In late August, before we moved to Jay Street, Beccah and I made a habit of wandering around our soon-to-be new neighborhood late on Sunday afternoons. Invariably, we’d end up at Vicky and Jess’s house right around dinnertime, and, invariably, they would have just finished cooking a three-course meal, and would invite us to eat with them. It was a good system, even if an entirely – I promise – subconscious one. We repeatedly made the mistake of wandering around Cambridgeport proper instead of the neighborhood that surrounded our future home, which is really Riverside, and is quite a bit shabbier than tree-lined, brightly-painted Cambridgeport – but nonetheless, our walks definitely sparked a love affair with Central Square that persists to this day.
One particular afternoon, the sun was baking the brick sidewalks, and at least one of us was wearing Beccah’s legendary Calvin Klein denim miniskirt. Our meandering took us past the Cambridge Women’s Center on Pleasant Street. We stopped outside the Women’s Center, of course, and paused to contemplate the building, glowing as it was in the languid summer sun. The painted signs that advertised its services – “housing resources,” “job listings,” etc. – filled us with sadness and nostalgia. The gorgeous, three-story building, and the bending trees in the yard along the side of the house, seemed hulking and unwieldy against the signs advertising services so much better suited, nowadays, to flat instantaneousness of the always-unsatisfying computer screen.
In Cambridge, as people who went to Harvard remember all too well, possessing physical space always means more than you think it might mean. Because land is a zero-sum commodity, its possession confers a sense of destiny, chosenness, on the possessor. You feel like landed gentry if you’ve got it. It’s stressful, in a way, just walking around, because every spare patch of scraggly grass could be used for nobler purposes and you have to think about that all the time. I was always afraid – I think many of us were – that if we actually got a Women’s Center at Harvard, we’d immediately be accused of not utilizing the space to its maximum potential, of serving too few people to justify our dominion over something as grand as the basement of a freshman dorm. And so it is with the Cambridge Women’s Center. “Justify yourself!” we reflexively think. We can get almost of all of what we need through the ubiquitous, undulating waves of wireless internet. What do we need you for anymore?
___________________
So during the winter I go to this gym often; I’ve mentioned it tangentially here quite a bit. It’s an all-women affair, and many things about the gym make me want to blog – the atmosphere of grim, unsmiling competition for scarce resources (elliptical machines, yoga mats, square feet on the exercise room floor); the hyper-perky, hyper-blonde card-swipers, whom I generally like; occasional dyke-spottings, etc. Both this year and last year I’ve known quite a few people who go to the gym, too, and since I go on a very predictable schedule, I almost never go to Healthworks without seeing someone I know. During the winter the gym is a bizarrely large presence in my life – I’m there almost every day, and a sizable percentage of the human interaction and visual field stimulus I experience each day happens there.
So, why doesn’t Healthworks become a women’s center? In fact, why doesn’t it become the Cambridge Women’s Center? It’s not inconceivable, right? Put aside for a second the skeptical part of yourself that says, “But exercise is just a patriarchal plot to make women lose weight and disappear.” Any institution, in possession of a building erected out of bricks and mortar, charging fees and requiring its members to get out of their houses and go somewhere, that also turns a profit, can only be admired. We all gather, in a manner of speaking, for two hours, nearly every day, in an age in which humans are singularly difficult to motivate to take part in civic and political life. Surely that presence can be harnessed for something beyond slimming down.
Healthworks already makes a few good-hearted stabs at being more of a community center than just a gym. There are several opportunities for the imprimatur of its members, and there could be more – there are colorful bulletin boards, with some space dedicated to volunteer opportunities and benefit marathons; members are encouraged to donate magazines of their choosing to the gym; some classes are open to community members, not just paying members. Of course, just about a million things would have to change for Healthworks to become a women’s center – a feminist women’s center, that is. First of all, I really can’t deny that Healthworks profits from and is spawn of the patriarchy; frankly, the gym’s success just proves how much time and effort women are willing to dedicate to conforming to patriarchal physical standards. The longer I think about it, the creepier it is. Somehow, we’d have to resolve that problem. Anyway, second of all, no more copies of Us Weekly or Cosmopolitan creeping out of every crevice like roaches. No more “Legally Blonde” playing on the movie channel. But – just imagine what we could have instead! NPR and Air America – whatever that is – piped into the locker room. “But I’m a Cheerleader” on the movie channel. I’d like it so much better. Duh. Whether these changes would have to be achieved by executive fiat, or whether we could have a looser, tipping-point approach that permitted Us Weekly but ensured a surfeit of Off Our Backs, could be figured out as we go along. We could have subcommittees that chose the weekly film rotation. All it requires is a little conscious application of thought, and it wouldn’t be so hard.
If only there were somewhere for us to go. But there hardly is anymore. If what we want it to get outside our dark little apartments, to pass our eyes over something pretty and unexpected, to run into someone we recognize, we had better be able to admit it, because most of the little tasks that might have drawn us out of the house, into the world, and accidentally into other people’s orbits, can be done perfectly alone. With no one to witness our small, proud undertakings, we may as well not be doing them at all.
Recent Comments