It was time for drastic measures. It was time for the Y.
The Meridia Y was just ten minutes from my house. I went one Friday after work, circling the crowded parking lot for a good space. Ironic, because I needed exercise, but I didn’t want to park too far from the gym’s front doors.
I had a Pillsbury canvas bag I’d gotten for free after earning points for buying twenty-five tubs of cookie dough from Madison to fund a class trip. It seemed to work well as a gym bag to carry my sneaks, an old T-shirt of Ian’s, and my sweatpants.
The silver-haired man at the front desk looked up as I went in. His nametag said Marvin and boasted a sticker of a man flexing his biceps.
“New member?”
“How did you know?”
Marvin didn’t answer, and that made me more nervous than I already was. Maybe I should have gotten an actual gym bag.
“Single membership?”
Again, how did he know that?
“Yeah, single,” I said, trying to sound casual instead of defensive.
“How often are you planning to come, twice a week? We recommend five or six visits to recapture fitness levels.”
I was wearing a heavy coat, but clearly, he could see I needed to restore fitness rather than maintain. I was starting to feel the urge to tell him I was in the wrong place and bolt back to my car.
“Does it matter how often you come? For a single membership?” I brushed my hair out of my face, wishing I’d tied it back.
“No, no,” Marvin said, briskly tapping the computer keys. “Just giving you some pointers.”
OK. Well keep those tips to yourself, mister, I thought. Then again, he was in excellent shape and must be pushing seventy. Clearly he had recaptured his fitness, or maybe never lost it in the first place.
I handed over my credit card for a one-year membership. There was a four-week trial period during which you could cancel, no questions asked. In other words, you could give up and slink away and no one would make you admit to your failure.
“Is there a weekly weigh-in?” I said, attempting to joke with Marvin.
“There’s a scale in every locker room,” he said. “Don’t weigh yourself every time you come; there will be ups and downs, and we don’t want you to get discouraged.”
Discouraged? I was a middle-aged woman with a Dough Boy bag in a gym for the first time since 1997 when I took a Mommy & Me tumbling class with Madison. I’d been told I had to recapture my fitness by someone twenty years older than me named Marvin.
I straightened my shoulders and pulled up the Pillsbury bag that had slid down my arm.
“Is there a tour?”
“Locker room’s that way,” Marvin said, pointing left. “Track is upstairs, you can see the pool and exercise room behind me. Trainers can help you out in there. Good luck!”
He could tell I needed it.
In the locker room, there were about a dozen women of all ages and all sizes in various stages of nudity undressing. On a bench near the orange lockers, a woman who was completely naked sat rubbing lotion on her arms. In front of a mirror by the sinks, an older woman was blow-drying her hair, also nude.
* * *
In high school, all the girls were required to shower after gym. It was widely rumored that the female gym teachers looked into the shower stalls to make sure we were naked and wet, not standing in there with our gym clothes on. I had been a “late bloomer,” as my mother always said, and spent much of my freshman year terrified of a gym coach peeking behind the shower curtain. That, and aging, had resulted in what was apparently a higher level of modesty than most women’s—clearly something I needed to work on overcoming.
I took my Pillsbury bag into a bathroom stall for a quick change in the Y women’s locker room before heading down the hall to the equipment room. There was ’90s music piped in, but most people were wearing headphones. I didn’t have any portable music. At home, I listened to a stereo/radio.
People were stair-climbing, furiously pedaling, not just running but downright sprinting on treadmills, and in the back of the room, guys with oversized muscles were using weight machines I’d never seen before. A woman with wide rubber bands on her ankles was walking sideways down the middle of the room. Two teenagers were doing yoga stretches on an exercise mat, and a man whose upper body was comprised entirely of muscle was doing chin-ups. In front of the room, two guys with Y T-shirts who apparently worked there were standing behind a red counter, texting.
There were women of all ages in all stages of restoring their fitness, all of them wearing black capris and bright spandex tops with crisscrossed straps on the back that showed their sports bras underneath. Oh, come on. A dress code at the gym? I was literally the only woman wearing sweats, and other than the men, the only one with a baggy T-shirt. Thank God I’d decided against the spiderweb leggings, and my sneakers were fairly new.
I started with the treadmill, which was at least somewhat familiar. Once I got on and pushed “go,” it jerked forward, picking up speed right away, so fast I stumbled. For a moment, I thought I might slide right off the back of it.
I looked around to see if anyone had noticed.
Nope. Everyone was in their own plugged-in world; no one was making eye contact. Wasn’t the gym supposed to be a place to meet people? How exactly would that be done?
