The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

I did not take any pleasure in that. I want to be honest about it. He was my dad’s brother. He had the same way of clearing his throat before he said something hard. Every time I saw him, I saw my dad at fifty, and it hurt.

At Christmas he did not come to my mother’s house for dinner. He sent a tin of the peanut brittle my aunt used to make, before she passed. My mother put it on the table without a word, and I ate a piece, and it tasted exactly the way it always had.

The feed store filled up that winter.

I had about 110 members on the morning they carried me down the street. By the end of January I had 164. A lot of them were people who had carried something that Saturday and had never thought of themselves as gym people.

The football boys came three afternoons a week in the off season. Neva started a 7:30 class for the night nurses, after their shift, so they could stretch out their backs before they went home to sleep. Arvid brought his wife.

Ingeborg came Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at nine. Every time she came in, she touched her plate on the bottom of the plate tree before she took her coat off. She never said anything about it. She just touched it, the way some people touch the doorframe of their church.

Nobody else used that plate. I never told anybody not to. They just didn’t.

In March my uncle walked in.

It was a Tuesday, a little after ten in the morning, and the snow was going off the roofs in long drips that caught the sun. The 10 o’clock class had just started. I was at the front with a clipboard.

The door opened, and the cold came in, and he was standing there in his canvas coat with his cap in his hands.

The whole room went quiet. Somebody turned the radio down.

He looked around for a while. He looked at the racks on the far wall, and the bars laid across the plate trees, and my dad’s benches under the south window where my husband had put them. He looked at the plate on the bottom peg for a long time.

Then he looked at me.

“Paige,” he said. “Could I have a word?”

I put the class on their warm-up and walked over to the door. He did not come any further in, and I did not ask him to.

He turned his cap around in his hands one full time.

“The front room’s empty,” he said. “Your old room. The boy’s working for the county now. He’s doing good.” He cleared his throat the way my dad used to. “I wondered if you’d want it back. Same as before. Five hundred a month.”

I looked past him at the street. I could see three blocks of brick and melting snow, all the way to the brown paper still in the window beside the hardware store.

I thought about my dad laying the mats in that room with me, on his knees, in the summer heat. I thought about Ingeborg pushing up out of a kitchen chair with both hands on the table. I thought about forty people walking past a window with iron in their arms and not one of them saying a word.

Then I looked back into the room behind me, at the 10 o’clock class doing their warm-up, and Arvid’s wife laughing at something, and Ingeborg’s plate on the bottom peg.

“Thank you, Uncle Cyrus,” I said. “But I’ve outgrown it.”