Mrs. Everything (47 page)

“You know what my problem is?” she’d asked Jo once, after ending a three-month stint on Weight Watchers, through a mouthful of half-melted ice cream and hot fudge at the Farm Shoppe, Avondale’s ice-cream parlor. “My problem is that a lot of things taste as good as thin feels.”

Jo always tried to tell Nonie that she looked fine, that her curvy figure suited her. “Not every single person’s meant to be thin,” Jo said.

“Says the thin lady,” Nonie retorted. On the fitness trail, a pair of joggers ran past them. Nonie put her hands on her hips, and squinted up at Jo. “C’mon. Tell me what to do. You teach PE, right?”

“I substitute-teach at the elementary school.”

“Good enough. Let’s go.”

The town’s fitness trail had just been completed the previous October. It was a two-mile dirt path that formed a loop around Avondale’s recreation center and golf course. Every quarter-mile, there were stations with instructional signs, and bars for pull-ups, or logs under which you could tuck your feet for sit-ups. Jo normally just ran the loop, sometimes once, sometimes twice, but that afternoon she stopped at each of the stations, guiding Nonie through squats and lunges and jumping jacks. “Come with me,” Nonie said when they were done, marching past the clubhouse and leading Jo to her car. Jo followed along, curious and amused and, of course, knowing that she’d follow Nonie anywhere.

“Look,” Nonie said, arming sweat off her forehead, reaching into her purse, which she’d locked in the trunk, and removing a copy of what turned out to be her high school yearbook. “Wait ’til you see. I used to be beautiful.”

“You’re still beautiful,” Jo said. Nonie gave a rude snort, opened the yearbook, and showed Jo a picture of herself, in a pleated cheerleader’s skirt, performing a split in midair. Her slim legs were spread wide against the sky, and the guy who’d tossed her stood underneath her, arms cupped, head tilted upward, looking delighted at the prospect of her descent.

“You see?” Nonie asked.

Jo drummed her fingers against her thigh. She’d worn plain gray sweatpants and a navy-blue T-shirt, her usual workout gear. “I don’t know much about diets . . .”

“Oh, that part’s easy,” Nonie said, waving her hand. “For breakfast, you have hot water with lemon juice and cayenne pepper and maple syrup. Then you have a hard-boiled egg and half a grapefruit for lunch, or a can of tuna with no mayo, and you eat what everyone else has for dinner, only you make yourself throw up, after.”

Jo stared at her, horrified. Nonie stared right back.

“What? It’s only for two weeks.” She closed her yearbook, running her fingers over its hardbound cover, looking wistful. “Maybe three. And it works. My sorority sisters and I did it all the time.”

Jo suspected that an eighteen-year-old girl would have an easier time shedding pounds than a woman in her forties, but she kept quiet. It was after four o’clock, almost four-thirty. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to get home before Lila. Her youngest daughter had a key, but she frequently lost it, and if Kim and Missy were still at school or at soccer practice, Jo would come home to find her forlorn ten-year-old sitting on the front step, scowling, as if Jo had been the one who’d screwed up.

“Anyhow,” Nonie said. “You let me worry about the food. I just want you to give me some exercises. So I can tone up my problem areas.” She patted her thighs, then frowned at the jiggle.

“You can’t lose weight in just specific parts of your—”

“Oh, hush!” Nonie said, playfully putting her hand across Jo’s mouth. “Let me cling to my dreams. Just tell me that you’ll help me.”

Jo considered. “I’ll do it,” she said. “But only if you promise you’ll eat reasonably. No crash diets. No throwing up.”

“Fine, fine,” Nonie said, rolling her eyes.

“Okay,” said Jo. “I’ll work on a plan. Can you meet me here tomorrow at three-forty-five?”

“Same bat time, same bat station,” Nonie said, smiling brightly, and Jo felt her heart lift and her cheeks get warm, and told herself that it didn’t mean anything other than that she was excited to have a project and to help a friend.

*  *  *

That night, Jo asked Missy questions about warm-ups and cooldowns and strength-training routines that her soccer coach put the team through, and wrote out a simple routine. The next afternoon, she waited for Nonie in the parking lot behind the golf clubhouse. Some of the women on Apple Blossom Court had gone back to work when their kids had started full days of school. Judy Pressman was a reading specialist in the school district; Valerie Cohen had become an interior decorator; and Stephanie Zelcheck worked at the Cape Codder, a boutique in Avondale’s two-block downtown that sold kilts and Fair Isle sweaters, Izod shirts and turtlenecks imprinted with tiny whales (“I’m mostly doing it for the employee discount,” Steph had confided, and Jo had felt a sad pang, thinking of her mother and everything she’d bought with her Hudson’s discount). Nonie didn’t work. She was part of the book club, and she volunteered a few mornings a week at the Congregationalist church that she and Dan attended, helping watch the little kids at Mother’s Day Out, but other than that, her time was her own. At 3:45, she pulled up beside Jo. That day’s track suit was black with bright-yellow trim. “I look like a bumblebee,” Nonie complained.

“You look fine,” said Jo, handing over the workout. Nonie tapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth, studying the sheet.

“You’ll do it with me?” Nonie asked. “You’ll show me how?”

“Absolutely,” said Jo. They started off along the trail at a brisk pace. A quarter mile in, Nonie was pink-faced, huffing and puffing and using her terry cloth wristbands to delicately dab sweat from her forehead. “C’mon!” Jo cheered. “I’m dyin’,” Nonie gasped, and clambered onto the sit-up log. Jo counted. Nonie groaned. Jo tried to get her friend to jog. Nonie complained. When Nonie couldn’t hang for even five seconds from the chin-up bar, Jo wrapped her arms around Nonie’s nylon-clad waist, hoisted her up, and held her in place, trying not to pay attention to the curve of Nonie’s waist and hips, the warm solidity of her flesh, or how she smelled faintly of Opium perfume. “I hate you!” Nonie gasped as Jo urged her across the finish line, increasing her own pace from a jog to a run to a sprint. Nonie collapsed, bent over with her hands on her knees, panting, before lifting her head and saying, “We’re going for ice cream. Do not tell me no.”

For the next six weeks, three afternoons a week, Jo and Nonie would meet at the fitness trail. They’d jog and do rounds of push-ups and triceps dips, mountain climbers and jumping jacks. Every Friday, Jo would introduce a new exercise—leg raises, jackknife sit-ups, single-leg toe touches, burpees (“Oh, God,” Nonie wailed after Jo demonstrated the move, “you’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”).

Jo was sure that Nonie would abandon the workouts the same way she’d quit all of her diets, but Nonie stuck with it. By the fourth week, a jogger they’d waved at a few times caught up with them at the chin-up bar. “Is this, like, an organized thing?” she asked. Jo told her it wasn’t, and Nonie said, “You’re welcome to join us!” That was how the fitness club began. By the end of July, on most afternoons there were at least six women following Jo along the trail, a funny, jostling, talkative bunch whose ages ranged from early twenties to late sixties. Some of the women wore the nylon track suits that
Nonie favored, accessorized with matching headbands and wristbands, and seemed more intent on protecting the integrity of their hairdos than they were on improving their fitness. Others came in sweatpants, or shorts and T-shirts, with their hair tied back in ponytails, ready to work. Jo charted their progress and celebrated their achievements: the woman who hadn’t been able to walk the two-mile loop without stopping and who, six weeks later, could jog the entire way around; the one who couldn’t manage a single push-up at her first session and who could bang out a dozen by her eighth; the ones who told her that they could carry more groceries, or climb two flights of stairs without getting winded, or who just felt better in their own bodies. “Even if you don’t lose a single inch, or a single pound, you’ve gotten stronger,” Jo told Nonie, the morning that Nonie performed her first unassisted pull-up.

“Screw stronger,” Nonie panted as she dropped to the ground. Dust puffed out around her running shoes, and the other women cheered. “The point of this endeavor is to dazzle my former classmates with my pulchritude, not beat ’em at arm-wrestling.” She paused, turning sideways, admiring her shadow. “But I am looking good.” She gave a dimpled smile. “Dan approves.” Jo nodded, not wanting to think about Dan enjoying her hard work.

On Friday after the workout, they were celebrating with their weekly ice-cream cone (child-sized, a single scoop on a sugar cone) at the Farm Shoppe. “You need to stop givin’ this away,” Nonie said. “All those ladies tagging along, you should make them pay you. Not me, of course,” she added.

“Oh,” said Jo. “I’m not a professional.”

“You teach phys ed,” Nonie said.

“I’m a sub. And I don’t even teach gym that often. Besides, I think that if I was going to set this up as a business, I’d have to get some kind of certification from somewhere. I think.” It was funny, but for all the years that Jo had watched Dave launch his various ventures and observed, from afar, her sister’s ascent to the throne of Jam Queen of Atlanta, Jo had only a vague idea about what starting a business actually required.

Nonie nibbled the edge of her cone. “You know what I’d do is go to the rec department,” she said. “That way, you can be on their insurance. They hire instructors all the time, right? The ladies can pay the rec department,” Nonie said, licking strawberry ice cream off her fingers with her pointed pink tongue. “The rec department can pay you. That way it’s not a problem if you’re using their facilities and someone gets hurt, or twists her ankle and decides to sue.” Jo, who’d never considered the possibility of injury, winced, and Nonie put a consoling hand on her forearm.

“Look, if you’re doing it anyhow, you might as well get paid.” Jo couldn’t argue with that. Extra money would come in handy. After Dave had declared bankruptcy, Jo had insisted that Dave give up his dreams of business ownership and get a job with a salary and benefits. He’d grumbled, but he’d acquiesced. He called his line of work “pharmaceutical sales,” but the truth was that he sold athlete’s-foot creams and shoe inserts to drugstores across a four-hundred-mile territory. His job paid well enough, but Dave had expensive taste, in cars, in clothing, in restaurants and vacations, and it seemed like there was always some expense that they hadn’t anticipated, whether it was the cost of soccer camp, or the Benetton sweater that Kim absolutely had to have, or the twenty thousand dollars they’d spent to get the roof replaced. Besides, it might be nice to have a little nest egg that was hers alone. The next Monday, Jo brought her résumé and the certificate she’d had to earn to teach elementary-school phys ed to the director of the recreation department, an avuncular, ruddy-faced fellow named Richie Barnes, who wore plaid shirts and suspenders clipped to his khakis and kept his work-booted feet propped on the green metal desk. “Sure, sure,” he said, with barely a glance at her papers. “I’ve seen you out there in the afternoons. What are you thinking of charging?” he asked, his Boston accent broadening the word to
chaahging
. Eventually, they settled on Jo’s rates: five dollars for a drop-in class, thirty dollars for a month’s worth of unlimited classes, with one-third of the money going to the Avondale
Recreation Department and the rest of it going to Jo. “You want my advice, make up some flyers and take ’em around to the gyms,” said Barnes. “That new Nautilus place on Main Street, and the JCC in West Hartford.” Puzzled, Jo said, “Aren’t women at those gyms already paying to exercise?” “Yeah, but they’re paying to exercise indoors. Have you ever been in one of those indoor gyms?” Richie made a face. “Fluorescent lights and bad ventilation, and pushy high school jocks and muscleheads strutting around like they own the place. Ogling the ladies.” He pronounced it as
oogling
. “If I was a lady trying to get in a workout, and someone offered me a chance to breathe fresh air, with people I liked, I’d take it in a minute. But it’s just a suggestion,” Barnes said, swinging his feet onto the floor and offering Jo his hand. “Either way, I wish you the best of luck.”

Jo drove home, barely hearing the Hall and Oates on the radio, running numbers in her head. Twenty dollars per woman per month. If she could get ten monthly members—and she was almost positive that she could—she would have two hundred dollars a month, all her own. It wasn’t enough to live on, certainly not enough to leave on (not, of course, that she was planning on leaving), but it was something. A start.

Over the weekend, Kim helped Jo design the flyers, after Jo enticed her with the notion of putting “amateur graphic designer” on the résumé she’d send with her college applications.
FITNESS CLASS NOW FORMING
, they read.
JOIN INSTRUCTOR JO BRAVERMAN FOR AN INVIGORATING HOUR OF BRISK WALKING
,
JOGGING
,
AND STRENGTH TRAINING ALONG THE AVONDALE FITNESS TRAIL
.
ALL AGES AND FITNESS LEVELS WELCOME
!
GET LEAN
!
GET STRONG
!
GET HAPPY
! (“Lean” and “strong” were Kim’s contributions; “happy” was Jo’s.) Jo begged Nonie for permission to use the yearbook shot of Nonie, from her cheerleading days, airborne and smiling, and Nonie agreed, after making Jo swear on her mother’s life that she wouldn’t tell anyone that Nonie was the woman in the picture. “I’m still a before,” she’d lamented, staring at herself in the mirror, sucking in her cheeks and tilting her chin. “No divulging
my identity until I become an after.”

On Monday morning, Jo went to Kinkos to run off a hundred flyers on eye-catching hot-pink paper. Kim and Missy helped their mother distribute them around town, at the area gyms and the supermarkets, the library and the mall, while Lila sat in the car, complaining and playing the handheld Simon game that Dave had gotten her for her birthday. By August, when the summer air was as thick as soup and many families had taken off for beach vacations in Rhode Island or on Cape Cod, Jo had almost forty students enrolled in her classes, which she’d switched to the cooler morning hours. At seven o’clock in the morning, the group would gather in the parking lot near the golf shop and follow Jo onto the fitness trail. Jo showed her older ladies, and a pair of pregnant ones, how to modify the exercises, demonstrating push-ups on her knees and low-impact versions of jumping jacks and high-knee skips. She carried a first-aid kit in a backpack—she’d had a fanny pack at first, but in an unprecedented show of unity, all three of her daughters had told her “absolutely not”—and she kept a close watch on her charges, praying that no one would twist an ankle or break a bone, but so far, the worst things that had happened were Ruthann Bremmer getting stung by a yellow jacket and Connie McSorley, one of the pregnant ladies, ending up with poison ivy in a personal area after she’d had to duck into the woods to pee.