The instructor blinked. “I haven’t taught yoga in like . . . a year.”
Well pardon her, was she the only one in Providence to have ever taken a little time off from the fitness program? Why didn’t they just run something over to the paper and announce it had been A YEAR since Tubby Rachel Lear had been to the gym?
She walked to the very back corner of the room, where no one could possibly get in behind her, and rolled out her mat.
The class started out great. She remembered the moves and was feeling very rejuvenated. And then the power part began, and she was quickly dizzy from not being able to breathe and her muscles felt like jelly. All she knew was that if the session didn’t end soon, someone was going to have to call an ambulance.
When the session, at last, did end, one girl leaned over Rachel—who was lying on her mat, staring at the fluorescent lights above her. “Are you all right?” she asked, looking concerned.
“Fine,” Rachel wheezed. She made herself sit up, and marveled at how sadly out of shape she was. Well, no more. Rachel Lear was a new person!
She headed for the gym and the stationary bikes—just a little something to get the juices flowing. Her pace was leisurely, and she set her monitor to random hills.
She hadn’t even gotten off the flat part and into the hills before a woman in gym pants and cropped top that showed off her flat belly got on the bike beside her. She looked impossibly bored as she punched some control buttons on the panel and began to cycle at a ridiculous pace.
Rachel could not help noticing that when the woman leaned over, her stomach did not make little rolls. It was perfectly flat.
Gawd, she hated that woman.
Hated her so bad that in a fit of zealous bigotry, she punched “in-zone training plus” and began to pedal furiously, too. And in the space of maybe a minute, she was huffing like an old woman, sweat was trickling down between her breasts and over her roll and into the waistband of her spandex yoga pants, which now seemed ridiculously tight and unforgiving.
She glanced at the woman from the comer of her eye— who was on the same setting, but doing five million rpms faster than Rachel, and hadn’t even broken a sweat.
Rachel suddenly stopped pedaling. “Whew!” she said, to signal to anyone who might be watching that she had just finished her ride through the Rocky Mountains, and swung off the bike like she did it every day.
It was nothing short of a miracle that her legs actually held her up and she didn’t collapse into an enormous pile of sticky jelly goo. Rachel mopped her forehead and sauntered—well, lurched, anyway—to the weight machines.
A full two hours after she’d entered the gym, and after several hundred pounds of lifting and squatting in various humiliating forms and fashions, sweating profusely, and her hair going in five different directions in spite of the two tight coils she had wound it into, Rachel made her way out to the parking lot, Frankenstein style. Images of steaming baths and candles danced in her mind’s eye, alongside an army of brownies.
As she staggered to her car (she would have to have parked in the very last slot on the very last row), she noticed that the coffeehouse next to the gym had filled to capacity with people who had nothing better to do on such a wet and dreary day. The place was so full that as she neared the end of the parking lot, she saw that someone had parked behind her, blocking her in.
She groaned, debated what to do, and inadvertently caught sight of herself in the reflection of the back windshield. Her face was the exact shade of a fireplug. It wasn’t enough that she was soaked and probably reeking—she had to herald her terribly out-of-shape body to the world with a fireplug face. Even worse, small corkscrews of hair around her face stuck as if she’d stuck her finger into a light socket.
Time to call Dagne to come save her. Later, she could get Dagne or Myron to bring her back for her car. Rachel fished in her bag for her brand-new T-Mobile cell phone . . . but it wasn’t in her bag, and she remembered seeing it on the kitchen counter. Fabulous. A big fat splat of something landed on top of her head, and she glanced up, got hit in the eye by another fat raindrop. And another. And then dozens of them. Rachel looked around, saw the coffeehouse, and made a mad sort of half-hobbling, half-loping dash for it.
The place was jammed to the rafters with toned and beautiful bodies, dressed in hip fashions, and all drinking coffee and poring over books and laptops. In a sort of ironic contrast, she looked a little like a Holstein cow in her black yoga pants and white tank. And what was up with always putting phones and toilets in the back of establishments? Rachel sucked in her breath, and with her head down, she made her way through the crowd, hitting at least two people in the head and shoulders with her gym bag.