community—women and men who come together for the purpose of pressing up against their own limitations. Together we struggle, together we overcome, and when we can't—when we cannot go round three of the bicep curls, when we can't adapt to the new samba step, when we have to relinquish our eight-pound weights for the five-pound weights mid-way through the tricep thunder, we are not in the business of judging the other. There's something so brilliantly non-verbal about all of this. Stories that don't require words.

I wanted, this morning, to say something about the women who lead these classes—women for whom I have enormous respect. I wanted to talk about how it is to wake up to radiant energy—to borrow another's until it settles in as one's own. I find, today, that I don't have the words. Maybe there aren't words for this body thing. Maybe there's only thank you.

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Gymtastics

So it happened: I joined the gym. I had gone all these years being the rebel non-joiner (I was clique-less as a teen, mommy-and-me free as a young mom, a failure in a book club, and I was kicked off a committee at church once for having too strong of an opinion about, well, most things). But I was getting bored with my little self-imposed, in-the-house exercise routines and my neighborhood jaunts have been lately messed with by these biblically saturated days.

So two weeks or so ago, I sashayed down to the gym and walked into a class called Zumba. Do you know about this? An hour of cardio set to Latin rhythms. I thought I could handle this because, well, you know: I dance. Let's just say I made it through. Barely. Nearly defeated, I rose the next day to conquer Abs and Arms, which is to say fire and indescribable pain. The next day I chose to think that I could Body Step my way to glamour (excuse me, but what's an A step? What's an L?). One day later, I could be found at Body Pump, thinking (the thought was all over my face): Barbells? Are you kidding me? For an hour?

Every day I'd come home and say, That's it. I cannot. The next morning I'd rise with the desperate hope of proving to me that I can.

And guess what? I am finding that I love the challenge. That I love the way the other women work, how they don't give up, how they make room for the one or two men, how today one brought me a mat and one brought me a chair, and how somehow community coexists with anonymity. I like thinking that maybe someday I can and that, already, so many others do.

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