Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

Alma was rippling with enthusiasm: “Oh my Gooood, water aerobics feels amazing.”
Tanti Cici, buried in snow somewhere in Canada: “I’m going, so why aren’t you going?”
Irina, at me, with her verdict-delivery tone: “You need it. You’re going!”
And me, defeated by the Anvil Chorus of demand: “Fine, fine, I’ll go. Just leave me alone.”

It took three days until I finally managed to get a spot. Registration opens at 7 a.m., and by 7:05 everything is already taken, as if retirees sleep with their fingers on the mouse. After a few failed attempts, I managed to sneak in.

I went there convinced I’d be floating among people with generous Rubensian shapes, like me, but reality contradicted me with all the elegance of a cold shower: out of thirty participants, twenty‑nine were grandparents or great‑grandparents. Sure, age has nothing to do with weight, but honestly, they were doing just fine in the kilograms department. Three had been declared male at birth; one was me, so I don’t count; another seemed either deaf or desperate to hear his own voice echo across the water; and the last one, struck by Parkinson’s, trembled so much that tiny waves formed around him, like a disturbed inland sea. Sad, of course, but the physics of water shows no mercy. The remaining twenty‑seven were women.

As for me, I lowered the average age with an involuntary nonchalance. Wrong demographics, as the Americans would say. The way I was looking at them was exactly how they were looking at me, wondering what the hell I was doing there.

The instructor appeared with a speaker the size of a suitcase and cranked the volume to maximum, as if she wanted to wake up the Walmart employees next door. Then she started moving. “Moving” is too modest a word: her energy level exceeded the combined output of the entire class.

She was a creature sculpted of pure fiber and muscles, not a trace of fat, dancing and bouncing for a full hour without panting, without sweating, just shouting instructions without ever losing the rhythm: “Eyes on me, jump, leg up, rotate, arms, arms, jump with your arms up, eyes on me, hips back, wave, thrust forward, wave…”

The grandmas followed her, hypnotized, trying to keep up with improvised grace. All kinds of aquatic exercises, executed more or less accurately, until the instructor raised the estrogen level in the pool with some pelvic thrusts that made me blush but turned the old ladies into reborn teenagers: they giggled, winked, and rotated their hips with a boldness I hadn’t seen since the disco days in college.

For relaxation she put on a slow song and started doing ballet. I’m typing “ballet” but I’m thinking “pole dancing,” my thoughts being totally expelled from the pool. That’s when I understood why almost everyone had water shoes. It was easier to stand on tiptoe.

I, hiding in a corner of the pool, was laughing like an idiot and wondering whether Irina, at pilates, was moving just as… expressively.

I don’t think I’m going again. I get embarrassed way too easily.