Anna scurried in seconds before the class started.
“What happened to Matthew?” Anna, already breathless, asked. Matthew, a preposterously handsome gay guy in his twenties, was their usual instructor. The fact that he was gay removed all sexual tension and made it fun to objectify him. Jane’s imagination could run wild without any fear of rejection.
“Some kind of emergency—we have a substitute.”
“Hi, my name is Sherrie.” The instructor clipped into her bike. “Some of you guys look familiar; to all those new faces, nice to meet you! Let’s have a good time, let’s work hard, let’s have a good time working hard!”
Soon the music was blaring—a Pink song!—and they were pedaling furiously, going fast and getting nowhere.
“Think of the different resistance levels this way,” Sherrie explained. “The heaviest resistance should feel like pedaling through peanut butter—thick and chewy. The middle level of resistance is honey, gooey and sticky. And light resistance is heavy cream—you feel a little something, but it’s silky and smooth, and then the lightest, is whipped cream, airy and fluffy, a whisper that doesn’t slow you down but makes you aware. Everyone got it? Great, let’s go! Okay, crank it up to... peanut butter!”
Jane dialed up the resistance knob, trying to imagine what pedaling through peanut butter would feel like. Was invoking these foods as markers of resistance some kind of perverse wayof conquering the desire to eat them? She let herself extrapolate: What would it be like to snowshoe on peanut butter? To swim through honey? To row in a lake of heavy cream?
Halfway through class, during a numbing Rihanna track, Jane was still grappling with the concept of pedaling through foods when Sherrie called out “heavy cream!” Jane lightened her resistance, catching her breath to get ready for the inevitable “peanut butter.” As her body sped up, her mind slowed down and her thoughts wandered.
She was remembering the one time Teddy had joined her in Matthew’s class. He’d been the token heterosexual man, and while his only regular exercise was bong curls, he was in great cardiovascular shape and beat her mileage.
“Ah, so that’s why you like this class so much,” Teddy teased her after he’d seen Matthew.
A sultry-eyed twenty-something in a fuchsia sports bra was getting on the bike next to Teddy and asked him for assistance adjusting her seat. Feigned helplessness? Did this woman know Teddy was with Jane? Seeing him through this woman’s eyes, Jane recalled suddenly feeling very possessive—Teddy was hers.
During the cooldown, Sherrie gave them a parting pep talk.
“I hope we can all appreciate how lucky we are to be here, to have the privilege to do this, to show up and take care of ourselves, and to be in our bodies, bodies that work and that we should love. I recently recovered from stage three cancer and am now completely clear. It makes me realize how precious everything is, and my journey is to try to share that, and hopefully inspire people to cherish every moment. Thank you so much for showing up this morning!”
This incredibly fit, vibrant woman had been battling cancer? It was beyond inspiring. Jane understood that she was a verylucky person and should be oozing gratitude. She would have to try harder.
Jane and Anna debriefed at brunch.
“Do you think she really had cancer?” Jane asked.
“What!?” Anna was appalled.
“I know, I feel terrible even thinking it, but come on, LA is full of fabulists and fantasists. So one wonders.”
“I don’t wonder,” Anna replied, “Youdo. You’re so cynical!”
“I know, and I hate it, but this whole town is so showbiz-y; maybe I’m scarred by all the habitual lying and pretending. Like that thirty-year-old writer who claimed she was a teenager, and that stand-up who faked being in the World Trade Center on 9/11.”
“Yes, those people suck, full stop. But even if she’s making it up—what does it matter? I never mind being reminded that we are very fortunate—in the big picture, that is. I mean, lord knows we have to deal with all kinds of ridiculous minutiae on a daily basis.”
Jane picked at a rubbery pancake. “I just can’t with the peanut-butter-slash-honey-slash-cream thing.”
“Me neither,” Anna said emphatically. “I was waiting for hot fudge.”
“And ice cream and nuts so she could make a proper sundae!” Jane chuckled. “I mean, god bless Sherrie, but give me my Matthew.”
The wide swaths of asphalt streets in the flats of Beverly Hills were lined by a hodgepodge of homes from different eras. The houses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the sleek mid-century moderns, even the seventies-style suburban ranch homes had vestigesof integrity, even elegance. But later, postmodern McMansions, which bastardized the architectural legacies they were supposed to be honoring, proliferated. Any home—especially those with a tinge of charm or quaintness—could be deemed a tear-down and replaced with a grotesque edifice that embodied the ethos of the eighties, the nineties, or the aughts, decades when consumption was conspicuous and indiscriminate as well.
Because it was December, most of the houses were bedecked with holiday decorations: garlands of conifers (both real and artificial), plasticine snow, crèches with surfer blond Jesuses and bodacious Marys, bloated life-size Santas lit up from within, glowing like malign, rotund aliens. More than a lack of good taste, they were an assault on it. Blue and white Hanukkah decorations (usually with a menorah motif ) were interspersed among the aggressively Christian displays. None of this felt spiritual or ethereal. It was simply a tableau of gross materialism.
Jane understood the compulsion to believe in something, be it a skinny man dying on a cross or a fat man schlepping presents from the North Pole. In elementary school, she went to an Episcopal church with her best friend, Alice, every Sunday. The rituals felt reassuring, cozy—inhaling the pungent, herbal scent of the incense was like an infusion of sweetness and love. The church provided a structure, a framework for acceptance and forgiveness, something that did not exist in her home. The idea of an omniscient presence with a plan appealed to her on many levels: it meant things happened for a reason, that they were organized. It meant pain and hurt were part of a larger schema and therefore could be assimilated. And if there was an afterlife, wouldn’t that be a nice bonus?
Jane lost touch with Alice once they went to different middle schools, so she stopped going to church. Part of her missedthe routine, but her parents had no time for it, what with her brother to care for and everything else that adults had to do. Thus, her spiritual quest was stymied, and ultimately she abandoned it. Her inability to silence her rational mind was a constant obstacle. If a god had planned this world, they had not done a very good job: the world was distressed, fraying both physically and psychologically. Could she make a conscious decision to believe? Maybe even just pretend to believe? Studies had shown that smiling put you in a good mood, even if you weren’t feeling happy. Maybe believing—in something—could accomplish the same thing.
Perhaps she could believe in romance. Jane had been exchanging flirty text messages with Jake, all within Bumble’s secure messaging app. It was 2019, so giving someone your actual telephone number was borderline promiscuous. Jane liked the lockbox feeling of in-app communication. It was both discrete and discreet, homophones which, sadly, had become interchangeable.
Luckily the holiday season made telling (aka texting) Jake that she was especially busy and unsure of when she could meet up next seem credible. Jane was buying time. She wished she could make a flow chart of her emotions and arrive at a correct answer as to what she wanted. Too bad humans weren’t wired that way.
