brunet. Her taut and toned body was apparent in her electric-blue leotard and hot-pink tights, and azealous 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 aweigh-in. And then, after you’ve been coming to this class for six weeks, we’ll weigh in again, and you’llreally see some improvement.”
She led the way to the locker room, where the “ladies” were invited to come in one at a time tostand on the scales. Several of the Sheilas and Tracees giggled when the heavy woman took her turn, andone voice stage-whispered the word, “Tilt!” If there was a way in which this class was dissimilar tojunior-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 ofjunior-high PE — the stale, sour smell of pubescent sweat. “O-kay, hon,” the aerobics instructor, whomLily 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 idealbody 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 overher ideal body weight, but because she had let Spandex Dominatrix actually make her feel bad aboutherself for a few seconds. Sheila and Tracee, she noticed, had stripped down to butt-floss leotards for theirweigh-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 enlightenedfeminist, fell prey to it sometimes. When she had suffered an insecure moment, when she had expressedto Charlotte the need to flatten her tummy or firm up her butt, Charlotte had always pulled her close andwhispered, “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.