Business Class

My mother always says that the world would be a much happier place if people would just mind their own business.

            Once, one of her sisters told her that she thought that Jack might have some learning problems. Admittedly, she said this after watching my brother carefully put on a child’s bicycle helmet, and then run headfirst repeatedly into living room wall. When he finally came to, his first words were, “Wow, heaven is so pretty!”

            Despite the fact that Mother had long suspected her youngest son was, in her words, ‘special’, in public, she was fiercely loyal.

            “There’s nothing wrong with Jack!” she told Auntie Wai-ling. “He’s just a very impressionable child. He’s been watching The Incredible Hulk, that’s all. And if anything, the fact that he was so sensible as to put on a helmet speaks volumes about his intelligence. And besides, Wai, if I were you, I’d be paying more attention to your daughter. Every time she comes around, she starts mooing and chews up half my bonsai!”

            I don’t remember what happened after that, but my sister Michelle says Mother and Auntie Wai-ling Did Not Speak for a couple of months. They made up when Auntie Wai-ling came home early one day from her hairdresser’s appointment to find Uncle Nam in bed with the maid, at which point, the rules of sisterly solidarity trumped any disagreements about offspring.

            I don’t know why, but I was suddenly reminded of Jack’s Hulk episode a few days ago at the gym. I was in the midst of my third set of squats and thinking why a stupid exercise this was and wondering how it is that 50 seconds can feel so long.

            “Keep going,” Dan, the gym instructor said cheerfully. “Twenty seconds done, thirty to go!”

            Next to me, Joanne gasped. “Twenty! How can it be only 20 seconds? I’m dying!”

            Just then, a big hulking guy in spandex gym shorts sauntered by. He checked us all out in the mirror, much in the same way a starving lion surveys a herd of antelopes at the watering hole. His critical eye settled on me, and he barked out something in Hokkien to Dan.

            Dan looked at me and smiled. “He say you need to eat more. You are too skinny. You eat more and you quickly put on more muscle mass.”

            As I later said to Amanda, if my legs weren’t trembling so much from exhaustion and pain, I would have said something rude. “I could feel my mother’s voice just dying to come up out of my throat, you know? I mean, really. Mind your own business!”

            Amanda shook her head. “Some people just have no boundaries.”

            Saffy said it’s something about the gym that gives rise to a level of permissiveness that you just wouldn’t accept anywhere else. “It’s all those half naked bodies, sweating and grunting!” she said. She must have noticed our looks. “What! It’s true! Your muscles are heaving and tensing and flexing. You’re making all sorts of funny faces and noises that if you did it in public, you’d be arrested immediately! So of course, the boundaries are different and people say stupid, intrusive things!”

            Which reminded Amanda of that one time she was in the gym. She was doing a very soft workout on the treadmill, which basically translates into her walking at the same speed as when she wanders along the clothes rails at Gucci. She was, in her words, minding her own business when the guy on her right struck up a conversation with the guy on her left.

            “They talked right over me, like I wasn’t there,” she said.

            “They didn’t know each other?” Saffy asked.

            “Total pick-up situation,” Amanda told her. “Full on flirting. It made me sick with jealousy!” Eventually, after a bit of harmless banter about their gym routine, the conversation turned to jobs and Right Guy asked Left Guy what he did.

            “I’m a lawyer.”

            “Oh? What area?”

            “Mergers and acquisitions.”
            “Mmmm, nice! I’d love to be merged and acquired by you!”

            Saffy stuck a fist in her mouth and screamed. “Oh my God! That’s the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard! Who says things like that?”

            For the second time that conversation, Amanda shook her head. “The super hot guys at my gym, that’s who! Last I heard, they were actually dating!”

            Saffy was astonished. “Huh!”

            Meanwhile, Barney Chen says he thinks he knows the lawyer in Amanda’s gym. “Total nut job! And not in a good way. We went out on one date. So not worth the merger!”