“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Ken smiled. “Daddy Ben and Uncle Ken will take care of her.”
“Come on, Lil-leee,” Sheila playfully whined, “it’ll be fun.”
Now she was in the position of looking like a total bitch if she declined. “Just a second... let me go get changed.”
In her room, she threw on a baggy long-sleeve T-shirt and some cutoff sweatpants, all the while imagining elaborate ways to murder Ben and Ken. A mere five minutes ago, she had been having such a pleasant evening.
“I tell you what, Lily,” Tracee said, after they had piled into her Lexus. “Five years ago, if Sheila and me was gonna have a girls’ night out, we woulda been heading to the bars instead of to aerobics class.”
Sheila giggled. “We’re getting old, I guess.”
“Yep,” Tracee agreed, “we ain’t nothin’ but old married ladies. How ’bout you, Lily? You feel like an old married lady yet?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t really given it much thought.”
“Oh, you wait till Benny Jack knocks you up a couple times, then you’ll feel like an old married lady—trust me.” Tracee laughed.
Lily hoped her tight-lipped smile didn’t reveal how uncomfortable she really was. She had spent very little time around straight women over the course of her adult life; it was little wonder she was so clueless about how to act like one.
The aerobics class was, if possible, even worse than Lily had imagined. The middle-school gym was populated by a herd of slim, tanned bleached-blond women who looked like so many Sheilas and Tracees. Lily wondered if somewhere in Faulkner County a factory churned out these seemingly identical women just as the Confederate Sock Mill churned out identical socks. The one distinctive-looking woman in the class was middle-aged and heavy, her broad hips stuffed into a pair of gray sweatpants.
Lily was just admiring the big woman’s chutzpah far attending an aerobics class full of Sheilas and Tracees when the real Sheila elbowed her, nodded toward the big woman, and whispered,
“Somebody’s got a long way to go.”
The aerobics instructor was distinctive from all the Sheilas and Tracees only in that her hair was brunet. Her taut and toned body was apparent in her electric-blue leotard and hot-pink tights, and a zealous smile of the type worn by born-again Christians was plastered across her carefully made-up face.
“O-kay, lay-deez!” she chirped, clapping her well-manicured hands. “We’re gonna start in tonight with a weigh-in. And then, after you’ve been coming to this class for six weeks, we’ll weigh in again, and you’ll really see some improvement.”
She led the way to the locker room, where the “ladies” were invited to come in one at a time to stand on the scales. Several of the Sheilas and Tracees giggled when the heavy woman took her turn, and one voice stage-whispered the word, “Tilt!” If there was a way in which this class was dissimilar to junior-high PE, Lily failed to see it.
As she stepped into the locker room for her turn on the scales, she even breathed in the odors of junior-high PE — the stale, sour smell of pubescent sweat. “O-kay, hon,” the aerobics instructor, whom Lily had begun to think of as Spandex Dominatrix, said, “now, how tall are you?”
“About five-three.”
Spandex Dominatrix wrote the information down on her clipboard. “Step on the scales, please.”
Just as she would have when she was thirteen, Lily dumbly obeyed.
“Uh-huh,” Spandex chided as she looked at the scale. “You’re a full eight pounds over your ideal body weight. But don’t worry. Stay in this class, and you’ll be shedding that flab in no time!”
Lily walked out of the locker room, disgusted not because she was supposedly a few pounds over her ideal body weight, but because she had let Spandex Dominatrix actually make her feel bad about herself for a few seconds. Sheila and Tracee, she noticed, had stripped down to butt-floss leotards for their weigh-ins, and she saw the fat woman looking at their firm buttocks with a mixture of envy and loathing.
What was this psychosis American women had about weight? Even Lily, a supposedly enlightened feminist, fell prey to it sometimes. When she had suffered an insecure moment, when she had expressed to Charlotte the need to flatten her tummy or firm up her butt, Charlotte had always pulled her close and whispered, “Now, who wants to ride in a car that doesn’t have any upholstery?”
The women lined up in rows for their exercises. “O-kay, lay-deez,” Spandex Dominatrix chirped, like Richard Simmons with just a touch more estrogen, “we’re gonna start out with a warmup. But first, does anybody have any questions before we start burning off those calories?”
Lily felt her hand go up in the air.
“Uh-huh?” Spandex acknowledged her.
“Uh ... yeah.” Lily searched for the right words. “I was just wondering, why does this class have to be about how skinny we can get? Can’t we just exercise to improve our health and feel good instead of trying to live up to some impossible commercial ideal of beauty?”
Although Spandex was still wearing her smile, she was looking at Lily as though she had been speaking to her in Latvian. Finally, Sheila nodded toward Lily and said to the aerobics instructor, “She ain’t from around here.”
“Oh,” Spandex Dominatrix said, seeming to find Sheila’s comment a satisfactory explanation. “Okay, let’s get started then.”
The soundtrack for their stretching was, as Lily had suspected, moldy top forty. They moved from the warmup into a more strenuous step routine. Lily looked around to all the Sheilas and Tracees, who were clapping and yelling “Whoo-hoo!” and enjoying themselves enormously. Great, Lily thought ...