Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions (24 page)

But then the other day, I entered the steam room while The Hot Girl was in the midst of her act, and the other women were tucked away in the corners, avoiding her. I hoped the steam hid my side-eye as I took a seat as far away from her vagina as possible.

And then, while she was arching her back in some sort of breast stretch, it happened.

She farted.

Twice.

Once mid-stretch, and again when she tried to sit down like nothing happened.

And we all heard it.

Farting in a steam room is pretty rude. It's one step above space suit for impolite places to bust a toot.

But luckily it didn't smell. Because, of course, it didn't.

For about thirty seconds, The Hot Girl tried to act casual, but then the embarrassment got to her and she high-tailed, or likely clench-tailed, it out of there.

A couple of us giggled after she left.

Not to laugh at her, per se.

But because no human can escape the occasional indignity of the gym.

 

Twisted Sister

By Lisa

So it turns out I have an occupational hazard.

I'm not complaining, because at least I have an occupation.

The only problem with my occupation is that I spend a lot of time occupying a chair.

And the first occupational hazard is that my butt is spreading.

What, I can't blame that on my job?

Fair enough.

Thanks a lot, carbohydrates.

Actually, the best part of my job is that I get to sit around all day in a chair, and I have set up my office so that my desk is in the middle of the room, with the TV to the left. I keep the TV on while I'm working, just to have some background noise that isn't dogs farting.

But a year ago, my back started to hurt. I ignored it for a while, then when my book deadline was finally finished, I got my big butt to the doctor, who said:

“We X-rayed your back, and you have scoliosis.”

I thought he was mispronouncing my last name, which everybody does, and I don't blame them. I tell them Scottoline rhymes with fettuccine, but this word sounded different. Lisa Scoliosis isn't a good name. I asked, “Scolli-what-is?”

The doctor answered, “It means a rotation of the spinal column, but in your case it's not congenital. So you're an author?”

“Yes,” I told him. I always put that on my medical records, so that my doctors will buy my books. I would say it's free advertising, but given the general cost of a doctor's visit, they would have to buy 3,293,737 of my books for me to break even.

The doctor continued, “So you probably spend a lot of time sitting and you must be turning to the left. Why are you turning to the left?”

“Because that's where the TV is?”

“Hmmm,” he said, just like a doctor in the movies.

Or on TV.

I was getting the general drift, because I'm a mystery writer and I don't need a lot of clues. “So you mean to tell me that just because I sat on my butt and watched TV while I worked, for twenty-five years, I rotated my spine?”

“Yes.”

So this was all TV's fault. Thank God it wasn't my fault. It can never be my fault.

The doctor added, “And you're probably crossing your legs, too.”

I thought about it. “I probably am. How else can you keep a dog on your lap while you work?”

The doctor laughed. He thought I was kidding.

You and I know I wasn't.

Maybe he should start reading my books.

Anyway, I got serious. “Now what do we do?”

“Work out.”

I tried not to groan.

Why is “working out” always the answer?

Why is the answer never “chocolate cake”?

Meanwhile, I tell the doctor that I walk the dogs, ride a bike, and even sit like a lump on the back of a pony, but he says none of this counts. He sends me to physical therapy, telling me to dress comfortably.

I don't need to be told to dress comfortably.

I'm a middle-aged woman.

We're too smart to dress any other way.

I've already gone to two sessions of physical therapy, which are held in a big open gym with a lot of other people who were sent there for respectable reasons that had nothing to do with watching too much television.

There, I do twenty reps of the Backward Bend, the Press-Up, Bridging, and an array of other horrible exercises, all of which require a Neutral Spine.

This doesn't come easily to me.

Not only because I hate working out, but because I'm not neutral about anything.

I have opinions.

My least favorite of the exercises is one called Isometric Stabilization, and the directions on the sheet say that I'm supposed to “tighten abdominal muscles as if tightening a belt.”

In other words, suck it in.

Oddly, I've been doing this exercise my entire life.

In any photo of me, I'm engaging in Isometric Stabilization.

Now I have a sheet of floor exercises to do three times day at home, with pictures to show me the correct form.

Oddly, none of the pictures shows my dogs jumping on my head, licking my face, or walking across my chest while I do the exercises.

Any pet owner who tries to work out at home knows how helpful dogs can be.

If you have twenty reps to do, good luck getting through rep two.

Or maybe they are helpful?

 

Good Grief

By Lisa

Today is Mother Mary's birthday, which is both a sad and happy occasion, since she passed away in April.

Good grief.

It's an interesting expression and applies perfectly, capturing completely the push and pull of emotions of a day like this, on which I'm mentally celebrating her life and mourning her passing.

In fact, it's the paradox of death itself, which is losing somebody and loving them, both at the same time.

We don't stop loving somebody just because they're not around anymore.

And that's true whether they're in the next room, on a trip to Belize, or simply passed into another realm.

They're away, but they're here, both at once.

Time and space are conflated on a day like this, collapsed into one another, each crashing the other's party.

At least that's how I've been feeling, these seven months past her passing—which never really passes.

I'm not sure if this is the correct way to experience the death of a parent, but it's the only one I've got, and it's the same one I had ten years ago, when my father passed away.

To me, they're both still here, and this is either sound mental health or the most merciful form of denial.

In any event, I'll take it.

I have no choice.

And to be completely honest, it isn't the way I thought it would be. I spent most of my life fearing the loss of my parents, because I was close to them both, but in different ways.

My father was fun-loving, smart, and warm, a benign presence in my life. He lived nearby and he was my go-to guy for advice, a sure laugh, or an outing to a movie. Father Frank would go anywhere, at any time. He was game and supremely easy to get along with. As a novelist, I know that actions describe character better than words, and the act that describes him perfectly is his habit of going to the movies on a Saturday night, around eight o'clock and buying a ticket for whichever movie he could see the most of at the time.

When he went to the movies, he went to the movies.

All of them, any one.

He never planned it, because it wasn't his nature. He figured all the movies were pretty good, and he never met a movie or a person that he didn't like.

Mother Mary, whom you know if you've read about her, was his exact opposite, which was probably why they were headed for divorce the day they married.

Another interesting conflation of time and space.

Another paradox.

Mother Mary was feisty, strong, and always ready to crack wise. She was a survivor of an impoverished childhood, the youngest of nineteen children. I won't repeat the many stories about her herein, but because her personality was so much larger than her four-foot-eleven frame and her influence so pervasive, I would've expected her passing to leave a massive hole in my life, like a vacuum in space into which things disappeared, a void like a bottomless loss.

But that hasn't happened at all.

Which is good for me and probably for the universe as a whole, because it sounded so scary.

I'm experiencing the loss of her, but the way I experienced the loss of my father. I'm not stricken, like a blow that leaves me reeling with the force of its impact, but it's more like a fact of life—that runs alongside the fact of death.

She's with me all the time even though she isn't.

I don't talk to her in my head, like other people do, but I hear her voice in my head and I know what she would say in any given situation.

Probably, so do you.

And if you have your mother plus Mother Mary in your head, I wish you luck.

People always joke that daughters become their mothers, and in my case, become their fathers too, and I think all of us embody the best of our parents.

And if we're trying to live our lives the best way possible, we're keeping what we loved about them and deleting the rest, like when a sure-handed editor goes over the first draft of the manuscript. The edited story morphs and changes, but the first draft—our mothers and our fathers—remain in the story, present behind the sentences themselves, and that essence abides always, never really going away.

And so we are, each of us, a book.

But no one of us is truly finished. We're constantly rewriting ourselves, and the possibilities are limitless. We never know where our own narrative will lead, or which plot twist will come out which way.

It's not The End.

We're not in final draft, not while we draw breath.

So breathe in.

And keep writing.

 

Carbs of Peace

By Francesca

It's commonly held wisdom that one healthy choice leads to another. So it seemed fitting that I discovered a health food store on the way home from my new gym.

The store is called Health & Harmony, and as soon as I passed through its doors, I knew I had entered the rabbit hole of rabbit food.

Rows upon rows of products I'd never seen before in brightly colored packaging with words I'd never read.

Chia, and kombucha, and flax, oh my!

I was dazzled. I've always been an adventurous eater, but since I started my new and improved diet in the spring, the result has been a rather repetitive rotation of lean meals.

This was like Willy Wonka's factory with no high-fructose corn syrup.

When I call this a health food store, I don't mean a box of Kashi cereal. Kashi is for amateurs. This was some next-level,
Goop.com
kind of stuff.

The dairy aisle, for example, isn't hemmed in by the confines of a cow. There's almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk, Tofutti cream cheese, anything
but
milk from a mammal.

Think outside the teat.

And forget that Greek yogurt that John Stamos sells. Health & Harmony is immune to Uncle Jesse's charms. Here, they sell Siggi's Icelandic-style Skyr.

Don't be scared, or skyrred. Skyr is just Icelandic for yogurt.

And it's delicious. They have the most unusual flavors, like Coconut, Orange & Ginger, and Pumpkin Spice, so of course I had to try them all.

Gluten is enemy number one at this store. Every pretzel, cracker, and cookie says GLUTEN FREE across the front. Even things that obviously wouldn't have gluten, like cheese, peanut butter, or edamame, proudly display their gluten prejudice.

But what if I want gluten? Or not so much that I want it, but I'm afraid of what they're substituting it with.

Remember when we all hopped on the nonfat bandwagon before we realized that meant replacing fat with enough sugar to send you into glycemic shock?

Or when we fell for sugar-free without realizing that meant carcinogenic-aspartame-full?

Better the devil you know …

So I stick with the unusual but still pure foods. Most of the time. I confess, I was intrigued by a bag of white noodles floating in water called Shirataki noodles. They look like spaghetti, but they are mysteriously calorie-free.

My foggy memory of chemistry class says that a calorie is a unit of heat energy, so if this food has no calories, does that mean you can't kill it with fire?

It is the devil's noodle.

But carb-free pasta, are you kidding? Mephistopheles, where do I sign?

(Holy sh-t, guys, I just Wikipedia'd Shirataki noodles, because I am a serious author who does serious research, and it, for real, said that another name is “Devil's Tongue Noodles.” I was just joking before! Now I'm scared.)

The Devil's Noodle

Also, it seems every food at this store has live active cultures in it. Apparently, bacteria in your food is a good thing.