“Maybe you should.”
“My name is Tim Bradbury, by the way. I do the weight training out here. Magda said you were going to be the new step aerobics specialist. We need a step aerobics specialist out here. We haven’t had one since Debbie North left, and people are always asking for it. It’s the big thing this year. I guess they can get anybody they need out in California. I guess that’s why they never need a weight trainer when I want to go.”
Frannie closed her eyes again. The street seemed to be full of potholes. All the streets seemed to be full of potholes. They were going around the Green in a big circle. Frannie tried to remember what Magda Hale had told her about the location of the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, but all she came up with was something about its being “up past Albertus on Prospect,” which told her everything and nothing. It told her everything, because that was her old stomping ground, the part of town where her mother’s house had been, the part of town she had once known better than any other. It told her nothing, because with the way things had changed, the neighborhood might easily be unrecognizable.
The car made a turn and another turn. Tim Bradbury pushed a few buttons on the dashboard and music began coming out of the tape deck. It was surprisingly soft stuff, old Joni Mitchell, and not the driving heavy metal Frannie would have expected.
“Listen,” Tim Bradbury said, “are you really hyped on Christmas? Is Christmas your thing?”
“Is it my thing? I don’t know. I like it. Why? Don’t we celebrate Christmas at Fountain of Youth on the East Coast?”
“Oh, we celebrate it,” Tim said. He made another turn, onto a well-lit block this time. The houses were bigger here and more neatly kept. “The thing is, we’re not making a big deal about it this year. I mean, not as big a deal as we used to. It wasn’t working out.”
“What wasn’t working out?”
“The promotions. Magda said it was too much like vacuum cleaners. You know, women don’t like their husbands to give them vacuum cleaners for Christmas. It’s kind of an insult. Like the husbands see the wives as just maids.”
“Oh.”
“Magda said it was the same way with the work-out memberships,” Tim went on. “It was like the husbands were telling the wives they had big butts and better do something about them. It was a kind of insult.”
“Oh,” Frannie said again.
“So we’re not doing Christmas this year,” Tim said. “We’re doing New Year’s instead. We had a whole campaign made up at an advertising agency in New York. ‘A New You for the New Year,’ Simon says it’s going to be the key to taking us really national. What do you think?”
What Frannie thought was that maybe she shouldn’t have come back here. Maybe she should have stayed out in California and let her life fall apart. “A New You for the New Year.” As a slogan, it had a lot to be said for it. Frannie could certainly use a new Frannie, for the New Year or any other time. She could use a whole new universe, with none of the people she already knew left in it.
“That’s Prospect Street up there, isn’t it?” she asked Tim Bradbury, and when he nodded, she settled down a little. Prospect didn’t look all that much different from the way she remembered it. More of it seemed to belong to Yale, but the Yale it belonged to was being very good about Christmas decorations. A building with a sign out in front of it that identified it as the Charles A. Hamilton Anthropological Laboratory had a pine tree in its front yard decked out in hundreds of colored lights. Frannie didn’t know if the Charles A. Hamilton Anthropological Laboratory belonged to Yale or not.
“The thing about New Year’s,” Tim said, as they drove up the steep hill toward Albertus Magnus College, “is that it’s the perfect holiday for a work-out studio. Everybody’s always making New Year’s resolutions. Everybody’s always trying to change their life. Simon says there aren’t a dozen people in any hundred thousand who really like the way they are. Do you know Simon?”
“I know who Simon is,” Frannie replied.
“Everybody is going to know who Simon is pretty soon,” Tim said. “They’re doing a profile on him in Forbes magazine. ‘The Selling of a Way of Life,’ it’s called. We’ve got an advance copy up at the house. It’s the only thing that makes me feel okay about not being able to get out to California. I mean, everything that’s really happening for the studio is happening out here.”
“It sounds like it,” Frannie said.
“I like the whole concept anyway,” Tim said. “Changing your life. Changing yourself. So many people are stuck in really destructive patterns. It’s nice to know you can always have a second chance if you want to do a little work for it.”