Gyms

Abstract

Gyms Jennifer De Leon (bio) I missed sweating. I wanted to run. I was living in Guatemala for several months, and my host mother, Blanca, told me that if I jogged around the neighborhood I would look like a crazy person. "People don't really do that here," she said one Sunday morning as I tied the laces on my sneakers in the courtyard. "Yes they do," her husband Alejandro said. He explained that people in Xela exercised, but they usually did it very early in the morning when the city streets weren't as busy with cars and people. I tightened my laces and told them I'd be back in an hour or so. They stared in silence as I left the house. It was sunny and cool. I jogged slowly at first. Ah, yes. Running. Then, a whistle. Across the street a man grabbed his dick and called, "Bella . . . bella." I quickened my pace. I felt that man's words all over my skin. Maybe running wasn't the best idea in the middle of the morning when the city was packed with slimy, dick-grabbing men. I switched to a power walk. I had to pay close attention to where I stepped. Dog poop, deep potholes, uneven sidewalks, cars, motorcycles, and enormous buses that pushed me up against buildings, threatening to run over my feet—all that made for a stressful walk instead of the soothing calorie-burn I had been seeking. So the following week I visited a couple of gyms, gimnasios, one of which was essentially a petri dish of germs in the form of three weight machines, two benches, and a skinny guy reading the newspaper at the front desk while half a dozen men lifted weights and stared at their reflections in a rusted mirror. The second gimnasio consisted of a long, narrow room on the third floor of a building in a neighborhood I would likely never find again, seeing as how there were no numbers or street names in that zone. Discouraged and desperate as ever, I needed to find a gym. It wouldn't be the first time I felt that particular angst in a foreign country. [End Page 66] My obsession with gyms started with my introduction to dieting. And that started when I was a child. ________ Diets were always something white women did. Women my mother cleaned houses for in the wealthy suburbs. These women would take Dexatrim diet pills and sprinkle artificial sweetener from pink packets onto grapefruit halves. It was the eighties. They wore magenta headbands and legwarmers on their way to the gym. They carried water bottles. My mother—who came to this country from Guatemala weighing one hundred pounds and, like many immigrants, discovered that Big Macs cost less than a packet of vine-ripe tomatoes—gained ten, twenty, thirty, pounds, eventually reaching nearly double her green card weight. She joined the new gym down the street from our house—Futura. The first time I went with her at the age of twelve, I stepped past the racquetball room where dripping-with-sweat men looked to be in great pain as their sneakers screeched loudly in the narrow space. I was scared. What if that small blue ball smacked them right in the face? And I was entirely unprepared for what I was about to see upstairs in the ladies locker room. Never had I seen naked women in real life. The occasional sex scene in movies I wasn't supposed to watch—Dirty Dancing, White Men Can't Jump—revealed nude women's backs and chests but never below the waist. The locker room ladies had nests in between their legs. They had cellulite on pale thighs, dark rings around their middles where the fat sat, and bumpy brown nipples. After that abrupt introduction to the female body, I began waiting for my mother in the carpeted hallway outside the locker room while she changed her clothes. Then I'd sit cross-legged in the corner of the workout studio, a pink notebook on my lap, writing stories about girls with spiral perms, while my mother stepped sideways and spun in...