To overcome a longterm injury I’ve taken on some personal training, in a stinky gym paved in black rubber. I can only afford two half hour sessions per week so we need to get us some work done. The trainer is strawberry blonde and perky, with perfect ankles and a somewhat staring pair of baby-blue eyes. On our third meeting she mentioned casually some news about her career: “I got a call-back from the someone-or-others!” I must have looked blank, though I said, “Good for you!” because she said innocently,
“Don’t you know anything about me at all?”
This so tickled my sense of humour that I instantly dropped into expressionless deadpan. My first thought was, Darling: I am so much older now than you will ever be. I said, levelly, “Why, no. I guess I don’t. The only stuff I know about you is what I have gleaned in these last two half hour training sessions.”
She took this as an invitation to fill me in. Outside our window the sun was setting and a dozen people churning up and down sprinting earnestly put my grunting machinations to poor shame. Her degree was in something. With a major in something and pilates and something else. She worked on a cruise ship? as a dancer? only then her brother got married so she had to come home – for the wedding. “Oh,” I said. And then she got this job with Anthony (the gym owner) and now she has been here two months only she’s passed an audition with such and such cruises (“Wow!” I said) and so by August she plans to be airborne again. That is, she’ll be seaborne on the world’s largest single cause of waste pollution, but her dance routine is “aerial” and in costume – last time round she wore glitter on her eyelids and was dressed “as a wasp.” Right, then.
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