aerobics
by janice norman

I’ve always been out of sync with the times—as a girl I’d shin up a tree after my brother but my mother would stand at the bottom, red in the face, and holler, “Get down here right this minute.” I’d have to slide down, go inside, bathe, and sit rocking on the porch for the rest of the evening staring into my black patent leather shoes.
As a teenager, the Fifties styles dictated that I should cover my slim body with a circular felt poodle skirt down to my thick white bobby socks and on top, wear an Eisenhower jacket that would have fit Eisenhower.

Now many years later, in the dimness of my bedroom, the only signs of aging I paid much attention to were a resemblance of my underarms to crepe paper and a tendency to put on a few pounds, both of which I hid under yawning jeans and tee shirt. One morning, however, my jeans belched instead of yawning, so I decided to investigate the brand-new fitness facility in a nearby shopping center. As I entered I should have been warned by the glaring lights and pulsating music that my illusions were about to be shattered. I stood blinking at a room encased in mirrors and dominated by a giant trapezoidal steel gym set. Nubile girls, harlequined in shimmering body suits, performed a mechanized ballet upon its pulleys. Silver weights clanked and steel shafts rose and fell in perfect synchronization.

Along the sides of the room, other slim young women worked on brown Naugahyde spot-reducing machines resembling surreal dental chairs. Still others, graceful as irises, stretched their slender legs on ballet bars. I was so entranced by the scene that I didn’t notice a nymphet in an iridescent diaper until she bounced up to me, shook my hand vigorously, and said, “I’m Olga, the director.” While appraising her sinewy thighs enviously, I explained that I felt a few sit-ups would take care of the fat roll I had developed around my middle. She smiled pensively and said, “Let’s take a tour of the building, then I’ll get your weight and measurements, compare those with the national fitness standards and see where you stand.”

Back in her office Olga removed a tape measure from her bracelet-sized waist and stretched it around mine. Then she weighed me. The scale undulated wearily. Olga was standing so close we exchanged breaths. She saddled the l00-pound puck on the bridge, and with the tip of her pencil teased the upper measure past all of my favorite numbers. The balance arrow stayed stubbornly up. When it started downward we both sighed with relief.

Alicia would be my trainer, she explained, calling to a girl who was lifting weights across the room. Alicia bounded over, her skin glowing from the recent exercise.
As we approached the equipment, I said, “I won’t have to use these things, will I?”
Alicia said “We have a program especially designed for someone your age, I’ll show you the ones I want you to do today, and then you’ll do 20 minutes rapid-walking on the treadmill.”

Someone my age smiled thinly.

Alicia instructed me on several machines designed like medieval torture instruments. Then we progressed to the pectoral crunch--the self-abasing Puritans must have invented this one just before the stocks.

“This will take care of those hanging places,” she said, pinching my delicate underarms. I wedged myself into the Crunch. In the mirror opposite I noticed for the first time that when I sat down my midriff dissolved into a mud slide.

“Okay. You’ll do this twenty times,” she said. “Just put your hands behind these flaps and push in until they meet over your nose. I’ll be right back.”

I put my arms behind the flaps and attempted to bring them forward. The only change I noticed was that my underarm jelly quivered even more.

Well, I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble with the treadmill. Just to be sure I watched the little old lady next to me. She was a monochromatic study as she attempted to keep up with the relentlessly forward-moving belt. Her gray warm-up suit matched her hair. Rimless glasses glinted, her chunky ankles were stuffed into worn-out tennis shoes, one toenail peeping out of a tear in the canvas. We smiled at each other in the mirror. I huffed and almost ran to keep up with the pace Alicia had suggested, then shifted down to a slower speed.

Five minutes was enough for the first day, I thought, as I stopped the machine and sat on a bench. Twenty minutes later that lady slowed her belt to a stop. I resisted the impulse to help her off. She wiped sweat from her forehead and started the treadmill back up.

I reflected that by the time I reached her age, I would have achieved karma and would have stopped testing the backs of my hands for the rebound factor. As I struggled to work the leg lift, she came up beside me and said, “I took your program card by mistake--it’s identical with mine.”

I’d paid in advance so I’d try it for a while. One day I was lying on the floor preparing to stretch out when Alicia sprinted by. “Mrs. Jordan, are you ready for aerobics? It will really help you with that reduced lung capacity.” I went to the aerobics room and took my place in the back of the room. I whispered a question to the sufferer next to me. I didn’t realize Alicia heard until she turned to me and said,

“Mrs. J. Yes, I do know CPR, but we don’t even have our leg warmers on yet.”
After the warm-up, the music shifted into a psychotic frenzy as we pogoed in place. I felt my heart popping out of my body as I jiggled up and down in boxer shorts and an old Optimist tee shirt. The floor vibrated with the force of our running. The mirror shimmied as if it were a lake, but when I told Alicia my heart rate she said I could work a little harder next time.

I got my card to find a note from Alicia one day, it read, “Top notch.” Thank goodness she was finally acknowledging my heroism. What a shock when one day, as I was scissoring on the duo squat, stretching out my legs and easing them back with sixty pounds of weight attached Alicia passed by. “Alicia," I said, "look how easy this is. I’ve done each leg twenty times while I watched C-Span. “Good for you, Mrs. J.” she said, as she added ten pounds of weight to each side, “but I wrote you a note about using the top notch.”

During the next few months I went to the fitness center three times a week despite my body’s twanging protest, I began looking forward to it. I felt alive and could bend over without pain for the first time in years. I now approached the machines almost like a cowgirl in charge of her wild horse. I slung my leg over the duo squat and said, “let’s go for it, pardner.”

One day I was rotating the torso turn when a woman next to me said,’“ Isn’t this hell on earth?” Before I could check myself I said, “But think how gorgeous we’re going to be.”

One day about three months later Alicia didn’t show up for aerobics. I noticed a familiar figure at the front of the room. It was...my mouth dropped open as the little old lady in tennis shoes took her place before us.

She pulled her jacket off revealing a shapely body and popped the snaps on her warm-up pants. She turned and beckoned to me. “ Mrs. Jordan, will you show the group the warm-up stretches?” she said. “You do them so well. I’ve been watching your progress. Why, you’re trim and you just glow.”

She blew a little whistle and the music started. She spanked her hands over her head, started running in place saying, “Okay, girls, lets go for it. I was ready.

Janice Norman, M.A. CCAS writes and teaches writing classes in Asheville. She was won writing awards and co-authored a self-help workbook, A Woman’s Journal, which sells nationwide. She teaches writing classes for the North Carolina Writers’ Workshop. Her humorous essays have appeared in Total Health, Women’s Princeton Newspaper, and Sunshine Magazine, and Chocolate For a Woman’s Soul.