The Wrong Answer

On watching carefully, speaking sloppy Italian, and writing from the room I'm in

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

The gym is a latter-day confession booth. People tell me a lot of things.

I have one of those faces (open, friendly, curious) that seems to broadcast come, tell me about your life, I won’t judge you. I might, a little. But I’ll do it with affection. The characters I meet at my gym in Florence have become, over the years, some of the most consistent people in my life. They will never read my work. They don’t know me. They have no idea.

My gym is an American franchise, which means it sits in the Florentine cityscape with the incongruity of a McDonald’s near a medieval tower, and yet it has become, for me, something like “Cheers.” I have a persona here. She is consistent, warm, more extroverted than usual in Italian, even as her Italian occasionally produces the wrong answer, and she loves the Friday morning playlist with an enthusiasm that requires no translation.

The cast of gym regulars has solidified over time. There’s the art historian with the curly hair and glasses who hoards the small free weights in the corner, a strategic perimeter that makes a kind of territorial sense once you’ve met her husband. He’s a large, stiff man I’d privately clocked as a retired high school coach: the flushing face of someone who believes suffering is the point. He struggles through the most basic Pilates poses and radiates a low-level sovereignty over his mat and its surrounding airspace. He objects to noise. He objects to cell phones. Once, when a woman’s phone rang mid-class, the morning her father had fallen and was in the hospital, he yelled at her because she was interrupting his concentration.

There’s the man at reception whose buongiorno, ciao bella arrives every morning with the reliability and pitch of a cartoon theme song. Mr. Stinky: lean and ripped in the way of an Outward Bound instructor or a rock climber, middle-aged, here every single day for workouts of a length and intensity that have led me to fear, quietly, whatever demon he’s outpacing. (Work out his moniker for yourself.) And there’s who I take to be the franchise owner, though I’ve never confirmed it, whose tireless encouragement of my Italian (and my workouts) feels genuinely, improbably kind. The retired wife of a dentist who confided that a foot fetishist cornered her on the train to Empoli, wanted to get closer to her toes. “I always wear light nail polish, so they never look chipped or scratched,” she clarified.

This spring two sets of American exchange students began attending the Monday and Friday classes, visibly outperforming everyone in the room, including the Italians who have been coming for years. When two blond girls who looked freshly cast in a “Barbie” sequel showed up one morning, the Italian grandmother who usually stands in the back row with minimal effort turned to me mid-plank with a look of theatrical confusion. Ma dai. I had to agree.

But last week something happened. An Italian woman I’ve seen before was speaking in the lockerroom with a younger woman whose Italian was hesitant. English, I assumed. Then Turkish-English, as it emerged. My first instinct was mild irritation, the involuntary response to overhearing a conversation in broken fragments of three languages before coffee. But they turned to me, curious and kind, and we began to talk. Within five minutes I was pulling out my newest copies of Open Doors Review and Pure Slush to show them my essays, one published in both English and Italian, another about London, and I felt the specific, unguarded joy of being seen unexpectedly.

I had to remind myself again: don’t be so quick. That Italian professor of English might find my work online. The Turkish woman might too. They might become readers, or fellow students in a local workshop, or simply people who remembered me warmly the next time we happened to be stretching in adjacent lanes.

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Many writers are haunted by the large difficult project, the hard one that “matters,” that deserves the good hours. The daily essay, the Substack post, the observation scribbled on a receipt: these feel frivolous by comparison, and certainly less serious than the work that announces itself.

I am trying to let go of that hierarchy.

Writing from everyday life is, for me, like painting wet on wet into paint that hasn’t dried, where the colors bleed into each other and the outcome is both intentional and partly accidental, shaped by both instinct and plan. The result is alive, unforced.

The gym gives me that. Florence gives me that. Moving through a language that I am working to make my own gives me that: the slight delay, the small wrongness, the moment of being perceived.

At this age , having moved through pregnancies and injuries and whole chapters of stillness, any day I can move, I move. The body is grateful. At it turns out, so is the work.