Janine Porterfield, president of the Riverside Recreation Council, didn't want to hear it. Her state might be in phase three of the Covid crises, allowing businesses to reopen, including gyms, but the Riverside Barbell Club, along with other indoor Riverside Rec facilities, would remain closed until further notice.
Riverside Barbell was unique among gyms in that it was located in the basement of Colby Middle School, and had been since a Colby teacher started it way back, around the time of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential race. The kids used it during gym class. Then, when school let out, from three in the afternoon to nine at night, the room was open to adult Riverside members who paid a nominal yearly fee to join. Riverside was also one of the few gyms in the region equipped with a lifting platform. Olympic lifters flocked there to train, as well as power lifters, bodybuilders and others who trained to keep strong and healthy.
All that changed in 2016 when the entire school received a renovation. The school stayed open but the gym closed. All the equipment was hauled out and put in storage, while the space was turned into two temporary classrooms during the two-year construction. The gym, its space renovated as well, reopened in 2018. However, it had few members willing to come back because during the closing, they had joined other gyms they liked better. By the time Covid-19 hit, only three long-time members wanted to train there—two former Riverside rec leaders and a teacher at the school; all three possessed keys.
Colby Middle, along with other state schools, closed in March. By fall 2020, the schools remained closed, though businesses, including gyms, had reopened in June. Yet because Riverside Barbell fell under the bureaucratic umbrella of Riverside Rec, the gym remained closed.
Well, officially, that is. Surreptitiously, the three key-holding members, during the state's shelter in place order, kept coming in. The teacher and one of the former rec leaders trained there during the early morning, did their workout, then locked up and left. The other former rec leader, along with his wife, trained after five in the afternoon. They made sure they weren't there between the hours of ten and three to avoid getting caught by Riverside Rec staff, whose offices were located just a few steps down the hall from the gym. This clandestine "operation" lasted until one day in early October, when Dave Baker, one of the staffers, decided to stay late and caught Jeff Marasco and his blond wife Cindy just as they entered the gym around five o'clock.
"You guys aren't supposed to be in here," he said. "The room is closed."
Jeff, a strong, barrel-chested truck driver in his early fifties, took his measure of the thin, out of shape, forty-something Dave Baker. "The governor opened all the gyms," he argued. "We're in phase three. And there's only a few people who now come down here anyway. What the fuck?"
Dave blinked his baby-blue eyes. "What the fuck? Gyms open and close at their own discretion, and this gym is under Riverside Rec. That's what the fuck." Dave could see Jeff clench his prominent jaw and the fire shooting out of his dark brown eyes. "Look, I'll let you slide today, complete your workout. But then you can't come back until Riverside opens its other indoor facilities." When he asked if anyone else was coming down there, Jeff dropped the names of Mark Melbourne and Dan Cheever, the teacher. "Well, my advice is to alert them. Not to be a prick, but if I catch anyone of you guys in here again, I'll have no choice but to take your keys away."
Jeff did his workout, then called Mark and Dan. Mark called it "bureaucratic BS." Dan, defiant, said he'd come to the gym at six in the morning if necessary. Mark, who had talked to Janine Porterfield back in April about the situation, gave Jeff her phone number. "I doubt it will help, she's pretty adamant that the gym stays closed," he said. "But it can't hurt. Good luck."
It was a very short phone call, with Janine holding to the party line. "The gym's closed until the board deems it safe to reopen," she barked into the phone. She then clicked off before Jeff could say another word. He tried calling her back. No answer.
If Mark wanted to keep his strength and sharp muscularity, he knew he'd be forced to cough up close to three-hundred dollars for a year's membership at Fitness Forever, one of the cheaper commercial gyms around, and where he had trained during the two-year construction. Because he had been a rec leader, Riverside cost him nothing. Jeff had a lifetime membership at La Fitness, but hated wearing a mask per their Covid-19 policy. Dan, who lived within walking distance, made good on his vow to keep training. He climbed out of bed before sunup and rolled into the gym by six-thirty. The janitor, who knew him from his years of teaching at the school, kept his mouth shut.
Jeff and Cindy explored the idea of contacting Riverside's district congress person for help. Mark wasn't sure what to do. He thought about filing a law suit, an idea he quickly dismissed, knowing the stress and pitfalls that would no doubt await them by going down that rabbit hole. As the cliché went, only the lawyers emerged the true winners.
He figured he'd have better luck working on Janine. He'd known her for at least six years, knew her from the once-a-month rec meetings held at the middle school and the yearly spring social that brought together Riverside's program rec leaders (besides the barbell club, there was boys' and girls' soccer and lacrosse, baseball, football, basketball, yoga and golf). He found the meetings boring, but looked forward to the socials, held at a genteel local country club that served a surf and turf feast of steak and crab cakes, baked potato and asparagus, with chocolate syrup poured over vanilla ice cream for dessert. A schmooze hour in front of an open bar preceded the meal.
The socials gave rec leaders, all volunteers, a chance to talk about things other than rec business, and it was there that Mark got to know Janine in a way he couldn't at the meetings. For the first couple years, Janine showed up with Brad, her attorney husband. But for the last few years, she'd been alone because she and Brad had divorced, an amiable divorce, Janine had told Mark, and one that included joint custody of their two young children. She was a career teacher at a local grade school and since Covid-19, she'd been conducting classes through virtual learning. Knowing that Janine and Brad were no longer together, Mark thought about asking her out. He saw the forty-something Janine as what he liked to call "average-cute." She stood a couple inches below his five-foot-nine, with shoulder-length brown hair and green eyes. She had a pleasant face: her features, including her prominent cheek bones, fit together nicely. But it was not a face that drew many doubletakes. Plain, average faces normally don't. She did have nice legs and a cute butt, at least from what he saw of them when she wore tight jeans. She held rec meetings wearing glasses that Mark found sexy. In his eyes, she exuded the image of the sexy librarian/intellectual/professor. Her nice skin and manner of speaking sweetened the package, her elocution and precise diction—traits he found alluring, traits that turned him on more than big boobs alone ever could. He thought she had a sweet disposition as well. That is, until she got crappy with Jeff, then hung up on him. Why had she done that? It seemed out of character, at least from what he knew about her. Would she do that to him also?
He called in the evening on her landline phone, listed on the Riverside Recreation web site. This was mid-October, six months after they last spoke.
"Hi Janine, Mark Melbourne."
"Hi Mark. I guess you're calling about the gym being closed."
He felt relieved she didn't hang up. "Right. Look, I know you're concerned about people getting infected. But there's only three or four of us interested in training there, and then at different times." Mark wasn't a squealer. Like the school's janitor, Mark kept to himself what Dan Cheever was doing.
"Mark, I couldn't make an exception with the barbell club without opening up Riverside's other indoor facilities. Our basketball courts, for example."
"The basketball players would be a lot more vulnerable than us," he argued. "And anyway, we're isolated to the point where nobody in those other programs would even know."
"Can't do it, Mark. You know what's going on, the virus is into a resurgence."
"Come on, Janine. Your lacrosse and soccer players have a better chance of getting infected than we do, even if they are outdoors." He heard her sigh. "Can we at least talk about it?"
"We are talking about it."
"Over a meal or a drink, I mean. A place where we can sit outdoors, of course."
"Are you asking me out on a date?" She giggled.
"Um, no, not really. I mean—″
"You'll do anything to get that room open, won't you?"
Technically, he knew she was right. "Janine, call it what you will. I just think it's absurd to keep the weight room closed for no reason. It's not like in the old days, when during certain hours, there were lines waiting to use some of the equipment. Far from it. It's just me, Dan, Jeff and Cindy, Jeff's wife."
"Jeff, the guy I hung up on?"
"Yes. Why did you do that, anyway? It seems so out of character for you."
"I don't know Jeff from Adam, number one. And number two, I wasn't in the mood to argue."
"But you're arguing with me."
"No, I think it's you that's doing the arguing, Mark. And my answer is still no. However, I will take you up on this meeting you've proposed. If nothing else, it will give us time to catch up on the books we've read."
Janine knew that Mark was a reader, because he'd always get to the rec meetings about fifteen minutes early, take a seat at the long cafeteria table, and begin reading whatever book he had brought along. When Janine came in, she always took the time to ask about the book. The socials gave them more time to discuss their reading lists. But that was in the past. Mark hadn't been an active rec leader since Colby Middle was renovated back in 2016, four years and over one-hundred books ago. When he wasn't reading or lifting weights, the also divorced, semi-retired, fifty-something Mark Melbourne wondered when he might once again become involved with another woman. Janine came to mind, though his goal now was simply to get her to relent and give the okay for the gym to reopen.
*****
"Long time, no see," Janine said before she and Mark took an outdoor seat at City Café, already busy with a noontime crowd taking advantage of this warm Saturday in mid-October. Reaching out for a hug, she said, "I'm not infected, believe me."
Briefly, they embraced, and then sat at a round metal table that stood over a dozen feet from the nearest diners. Only the servers wore masks, one of whom, a college-age black male, handed them menus.
"Let's see, it's been at least three years," Mark said. "You haven't changed a bit." He wasn't just throwing out a cliché, because she looked the same to him. Her brown hair still dropped to her shoulders, worn with a part slightly right of center, with nary a gray hair in sight. She wore a light blue sweater over jeans.
"Nor have you," she said. "You must be weight training somewhere or you wouldn't still look the way you do."
Mark's green, long-sleeve pull-over revealed chest and arms thickened by decades of weight training. "I trained at Fitness Forever during the school construction and through last March until they closed down. Then, as you now know, it was back to Riverside during the shelter in place order up to the time that Jeff got caught. I've managed to scrape together a modest, bare-bones home gym in my basement. A barbell, two dumbbells and a bench. All purchased online. But without the machines we have at Riverside, it's not a full workout. Fitness Forever has great machines also. But I'd rather not pay hundreds of dollars a year if I can avoid it. Like all gyms desperate to recoup their losses, they jacked up their prices. I wouldn't have to do that if you and the board voted to keep Riverside open. Of course, that's what we're here to discuss."
"I thought we were here to trade reading lists." She grinned in a way that let him know she was only half-kidding. "Look, I know why we're here. But can we do the reverse from what is normally done, put pleasure before business?"
"Sure," he said, then began to peruse his menu. When Janine slipped on her brown-frame reading glasses, he looked up. He wouldn't describe Janine as pretty. But there was something about those glasses that went with her features, her smallish nose, prominent cheekbones and a pleasant smile. He liked her coloring also—she had one of those faces that looked perpetually tanned.
