The Swimming Lesson

A few days ago I joined the gym at the Marriott, or should I say gyms: there are two fitness centers, labeled "Ladies" and "Gents" in silver cursive on glass doors. It's a good thing, too, because no man could possibly contain himself, let alone exercise, while I use the bench press thirty feet away wearing my size XL, paint-stained Riverside High School sweatpants.

The women's gym is, at most, 250 square feet. It has two elliptical trainers, one with a broken handle; two treadmills; an ancient stairmaster with a screen that looks like a dot-matrix print-out; one of those 20-exercises-in-one weight machines featured in 1980s home gym infomercials; and, in a pile on the floor, a few free weights that are often slippery from a ceiling leak. On a day when the air conditioning was not working especially well, my friend and I decided to crash the men's gym. We are, I think, technically allowed to do this, though I have yet to see another woman break the barrier.

The men's gym is, of course, in size and quality, akin to a smallish Washington Sports Club -- it has a glass wall that looks down on a pool, flat-screen televisions tuned to FashionTV (in Pakistan, this is the equivalent of soft-core porn), a ceiling tiled with Bose speakers, a balance ball, and new weight machines that, in their instructional diagrams, show pony-tailed women performing the exercises. Most men using the gym are from Western Europe or Australia, and so they appear completely unruffled by my presence.

Yesterday, after lifting weights among the men, I decided to swim laps in the women's pool, which is tiny and bathwater warm (this seemed compelling at the time, though now I couldn't tell you why). I'd completed three pool-lengths of breast stroke and had begun to mentally restructure a chapter of my novel when a woman at the opposite end of the pool, wearing what could have been my high school's wrestling team uniform, yelled and beckoned for me to come over to her at once. I rushed over, thinking there was an emergency. "I need you to teach me how to swim," she said. "Actually, I'm thinking you could just give me a few pointers. Just some tips."

I am at my least gracious when anyone interferes with or interrupts my workout, and so my first response was to try to think of a plausible reason to cancel or delay the swimming lesson. "I'm not a very good swimmer," I said, remembering the summer I was on the swim team and came in dead-last, by a margin of several seconds, in every event.

"You are a great swimmer," she said. "It won't be difficult for you. I just need a few little tips so I can improve."

"Sure," I said finally. "Why don't you show me what you can already do."

She lunged forward and then started thrashing violently, eyes squeezed shut, until she righted herself by grabbing the top of my swimsuit and pulling it down to my waist.

"So," I said, putting my bathing suit back on. "You don't really know how to swim at all."

"Just a few pointers. Just some tips."

I spent the next hour trying unsuccessfully to teach her to blow air out of her mouth and nose while under water. "So I breathe out and then in under water?" she kept asking.

"Um, not exactly."

At the end of our session, after I'd acquired a bruise and grown light-headed from demonstrating the proper way to blow bubbles, she said, "From now on let's come to the gym at the same time."

"Hmmmm."

"Give me your phone number. Also, we could hang out on the weekends. We could hang out all the time."

"Well--"

"It will be great!" she exclaimed. "I cannot wait. It will be so much fun!"