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7. Enduring Images
- State University of New York Press
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Enduring Images 쮿 91 91 7 Enduring Images Catherine Houser The woman on the elliptical machine has purple hands. Jamella comes to the gym every morning to try to get her joints moving, to try to stay a step ahead of her rheumatoid arthritis. She never complains about it, rarely ever talks about it. When I ask how she’s managing now that they’ve taken her arthritis drug off the market, she holds up her left hand, swollen, painfully purple, and barely able to hold on to the handle on the elliptical machine, and she says it just means she’ll have to work out a little longer each day to loosen up while she deals with the pain. They talk about the triathlete’s ability to endure, but this, this is endurance. I live in a small town on Cape Cod and I work out nearly every morning in a gym owned by a woman, though it is certainly not a “ladies gym.” Most of the men and women there working out in the predawn hours are, like Jamella, old enough to be my parents. We see each other at the gym around the same time every morning. I’m part of a collection of women who come and go in their own way and on their own time, though very often in the same pattern of activity. We smile, we nod, we step out of the way when one or the other is passing in the narrow corridor on the way to the cardio deck. Then, once there, we plug in our headphones and focus on one of the twelve televisions lining the wall in front of us. In that early morning dance, we have these little five-minute conversations where we learn of families, jobs, dogs, boats, political leanings, sports loyalties, vacations, and gardens, and when we’re at a loss for words, we talk about the weather. It is an odd intimacy, knowing so much about these women’s lives yet at the same time not even knowing their last names. But that is the nature of our relationship . We know each other in the gym where, very often, women of a 92 쮿 My Life at the Gym certain age are working out other things besides their muscles, working toward something more than just a healthy body. What I found there in these half-sleepy, half-grumpy women was a road map for the rest of my life. I lost my lifelong model for perseverance and endurance when my mother died shortly after I turned forty. I didn’t know it at that moment, but when I lost my mother, I lost my way. Though my mother was no role model for physical health—she had five kids, an alcoholic husband, worked nights, and smoked two packs a day—she was my model for endurance. When she was suddenly gone and I was facing this broad morass of middle age, I found myself looking for someone to lead the way. I didn’t consciously go looking for someone. In fact, being one of those middle-age, half-grumpy women in the gym in the early morning , I am often annoyed by people I encounter. I am there to stave off the ravages of age, to manage an often out-of-control perimenopause, and to work out, quietly in my head, all of the prickly relationships that come with being the chair of an English Department. That’s quite an agenda to tackle at 6 a.m. every morning. But I began to notice how much better I felt walking out of the gym on the days when I saw Jamella, Amy, Rosemary, and the others and we had one of our five-minute encounters. As women, we often come to understand ourselves in the context of others. They become part of the story we tell ourselves. As young women, we measure ourselves, our bodies, against the women on the treadmill next to us. There is a competitiveness even in the simplest forms of fitness and health. Later, after we’ve played out our biological imperative, the women on the treadmill next to us are less our competition and more our comrades. So when I see Jamella, her eyes swollen, day after day for more than a week, I ask her if she’s okay. She tells me her sister is dying of liver cancer. We exchange a few words, her trying to contain her sadness, me...