Wicked Jealous: A Love Story (5 page)

Pottery sounded kind of cool. Maybe I would become so good at it I could open up a little online store on Etsy. Or at least make one mug that wasn’t so crooked that all the liquid sloshed out of it whenever I tried to take a sip. “It
is
close to my house,” I said.

“Yeah. You could even ride your bike there,” Nicola said. “Might get you into that blue satin dress faster.”

I shot her a look. That was pushing it. Physical exercise
and
spending my afternoons around strangers? No thanks. I’d be like every other person in Los Angeles and contribute to the pollution problem by driving there.

Well, I
would’ve
driven there if my Saab had started. But it didn’t. Again. And because L.A. is not a real
city—like, say, Manhattan or Paris—I couldn’t just walk out my door and get a cab. And because I’m one of those people who, if I miss the first five minutes of a movie I can’t watch it, I didn’t even want to think about how uncomfortable it would be to miss the beginning of a pottery class. Which is why I was forced to wade through old lawn mowers, a moth-eaten volleyball net, a Big Wheel, a Slip ’N Slide, and a few empty propane tanks in the garage to get to my very dusty bike. It had been years since I’d ridden it, and although they (whoever “they” are) say that you never forget how to ride one, from the way I wobbled down the driveway before finally getting my balance, I was pretty close to proving them wrong. Luckily, by the time I got to the end of my street my memory had come back and I felt safe enough to brave my way to the AFCC.

When your physical activity for the last few years has been limited to chewing and channel-changing, heavy aerobic activity like biking is somewhat of a shock to your system. Not to mention your clothing. By the time I arrived, my Psychedelic Furs T-shirt had sweat stains in places that I hadn’t known were possible. And my long hair looked like I had just washed it. In body oil.

As I walked in, an older woman with frosted blonde hair wearing a pink Juicy Couture velour tracksuit looked up from the desk and gave me a big smile. “Hello. I’m Cookie. And look at you—a workout before the workout!” she said before cringing at the drop of sweat that plopped off my forehead onto the counter. “Aren’t you the little overachiever!”

“I’m here for—” I gasped.

“Zumba, I know,” she said as she slid a clipboard across the desk with what looked to be a novella’s length stack of forms. “Just fill these out. And don’t forget the section about whether you’re a convicted criminal with a previous record,” she said. “People think just because we’re in Brentwood that would never be the case and they can skip over it, but I’m here to tell you, you would not
believe
the number of middle-aged housewives in this town who have been arrested for shoplifting. . . . It’s actually quite shocking. But you need to hurry.” She looked at her blinged-out watch. “Class started five minutes ago.”

“Actually. I’m. Here. For. The. Pottery. Class,” I panted before mopping my forehead with the edge of my T-shirt.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry—we canceled that.”

“What?!” I had gotten my heart rate up for nothing?

She nodded. “Yeah. No one enrolled.” She shook her head. “I keep telling Waheel—he’s the programmer here—that if you want to draw a crowd, it’s got to be something that helps them either slim down or meet their soul mate.” She sighed. “But I’ve only worked here for five years, so what do
I
know?” She flashed a smile. “But lucky for you, our ten-week Zumba Your Way into Health and Happiness starts today—which I know you’re just going to
love
. And it’s just in time for the holidays! Now will that be cash or charge?”

It was a little obnoxious for this woman to think that I automatically wanted to lose weight. I mean, maybe I didn’t. Maybe I liked being fat. I sighed. Okay, fine. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I had just gotten used to it and felt like even if I wanted to do something about it, I didn’t know how. Plus, I could tell that “No, thank you” was not an answer that computed in her world. I’d give it a try. One class. And if I hated it—which I obviously would—I’d never come back again.

She peered over the counter at my beige cargo pants, which, thanks to my bike, were now streaked with grease stains, before standing up and waddling over to the boutique area, which was filled with bedazzled yoga pants and bedazzled tank tops. There were even bedazzled water bottles. “Now, while you can get away with wearing the T-shirt, you’re going to need something a little more appropriate pants-wise.” She held up a pair of orange-camouflage yoga pants. “And I think these would just look
fabulous
on you!” She looked at the tag. “They’re an extra large, so I think they’ll fit, but I’m telling you—five sessions into this course and I bet my bottom dollar you’ll be
swimming
in them.” She waddled back to the counter. “And because you’re a new member of the AFCC family, you get a fifteen percent discount on them, which means”—she clicked on a calculator with her pink nails with little flowers painted on them—“they’re only going to set you back ninety-two shekels! You’re just gonna
love
Zumba, honey!” Cookie said. “It’s completely off the doorknob!”

“Huh?”

“You know . . . amazing!” she explained. “My eight-year-old granddaughter taught me that phrase. Isn’t it so catchy?”

“I think what you mean is that it’s ‘off the hook.’”

“Huh?

“It’s not ‘off the doorknob’ . . . it’s . . .” From the look on her face, I could tell she was very confused. “You know what? Never mind. So are we talking
Zumba
Zumba?” I asked. “That dance thing that they made fun of on
Saturday Night Live
last weekend?”

“Yes, but maybe if those
Saturday Night Live
people actually tried it, they would realize the wonderful benefits to it and wouldn’t make fun of it,” she replied, all huffily. “Now cash or credit?”

I sighed. I wasn’t psychic or anything, but I intuitively knew that the chances of my convincing a woman named Cookie with nail art that Zumba wasn’t really for me were slim to none. And seeing that the reason I was here was because I was kind of like one of those displaced persons from World War II whom we studied about in history class, I figured my dad could pay for it. “Credit,” I said, handing over the American Express card I carried around in case of emergencies. Which—if this Zumba thing was going to require any sort of coordination—this could end up being.

After I had filled out the application to the best of my ability (who walked around with their passport in their bag at all times? Or their vaccination records?), I went into the locker room. As I started to undress, I told myself that if the yoga pants didn’t fit, I could leave. Unluckily for me, while definitely tight, the Lycra made it so that there was enough give that I could get by.

“OMG—orange is
so
your color!” Cookie exclaimed when I walked out. “BTW, OMG is short for ‘oh my gosh.’ Or is it ‘God’? Oh, and BTW is ‘by the way,’” she said as she pulled me toward the gym and opened the door. Inside, about twenty middle-aged women with muffin tops hanging over their waistbands were shaking their booties as Latin music blared out of an old-school CD player.

“See Rona over there?” she asked, pointing at an equally frosted blonde woman wearing a neon-pink yoga top with lemon-yellow yoga pants. I could see that the charm bouncing up on and down on her chest as she shook and shimmied said
WORLD’S #1 GRANDMA
. “When she first started coming, all she wore were these awful caftans from International Woman over on Sawtelle. Now she’s into
jeggings
.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the world’s number one grandma wearing jeggings, but still, the idea that you could lose weight from Zumba-ing rather than just die from laughter because it looked so ridiculous was pretty impressive.

“Ay carrrrrrramba!”
yelled a twentysomething guy in lime-green short shorts and a purple
I’M THE REALEST BITCH YOU KNOW
Mob Wives
tank top. Even from far away I could see that underneath his yellow bandana, his curly dark hair was smothered in hair gel. “Shake those
tuchuses, guapas
!”

“That’s Jorge. Isn’t he the bomb shelter?”

“I think it’s just ‘the bomb.’”

“Huh?”

“It’s not bomb shelter . . . it’s just ‘bomb.’”

More confusion.

“Never mind.”

“I just love that he’s able to mix Yiddish and Spanish in the same sentence,” Cookie went on. “It’s so creative.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know if I can shake my
tuchus
—”

“Of course you can. Now go! Go!” she cried, shoving me toward the group of women. “You don’t want to miss one more calorie-burning moment!”

I landed between Rona and a tiny woman with close-cropped dark hair and huge red-framed glasses that made her look like an owl, I tried to shake my
tuchus
but instead ended up shaking my right arm. So hard that my bracelets kept flying off, once even getting caught in a blonde woman’s bun.

“Oy vey.
Mami
, what are you doing?” Jorge demanded after he pressed Pause on the CD player and took a giant swig of his Gatorade, even though there was no reason he should’ve been exhausted, seeing that he was just yelling at us rather than shaking his own
tuchus
.

“Zumba-ing?” I replied meekly as I pulled my hair back from my face to swipe at the sweat. If I kept this up, I was going to have to invest in some ponytail holders. And some Stridex pads.

“That is not Zumba-ing!” he bellowed. “That’s . . . I don’t
know
what that is, but it’s not Zumba!”

I could feel myself turning red. You would have thought that Zumba teachers would be nicer than gym teachers, but apparently not.

“Don’t mind him,” Rona whispered. “It’s the hot-blooded Latin thing. He doesn’t mean it. You’ll see—at the end of class he’ll kiss you on both cheeks and everything.”

But by the end of the class, I had stopped shaking my arm and started shaking my
tuchus,
even if it wasn’t exactly in time with the music. Which not only made my T-shirt even more sweaty but also reminded me for the first time in a long time that my hips did more than just take up space in my pants—that they actually
moved.
And Rona was right—Jorge did kiss me on both cheeks. Right after he shook his head and sighed and told me that lucky for me, coordination-challenged white girls were his specialty.

“So what’d you think?” Cookie asked excitedly as I limped behind my fellow Zumba-ers into the lobby, realizing that my rubbery legs were going to
kill
in the morning. “Was it totally red?”

“Huh?”

“You know—
red
. Awesome. Hard core.”

“Do you mean . . .
rad
?” I asked.

Cookie thought about it. “You might be right.” She reached into her studded orange leather handbag and dug out a little notebook whose pages were covered with writing. After looking at it, she nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I made this little cheat sheet to keep all the slang straight, but sometimes I can’t read my own writing. So was it?”

A bunch of the women had stopped, waiting for my response.

“It was . . . an experience.”

“That’s the
exact
same reaction I had!” exclaimed the owl lady. “That it was a life-changing experience that opened a portal to a new era of my life!”

The woman with the bun, whose heavy makeup made me think she was probably a rock-and-roll groupie at some point, gasped, “Cheryl, I can’t believe you just said that. That was my experience as well. How did we never talk about this before? I was actually thinking of writing something for Oprah’s magazine about it. You know, the whole ‘aha moment’ of it all.” She smiled at me. “I’m Marcia. You’re coming with us to Coffee Bean, right?”

“After class, we go to Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf,” explained a preppy-looking Brentwood-mom type. The kind who didn’t say sorry as she wheeled her double stroller down San Vicente Boulevard and over your feet.

“Oh. That’s really nice of you to invite me, but I can’t,” I said nervously. “I . . . have to get home and do homework.” Actually, what I had to do was get my butt to 7-Eleven and purchase a smorgasboard of snack cakes, because the stress of trying to get my butt to shake instead of my arm and being surrounded by a group of middle-aged women inviting me to be social over coffee when I was not really a social kinda girl was freaking me out.

“You heard her, Beth—she’s got homework,” chastised Cheryl. “Well, we’ll see you in class on Thursday.”

“Oh. Um. Well, see—” Sure, I had forked over (or, rather, my father had) a decent amount of money for ten classes—not to mention a very bright pair of yoga pants—but it’s not like I was planning on actually coming
back
. I didn’t know these women, and had spent only forty minutes sweating next to them, and yet, as I looked out at the sea of made-up faces smiling back at me, I did know one thing—that they were the kind of women who would badger and nag you to death until you said yes.

“—that sounds just great,” I said weakly. “I’ll see you then.”