Curves

Writing my memoir made me so mental I actually forgot who I was for a while, and, having forgotten, went out and joined Curves. Dr. Mars thought Curves would benefit me, that physical exercise would help me to write by giving me a sense of wellbeing. Personally, I think that’s the job of life-affirming, glorious sex but, as I reminded both Dr. Mars and myself, a person can’t always just order that up.

The problem between me and exercise is that my favorite state of being is Perfectly Silent and Utterly Still. The problem with wishing to always be still is that after a while, your bones turn to dust and your doctor diagnoses you with the dreaded condition called osteopenia. Osteopenia, the secret name of King Lear’s fourth daughter, is the prelude to the even more dreaded state of osteoporosis, the disease that makes you fall down and break both your hips while strangers on cell phones sidestep around you. Curves, which is for women only, is designed to prevent that nightmare and more.

My friend Millie Moon, who adores exercise and never stops moving, recommended I try it. “The whole workout takes thirty minutes,” she said. “I go on my lunch hour five times a week!” I trust Millie Moon because, back in our twenties, we and a friend took tap dance lessons together. I’m not kidding. We wore leotards, tights, and tap dancing shoes. This was before my nervous system was thoroughly shot, when I could still bear the onslaughts of motion and noise.

It was the noise, not the movement, that killed me at Curves. That and the fact that no one else there, not even the frailest octogenarian, seemed to mind it one tiny whit. How, I marveled, could such a thing be? How is no one else made suicidal by the constant, anti-musical shrieks of “Won’t you take me to Funkytown?”

I jumped right off my bicep machine and went to speak to the girl at the desk.

“Do you hear this?” I asked. “Do you hear the words? Must we really go down? To old Funkytown?”

But it wasn’t just the ‘seventies hits that drove me directly into despair. Every thirty seconds (that makes sixty times per half hour workout) a woman on meth would interrupt “Funky Town” to remind everybody to “Change Stations Now!” Said stations, which are either machines or “recovery” sites where you keep up your heart rate by doing the Frug, are like lily pads in a big curvy pond.

I told Dr. Mars I’d turned into a frog, that I was leaping from one lily pad to another just to avoid falling down and being run over by convoys of skateboards. Which was probably going to happen regardless.

“Yes,” he said, “but is it helping you write?”

I tried to give him a withering look, the gaze of a disgusted amphibian, but honestly, I don’t think he noticed.